Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

From soccer federations to surrogate mothers, antisemitic bullying works

When there was an organized, premeditated pogrom in Amsterdam against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, UEFA did not condemn those attacks specifically. It put out a general statement that "both sides" the issue. (The announcer assumes it is supportive of the Israeli fans but the wording says nothing about them as victims.)

The UEFA strongly condemns the incidents and acts of violence that occurred in the city of Amsterdam before and after the UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. We trust that the relevant authorities will identify and charge as many as possible of those responsible for such actions. UEFA will review all official reports, gather available evidence, evaluate it and consider any other appropriate course of action in accordance with its relevant regulatory framework.

This statement is not on their website or social media.

The UEFA has rules against political messages at games, yet it didn't say anything negative about the huge "Free Palestine" banner shown at a game last week which included a map that erased Israel and a depiction of the Temple Mount topped with the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Jewish Temples.

The UEFA spokesperson said the team would not face sanctions as it only bans political messages "deemed insulting or provocative." Showing a map erasing Israel, and a mosque deliberately built on the holiest spot, is not deemed provocative enough.

And the UEFA is lying about its own policies. Its rules ban all political messaging, without caveats: "The promotion or announcement, by any means, of political messages or of any other political actions inside or in the immediate vicinity of the stadium is strictly prohibited before, during and after the match."

The UEFA also did not say a word about footballer Hakim Ziyech who mocked Israeli fans running for their lives in Amsterdam.

Again, this is a violation of UEFA rules, which say, "Any person under the scope of Article 3 [which includes players] who insults the human dignity of a person or group of persons on whatever grounds, including skin colour, race, religion, ethnic origin, gender or sexual orientation, incurs a suspension lasting at least ten matches or a specified period of time, or any other appropriate sanction.

Normally, the UEFA zealously adheres to these rules. When Jews are the victims, not so much.

How can the UEFA justify violating its own policies so egregiously?

Because there are a lot of Muslim football fans in Europe and if the UEFA would apply its own rules to situations that would upset them, they would protest and threaten the UEFA itself.

In short, antisemitic threats force people to avoid any situation where they could become targets of the antisemites, and they justify their hypocrisy after the fact by claiming that there is a loophole in their own policies that allow discrimination against Jews.

The UEFA inactions are perfect examples of "proleptic dhimmitude" where Westerners take what they assume to be pro-Muslim positions in anticipation of supremacist Muslim threats and demands.

As bad as that is, there is a newer dimension of fear where ordinary people are not only afraid of extremist Muslim violence, but of "cancellation" from their "progressive" friends.

Canadian surrogate mothers, the most progressive people you can imagine, are refusing to carry Israeli babies.

They claim to have only the best and most moral of reasons, of course. According to The National Post, some say that they oppose any Israeli parents because they consider all Israelis guilty of "genocide." Others say they don't want their birth children to grow up in a conflict zone. Those are the reasons that are highlighted in the article and in various Facebook surrogacy groups.

But hidden among those is the real reason that most surrogates would prefer non-Israeli parents:

[A] few surrogates fear personal blowback if it became known they were gestating a baby for an Israeli.

...Jacki Lebert, CEO of Ontario’s Platinum Surrogacy, [said] “There are surrogates who feel that carrying for an Israeli would be supporting genocide … More frequently than that is the fear (of harm to the parents or baby or reprisals for them).”

Surrogates are uniformly progressive. A great number of the parents they help out are gay men who want a family. They know that in their social circles, they would be ostracized if their friends know that they are carrying Israeli babies.

Because no one wants to admit to knuckling under pressure and threats, most of them re-work their brains to say that this is their own courageous decision to show how moral they are rather than thinking of themselves as cowards and hypocrites. In the end, the only people they refuse to help out are Jews.

This is only one of many examples that show how insidious modern progressive antisemitism is. The BDSers promise they will incessantly hound anyone who shows even the slightest relationship with Israelis, and most people - understandably - don't want the hassle. Over time, they create their own justifications for their discrimination against Israeli Jews and Zionists, because they cannot live with the knowledge that they cannot stand up for their own principles of treating everyone equally.

The Canadian surrogacy story goes beyond proleptic dhimmitude - it is a fear not of Muslims directly, but of fellow progressives who have already gone beyond dhimmitude into full blown antisemitism themselves.

In both cases, and countless others like when artists refuse to perform in Israel or Kamala Harris buckles under to demands by Israel haters out of fear of their own supposed supporters, the BDS and Islamist method of threatening anyone and everyone who do not adhere to their maximalist demands is startlingly effective. It furthers their agenda and the people who fear being bullied end up becoming BDS' biggest backers in order to be able to live with themselves and their hypocrisy.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Hamas-supporting NGOs are upset at a House bill to strip them of tax exempt status

The Intercept, which literally appeals to antisemites to raise money to write anti-Israel stories, describes a bill in Congress this way:

Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, also known as H.R. 9495, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization.”

Under the bill, the Treasury secretary would issue notice to a group of intent to designate it as a “terrorist supporting organization.” Once notified, an organization would have the right to appeal within 90 days, after which it would be stripped of its 501(c)(3) status, named for the statute that confers tax exemptions on recognized nonprofit groups.

The law would not require officials to explain the reason for designating a group, nor does it require the Treasury Department to provide evidence.

Let's read H.R. 9495:

(i) NOTICE REQUIREMENT.—Prior to designating any organization as a terrorist supporting organization under subparagraph (B), the Secretary shall mail to the most recent mailing address provided by such organization on the organization’s annual return or notice under section 6033 (or subsequent form indicating a change of address) a written notice which includes
(I) a statement that the Secretary will designate such organization as a terrorist supporting organization unless the organization satisfies the requirements of subclause (I) or (II) of clause (ii),
(II) the name of the organization or organizations with respect to which the Secretary has determined such organization provided material support or sources as described in subparagraph (B), and
(III) a description of such material support or resources to the extent consistent with national security and law enforcement interests.

The bill explicitly says that the IRS must provide evidence. In theory, an unscrupulous IRS could claim that every bit of evidence is classified, but if that would happen the news media would be all over it, and the IRS would not wantonly designate organizations it has political problems with unless they can back it up.

In short, The Intercept is lying. So is the Who's Who of Israel haters who signed a letter opposing this bill, pretending that an organization losing its tax exempt status is tantamount to silencing free speech.

The potential for abuse under H.R. 6408 is immense as the executive branch would be handed a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.

Somehow, Al Jazeera is still available to read in America without getting a tax break. If the people who donate to Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice for Palestine refuse to donate unless they get a tax deduction, then they aren't really such strong supporters of those groups' messages to begin with.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/11 Links Pt2: BBC News promote yet another Hamas ‘doctor’; The modern intellectual diktat for Jewish authors; JNF Canada loses appeal to retain charitable status

From Ian:

David Collier: BBC News promote yet another Hamas ‘doctor’

Yesterday, the BBC ran another story about a ‘massacre’ in Gaza. We have now seen it countless times – Hamas propaganda make an empty claim – and the BBC rush to promote it.

The latest headline covered both Gaza and Lebanon.

‘Israeli strikes on north Lebanon and Gaza kill dozens, officials and rescuers say’.

The only named Gazan based source for the claims in the BBC article was a Dr Fadel Naim, director of the Al-Ahly hopsital:

The report from the good doctor is grim. Of the 17 bodies his facility received ‘nine’ were women – thus strongly implying this was a random attack that killed women – not terrorists.

But is there any reason the BBC should not have reproduced the claim of Fadel Naim? Did the BBC do the slightest bit of due diligence on this witness, before sharing his lies to the world?

The answer is no. They could not have checked at all.

The timeline of the doctor
Unusually for Gazan based witnesses these days, Fadel Naim does not hide his social media behind confusing variations of his name. Search for a ‘Fadel Naim’ in Gaza on Facebook and you quickly find his account.

When you search his account to see what he was posting on October 7 2023 – it quickly becomes apparent this is not the type of person any of us would recognise as a doctor. His timeline is full of open support for the October 7 atrocities:

It is not just about October 7. On 27 January 2023, Hamas terrorists slaughtered seven Jews outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. Fadel Naim took the opportunity to celebrate the attack:

If the BBC journalists had even bothered to look – they would have seen that this man openly supports terrorism and should not be trusted. In the end, it is left to people like me to do their job for them.

The Hamas doctor
From scanning the photos on his own public timeline, it soon becomes apparent that this doctor is no idle supporter of terrorism. This is an image from his daughter’s wedding. The top table at the event included not just Fadel Naim, the BBC ‘witness’ – but also Ismail Haniyeh – the (then) leader of Hamas in Gaza:

We can conclude that this doctor is closely aligned to the top Hamas leadership – and no western media organisation should be relying on him as a witness. It is kind of obvious anyway. A basic truth completely ignored by western media is that Hamas control Gaza – so if a person has ‘made it in Gaza’ – (for example becoming a director at a hospital) – it is a near certainty that his family is aligned with Hamas.

What makes this all worse – is that the Associated Press used him before – and was notified of the doctor’s terrorist associations.

The modern intellectual diktat for Jewish authors

Nearly a century ago, the Nazis burned the books of Jewish authors. Today, the publishing world is attempting to resurrect the exclusion of writers because of either their faith and nationality or their refusal to conform to a new intellectual diktat.

Books deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis for being “un-German” — especially those written by Jews — were purged from bookstores and libraries for reasons of racial as well as intellectual superiority. This self-righteous effort to purify German thinking targeted such Jewish luminaries as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger and Vicky Baum, whose works were either banned outright or torched by Nazi Stormtroopers.

Nearly a century later, a new effort is afoot to compel Israeli authors into a contemporary variant of ideological submission. Last week, more than 1,000 writers, including acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney and award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, book festival organizers and literary agents who have yet to publicly denounce the “genocide” in Gaza.

Boycotts like this are self-licking ice-cream cones, enabling the signatories to congratulate themselves for taking a stand on the “right side of history,” as Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last spring fittingly described the protestors in Western countries championing groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That such literary boycotts are as blatantly antisemitic as they are hypocritical is of course ignored by their exponents.

The statement these writers have endorsed proudly declares that it is the “biggest cultural boycott against Israeli cultural institutions in history,” and encourages Israeli writers and literary institutions to “Denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime” and “Affirm the full protected rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return.”

In essence, the statement’s signatories want Israelis to publicly acknowledge that their state has no right to exist, thereby disavowing their religion, whose aspiration has for centuries been the return to Zion.

In the 1930s, German Jewish writers were just banned. Today, their Israeli counterparts are being told to denounce their own religious and national identity and cruelly distance themselves from their homeland or else risk ostracism and opprobrium.

Writers and Careless Use of Words

[T]he esteemed writers did at least four things that one does not expect from people of letters.

The first was casting anathema on publishers, book clubs, cultural associations, art festivals and, inevitably, hundreds or perhaps thousands of writers, poets, composers, cineastes, dramatists, painters and other artists associated with them, simply because they happen to be Israelis.

Annie Ernaux the French winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also a signatory, explained her move as opposition to "institutions that have never recognized the undoubted rights of the Palestinian people" without saying what those rights were and why are they undoubted, or whether they include raids like the one on October 7, 2023.

The second move not expected from the literati... is to preach blanket censorship based on guilt by association.

This is all the more surprising because most signatories are from the "Western world," where refusing guilt by association is a fundamental principle of the law.

Thirdly, a writer always provides even the character he most dislikes the chance to make his case before he is stamped with a final judgment of banishment.

[W]all-building, now done by the United States, Turkey, Iran, Hungary, Poland and Estonia, doesn't amount to Apartheid. In any case, as Israelis built walls to keep Hamas away, Hamas built tunnels to go and pay them a visit.

The Palestinian cause may be a noble one. So, as a writer, show us what it is and why it is noble. A writer isn't a labelling machine or a virtue-signaling device.

However, neither Walker nor Corbyn wondered why so many Palestinians in Gaza were still in refugee camps, although Hamas had ruled Gaza for more than a decade after the Israeli withdrawal.

Virtue-signalers do no service to Palestinians by using and abusing their undoubted sufferings to vent historic, cultural and pseudo-religious hatred against Jews.

If they are sincere in supporting the Palestinians they should call for transforming a "cause", that in Hamas's version means the annihilation of Israel -- a cause that has produced nothing but grief for eight decades -- into a "project" to shape a better future for Palestinians beyond eternal refugee camps.

11/11 Links Pt1: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’; Dear Jared Kushner, the Jewish people need you; IDF seizes ammunition hidden Gaza aid convoy

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’

This is what the counternarrative surrounding Amsterdam is doing. And it’s edifying to see the counternarrative crafted and released into the air vents in real time.

There’s an easy test to see whether the “Jewish soccer hooligans” blather is yet another “109 soon 110,” only this time from the left: Even if you were to grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ behavior, would it mitigate the evil of the pogrom? Did random Jews deserve to be stabbed and run over because other Israeli soccer fans were rowdy? To even write out that question is to see how much of a lunatic you’d have to be to entertain it.

And yet we also know that you cannot grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi fans’ actions. For example, we now know that the small number of Israelis who picked up sticks or other makeshift weapons had done so because they were set upon by organized attackers. We now know that taxi drivers were not victims of Israeli abuse but rather were the ringleaders of what the pogromists referred to as the planned “Jew hunt.” We now know the disingenuous nature of the accusation that random Jews deserved to be stabbed because some Maccabi fans interrupted a moment of silence for victims of a flood in Spain: The announcer was speaking in Dutch, which only one team’s fans in the stadium could understand. We now know that the rumor that Israelis were disruptive at a casino is false and that what actually happened is that an employee of the casino alerted the pogromist organizers to the Israelis’ location so they could be hunted. (Those last two details come to us from excellent reporting by the Wall Street Journal.)

So we’re left with a video of some Maccabi fans singing an anti-Arab chant as they’re being escorted by police away from crowds that taunt them and which the police assume will get into a violent confrontation with the Israelis. The people claiming that video is what led to a preplanned pogrom are telling on themselves, both because they don’t know what “preplanned” means and because there is a sociopathic element to their justifications.

And history is littered with them. In 1881, Jews in Alexandria were accused of kidnapping and killing a Greek child in a ritual murder—the classic blood libel. A newspaper reporter wrote that, in light of a similar accusation made against the Jews in Syria, “the position taken up by the Greeks is not on the face of it so absurd, untenable and prejudiced as the European colony would have us believe. If the voice of the vast majority be the voice of the people, and if it be true that vox populi vox Dei, then one should surely pause before exonerating the Jews of Alexandria of every suspicion of guilt.”

His point was: Could it be that the Jews keep getting accused of the same thing and yet all of these accusations are false? Could it be, today’s anti-Semites on both left and right will ask, that the Jews keep getting kicked out of their “host” countries and yet it is always the host countries’ fault? In the past year there have been Jew hunts not just in Amsterdam but across Europe and even an occasional version in the U.S.; could it be, we are asked, that none of those Jew hunts were the Jews’ fault? And don’t get so defensive, these pundits and activists insist; they’re just asking questions.

Brendan O'Neill: The moral ghettoisation of the Jews

There seems to be a new rule on the woke left: if some members of an ethnic group behave badly, we should not be surprised if other members of that ethnic group get attacked. Will this rule be applied consistently? Will they say, next time a few fuming Islamists gather in a city centre in Britain to burn the UK flag or the Israeli flag and to chant about the return of Muhammad’s army to finish off the Jews, that we shouldn’t be surprised if EDL-style racists then go out and attack random Muslims? That these people ‘fucked around and found out’? Of course they won’t. I hope they won’t. So why are they ceaselessly mentioning that some Maccabi fans are idiots, as if this explains why some Jews got beaten to a pulp in a self-described jodenjacht?

Worse than the contextualisation is the moral inversion. In accusing all of the visiting Israelis of ‘rampaging’ through Amsterdam, of being ‘racist’, even of bringing ‘the spirit of Israeli fascism’ to Europe, the left turns truth and reason utterly on their heads. The Israelis are accused of doing what was in truth done to them. It was the self-confessed ‘Jew-hunting’ mob who rampaged. It was they who stamped racism on to the streets of Amsterdam. It was they who embodied the ‘spirit of fascism’ with their vile demands to know who’s an Israeli, who’s a Jew, so that they might know who to batter. To accuse the victims of something not unlike fascism of being the real fascists is almost unimaginably cruel, even by the standards of the post-truth woke left.

We cannot overlook the magnitude of what happened last week. A literal Jew hunt unfolded in one of the cities that trembled under Jews hunts in the last century, and some in our intellectual classes essentially said: ‘Well…’ People who write for newspapers, who are feted by the BBC, who move and shake in the middle-class universe of performed virtue scratched their chins, offered up explanations, saw a young Jew with the gash of an anti-Semite’s boot and wondered: ‘Is this a thug who deserved it?’ This was more than hypocrisy. It was more than the identitarian downplaying of anti-Jewish racism that has become tragically commonplace on the modern left. It was confirmation of a new moral ghettoisation of the Jews, of their unforgiving exclusion from the entire realm of progressive sympathy.

In essence, a new edict of expulsion has been issued against the Jews not from the physical kingdom of the nation state this time, but from the moral kingdom of elite empathy. They are to enjoy none of the rights or privileges of woke concern. No other social group can be victim-blamed, but they can be. No other ethnic group’s ‘truth’ about the hatred they experience may be discounted, but theirs can. No other group is forbidden from making sense of their current persecution through their past persecution, but they are. Witness the rage against those who have used the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the hunt in Amsterdam. The words ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ have already been stolen from the Jews, and are now used against them by a woke elite convinced Israel’s war on Hamas is a new species of Nazism. Now, ‘pogrom’ is taken from them, too. Not only is their persecution denied – the very linguistic tools through which they might describe their persecution are denied to them as well.

To my mind, the chattering classes’ ‘contextualisation’ of the violence in Amsterdam could prove more dangerous, in the long run, than the violence itself. The Jews’ black eyes and torn skin will heal. Their attackers – we hope – will be brought to justice. But the grim ‘intellectual’ singling out of the Jews as a lesser identity, to whom few of the new moral codes apply, will linger. The pogrom is over – the spirit of the pogrom lives.

"Deceit of an Ally" is a memoir of sorts by Bruce Brill, who worked at the NSA 50 years ago as an Arabic translator.

The main point of the book is that Brill, who was Jewish, was urged by his boss not to travel home for Yom Kippur in 1973 because he had absolutely positive information that a war was going to break out that day.

The rest of the book is mostly Brill's attempts to find out why NSA didn't tell the Israelis about this intelligence ahead of time. After he left the military and the NSA, Brill moved to Israel and over the decades interviewed many of the decision makers and wrote about his experience (once cleared to do so); he eventually realized that not only didn't the Americans warn the Israelis but they misled them, saying that Egypt was not going to attack that day. Newly release d archives support this contention. This is one reason the Israelis were caught flat-footed on that terrible Saturday morning.

However, Brill does not address the other evidence that the IDF ignored at the time. Assuming he is right, the American deceit was a factor, but not the only factor.

Brill fills out the book with some other anecdotes and unproven theories; after all he was a fairly junior member of the NSA and everyone there is only told what they have a need to know. He writes about the secret "Jew Room" at the NSA as reported in "The Secret War Against the Jews," by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, where they intercept and decode Israeli communications and don't allow Jews to enter. Brill believes he saw a glimpse of the "Jew Room" he was not allowed to enter without escort when he worked at the agency - the door was opened and he saw a map of Israel and settlements that wasn't behind its usual curtain. But he has no proof.

There is a lot of paranoia in this book. Brill talks about his fears that he will be assassinated for his work to expose this conspiracy. For example, he thinks a character named "Brill" in the Gene Hackman movie "Enemy of the State" was named after himself.

When he writes letters to everyone he can think of asking what they know about the US misleading the Israelis and the "Jew Room," most of them ignore him. He thinks that is evidence of a coverup, but it is more likely they think he is a flake.

In the end, the only thing he proves is the NSA knew about the Yom Kippur War ahead of time. He corroborated that with other translators who worked at the NSA at the time. Brill fills up the book with copies of original letters and documents; he submitted the book to the NSA to be vetted and he left the blacked-out parts as part of the book.

One of his paranoid-sounding theories does make one wonder, though.

When Brill's miliary time was up, he had an option to "convert" to become a civilian employee at the NSA. He decided to apply - not because he really wanted to stay there but because the process happened during working hours and he was bored. One of the steps was a polygraph test, and when they asked if he would ever pass information to a foreign country he said no - but the polygraph said he was lying. That uis usually enough to disqualify anyone from working there, but not only did they then invite him to negotiate a salary, they offered him a much higher pay grade than his job would normally receive. Since he wasn't interested, he declined anyway.

The NSA, of course, knew Brill was Jewish and was studying Hebrew. Why did they want him so badly? Brill wonders if they were trying to set him up - this is before Jonathan Pollard - as someone to whom they would leak critical secret information about Israel's enemies and then try to entrap him when they assumed Brill would tell it to Israeli agents.

Could it be that this was a plan, and this was done to Pollard? It seems far-fetched, but antisemitism at the NSA in those days seems certain, and Brill describes some that he had to endure.

Some parts of the book - like details about working at the Agency - are fun to read. I was surprised to find out that satellite imagery in the 1970s was already good enough that Brill could read the Hebrew on the knit kippah of an Israeli soldier embroidered with his name from space. If that was true in the 70s, it is mind boggling to think how today's intelligence agencies could do orders of magnitude more.

But it is not a very well written or edited book.

It is nearly impossible to read Deceit of an Ally and not think of analogies between Israel's intelligence failure in 1973 -whatever the true reasons were - and its equally devastating failure on October 7. In both cases, the data was there; the people whose job is to interpret the firehose of data and make correct decisions, or at the very least hedge their bets and make contingency plans in case their assumptions were wrong, were the ones who failed.

Bruce Brill sounds like a fun person to talk to, but once you know the gist of his book, there isn't much more to learn.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Over the weekend, according to reports out of Lebanon, Israel targeted and killed Saudi citizen Imran Ahmed Al-Mughassil, a dentist, in an airstrike.

There is no international incident. No one is saying that this will harm potential relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The reason is because he was a Shiite terrorist, described as a fighter in Hezbollah, where he was known as Imran Karim. Hezbollah has extensively mourned his "martyrdom."

The terrorist's father, Ahmed Al-Mughassil, was he leader of the military wing of Saudi Hezbollah. He is now in a Saudi prison for his role in the 1995 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 US Air Force personnel.

The US is still seeking Ahmed for trial.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Yemenite Jew in the early 20th century wearing the sudra

Years ago we lampooned how Palestinians and their pals would freak out when Israelis would make their own Jewish versions of keffiyehs. Apparently Palestinian culture is so weak that the every existence of Jews eating hummus or wearing a headdress that Jews have worn for thousands of years threatens their cherished "symbol of resistance."

One Israeli, Rudy Rochman, is marketing his own sudra with a Star of David pattern, and he made this video describing it and its Jewish roots.

The only reason I found this video is because rabid anti-Zionist Rafael Shimunov stumbled upon it and labeled it "genocidal."

Yes, Jews wearing a scarf like their own Middle Eastern ancestors did is "genocide." Just like Israeli versions and adaptations of Middle Eastern foods are "genocide." Just like Israeli versions of Middle Eastern dance are "genocide."

Perhaps the ubiquitous olive wood camels that Arabs eagerly sold to Jewish tourists in the 1950s and 60s are also "genocide."

The constant associating Jews with genocide is, of course, deliberately meant to invert the Holocaust, the event that the term to be coined for. It is ironic that the people who pretend to care about genocide by using it for everything Israelis do are redefining and trivializing the term so that it becomes meaningless - and therefore all but ignored in cases that it really happens.

To the modern antisemites, applying the term to Jews is far more important than genocide itself.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Hezbollah has been recruiting child soldiers from their Imam al-Mahdi Scouts who are as young as 15, according to reports.

From what I can tell, they were killed in the vicinity of adult Hezbollah fighters, and were not targeted themselves.

Nazi salute at the Mahdi Scouts

According to experts interviewed in Lebanese media, Hezbollah is suffering a manpower shortage. They have been recruiting from their scouts to backfill various functions.

It does not look like these are fighters, but they are being used as messengers, lookouts and couriers. Under international law, they are still combatants.

Since Hezbollah's communications system has been thoroughly compromised, messengers are necessary to communicate between different cells.

Hezbollah attracts the youth to the Scouts with promises of an (Iranian) salary as well as the promise of martyrdom that they children are brainwashed with in the scouts. Al Jazeera quoted one 14 year old in 2021 as saying, “Al-Mahdi Scouts told us to be martyrs defending our land from all the countries that attack us.

Training kids to want to die is, of course, child abuse. And Western media simply doesn't talk about it.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/10 Links: The Amsterdam pogrom and antisemitism in Biden’s America; Hamas Must Be Defeated, Not Legitimized; Videos of brutal Hamas torture in Gaza

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle

The shiva was an unbearably tragic, moving and yet inspirational experience.

Inspirational because here in microcosm was something of unexpected and priceless value that has emerged in Israel during this terrible year. It is no reflection on the grit and valour of those who fought in Israel’s previous wars to say that what’s now taking place is seen by many as a spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation.

At the funeral and shiva, Avi’s widow Rachel showed the inner strength of this couple when she spoke up for three principles dear to her husband and demanded by his ultimate sacrifice.

The first was the need for unity, demonstrated by the family’s request that any politician who paid a shiva visit should be accompanied by someone with a different perspective.

The second was that Charedim should enlist in the IDF, a demand she made in public to a prominent rabbinic opponent of the Charedi draft when he visited the mourners.

The third, which encompassed the first two, was that the cause for which her husband had given his life was a war of good against evil.

This understanding lies at the core of the astounding spirit shown by countless IDF soldiers, secular as well as believers, over the past year.

These soldiers — many of them achingly young — have shown they aren’t fighting merely to defeat an enemy bent on their nation’s destruction and to recover the remaining Israeli hostages.

They understand they are up against an existential evil, the same barbaric depravity that has claimed millions of Jewish lives over the centuries.

This conscript army accordingly feels accompanied on the battlefield by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in previous generations. These soldiers know they’re fighting for the moral and spiritual principles that have kept the Jewish people alive throughout unparalleled persecution.

It’s why they believe they will win this war, whatever the cost.

It’s why so many of them, secular as well as religious, have gone to war wearing tzitzit, the fringed garment intended to remind them of the Jews’ religious calling. They wear this Jewish identity like armour next to their hearts.

Avi Goldberg was a warrior rabbi fighting for the nation, the first for centuries to have taken this dual role so familiar to us from the Hebrew bible. He had the aura of a biblical figure fighting in what many have come to view as a biblical war. For it feels like a momentous new chapter is being written in Jewish history.

No-one is under any illusion that, after the war ends, Israel’s profound political dysfunctionality and social divisions will magically melt away. But a great new generation is arising from the smoke of the battlefield who will never again put up with the doublethink and confusion of a society that lost its ancient clarity of vision and paid a terrible price.

A spark has been rekindled by this war to forge the nation anew. The people of Israel are being bound together in fire, a nation fighting for civilisation against barbarism, for light against darkness, for life against death.

May the memory of all who have fallen in this seismic war be a blessing.

10 Lies about Israel (pdf)

Telling the truth about Israel is an urgent necessity after the October 7th massacre and the unexpected wave of antisemitism that we witnessed afterward. For many years Israel’s image has been polluted to the point of asphyxiation by a well-prepared set of lies that, over the decades, have become widespread – mindsets that fuel not only incitement to terrorism in the Arab world but also antisemitic hatred in the Western world.

The resulting ignorance is an abyss of shame. The young people who take to the streets against Israel know nothing but myths and lies, while ignoring even the most basic facts of Israel’s history and current events. In this little book, we offer our contribution to the truth facing the ten basic lies about Israel.

About that 2020 election anomaly chart (UPDATE)

(This is off-topic for me, but I got a little obsessed with the topic. See UPDATE at the end.)

This chart has been going around on social media the past few days:

At first glance, it appears that the number of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate were very anomalous compared to the previous and succeeding elections.

I know that people have analyzed the 2020 results to death, but this interested me enough to look at it on my own.

First of all, the scale of the chart - while acceptable practice - is deceptive, since the Y axis starts at 50 million votes, exaggerating the effect. Here is the correct chart for the past five elections in proper perspective.

Obviously far more ballots were counted in 2020 than for any US election in history. The reasons given, according to ChatGPT:

Heightened Political Engagement: The political climate in the years leading up to the 2020 election was particularly charged, motivating more people to vote.

Expanded Mail-In and Early Voting: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states expanded access to mail-in and early voting to make it safer and more convenient for people to cast their ballots.

Increased Voter Registration Efforts: There were significant efforts by various organizations to register new voters, particularly among younger demographics and minority groups.

High Stakes: Many voters on both sides viewed the 2020 election as particularly crucial, leading to higher turnout.

Intensive Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns: Both major political parties and numerous advocacy groups invested heavily in efforts to mobilize voters.

Four of the five apply to 2024 as well, yet the number of votes cast went up by over 21 million in 2020 and went down by about 18 million this year. The main difference as far as I can see is that there was a huge increase in mail-in voting in 2020 due to COVID concerns - 65 million compared to 25 million in 2016.

This year there were more than 80 million early voters, but I cannot find a breakdown yet of mail in vs. early voting at official locations.

Looking further into the 2020 numbers, I looked at the differential of votes compared to 2016 by party. My theory is that in general, 2016 Trump voters remained Trump voters (49%) and 2016 Clinton voters remained Clinton voters (51%), within a couple of percentage points.

If we subtract the 2016 results from the 2020 results, the excess number of votes come out to 58% Democrat vs. 42% Republican (I'm not counting third parties).

That number is, to me, statistically suspicious. The additional votes should be roughly in line with the more general results (which totaled 52% Democrat to 48% Republican, including the excess votes.) Clearly the excess votes are way out if whack and not close to a representative sample compared to the rest of the voters in America.

Even more crazily, if you subtract the number of Democratic and Republican votes of 2024 from the historical highs of 2020, you see that the "missing" votes that weren't cast were 83% Democratic and 17% Republican. (In this case, however, there are stong indications that there was a lot of voters who "flipped" from D to R this year so this number is not as meaningful.)

Now, it is possible that there are non-suspicious reasons for the 2020 anomalies. Trump disparaged mail-in voting throughout his campaign so in general Republicans went to the polls while a far higher percentage of Democrats voted by mail.

Surveys afterwards showed that people were happy with the ease of mail-in voting. However, if it is so easy and convenient, why did we see the number of votes cast go down so dramatically this year?

Nevertheless, the claim that somehow the 2020 voting - specifically the excess voting - was manipulated would require extraordinary proof to me. My hypothesis to test that idea is to look at each individual state's excess voting. If the Democrats were concentrating on manipulating the votes somehow, it would be logical to expect that they would put far more effort into the battleground states and not bother much with states that were not up for grabs.

The eight states considered battleground states in 2020 were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When I look at the percentage difference between those eight states and the 2016 results, I do not see them as being towards the top in a list of anomalies. The top four gains for Democrats percentagewise compared to 2016 were in already blue states (New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, Connecticut, all with above 24% difference in Democrat excess vote in 2020 compared to total in 2016.) The swing states are generally in the bottom half of that list.

Yet, when you compare some of the swing states percentage point difference between the excess 2020 votes and how they vote in 2016, some of them come out above the national average of 6.91 percentage points. They include Georgia (14), Michigan (9), North Carolina (7.4), Arizona (7.4) and Pennsylvania (7.) All of those besides North Carolina flipped from R to D.

Ohio, Arkansas, Nevada and New York's excess votes were fairly close to their 2016 votes.

Florida's excess votes were more Republican than in 2016 by 6.4 percentage points.

My analysis does not indicate that there was a concerted effort to manipulate the votes in the battleground states, at least no more than other states. Maybe many of the new 2020 Democrats, who were less motivated in previous years to vote, were unenthusiastic about Kamala Harris and went back to not voting.

But there are still many unanswered questions about the 2020 election and why it had so many more Democratic votes than the previous and successive election years, compared to Republicans.

UPDATE: Yair Rosenberg points out that the 2024 numbers (which I had verified at the time I first looked at this) have been significantly updated as new votes are counted. The number of votes in 2024 is not nearly as significantly lower as I thought - at the moment, less than a million fewer than 2020. So my comparison between 2020 and 2024 goes out the window, although why the excess votes in 2020 were so skewed towards Biden is still strange, to me at least.

Updated chart, including the section outlined in red shown in the original graphic for comparison:

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The news out of Amsterdam gets more and more horrifying. And it appears that the police are part of the problem.

Another sickening video was released showing a gang of Islamic thugs chasing down and repeatedly kicking a presumed Jew in the head.

Even after the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans left the city, the antisemitic attacks continue.

On Saturday night, police said, gangs were still roaming the streets threatening anyone who "looked Jewish" and demanded they show their IDs,

On Saturday, a number of "free Palestine" stickers were found in the city - including near the Holocaust Museum - backed by razor blades to injure anyone who tries to remove them.

It turns out that the Holocaust Museum is a "safe space" - for antisemites.

Because last month, the Dutch police admitted that some of their officers refuse to be deployed at places like the Holocaust Museum or at Koran-burning demonstrations because of "moral objections." Police spokesperson Mireille Beentjes said in response, "We take moral objections into account when drawing up schedules." But, she insisted, for "urgent" matters the police department expects all officers to show up.

Which means that there are fewer officers available to protect the Holocaust Museum compared to other sections of Amsterdam.

There is a clear trajectory we have seen over the years: the sort of attacks we see against Jews in the Palestinian territories spread to highly Muslim sections of Europe a few years later, then to England, then to Canada and the US. These attacks get normalized over time. That's what "globalize the intifada" means.

And no matter how depraved, how disgusting, how utterly inhumane the attacks are, they are always justified as a natural reaction to things Jews are doing.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Palestinians are not only justifying the Amsterdam pogrom - they are celebrating attacking Jews

While the usual Israel haters are justifying the pogrom against Israeli Jews in Amsterdam, Palestinians are celebrating them.

The Gaza Now Telegram channel is filled with videos of rabid Muslims beating Jews in Amsterdam. But they pretend that the attackers were regular freedom-loving Dutch citizens who had no choice.

Here are some of the caption of the most violent videos, where they freely admit and brag about terrorizing Israelis on the streets. The only justification they give is that Israelis tore a Palestinian flag.

After they tore up the Palestinian flag⚠️run over, stabbed and beaten🔻
They told them this is for the children of Gaza, you scoundrels.🇵🇸🇳🇱
Thousands of Dutch and Arab supporters of the Palestinians beat up the Israeli terrorist pigs in the Dutch capital Amsterdam after the match between "Maccabi Tel Aviv" and the Ajax Amsterdam team.

100 injuries🔻Among the Israeli terrorist pigs in the center of the Dutch capital Amsterdam after they were beaten, stabbed and trampled in response to tearing up the Palestinian flag during the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam, and the response came from Dutch youth, Arabs, Turks, Russians and Chechens.🇳🇱🇵🇸

The moment the Israeli terrorist pigs tore up the Palestinian flag in the Dutch capital Amsterdam, which led to an angry reaction from Dutch, Arab, Russian, Chechen and Turkish youth.🇵🇸🇳🇱

This is how the free people of the world in the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, dealt with the Israeli terrorist pigs who returned to normal life after killing defenseless Palestinian civilians and committing genocide in Gaza. All of these are Zionist soldiers who participated in killing the children of Gaza.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻

Crying Israeli terrorist pigs in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a Zionist soldier who participated in killing Gaza children gets punched in the face and falls to the ground.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻

In response to the tearing down of the Palestinian flag and its removal from homes in Amsterdam... the free people of the world tear up and burn the flag of the terrorist Zionist occupation pigs in front of the hotel where the terrorist Israeli pigs are hiding in the Netherlands.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻

The Israeli terrorist pigs are trying to cover up their terrorism in Gaza by using video clips showing the free people of the world raising and disciplining the soldiers of the terrorist Zionist occupation in the streets of Amsterdam while they cry like mice.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻

They aren't denying the crimes - they are proud of them.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/09 Links: Hostage families rally to mark 400 days since Hamas attack; Iran wants war with the United States; Amsterdam Pogrom Is the Quintessence of Anti-Zionism

From Ian:

‘Why is they still in Gaza?’: Protesters in Tel Aviv mark 400 days since October 7

Hundreds gathered outside the IDF’s Tel Aviv headquarters on Saturday evening for the weekly protest demanding a hostage deal, as many of the captives’ families leading the demonstration marked 400 days since their loved ones were abducted.

The crowd appeared slightly larger than in recent weeks. This weekend’s rally on Begin Road was the first since the major one that spontaneously unfolded on Tuesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was considered a proponent for a hostage deal.

While weekly protests earlier on in the war attracted thousands, Home Front Command restrictions put in place in September cap such gatherings at 2,000 people.

A massive sign reading “Why are they still in Gaza? 400 days” hung from the pedestrian overpass down to street level, while big white cardboard letters on the street spelled out: “400 days — the shame of Netanyahu.”

Though overtly partisan politics are usually absent from the Begin Street protest, the youth wing of the opposition Yesh Atid party set up an informational stand by the demonstration.

A block away, some 500 people assembled at Hostages Square for the main weekly rally organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

With a band of mothers clad in white, Niva Wenkert, the mother of hostage Omer Wenkert, kicked off the rally with a call to join “Shift 101,” a silent protest group. Demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip outside protest in Tel Aviv, November 9, 2024. (Itai Ron/Flash90)

After Wenkert, actor Lior Ashkenazi, the regular MC at the forum’s rallies, spoke against the government’s politicking at home while the captives have languished in Gaza. He noted that Saturday’s rally fell on the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, drawing a direct line between the Nazi pogrom and Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023.

Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador to Israel, also spoke at the rally, saying in Hebrew that for some Israeli politicians, “the fate of the hostages is just one of the [war’s] aims, and certainly not the primary one” — a not so subtle shot at members of Netanyahu’s hardline government.

Seibert added that he was speaking “as the representative of Germany and out of responsibility” to hostages with German citizenship. “I must admit that until now, we have failed to bring everyone home. All the talks with those who have influence on Hamas” have failed to materialize.

Naming hostages who have German citizenship or are related to German citizens, Seibert said: “These are Germans, or family members of Germans, and we want them back.”

Families of four pairs of sibling hostages held in Gaza mark 400 days of captivity

Sylvia Cunio doesn’t live in Kibbutz Nir Oz right now, but when she visits, she has only one wish: To go to Gaza and find her two sons who were taken hostage last October 7.

“I was in Nir Oz the other week and I said to my friends, to my family, ‘Let’s go to Gaza, let’s go, let’s go get them,'” she said. “I just want to go to Gaza and bring them out myself.”

The Cunios are part of a distinct circle within the broader group of hostage families — those awaiting the return of two siblings held by Hamas in Gaza.

Many sets of siblings were taken hostage on October 7, but only four pairs are left in the enclave, with their families bereft and anxious about the future of their loved ones: David and Ariel Cunio, Eli and Yossi Sharabi, Iair and Eitan Horn and twins Gali and Ziv Berman.

Sylvia’s sons David Cunio, 34, and Ariel Cunio, 27, were each taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz. David was taken with his wife, Sharon and their three-year-old twins, along with Sharon’s sister Danielle and niece Emilia who were visiting Nir Oz that weekend. Ariel was taken hostage with his girlfriend, Arbel Yehud.

On November 27, sisters Sharon and Danielle and their three young children were all released home to Israel under the week-long truce. David was left behind, injured, rail thin and terrified, as described by his wife, Sharon, who was aghast at the idea of leaving him behind in Gaza.

Ariel and Arbel are also still held in Gaza. Sylvia Cunio, far left, with her husband, Louis, and three of her four sons, Ariel, (third from left), David and Eitan; Ariel and David were taken hostage to Gaza on October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)

“I have hope and that’s the last thing I’ll lose,” Sylvia said. “But I won’t believe they’re coming back until I see them with my own eyes, next to me, and hug them, smell them and cook for them.”

Noa Argamani on Instagram: 'The abandonment continues'

Noa Argamani, who was rescued from Hamas captivity in Operation Arnon, posted an Instagram story marking 400 days since October 7, 2023.

''I don't even know how to describe to you the frustration I experienced while still in Hamas captivity. Another day passes and another day passes amid complete uncertainty wrapped in despair,'' she wrote.

Speaking about of her captivity drawings, she added: "'When will it be my turn to go home?' 'Have they forgotten me? Left me behind?' These are sentences that I would raise on a daily basis. But the most frustrating moment is when another hundred days join the previous hundred; it's the time when I started counting from the beginning again. Although the counting was restarted, the conditions only worsen, and the despair only increases. It is impossible to put aside the fact that for already 400 days there are 101 hostages who are just waiting for someone to come and save them. 400 days and the abandonment continues, 400 days too many.''

Meanwhile, the families of the hostages held a statement this evening at the Begin Gate in Tel Aviv. Einav Tsangauker, the mother of the hostage Matan, said: ''After 400 days, it's time to say clearly, everywhere, and on every channel: We must end the war in Gaza and bring everyone back. Yoav Gallant said this week that conditions are ripe, achievements have been secured, and there is nothing left to do in Gaza. The entire security system says this. Everyone understands that the only way to bring back the hostages is to end the war in Gaza. There is no other way.''

She claimed, ''But Netanyahu refuses to end the war for criminal political considerations. Because of Netanyahu, the hostages are dying in captivity. Because of Netanyahu, soldiers are being killed in a war that has achieved its goals. Instead of ending the war in Gaza, the government promotes Israeli towns in Gaza. Instead of acting according to the national interest, Netanyahu acts according to the interests of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. The people understand this, the people support the deal and ending the war. Every Israeli patriot should demand from Netanyahu: End the war in Gaza and bring back all the hostages. What else is there to do in Gaza besides a hostage deal?''

11/08 Links Pt2: Trump’s election has checkmated Iran; US three men in Iranian plot to assassinate Trump; Qatar To Expel Hamas Leaders

From Ian:

Why America Stopped Winning Wars

Israel, a country of just 10 million with no friendly population on any of its borders, cannot afford to follow America’s example. America might be able to avoid national suicide by correcting its policy errors, because of the great physical distance that separates it from its enemies. Israel’s enemies are right on the border, and Israel has neither a moment nor a square foot to spare.

The events of Oct. 7 demonstrated that Hamas indeed posed and continues to pose a catastrophic threat to Israel’s citizens. If Hezbollah’s forces poised on Israel’s northern border had followed through on its own invasion plans for the Galilee on Oct. 7, for which we now know it was amply prepared, the result might well have been three or four times the scale of mass killings, perhaps precipitating the collapse of Israel. Proportionality, in its true sense, would therefore dictate the annihilation of Hamas in response, to remove an existential threat.

Control of a territory by an extremist movement necessarily means that the majority of the civilian population either actively sustains it or else tacitly accepts its activities.

Yet, in contemporary American military and government understanding, proportionality means that every Israeli action should be examined from the point of view of whether “disproportional harm”—often meaning, any harm—has been inflicted on noncombatants. This is insane in the literal sense, as there is no way for Israel to apply this principle in practice and at the same time destroy Hamas.

The reason why the U.S. managed to spend the extraordinary sum of $2.3 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other, associated operations, is largely “proportionality.” Careful assessment of what is and is not a proportional attack, or a proportional campaign, is incredibly expensive. It requires the constant collection of a vast amount of detailed intelligence on such subjects as the number of civilians likely to be present in a particular building. In its implementation, proportionality is taken to require the use of guided “smart” low-impact munitions in almost all circumstances, another enormous drain on the budget. Repeated attacks on the same target with expensive munitions often substitute for single attacks with cruder weapons, whose death tolls might be higher—but which will not exhaust America’s financial strength and are more likely to lead to victory. If the Union had spent the Civil War obsessing about the proportionality of its actions instead of annihilating the Confederacy, the war would likely have ended in a stalemate, and the continuation of slavery in the South.

A third and final reason why America stopped winning wars is its misunderstanding of democratization, which is not at all limited to the actions of President George W. Bush, or the ideas of so-called “neoconservatives.” Predictably, relying on democratization as a long-term solution to a foreign threat has proved a misguided and exceptionally expensive approach.

A dangerous regime like Saddam Hussein’s is a proper target for war. Those who are inclined to suggest that Saddam was not dangerous, or no longer dangerous, by 2003, are invited to consider what a vicious dictator like him would have done with Iraq’s vast oil revenue over time. Iran, a very dangerous regime, earns much less money exporting oil than Iraq, partly because it is much simpler to extract and export Iraqi oil. Thus, making sure that Saddam was not left permanently sitting on top of a vast revenue stream to support future aggression was a legitimate military objective.

Imposing democracy on Iraq was not a legitimate military objective, because it could not be reasonably achieved in a limited period of time through force. A society which has existed as a tyranny for decades cannot suddenly be turned into a democracy, especially if the society is not very sophisticated, either technologically or socially, simply by means of military invasion and occupation. It is worth remembering that West Germany had previously been a democracy, however flawed, during the Weimar Republic. It was also an advanced industrial power. Under direct occupation by the Western Allies after a catastrophic military defeat, and with massive Marshall Plan aid, West German society was capable of again sustaining democracy—which was already a familiar form of government. Nothing of the kind was possible in Iraq.

Seeking democracy, or even some substantively democratic form of government, is futile in places like Iraq and Gaza, because democratic governance requires a preexisting institutional and social basis. What should be done, and what America can do, is to rapidly destroy military threats to its national security and economy—as was in fact done in America’s initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. Instead of attempting to police Iraq into the future, America should have then maintained forces in safe areas in close proximity, like Iraqi Kurdistan and Kuwait, to make sure that the old regime could not return to power.

America cannot afford to fight long wars against its enemies, both because of the cost, and because any long campaign inevitably teaches the enemy to adapt and adjust, and thereby become at least partially immune to attack. What the United States should do instead is carry out sudden crushing attacks, which can be repeated without warning. America’s nature as a distant power with a large air force and navy makes this approach ideally suited to its strengths, while avoiding its weaknesses. If you don’t want to suffer the consequences of such an attack, then don’t do things like attack shipping in the Red Sea or take Americans hostage.

For the moment, America has no strategy, no operational approach, not even a clear sense of the tactics it should employ, even in simple situations where America’s interests are clear—like keeping shipping lanes open or keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of an Iranian regime that regularly promises “Death to America.” What America has, in overabundance, are empty soundbites. As long ago as Jan. 17, 2005, President Bush said of Iran’s nuclear program, “I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.” Two decades later, Vice President Harris says on that same topic, “diplomacy is my preferred path … but all options are on the table.” After two decades of continuing inaction, such rhetoric, on both sides of the aisle, is a portent of further failures to come.

Jonathan Tobin: Will Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy help or hurt Israel?

The stakes involved in Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies are very different. The notion that Ukraine is a valiant democracy fighting for the freedom of the world is a myth. The regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not as democratic or free from that nation’s antisemitic past as the foreign-policy establishment claims. By contrast, helping Israel defeat these terrorists who seek to spread chaos and genocide in a region central to American interests because of its oil reserves and strategic placement is vital to U.S. security.

All foreign-policy choices are transactional, but every nation has the duty to consider the interests of its own people first.

The choice of “America First” for the title of Trump’s foreign-policy vision has always been unfortunate since it conjures up the pre-World War II movement led by Charles Lindbergh that was both dedicated to appeasing Nazi Germany and antisemitic. Trump’s “America First” is neither dedicated to appeasing a foreign foe or spreading Jew-hatred. It is, instead, more of a realist policy than anything else. That’s because it involves, as we saw in Trump’s first term, a desire to defeat the Islamist terrorists of ISIS, in addition to an aggressive policy of sanctions and anti-terror special operations against Iran.

There is a difference between having the good judgment to pick and choose your battles based on American interests and a policy of isolationism. The notion that an America not willing to commit itself to conflicts anywhere no matter the circumstances will betray Israel is absurd as well as impractical. And it has yet to be explained how Israel is helped by a situation in which American strategic reserves are drawn down to the breaking point to fund and supply an endless war in Ukraine, rather than expended sparingly until they are needed for more important conflicts. Israel needs a strong American ally, not one mired in a conflict that only saps its strength.

Trump’s version of “America First” has other tangible benefits for Israel. Unlike both Obama and Biden, Trump is not interested in bolstering multilateral organizations like the United Nations that are cesspools of antisemitism and irredeemably hostile to the Jewish state. The president-elect has little use for that world body or any of its constituent agencies that do so much to demonize and harm Israel.

And though Biden bragged about how European leaders were thrilled with the return of the Democrats to power in January 2021, Trump is right to regard their good opinion as having no value. The less connected the United States is to international opinion, and especially that of the governments of Western Europe, the better it is for an Israel that Western Europe has already largely written off.

Some observers are so deranged by Trump’s ascendance that they fail to recognize that defending the interests of U.S. citizens “first” is both moral and a wise policy. Though many anti-Trumpers falsely accuse Trump of antisemitism, the opposite is true since he did more to combat Jew-hatred on campuses than his predecessors, who saw the antisemitic mobs as demonstrating idealism that must be heard, if not fully accepted.

While events and changing circumstances can’t be accounted for when determining the future, Trump’s pro-Israel record and opposition to woke ideology represent a harbinger of smoother sailing for the alliance between the two countries in the next four years. Whether successful or not, “America First” is likely to be a better American foreign policy for Jerusalem than the efforts of Biden and Harris.

Douglas Murray: 10 things Trump can do to clean up Biden’s messes abroad

Israel
Biden talked a strong game on Israel, but his administration was wet and leaky as hell.

In fact, the Biden administration spent more time trying to perform regime change in Jerusalem than it ever did anywhere else.

Now that Biden, Chuck Schumer and that gang are out, this is a good time to reaffirm the alliance.

Israel doesn’t need America to fight its wars for it. But it does need the US as a resolute ally while it finishes off Hamas and Hezbollah.

It also needs America to assert the sort of pressure the Biden-Harris administration never did to get the remaining hostages freed.

Trump has said before that they must be freed before his inauguration. Now is the time to tell Hamas’ regional backers that time is up.

The slogan for freeing the hostages — including the American ones — should never have been “Bring them home.” It should be “Give them back.” Now.

Iran
Which brings me to the single most important thing Trump can do in the Middle East.

The only reason Iran has been able to fight a seven-front war against Israel for the past year is because Biden-Harris turned the money spigots on for the mullahs the minute they came into office.

Before that, the mullahs were crawling to Trump, begging him to lift his crippling sanctions on their country.

Now is the time to slam the sanctions back on. Iran has seen its terror proxies crippled by Israeli military and intelligence in the past year. Now is the time to go for the head of the snake.

The Iranians are threatening another direct strike on Israel from Iranian territory.

In the last exchange, Israel took out the Revolutionary Islamic government’s air defense systems. There might be a reason for that. In the “tit-for-tat” of this part of the war, the next strike from Iran is imminent.

With Trump on the way back, Israel should be confident that its responding counter-strike destroys the mullahs and wipes away their nuclear ambitions once and for all.

Who knows, perhaps the sordid, barbaric Islamic regime in Tehran will finally fall and the Iranian people can finally get their country back.

If so, then perhaps by the end of his next term, Trump will be able to bring Iran into the Abraham Accords.

Now that is something that even the Nobel Committee would have to notice.

Podcast: Mark Dubowitz on the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President

America has just elected a new president, or rather, a new-old president. Donald Trump will be the first American president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms. All transitions between presidential administrations have an awkward aspect, felt especially during the months between the election and when the incumbent takes office. This period, when the successor has already been named by the electorate but does not yet have any official power, is when a lame-duck session of Congress meets, and the president himself is called a lame-duck president.

During this period, the president—while retaining all of his constitutional authority—nevertheless tends to diminish in the power hierarchy of Washington. Presidential power is based, to a very large degree, on the possibility of promising something in the future, and lame-duck presidents don’t have a future in which they can fulfill any promises. It can also be a period when, unconstrained by the need to run for office again, a president can put executive orders and other kinds of policies in place without worrying about their political consequences. So it can be a period of troublemaking.

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), fears that a lame-duck Biden administration might decide to target Israel with executive action in very damaging ways. Dubowitz has spent decades working on financial warfare and sanctions in and out of government, and he is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program.

In order to follow this conversation, there are a couple of things it helps to know. First, in December 2016, during President Obama’s lame-duck period, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, which conveyed that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem are illegal. The U.S. could have vetoed the resolution, but instead abstained.

The second is Executive Order 14115, which President Biden signed back in February, which gives the State and Treasury Departments authorization to sanction individuals and entities who undermine peace and security in the very areas Security Council Resolution 2334 determined Israelis may not live in. Sanctions have already been levied against some Israelis—some of whom genuinely do undermine peace, and some of whom do not. Dubowitz joins Jonathan Silver to warn of the danger that the president will use the last weeks of his term to take accelerated action under these authorities.