Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 09, 2025

06/09 Links Pt2: The world has fallen into the moral abyss over Gaza; Plot to poison Israelis at Boom Festival in Portugal; Report debunks ‘settler violence’ narrative

From Ian:

David Collier: The world has fallen into the moral abyss over Gaza

This article is not about the conflict – it is about the international community .

The war – whatever you think of it – is ongoing. Israel rightly or wrongly seeks to eliminate the Hamas threat from Gaza and successfully return every single hostage (whether alive or dead). That is a given. And it is true, everyone does have a right to oppose the Israeli action and call on them to stop.

But that is only part of the equation. This war has been going on now for over 19 months. The world’s human rights NGOs argue that many of the people trapped inside are ‘refugees’. Legacy media have been running (real or imagined) massacre stories non-stop for 18 months. Yet not one of them has run a campaign to get the refugees to safety.

This is nothing to do with the Gazans. The international Palestinian solidarity movement, the hard-left, and the Islamist extremists, all want Gazans to stay in place. Not one of them, actually thought about the people of Gaza, what they wanted, or what was safest for them. Instead they wanted the civilians to remain caught between Hamas and the IDF. Just as Hamas use these people as human shields and want a high casualty count – that same accusation can equally be placed on the shoulders of the entire industry of ‘human rights’.

Israel did not want this. Israel did not seek this conflict. Hamas did. And Israel would much rather be fighting Hamas with no civilians around. So ask yourself why on earth the self titled bastions of moral virtue in the international community have done everything they can to make sure that the civilians have stayed in an area of urban conflict – and then they all express absolute outrage and pointed a finger of blame at Israel when anything happens to them?

And I will leave you with this one simple thought.

If your reflex opposition to this idea of Gazans leaving Gaza is also to reject it because ‘it is what Israel would want’ – then the Palestinian cause has turned you into an absolute monster. It really is that simple.

Richard Kemp: Trump is running out of time to crush Iran’s nuclear ambitions

Iran’s nuclear programme threatens the world and especially the Middle East, with Sunni Arab countries viewed as sworn enemies in Tehran’s maniacal eyes. But Israel is most immediately in Khamenei’s cross-hairs with his repeated guarantees to annihilate it. It is the only country other than the US that is capable of damaging Iran’s nuclear project, but is now on the horns of a dilemma.

Israel can hardly attack while its number one ally is in negotiations on exactly this issue. And if Trump eventually agrees a deal which does not fully dismantle nuclear production facilities – which is a distinct possibility – it will be faced with a decision on whether to go ahead anyway against Trump’s likely desire.

Israel is also certain to face obstruction from European leaders who will cravenly do what they can to avoid conflict no matter the consequences. If Trump’s negotiations grind to a halt and snapback sanctions are imposed, they will no doubt demand that these are given a chance to work and meanwhile Israel should refrain from attacking.

Such vacillation can be more easily swept aside than hard objections from the US, from which Israel would anyway need support including with potentially large retaliation from Iran.

On that subject, Tehran’s ballistic missile stockpiles have been severely depleted by two major attacks against Israel last year, the IDF’s strikes against Iranian ballistic missile production facilities and by export of missiles to Russia to attack Ukraine. But Iran is not sitting on its hands over that challenge any more than it is over uranium enrichment.

Earlier this year it took delivery of shipments of ammonium perchlorate from China and has reportedly ordered thousands of tons more, expected to arrive in the coming months. This is an essential component for solid fuel ballistic missiles, including nuclear armed missiles. As well as direct use against Israel, Iran will also send missiles to Lebanon to rebuild Hizballah and to its other proxies in Iraq and Yemen to attack Israel and potentially US forces in the region.

All this means the time for effective military action is now. Iran will do everything it can to spin out talks with the US, doing its best to lead the negotiators along while manipulating Europeans to throw a lifeline.

As well as building up its offensive capabilities, it will be trying to replace its Russian-supplied air defences shattered by an IDF counterstrike last October. It will also be further hardening and dispersing its nuclear facilities.

Trump needs to understand that, even if a deal is agreed, it won’t be worth the paper its written on. Tehran has repeatedly breached the terms of Obama’s deal as well as its obligations under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever obfuscation it comes up with, Iran will not voluntarily surrender its nuclear weapons programme.

All these negotiations will therefore achieve is to obstruct and delay the inevitable. It is imperative that the US now gives a green light to Netanyahu to do what he has to do, and provide him with whatever support he needs.

The consequences of failure to act go beyond Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Trump’s moves will also be measured in Moscow and Beijing. Anything other than a hard line with Tehran will be taken as a sign of weakness. It will encourage Putin to continue to refuse to negotiate over Ukraine, believing the cost to be low.

And it will show Xi that even the most bullish and unpredictable president the White House has seen for many years may not stand in the way of his own imperial ambitions. Ultimately, deterrence comes down to demonstrable political will. If a (not yet) nuclear armed state can’t be prevented from endangering the world by the American superpower, then what hope is there for anyone deterring two nuclear states.

‘For Dummies’-style manual aims to equip college-bound Jews for campus life

Targeting college-bound Jewish students and their parents, two American immigrants to Israel penned a “For Dummies”-style primer on being a Jewish collegiate during times of surging antisemitism.

The authors of “10 Things Every Jew Should Know Before They Go to College” — Emily Schrader and Blake Flayton — were each at the center of antisemitism scandals on their respective college campuses. Although they now live in Israel, Schrader and Flayton remain closely connected to the scene on American campuses.

In an interview with The Times of Israel, Schrader said the antisemitism at her former campus — University of Southern California — spurred her to move to Israel in 2015.

Incidents ranged from antisemitic Tweets to chants of “Death to Israel” on the USC campus quad, said Schrader. The journalist quickly became an outspoken opponent of Students for Justice in Palestine, the anti-Israel network that has been banned on several campuses in recent months.

“The administration did nothing,” said Schrader. “I knew the trajectory was going the wrong way even at schools like USC.”

Although “10 Things” is most relevant for North American Jews, the book makes note of campus developments around the world. Anti-Israel university activities often migrate from Europe to North American campuses, said Schrader.

“It’s worse in Europe. What happens in the UK is sort of a precursor to what happens in North America,” said Schrader.

The book is divided into 10 chapters based on topics including the media, the West Bank and the United Nations. There is content regarding campus support networks — including Hillel and Chabad — as well as warnings about Israel’s campus opponents and their activities.

06/09 Links Pt1: Good riddance to Greta’s Gaza ship of fools; Unfathomable Media Fraud; London-based ‘Hamas operative’ behind Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Unfathomable Media Fraud

Please read the following headline and subhed on a New York Times report today:
“The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza

To Israelis, the location of an underground passageway highlights Hamas’s abuse of civilians. To Palestinians, Israel’s decision to target it highlights Israel’s own disregard for civilian life.”

Just so we’re all clear on what happened: The leader of Hamas was using a bunker directly underneath the emergency department of a hospital. Israel took out that leader with a strike that avoided the hospital itself, after giving advance warning of its intentions. Then Israel cleared the area around it and retrieved the body.

According to the Times, the preceding scenario is open to interpretation.

But to really understand what’s happening here, one has to rewind slightly to the moment of the strike and its aftermath. Last month, Israel struck the tunnel under the European Hospital in an attempt to eliminate Muhammad Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and successor to his brother, Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks. News agencies insisted Israel was lying about the presence of Hamas leadership or an underground bunker, relying on fake “experts” whose expertise I debunked here.

Then it turned out that, as usual, Israel was telling the truth. Then journalists complained that Israel was keeping journalists out of the war zone, a kind of veiled justification for why they keep making up stories. Israel responded by giving journalists a tour of the underground bunker itself. Journalists responded by saying, essentially, ah well, nevertheless!

So here’s a question worth repeating: Will these news agencies still continue to platform the fake “experts” who keep making fools of them? Will they still use the same reporters and anchors that keep getting these stories wrong while behaving unprofessionally on-air?

Brendan O'Neill: Good riddance to Greta’s Gaza ship of fools

It’s brilliant to see the fizzling out of this summer jaunt to the Med masquerading as a moral crusade. For nothing has ever captured the lazy theatrics and fake virtue of modern activism as much as Greta’s dumb boat did. This so-called freedom flotilla would have done precisely nothing to assist the suffering people of Gaza. That was never really its aim. The ship of fools was always more interested in raising awareness about itself and its moral brilliance than about the needs of Gaza’s civilians.

Indeed, as Greta and Co crossed the choppy Med with their ‘tiny amount of aid’, Evil Israel handed out millions of meals in Gaza. In the first 15 days of its operations, the US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has given more than 10million meals to the needy. You couldn’t write satire like this: 12 woke fainthearts on a boat wail ‘Feed Gaza!’ as Israel does exactly that. As Greta and her smug chums bloviated on their boat to any media channel that would listen, Israel did the hard graft of feeding a war-whacked populace. As they took selfies of themselves sobbing into their keffiyehs about hungry Gazans, Israel was giving those Gazans food. They did moral pantomime, for likes on Instagram; Israel did aid, with no thanks at all.

Tell me that doesn’t sum up 21st-century activism. Tell me it doesn’t shine a brilliant light on the self-serving shitshow that is modern ‘leftism’, where the aim is always to accrue greater virtue for oneself rather than to improve the lot of others. As Greta was snapped dangling her legs off the hull of her boat in the glorious sun, young IDF troops were risking their lives guiding food trucks through a warzone. And you want us to cheer her? Forget about it. To some of us, it feels like the people on that boat were primarily interested in rebuilding their moral brand on the rubble of a bloody war. That’s not admirable, it’s sick.

Yet even as we cheer the interception of this ship of pricks, we need to get real about what it tells us about our times. This flurry of keffiyehs in the sea, and the cheering of it by the media elites, confirms that your virtue is now measured by how much you hate Israel. The old omnicauses of climate change and gender bollocks have withered away, to be replaced by the new omnicause of raging against the Jewish State. Hence, Greta has swapped her childish baloney about billions perishing at the altar of modernity in favour of lamenting Israel’s ‘genocide’ and the threat it supposedly poses to us all. You don’t need a PhD on 20th-century Europe to recognise how dangerous it is for the self-righteous of the West to define themselves in direct and furious opposition to the world’s only Jewish nation.

Seth Mandel: Free Palestine from ‘Free Palestine’

The great left-wing monocause of anti-Zionism is the chief organizing principle of progressive protest and it is currently the closest thing the movement has to a genuine litmus test. But for a time this could be expressed by simply banning Jewish symbols from progressive gatherings. Now, the iconography is an affirmatively Palestinian one.

The way this happens is a two-step process. Step one: The angsty activist left grabs on to someone else’s readymade cause and rides along, adopting an approach of basic mimicry. Step two: Youngish, progressive American activists soon outnumber actual Palestinians in the movement, and the “for Gaza” world is absorbed by the progressive Blob. Like the merger of a brand with a sales infrastructure, the issue is now owned by the conglomerate.

Is this a happy marriage? I doubt it, because everything done by Western activists makes life actively worse for Palestinians in the long run. But now the keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag are contributions to the intellectual property of the Blob.

Sales are excellent, but actual Palestinians don’t see a dime from the keffiyeh bubble, and when it bursts, they’ll be blamed. That’s how the Blob works. Don’t take it personally; it’s just business.

And until the bubble bursts, that stuff will be everywhere. (Intersectionalism, baby!) Every other progressive activist is treating the keffiyeh craze like spring break in the ’90s, coming home wearing a Señor Frog’s t-shirt. The marketing possibilities are endless: I Accused Israel of Genocide at the Hague and All I Got Was This Stupid Shirt.

Pretty soon, everywhere someone is denouncing the United States or assaulting a police officer or torching cars or vandalizing houses of worship, the Palestinian flag and keffiyeh will be there. Not because Palestinians want it that way, but because the Blob’s merchandizing department does. Meanwhile, any capital spent on the Palestinians will be spent defending and buttressing Hamas, the fascist death grip currently squeezing the life out of everything it finds in Gaza. But cool shirt, bro.

Andrew Fox: Moby Dickhead

This is not activism; it is narcissism masquerading as the rhetoric of moral urgency. It is the political equivalent of a wealthy teenager running away from home to make a statement, only to call the press for coverage and an Uber for the return journey.

Just like that, the climate crusader became a freedom flotilla freedom fighter, in a saga that feels less like history and more like an overwrought TikTok skit: “White Girl Finds Herself on the High Seas.”

Let us dispel the fantasy that Greta is some generational prophet. She is a product of PR handlers, of post-ideological Instagram politics, of a generation that confuses virality with virtue. Her interventions have consistently carried the theatrical air of a school play written in crayon and directed by individuals with saviour complexes. This latest escapade merely confirms what many suspected: Greta has outgrown climate change. The original cause, having reached its peak in moral clarity, no longer satisfies the appetite for drama. Now, like any brand in decline, she pivots. Gaza is the new climate; victimhood is the new activism.

If you want to play with fire, expect to get burned. Reports suggest that Greta, along with other detainees, will be shown footage from the 7 October atrocities, the defining trauma for Israelis still reeling from the bloodshed.

Good.

She should watch it: every gory frame; every slaughtered festival-goer; every burned corpse; every grandmother dragged from her home. She should watch it all and sit in silence for a change, instead of trying to turn every global tragedy into another Greta-centric chapter of her self-authored mythology.

This is not about denying the suffering of civilians in Gaza or about opposing protest. It is about proportion, decency, and reality. Greta’s self-aggrandising stunt insults the real victims on all sides. It reduces the complexity of a brutal, decades-long conflict to a teenage morality play with herself at the centre.

Greta was not kidnapped. She was interrupted.

For the rest of us still trying to live in the real world, to make sense of its horrors without resorting to cosplay and Instagram reels, that is at least some small mercy.

UK Parliament discussing whether to ban Jewish ritual slaughter today

From The Express (UK):

MPs are holding a debate on banning halal and kosher slaughter of animals, after thousands of Britons signed a petition demanding better animal welfare. It will be held in Westminster Hall, meaning that while there won’t be a vote it will be the first debate of the religious practice in parliament for years.

The showdown was forced as a result of a public petition on the parliamentary website, entitled: “Ban non-stun slaughter in the UK”, which garnered 109,018 signatures. It read: “In modern society, we believe more consideration needs to be given to animal welfare and how livestock is treated and culled. We believe non-stun slaughter is barbaric and doesn't fit in with our culture and modern-day values and should be banned, as some EU nations have done."

A Government response on January 10 defended the practice, arguing that while it would “prefer all animals to be stunned before slaughter… we respect the rights of Jews and Muslims to eat meat prepared in accordance with their religious beliefs.”

Muslims are complaining that this is just using animal welfare as an excuse to attack them. They have a point. Hunting is still allowed in Great Britain, and there is obviously no stunning beforehand. But British culture is more important than Jewish and Muslim religious precepts.

Many Muslims do say that stunning the animals does not invalidate the eating of animals, but stunned animals are not kosher.

The organization that brought the petition mentions cases of abuse seen in Halal and kosher slaughterhouses, but they also admit they see abuses even in slaughterhouses that stun the animals. They also said (as I recall) that they saw knives in the halal slaughterhouses that were not sharp. I have no idea about that, but if the knives in a kosher slaughterhouse are not super- sharp, the food would not be kosher.

I am all for treating the animals to the highest standards in the slaughterhouses, and the kosher meat industry has improved a great deal in recent decades. But there is no evidence that the actual slaughter itself, when done properly, is more painful than the process of stunning is (when it works.)

The UK government's response to the petition seems like it will defend Jews and Muslims' religious rights. That's good news. But who knows how long that will last?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

For centuries, the dominant language of Western morality has been rights: the right to life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, speech, education, healthcare, and more. I've discussed this in previous essays.

Upon further thought, I suggest that the entire idea of rights is a fiction, and Jewish ethics shows this to be the case. Moreover, the discourse of rights is damaging to society.

Firstly, without even invoking Jewish ethics, a little thought shows that while rights discourse assumes that rights are universal and even unalienable, it is not true. The best example is the one right everyone would agree on: the right to life. Does a soldier in a (legal) war have the right to life? No, he is expected to risk his life, and his very job is to do dangerous things - perhaps even missions that are tantamount to suicidal. If the opposing army has the right to kill the soldier, then what does "right to life" mean? Partial or provisional rights are not rights.

Furthermore, as we've discussed, , the idea of rights makes people feel a sense of entitlement. It makes people think in terms what they are owed, not what they can contribute. Each person's rights can clash which makes everyone potential adversaries - free speech vs. privacy, for example. When rights are absolute, how do you decide between competing rights?

Moreover, the very language of rights makes no distinction between what is allowed and what is ethical. For right-based moral systems, anything that is a "right" is also moral by definition. This means that there is no ethical barrier to speaking ruinous gossip for no positive purpose, for example.

I’m not the first to question the idea of rights. Jeremy Bentham, a prime architect of utilitarianism, called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts.” Hannah Arendt noted that rights are dependent on being a citizen, which means that there are no universal rights at all. Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed away, ridiculed the entire concept of rights, saying “there are no such rights and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”

Jewish ethics offers not only a critique of the rights-based model, but something richer: a system rooted in relationships, responsibility, shared obligations and covenant. It reframes the moral conversation not around what we are owed, but what we owe each other. What looks like a "right" in Jewish thought is often the visible result of others’ duties.

In this framework, what we call "rights" are the shadows cast by others' obligations. You have a "right" not to be stolen from because others are forbidden to steal. You have a "right" to safety because the community is obligated to protect you. These are not abstract entitlements but the byproduct of relational duties.

There is no “right” to life in a vacuum. But murder is categorically forbidden—except in edge cases like self-defense or war. And there is no contradiction because the priorities and triage principles are defined.

Instead of total, inalienable rights, Jewish ethics offers instead a layered structure of moral obligations - personal, communal, national - that interact to protect dignity, preserve justice, and respond to human need.

If there is any “right” in Jewish ethics, it is this: the moral freedom to act within the bounds of ethical obligation. That’s it. You are free to do anything that doesn’t violate what you owe to others.

This is not license—it is liberty with responsibility. And it’s enough.

So what about education, healthcare, wages, safety?

These aren’t rights in Jewish ethics. They are obligations - duties the state or community owes when individuals or families can’t fulfill them.

The state is obligated to provide a court system. It must support the poor. It must provide healthcare for those who cannot afford it. Workers must be paid and protected from being abused. Public infrastructure must be built. These are all community or state-level obligations to the people in exchange for the covenantal agreement of following the law, and of paying taxes.

The question of who is responsible for providing essential services is an interesting one. The answer goes beyond pure ethics into political theory,. It is worth thinking about it in terms of Jewish ethics principles we have already discussed. After all, if Jewish ethics are universal, and can apply to every imaginable situation - which is my thesis - then it should have something to say about how a government is built and run, at least as an aspirational model.

Ideas for a democratic government that is centered on Jewish ethics

Consider the following paragraphs a trial balloon describing one way that a democratically elected government can adhere to Jewish ethical standards. It is not complete but it is aspirational. There may be other models, but this is a thought experiment to see how truly universal the Jewish ethical framework is. Most other secular ethical systems do not get close to even thinking about these sorts of issues.

It seems to me that the obligations of government to citizens follow the same tiered structure of obligations of citizens to others. In short, the concentric circles of responsibility that everyone has - to themselves, to their families, to their community, to their nation, and to the world - applies in the obverse: the state should only step in and provide services when the smaller units like family and community cannot do them for any reason.

The state is the safety net when the other systems fail.

This means that the primary responsibility of care belongs to the individual. But some things, like infrastructure or self defense, cannot easily be done by all but the wealthy, and that is where the government steps in. Similarly, if caring for orphans or the chronically ill is too onerous for the family or community, only then should the state subsidize or provide the care. People should always think of themselves as the primary responsible party and the state as a backup.

This is similar but not identical to the Catholic concept of ethical subsidiarity, but instead of defining which group has authority to act, the Jewish system describes who has the obligation to act and when. Each actor fulfills what they can in an outward direction of concentric community circles, and the state steps in precisely where failure occurs.

Interestingly, this also means that the person most responsible for themselves as individuals is themselves. Personal responsibility is the default, as opposed to modern society where everyone blames everyone else (their parents, their boss, their spouse) for their own perceived shortcomings.

This is how to build a better society.

There are still practical problems that would need to be solved, but this framework gives us a refreshing prism to view old problems anew.

One major question relates to changing government roles in response to new needs that it must provide for logistical, financial or practical reasons. Whenever the government is needed to provide a new service, there is always a cost which typically is seen in new taxes. But is this a new covenant between the people and the government? What happens if people don't want this new program? How, in a democratic government, can we keep the spirit of the covenant alive when it changes often?

Jewish tradition offers possible ways to solve this.

One is the idea of takkanot and g'zeirot, new laws enacted by the leaders to handle new situations. (Takkanot would be new positive laws, g'zeirot are new protections around existing ethical concepts, "fences" around laws, termed as "negative" laws.) Takkanot (as a generalized term for both) were only issued for exceptional circumstances. But crucially, these laws were given along with the reasons they are enacted, with the idea that when the circumstances change, the new law can and should be canceled. So new laws and services should be a last resort when necessary.

Another, more novel idea for negotiating new laws and services without holding a referendum for each one is a twist on the idea of representatives. In Jewish law, a "shaliach" is an agent who is empowered to act on behalf of an individual. Perhaps the representatives should have formal roles as shlichim, agents, who can decide on behalf of their own (local) communities which laws and services make sense to them. These agents are not lawmakers, they are not the government, and their only power is to decide on behalf of their people what laws are worthwhile knowing the tradeoff of increased taxes or other additional responsibilities.

But how do we protect minorities in such a system? How can the representatives who are representing their people ensure that everyone is treated fairly? Because legislation cannot override ethical principles. Major values like value of life, human dignity and freedom from persecution are basic functions of society and any proposed law that violates these would not be allowed at the outset. There is no concept of a "mandate" by a government elected with 53% or so of the vote to do whatever they want - every law must adhere to the basic ethical principles.

New laws and new services would be, by default, temporary unless a supermajority supports a permanent new service. Each one would have a mandatory periodic review to see whether it should continue. New organizations should not build new buildings but lease or rent; employees should typically not expect a job for life but be contractors.

This is a curious combination of libertarian and social centered government. Some services to help those most in need are not negotiable because they fulfill basic ethical requirements and the community level cannot pay for them. But the default behavior is that any new program is considered temporary except under exceptional circumstances.

The very existence of a Jewish ethical framework often shows how the current partisan divides between right/left or libertarian/socialist are not necessarily accurate reflections of the choices one can make. If you think that some parts of the liberal ideology makes sense and some parts of conservative thinking makes sense, it is nice to see that there are more than two choices in how to look at issues. Very possibly, the Jewish framework can provide a way out of the binary thinking that dominate American political life today and show that you can care for the needy, minimize government and still be consistent in your ideology.

This obligation-based framework:

Protects dignity without flattening context.
Allows for compassion without collapsing into relativism.
Encourages moral creativity without moral chaos.

Jewish ethics isn’t stingier than rights-based models; it’s deeper and more real. By asking, ‘What do I owe?’ instead of ‘What am I owed?’ it binds us together in ways no list of rights ever could

That’s not just more realistic. It’s more human.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The New York Times Patrick Kingsley visited the tunnel directly underneath the European Hospital where Gaza leader Mohammed Sinwar was killed.

This section of the article is a perfect example of how a reporter can subtly accuse Israel of war crimes without violating any journalistic standards:

When we entered the tunnel on Sunday, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Mr. Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle — stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said — dangled from a hook in the corner.

It was not immediately clear how Mr. Sinwar was killed, and General Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Mr. Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions.

If Mr. Sinwar was intentionally poisoned by gases released by such explosions, it would raise legal questions, experts on international law said.

“It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb — a generally lawful weapon — if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the U.S. Defense Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

General Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasize here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said.

The evidence that the reporter saw was a mostly undamaged room with bloodstains. The Israeli general suggested two possible scenarios - suffocation as a secondary result of bombings, or a shockwave. He then quotes an expert saying if Israel's intent was to kill with gases from the bomb that would be illegal.

I asked an AI to rank the possibilities of how they died given the evidence. A shockwave is the most likely scenario: the pressure from a shockwave can easily cause internal injuries which would result in coughing blood.

#2 is that explosions nearby could consume the oxygen in the room, suffocating the people. Blood is less likely but possible from people struggling to breathe, yet the amount of blood described makes this seem unlikely.

Every other scenario (damage from shrapnel or debris from the airstrikes, tunnel damage) do not fit the evidence at all.

And intentional use of poison gas is the very bottom of the list: there would be no blood, there is zero evidence that the IDF would use that method.

So why is that possibility even discussed?

Did the legal expert bring this possibility up on her own? That seems unlikely, since forensics is not her area of expertise. It seems that Kingsley asked her about the legality of Israel intentionally using bombs with the intent to gas the terrorists to death (with the carbon monoxide that bombs might release?) something that makes no military sense.

So Kingsley made upo a war crime scenario, he got an expert to confirm that it could be a war crime, and he then could credibly quote the expert to surface the possibility, He then asks the general, who of course denies it, and now he created a "he said/she said" story out of literally nothing, but subtly implying for readers that there is a 50% chance that this could have happened that way.

It is the equivalent of asking an animal rights expert "If the IDF is strangling puppies with their bare hands, would this be an animal rights issue?" and then quoting an Israeli denial that they strangle puppies. See? They quoted both sides!

This is a particularly disgusting slander that is perfectly ethical according to journalistic standards. And the editors at the New York Times happily allow this one-sided reporting to be published.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Major media calling Greta Thunberg's boat an "aid ship" even though it didn't have any real aid and it isn't a ship (@NYTimes @Guardian @CNN @Reuters @AP)

It is hard to overstate how successful anti-Israel propaganda is.

Look at these headlines:

Every single major media outlet refer to the "Madleen", a 60 foot yacht, as an "aid ship" or "aid boat."

But it wasn't. Everyone knows that the little cargo it carried was symbolic, and news stories admitted that. (A quick look at Israeli media found none of them used those terms.)

The flotilla was carrying nothing but propaganda. It was a publicity stunt. The Madleen couldn't hold large amounts of aid even if they wanted to - the cargo hold is small and it had to also feed the 12 anti-Israel agitators on board.

If the media knows that there was next to no aid on the boat and that it is a propaganda mission, why do they call it an "aid boat?"

Moreover, the New York Times and Guardian stretch the lie by calling the Madleen an "aid ship." It is a yacht. The word "ship" has a specific meaning, typically a cargo vessel, and a yacht is not a ship (although it is a boat.)

The news media, by adopting these false terms as objective descriptions of the publicity stunt, are themselves guilty of anti-Israel propaganda.

Media that care about objectivity would never use the term "aid ship." Media that wants to promote the agenda of today's antisemites would certainly use their false terminology - and normalize it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

06/08 Links: America’s Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism; Journalists for genocide; Hamas tunnel found meters from hospital; Gaza Civil Defense rep is a Hamas terrorist

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: America’s Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism

Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries.

Given this dynamic, a rational anti-Zionist movement would devote itself to making Jews feel welcome in every facet of life outside of Israel, ruthlessly rooting out any inkling of anti-Semitism in order to convince Jews that they have nothing to fear and certainly no need for a separate state. Such an anti-Zionist movement would overcome Zionism by making it obsolete. But that is not the anti-Zionist movement that currently exists. Instead, Israel’s opposition around the globe—whether groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or their international apologists and imitators—often seems determined to persuade those Jews who chose differently than Herzl did that he was right all along.

Attacks such as those in Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania, not to mention the white-supremacist massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, have raised the costs of being Jewish in America. Synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions collectively pay millions of dollars to secure their premises, resulting in communities that are less open to the outside and attendees being forever reminded that they are not safe even in their places of worship. And now American Jews thinking of attending communal events must stop to consider whether would-be attackers will associate them with Israel and target them for death.

America, at least, was not always this way. The country has long stood as the great counterexample to the Zionist project—proof that Jews could not just survive but thrive as equals in a pluralistic liberal democracy, without need for their own army or state. After Barbra Steinmetz, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, was attacked, she had a message for the country. “We’re Americans,” she told NBC News. “We are better than this.” That is what most American Jews and their allies believe, and the justification for that belief was evident in Colorado this week, where Jared Polis, the state’s popular Jewish governor, forthrightly condemned the attack. But if the perpetrators and the cheerleaders of the incipient American intifada have their way, that spirit will be stifled.

Such a victory, however, would be self-defeating. According to video captured at the scene, the Boulder attacker accidentally set himself on fire in the middle of his assault. It would be hard to script a better metaphor for the way such violence sabotages the cause it purports to advance. If the anti-Zionist assassins succeed in making Jewish life in the United States less livable, they will not have helped a single Palestinian, but they will have made their opponents’ case for them. They will have proved the promise of America wrong, and the darkest premonitions of Zionism right.

The Boulder Attack Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere

For years, American Jews watched with horror the attacks on their European co-religionists. A young man kidnapped and tortured to death, an elderly lady beaten and thrown out the window of her home, and a teacher and three children murdered outside a Jewish day school are among a long list of violent anti-Semitic incidents in France alone—the country with the world’s third-largest population of Jews after Israel and the United States.

“What history had taught him was Amazement,” Lion Feuchtwanger writes of the conclusion reached by one of the characters in his deeply prescient 1933 novel about Nazi Germany, The Oppermanns. “A tremendous amazement that each time those in jeopardy had been so slow in thinking about their safety.” Despite the sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. recorded over the past decade by the Anti-Defamation League, American Jews also once believed that the violence against Jews in France, Britain, Germany, and other European countries couldn’t happen here. Many told themselves that this threat was unique to European Jewry, given the internal frictions within their own countries, which had absorbed large immigrant populations from former colonial possessions. But yesterday’s attack, coming on the heels of the firebombing of Shapiro’s residence and the D.C. murders, has proved otherwise. As Ian Fleming, the former spy and novelist who created James Bond, reportedly observed, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Arguably the system was already blinking red after the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, where a gunman killed 11 people, and the near tragedy averted four years later, when an armed man took hostage the rabbi and worshippers at a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue. The October 7 attacks heightened that awareness and led Jews to emulate the security measures standard at synagogues, day schools, community centers, and senior residences in Europe. Private companies were hired to provide guards at the entrances to synagogues and schools. Volunteers were solicited, trained, and deployed by community-based security organizations. The positioning of at least one local police car and patrol officer in front of synagogues became commonplace.

But in today’s threat environment, the question for Jews everywhere is inevitably: How much security is enough?

Melanie Phillips: Journalists for genocide

Next month, the London freelance branch of Britain’s National Union of Journalists is to hold a meeting to discuss ”the ethics and realities of reporting genocide when the only journalists on the scene are being slaughtered.”

The meeting is being sponsored by the hard-left Labour MP and former Corbyn apparatchik John McDonnell, who has accused Israel of murder and called for its economic and military isolation.

So a fair, balanced and objective discussion, then.

Accusing Israel of “genocide,” when it’s fighting a just war against genocidal attack, when it’s allowed into Gaza tens of thousands of tons of food and other aid, when it’s repeatedly moved Gaza’s civilians out of harm’s way and has killed a far lower proportion of civilians to combatants than any other military in war, denotes either illiteracy, imbecilism or malice.

As for “the only journalists on the scene being slaughtered,” a number of those individuals have been exposed as terrorists masquerading as journalists.

Yesterday, the Israel Defence Forces said it had killed two Islamic jihadi terrorists who had posed as journalists and who had operated from a command centre in the courtyard of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. So not only were these individuals not journalists but they were terrorists engaged in the war crime of using a hospital as cover for terrorism.

Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?

Last October, the IDF disclosed that intelligence information and numerous documents found in Gaza had confirmed the military affiliation of six Al Jazeera “journalists” to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This discovery included personnel tables, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories and salary documents for terrorists.

Last month, Al Jazeera and other Arabic outlets mourned the death of “journalist” Bilal al Hatoum, who they said had been targeted and killed with a group of “civilians” in Gaza. Yet Al Jazeera analyst Saeed Ziad eulogised Bilal as a “beloved martyr” who “fought from the dawn of the Day of the Flood [October 7th] until noon today”. And someone else who called him his “beloved brother” described him as having been “martyred” with “a group of mujahideen” in a “blessed battle”.

Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?

The Reporting on the Gaza War Is Fundamentally Broken

The bias is so out of control that in February, the BBC discovered, much to its embarrassment, that it had aired a pro-Palestine documentary without realizing that its narrator is the son of a senior Hamas militant. The narrator expressed what the BBC already believed about the evils of Israel and the righteousness of the Palestinian cause. Consequently, BBC journalists didn’t bother to scrutinize the documentary.

(As a brief aside: Last February, the New York Times celebrated Gaza photographer Yousef Masoud for winning a George Polk Award, despite accusations of his collaboration with the October 7 attackers. This came after the Times rehired a Palestinian video journalist who had praised Adolf Hitler.)

As is the case with so much careless reporting, the failure goes beyond journalists simply failing to adhere to even the basic standards of their chosen profession. The danger lies in the perpetuation and dissemination of outright falsehoods, which risk enflaming further these ancient blood feuds.

Last weekend, in Boulder, Colo., a 45-year-old Egyptian national, who is in the United States illegally, attacked peaceful Jewish demonstrators with a “makeshift flamethrower,” severely injuring 15. When the attacker was arrested, he was heard shouting “Free Palestine!”

On May 22, a gunman murdered two Israeli Embassy staff members, an Israeli and an American, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. At the time of his arrest, the alleged gunman shouted, “Free, free Palestine!”

The corrections and retractions of inflammatory anti-Israel stories from around the time of both heinous crimes are proper and all, but couldn’t these newsrooms have worked a bit harder to confirm the stories before publishing?

A little due diligence could spare media the embarrassment and Americans Jews from being murdered and maimed.

The media loves a good protest (Daled Amos)

Five years ago, CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez reported on the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

CNN had its own take on those "peaceful" protests:

At the time, CNN was widely mocked on social media for its "mostly peaceful" comment. However, CNN is not the only one that cannot distinguish between riots and protests. And that is not the only point of comparison with the pro-October 7th "protests."

There are also the lengths the media goes to defend the protests. When the District Attorney announced that no charges would be pressed against either the police or Blake, an AP reporter posted on X:

This is the popular version of events, as reported the previous year by NBC:

At 5:11 p.m. Kenosha police said officers responded to a call of a "domestic incident in the 2800 block of 40th Street. There, they would encounter 29-year-old Jacob Blake who is seen on video posted to social media in an altercation with officers before they Tase and ultimately shoot him seven times in the back as he leans into a vehicle. The Kenosha department does not have body cameras so officers were not wearing them at the time of the shooting. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blake's family, said Blake was “simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.”

Joel Pollak, a senior editor at Breitbart News, responded to the AP post on X. He called them out on their misrepresenting the facts and ignoring the danger it represented:

Pollak's response is based on the information presented by the DA, as summarized by Legal Insurrection:

He went through the evidence and step-by-step timeline. Blake resisted arrest, fought by police, and by his own admission, was carrying a knife, after multiple attempts to subdue him, including taser, failed. Blake was shot when he made a move with the knife, having switched it to his right hand, towards the police officer. Contrary to the popular narrative, Blake was not shot seven times in the back, three of the shots were to his side consistent with the twisting motion with the knife towards the officer. The officer’s seven shots were objectively reasonable because police are trained to keep firing until the threat is removed, which in this case was when Blake dropped the knife.

Blake lied when he said he didn’t know there was a warrant for his arrest, his phone internet records proves he knew, which would provide motive for his to resist arrest in front of his children, and makes him a not credible witness at trial. There also was a 2010 incident in Chicago where Blake similarly displayed a knife resisting arrest, and actually slashed at the officer.

We see a familiar pattern of media negligence:

o Jumping the gun to get unsubstantiated headlines
o  Building a false narrative
o  Carelessly stirring up emotions without regard to the consequences
o  Presenting the resulting riots and destruction as mere "protests" and free speech

The media defense of what passes for "free speech" is now showing itself in the media's defense of anti-Israel protests on university campuses across the US.

But there are legal limits to free speech. In a recent interview, Alan Dershowitz explained:

When you take people on college campuses who are calling, “Death to the Jews,” who are calling to prevent Jews from going to class, who are calling for immediate attacks and harassment of Jews–that’s not protected speech. On the other hand, if you make an abstract talk and say, well, it would be good if there were no Israel–that hate speech is protected speech...Abstract arguments, even if they are hateful, are permitted under our Constitution. But direct incitements to kill or harm other people or block their access or deny them the opportunity to go to class–those are not protected by the First Amendment.

Journalist Douglas Murray raises a parallel point during a recent Tikvah webinar, The War Against the Jews Comes to Washington with Professor Ruth Wisse. The moderator asks Douglas about his book, The Strange Death of Europe, and whether we should be concerned about the strange death of America.

Murray responds (at 27:17):

I think there are early warning signs, and we remain almost incapable of rising to the challenge. The most obvious one has been thrown up very visibly. I don't really like to linger on the campus issue because most people don't go to Ivy League universities anymore, thank goodness, and so it always sounds like a rarefied point to make, but just consider how most of the ivy League universities in the last two years have permitted violence and intimidation as the norm, and pretended that the figures like those in Colombia University are free speech martyrs when in no other situation, would they have got away with this if they had done this against any other minority.

And, you know, people say, well, the limits of free speech and so on. Nobody has yet been able to persuade me. But if for the last two years, there had been people from abroad coming into America using their time or student visas to call for the lynching of Black Americans, nobody can tell me that from right to left, from the universities to people in politics--nobody can persuade me that this would have been a mere free speech issue. It would not have been. People would have said from the get-go, I would have thought no more than 24 hours, whether I think under a Democrat or Republican government. They would have said: no, we have no need in our society for importing racists calling for racist violence. The case of the Jews? Yes, that's been permitted and more than permitted, encouraged.

The media's sloppiness shows itself in its coverage of campus disruptions. They insist that university disturbances are merely expressions of free speech and that the Trump administration's attempts to hold universities responsible for the safety of their Jewish students are somehow proof of its authoritarianism.

Five years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton on the need to use US troops to support the police in the face of riots.

Once the op-ed was printed, the paper couldn't back off fast enough.

They ended up prefacing the article with a 5-paragraph apology, explaining the supposed flaws in the piece that prevented it from meeting the New York Times' standards. The paper went so far as to claim that maybe the piece should not have been printed at all.

The lengths they went to repudiate the op-ed were due, in part, to the rebellion in the New York Times newsroom:

More than 800 staff members signed a letter protesting its publication, according to a union member involved in the letter. Addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives, the letter argued that Mr. Cotton’s essay contained misinformation, such as his depiction of the role of “antifa” in the protests.

Dozens of Times employees objected to the Op-Ed on social media, despite a company policy that instructs them not to post partisan comments or take sides on issues. Many of them responded on Twitter with the sentence, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” More than 160 employees planned a virtual walkout for Friday morning, according to two organizers of the protest.

One of those employees was Taylor Lorenz, who in a since-deleted post on X, bewailed the alleged danger Cotton's op-ed posed to the black New York Times staff:

Taylor's claim sounds no less self-serving now than it did then. Just how concerned have the New York Times staff been about the actual danger posed to the Jewish community by their one-sided coverage of the October 7th massacre and its aftermath?

But the internal influence of the paper's staff and employees is clear. They forced the editorial editor to resign:

So much for an independent media and journalistic integrity.

The New York Times' bias goes beyond just the liberal bias at the top. The infectious agenda is hardwired into the paper, starting from the ground up. From the reaction to the riots in 2020, we could have predicted how the New York Times and others would frame the anti-Jewish riots on university campuses and whose side they would take.

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Jewish ethics as a relational system

In a recent post, I explored one of Judaism’s most overlooked moral strengths: compromise. Where secular ethical systems often treat compromise as a concession - or worse, a failure - Jewish tradition elevates it to a mitzvah, a tool for peace, dignity, and community trust. In the real world, the goal shouldn't be to find a single right answer in a binary ethical choice, but to find the optimal solution that respects not only abstract ethical rules but real people, real circumstances and real ramifications.

Compromise is not a moral detour. It’s a signpost. It reveals the deeper logic of Jewish ethics—a system not built on rigid principle or mathematical justice, but on relationships.

Here’s the (latest) radical idea: Jewish ethics doesn’t start with rules or outcomes. It starts with people and their relationships.

Jewish ethics' fundamental moral units aren’t issues or actors. They’re relationships. Jewish tradition does not categorizes ethical responsibility as "private vs public" or "individual vs collective." Instead, there are three categories:

Between me and God
Between me and you
Between me and myself

These are relational vectors. They frame obligation not as burden but as connection.

You might think that "between me and myself" is not relational, but in Jewish thinking, it really is. There are the metaphysical concepts of one's good and evil inclinations ("yetzer hara" and "yetzer hatov"), or in terms of repentance, between myself as I was and myself as I aspire to be, the physical self and the spiritual self. When we talk to ourselves, it is still a dialogue.

Ethics, at its core, is about how we relate to others as well as ourselves. And the Jewish focus on relationships feels much more grounded than the Enlightenment-era secular systems. Jewish ethics is not about achieving moral purity. It’s about sustaining covenantal belonging. That changes everything.

A Kantian ethic might say, "Tell the truth, even if it hurts the other person." Jewish ethics asks, "Is this truth a betrayal of our bond? Will it cause pain that can’t be repaired?"

Utilitarianism might calculate happiness across a population. Jewish ethics asks, "Who is in my circle of obligation right now? What do I owe this person, in this moment, to sustain their dignity?"

This is why compromise is not just allowed but preferred. It lets us act ethically without tearing the social fabric. It invites people to stay at the table - to stay in relationship.

Halacha -the Jewish legal system - is often framed as rigid. In reality, it’s a finely tuned system for nurturing trust. Compromise before judgment isn’t a workaround. It’s the model. Peace (shalom) is a higher goal than victory.

Secular systems talk about rights. Judaism talks about promises. Rights are protective walls. Covenants are bridges.

Rights say, “You can’t do that to me.” Covenants say, “We owe each other more than the minimum.”

This doesn’t mean rights don’t matter. It means they rest on something deeper: shared responsibility.

In an age of partisanship, polarization, abstraction, and distrust, Jewish ethics offers something rare: a moral system that feels like home. Not because it’s soft, but because it’s grounded in real relationships, with all their complexity, compromise, and possibility.

If we start from the perspective of belonging - not the squishy "we are the world" utopian fantasies but real belonging with our families, communities and beyond - we can build an ethic that holds together not just ideas, but people.

That’s what Jewish ethics does best.

----

I need to give credit for this post to my own AI ethical chatbot, AskHillel.com . I've been keeping track of novel ideas ("chiddushim") throughout this project; most of them putting implicit Jewish ethical ideas into words but nevertheless concepts that are foreign to traditional ethical philosophy. I've been using AI as my study partner ("chavruta") in refining these concepts, as well as to challenge them.

I've mentioned previously how AskHillel has blown me away multiple times with its ability to go way beyond the "advice column" proof of concept type of function I had envisioned it to be. This idea of Jewish ethics being relational is not my "chiddush" but AskHillel's. This astounded me. As with any chavruta, I pushed back, and it defended its position. (Yes, sometimes I win our arguments, believe it or not.) I asked it to draft this essay, and I edited it.

Even though any output from a chat session are not copyrighted and I do not legally have to credit AskHillel for this insight nor this essay, I have to act ethically. I cannot take the major credit for this post. My creation created it. And already, today, we need to create a framework for ethical relationships between humans and intelligent machines.

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Arabic media often complains that Israel destroyed hundreds of mosques in Gaza.

I could not find one article from an Arab source that condemned Hamas for using mosques for military purposes.

But as I was looking, I found an Al Jazeera article from last October that praised Hamas unequivocally for how intensely Islamic it is - and it included the fact that of course Hamas used mosques for its activities, as well as indoctrinating children with terror in its camps and schools, all under the name of Islam.

It starts off with a poetic paean to Hamas:

Our journey begins from the side of the altar. This beloved line in Islamist literature summarizes a fundamental part of the intellectual and spiritual structure of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and rather the most important foundations of the sustainability of jihadist action in this movement, which has been extending the sails of its power throughout Palestine for more than 30 years.

On the road to martyrdom or victory, Hamas fighters take provisions from the Qur’an, which they see as a source of comfort and happiness, fuel for determination, a talisman of protection, and a source of victory. The journey begins at the mosque and returns to it.

It goes on with how wonderfully Islamic Hamas is.

While a whole year of flames has swept away many mosques from their foundations and turned their minarets into chaff scattered by the blazing flames and the missiles of death, the resistance fighters in Gaza are always optimistic that they have an impenetrable fortress: the Qur’an, the whispers of glorification in the fluttering of dawn, the night prayers, and the longing for martyrdom.

According to what has been circulated in numerous studies and articles, the "religious state" in Gaza is the resistance's greatest and most sustainable weapon, having transformed from an individualistic spiritual behavior into an impenetrable social fabric.

It is a long article but eventually it describes how Hamas considers mosques central to its "resistance:":

The architecture of mosques, after their construction and the raising of their minarets, was an important incubator for the formation of generations of resistance over the years. Memorization circles and scientific lessons spread throughout the mosques, and they were also active venues for meetings between leaders and resistance fighters that were less likely to be monitored.

With Hamas's control of the Gaza Strip , mosques became an essential part of the strategy of governance and resistance, with multiple mosque committees established throughout the Strip.

To consolidate the role of mosques in Gaza, Hamas organized the "Mosques of Gaza: Support and Pride" conference at the end of May 2009, under the patronage and support of the late Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh,....which concluded with the development of a guiding document for the message of mosques in Gaza and the centrality of their role in the resistance.

The "revolutionary" role of imams has transformed them from supervisors of worship into community leaders, managing a regular human resource in various activities, including Quran memorization and recitation courses, community service, managing donation boxes, and managing neighborhood affairs, in full coordination with the administrative and security agencies represented by the Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip and, to a certain extent, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Hamas using mosques for military purposes isn't something to be condemned, but celebrated. it proves how dedicated Hamas is to Islam!

In short, every Arab knows that Hamas uses mosques for military purposes and the mosques are partners with Hamas. Al Jazeera was celebrating it.

So when they say they are upset that Israel destroyed mosques they are really saying they are upset that Israel hit Hamas.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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06/07 Links: Why Britain must not recognise Palestine; Body Thai national recovered in Gaza by IDF; Hamas threats force halt in Gaza food aid; Mohammed Sinwar's body found under Hospital

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Why Britain must not recognise Palestine

War is hell. Israel – which neither wanted it nor started it – evacuates civilians before attacks and provides them with aid. Yet in Parliament last week, amid nods from MPs who have never known the inside of a bomb shelter, the Prime Minister branded Israel “appalling”.

As ever, Starmer’s petty politicking blinds him to his own moral bankruptcy. Unilaterally recognising a state of Palestine is a contemptuous proposal. Dismissing Israel’s existential security concerns is insult enough, but providing a reward for October 7 creates awful incentives for the future.

Worse still, perhaps, is the narrative it would create. Britain’s official policy would be to blame Israel for the lack of a Palestinian state, when the historical truth is the opposite.

The Palestinians were first offered self-determination in 1947, but rejected it in favour of attempted genocide. They were offered it again during the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, but derailed it with a spate of suicide bombs that claimed the lives of many Israelis.

In 2000, at Camp David, they were offered 96 per cent of the West Bank but turned it down. In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert offered 94 per cent of the territory with land swaps for the remainder, East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and the Old City turned over to international control. Again, Abbas rejected it.

Why? Because the true problem is the very existence of a Jewish country, which is seen as a rebuke by some to Arab honour. The Palestinians don’t want a state alongside Israel. They want a state instead of it. This is what Britain would be supporting.

Two articles reveal how Trump Derangement and the Gaza war have twisted the Jewish left

The election of Donald Trump and Israel’s actions since a ceasefire that Trump helped initiate collapsed have brought about a new virulence in anti-Israeli activity that now has taken in many in the West until now supportive of the Jewish state.

Signs of this are all around us – the absurd threats by supposed allies UK, France and Canada; the willingness of many in the punderati, such as Piers Morgan, to agree that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza;, the leader of a leftist Israeli political party and a former IDF deputy chief of staff saying that Israel “kills babies as a hobby”; and the resulting – and increasing – violence against Israelis and Jews worldwide.

Nor have North American Jews been inoculated against the slanders and lies regularly hurled at Israel. Currently joining the “asaJew” longtime anti-Israel chorus are left-leaning Jews, hitherto supportive of Israel, but swayed by Hamas propaganda swallowed whole by Western media and politicians, and even more so by their deranged hatred of all things Trump, including his apparent support for Israel (despite this being less obvious since his recent trip to the Middle East).

One such individual is Eric Alterman, a very well credentialed academic and journalist. Alterman fancies his views on Israel to be balanced because he’s been attacked by pro-Palestinians as pro-Israeli, the same reason that allows BBC and other media to convince themselves they’re being objective, and for his stance against BDS. But in reality, since at least 2020, Alterman’s views have been trumpeted by the fiercely anti-Israel site Mondoweiss. For example, he has written articles stating, among other things, that:
Three democratic presidents – Clinton, Obama and Biden, worried about their second-term chances if they supported Palestine.
Israel’s conduct is responsible for antisemitism
Young Jews abandoning Judaism because Jewish institutions support Israel
Zionism is at odds with Liberalism.

Alterman’s disenchantment with Israel results from his disappointment with how Israelis vote: namely, for right-wing parties. In Alterman’s world, as in the worlds of so many other so-called liberals, being right-wing is anathema. Which brings us to the second and, I would say main, object of Alterman’s hatred: U.S. president Donald Trump.

In his recent article in the New Republic, “The Coming Jewish Civil War over Donald Trump,” Alterman’s view is that Jews are split over what’s more important: Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism (on campuses, for instance) and support for Israel vs. his supposed “dismantling” of institutions broadly supported by American Jews. In the course of describing this split, one would expect serious criticism of Trump, and one wouldn’t be disappointed. However, one might not expect searing criticism of Israel from his first paragraph onward.

David Christopher Kaufman: Shame on LGBT elite for ignoring lesbian Israeli hostage Emily Damari this Pride season

There have been no articles in leading American LGBT media brands such as The Advocate and Them. And no public commendations from major LGBT advocacy organizations — such as GLAAD, whose annual media awards last May devolved into an orgy of Israel bashing.

Meanwhile, feminists have also kept silent about Damari, despite her ordeal at the hands of, perhaps, the most misogynistic political entity besides the Taliban. Remember the crowds that Hamas gathered for the creepy release ceremonies that accompanied the hostages’ release in winter. Notice anything strange: There are almost no women — anywhere. Only men and machine guns. This is the misogynistic reality Emily Damari contended with for over a year.

Mostly, Damari’s story makes me proud: Proud to be a Zionist – proud to be a Jew. I’m proud to know that Israel is the only nation in the Middle East where gay Arabs and Muslims — and, yes, Jews, too — are protected by the state. So much so that queers from the West Bank seek and receive asylum after fleeing for their lives from Jenin or Ramallah. Sure, anti-Zionists will reduce Israel’s LGBT bona fides to mere pinkwashing or propaganda. And let them.

Meanwhile, I challenge anyone to find me an out “queer” in Gaza or the West Bank. Not gay Arabs and Muslims in the West, who pimp for Gaza without ever stepping foot in Gaza. But actual, identifiable Palestinian gays and lesbians advocating for their own destiny in their own nation. Back in 2022, 25 year-old Ahmed Abu Marhia tried to be out and proud in the West Bank after returning from the relative openness of Israel. His fate: He was beheaded in Hebron. Because the only out queer person in the Palestinian territories, recently, appears to have been Emily Damari.

Ultimately it’s Damari herself for whom I feel the most pride — hardly surprised when we learned she volunteered to remain in Gaza so that 65 year-old Keith Siegel could be released first (he finally returned home shortly after Damari). The emotions are strong when I think of Damari strutting her way back into Israel to mom Mandy and her partner, Orel a few months back. For those of us hip to such things, Damari (a lifelong soccer devotee) was immediately and unmistakably queer — her gait cocky and confident and even so slightly butch.

Even after months with Hamas, it was almost impossible to believe that Emily Damari was still Emily Damari: Out and proud from her first moment out of captivity. This is the bravery the #queersforpalestine madfolk never match — and a bravery I’ll display myself the next time I worry about holding another man’s hand on a New York City subway.