Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

06/10 Links Pt1: Greta’s blind eye to murder; Uber Eats for Hamas: The UN’s Latest Humanitarian Scam; Hamas Plans Attacks on US Aid Sites In Gaza

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Greta’s blind eye to murder

There was a glimmer of good sense when Israel offered to provide some education to the activist, who had famously abandoned her free schooling at the age of 15. You care so much about suffering? Come and watch what happened on October 7. Be educated. But now we hear that she refused to do so. Closing her eyes to the reality of what caused this war in the first place, and what continues to perpetuate it today? Priceless.

It was typical of the global effort to erase the casus belli of this conflict and rewrite history to make the victims the aggressors, the victims of attempted genocide the perpetrators of the same crime, the people who had their babies murdered the true baby killers. To be fair to Thunberg, she’s hardly the only person at it.

This week, our most distinguished foreign correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, produced a major piece of journalism – journalism? – which was criticised by the Board of Deputies as containing “unacceptable bias”, as it “seemed not to consider the Hamas war crimes which started and sustain this conflict,” not to mention the gratuitous Holocaust references. For shame.

If we are facing a monstrous NGO-media-digital industrial complex of propaganda, in which Bowen commands the broadcast arm, Thunberg is the brigadier general of its activist wing. In fact, her transition – may I use that word? – from climate campaigner to Gaza obsessive has been as revealing as it is opportunistic.

The juncture between the two identities was quite amusing: for a while, she was chanting “no climate justice on occupied land”, as if the top priority for Hamas was a net zero policy. (Not that Gaza has been “occupied” since 2005, but you know what she means.) Then she simply jettisoned the climate guff, which was feeling rather dated, and went full keffiyeh. Identified as a Gaza campaigner, I suppose.

Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.

This spectacular teenage tantrum is most often indulged by people like Gary Lineker, like Dawn French, like Jeremy Bowen, like Thunberg herself, who all supposedly left their teenage years behind a long time ago.

While Israel’s youngsters were murdered at the Nova festival and are putting their lives on the line daily for their country, enduring unbelievable quantities of hatred and bigotry around the world, their greatest critics have never grown up themselves. That’s the final irony.

Hamas Plans Attacks on US Aid Sites In Gaza, Telegram Messages Show

Hamas and its terror affiliates in the Gaza Strip plan to attack American aid distribution centers, Telegram messages confirmed by a senior U.S. official show, threatening to draw the United States into direct conflict with Palestinian militant factions.

"Resistance security is authorized to firmly confront anyone who cooperates with the enemy or its agents, and agents and mercenaries will be legitimate targets," Hamas affiliates said in a statement issued late Sunday to "Palestinian resistance factions" active on Telegram, a social networking site terrorist groups regularly use to coordinate their activities.

The terrorists directed their threats at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a joint U.S.-Israeli aid effort formed in February with private contractors to replace the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which is known to collaborate with Hamas.

A senior U.S. official confirmed that the Trump administration has monitored the situation to protect Americans working with GHF in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid.

"These reports of Hamas threatening the GHF and its workers, many of whom are Americans, are deeply concerning," the senior administration official told the Washington Free Beacon. "Hamas should think twice. We are watching closely."

The Palestinian terrorist groups claimed that GHF centers established throughout Gaza "have become traps targeting our hungry people. Their goal is to end UNRWA's mission and turn the Palestinian cause into a humanitarian one to facilitate forced displacement and ethnic cleansing in Gaza."

They further demanded "the resumption of aid distribution through UNRWA—and international institutions, given their legal competence and expertise that guarantee the lives and dignity of our people."

Israel formally banned UNRWA from operating in January after it became clear that the U.N.-backed aid organization employed dozens of Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and helped keep Israeli hostages hidden in Gaza. The Trump administration supported this move, citing additional evidence showing that Hamas systematically steals UNRWA supplies and resells them on the black market to generate profits.

UN aid trucks reached homes of senior Hamas terrorists

Information obtained by Israel Hayom details how Hamas, in collusion with UN agencies, seized humanitarian aid at the expense of Gaza's two million residents, right under the nose of Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

Hamas had a consistent method of identifying vulnerabilities in the entry process of goods into the Strip. The group created a parasitic mechanism to smuggle items like communication equipment and cigarettes into Gaza via trucks belonging to international aid agencies. This method brought millions of dollars into Hamas's treasury, even as Israel was actively waging a war to dismantle its infrastructure.

Monitoring of Hamas's methods revealed direct clandestine collaboration with UN organizations. Throughout 2024, there were continuous communications between Hamas-linked smugglers and staff from the UN's World Food Programme.

Hamas deliberately used the WFP's aid supply route to smuggle cigarettes hidden inside aid sacks. Internationally gathered documentation paints a clear picture of tight cooperation masked by a public facade of Hamas having forcibly taken over aid operations. In practice, Hamas terrorists routinely seized control of incoming aid trucks, looted their contents, sold the goods to Gaza residents, or stockpiled them for their own use.

UN staff looked on
On several occasions documented in northern Gaza, Hamas took de facto control of aid convoys and goods, publicly declaring it was managing distribution. UN workers reportedly stood by passively.

Astonishingly, some aid trucks, at times up to 600 per day, were directed straight to the homes of senior Hamas officials or to the group's warehouses. The data point to a systematic pattern of collaboration between Hamas and the UN aid agency, operating freely much like its pre-October 7 relationship with UNRWA.

Throughout the war, even after senior Hamas figures publicly declared their takeover of UN facilities and redistribution of aid, the UN never issued warnings or statements condemning the seizures. On the contrary, the UN and its Secretary-General António Guterres are now pressuring the American humanitarian fund operating in Gaza, an Israeli-American initiative aimed at severing Hamas's grip on aid distribution.

Instead of supporting this new organization's efforts to prevent aid from reaching terrorists, the UN is reportedly undermining it, seeking to preserve the system that had long enriched Hamas and its operatives under the guise of humanitarian work.

Data gathered just in the past month show not only Hamas's direct control over aid but also an operational arrangement between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the WFP. Under this deal, each group received an agreed-upon share of the trucks officially entering Gaza. Absurd display

Conspiracy theorist and antisemite David Miller has a "scoop" on Iran's PressTV:

Press TV show Palestine Declassified obtained private correspondence sent to the Glastonbury Festival, attempting to intimidate the organizers into cancelling Kneecap.

Marked “Private and Confidential,” the email states that the authors wanted to “raise” Glastonbury’s “awareness” about Kneecap. The message further claims the band is “propagating hate” and therefore should not be protected by “free speech,” a notion the letter writers claim to support.

Briefly, a group of music executives wrote to the Glastonbury Festival asking them to disinvite Kneecap because the pro-terror band would not make the festival a safe environment for Jews attending.

There is nothing illegal or unethical about writing to the festival making such a request. There were no threats to Glastonbury.

Miller goes on a rant about how this is "cancel culture' and how the letter writers are "pro-genocide."

But he also mentions that the letter said on top that it was meant to be "Private & Confidential," yet he publicized not just the letter but also the names of two of the Jewish music executives who signed the letter, and one of their email addresses.

Under British law, this is almost certainly illegal. It violates several UK laws - UK GDPR, Data Protection Act, misuse of private information, and breach of confidence. The writers clearly did not intend the email to be publicized - placing "private and confidential" on top has legal meaning.

Calling these people "genocidal" would encourage people to physically attack them. This privacy violation is not a theoretical issue - this is Miller endangering Jews.

So Miller, outraged over the supposed unethical nature of making an opinion known to a music festival, shows that he is not only more unethical but also a lawbreaker and inciter to violence.

(h/t Jill)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

As I have been working on creating a secularized Jewish ethical system, I've been noticing that some basic facts that apply to the Jewish people, to Judaism or even to religion altogether are difficult to port over or universalize. There are some specific features of Judaism that makes applying the ethical components more challenging- for example, ethical decisions in the secular world do not have the same obligatory nature that commandments from God do.

While I believe, based on my testing with my AskHillel AI chatbot, that the secularized system I created so far already far outperforms any secular system out there, I want to identify the gaps and see how the Jewish particularism can be most effectively universalized. This also helps surface features of both the Jewish and secular systems that are not often discussed.

One example that I've been thinking about is humility. Not humility as a human value, but humility as a building block for ethical philosophy itself.

Humility is more foundational in Judaism than you might think. Moses was the greatest prophet because he was the most humble person. Hebrew scripture is filled with stories of how the greatest Jewish figures like Aaron and King David made mistakes. The Talmud is the antithesis of Plato's Cave - instead of positioning the rabbis as being on a higher intellectual plane than everyone else, the Talmud is filled with stories where rabbis learn wisdom from their wives, children, slaves and non-Jews. This is explicit in Pirkei Avot: "Who is wise, one who learns from all people." Everyone, from great to small, must identify and repent from their sins and mistakes every year.

This is reflected in Jewish law. A basic assumption in Jewish law is that sometimes we cannot know the answer. The legal system builds in structures to handle this uncertainty - for example, safek - things that are indeterminate, like whether twilight is halachically considered day or night.

Many schools of secular philosophy have hubris built in rather than humility. (Not all - in recent decades the idea of uncertainty has become more mainstream.) The simplistic rules behind utilitarianism and duty-based ethics include an assumption of certainty - that they understand how the world works. Some will confidently misapply the rules of logic or mathematics or physics to metaphysics and ethics, as if different domains are all the same. Even today, philosophy forums online are characterized with at least as much of a sneering superiority and smug condescension as any political forum is.

The reason for this, I believe, is the secular nature of modern philosophy itself. Talmudic rabbis were humble because they had a constant awareness of the infinite intelligence of God, and the absolute knowledge that compared to God, the difference between their own intelligence and that of the shoemaker is infinitesimal. Rabbinic humility isn’t about low self-esteem - it’s about accurate self-location in a world filled with mystery and inhabited by God.

Secularists keep thinking that science will answer everything and that they are on the cusp of finally understanding the world fully. They have been on this cusp for centuries, and new riddles keep arising. Yet their misplaced confidence remains. Believers, on the other hand, are keenly and constantly aware that they can never know everything, and they approach everything with the sense that seeking knowledge is a never ending quest and we are barely starting.

Some of history’s worst moral wrongs, like communism, came not from ethical confusion - but from ethical certainty without humility.

Jewish ethics has this humility built in. Don't throw out an answer with confidence - there can always be additional factors we are unaware of that can change the ethical decision. Jewish ethics has baked-in epistemic humility. Humility is not the absence of conviction, rather it it is the refusal to pretend omniscience. It is not just a personal or societal value: humility must be put in the architecture of ethical reasoning itself.

Humility is not incompatible with secularism. But it comes more naturally with faith. If secularists want to be ethical, it means they have to redouble their efforts to understand that they don't know everything - and use that as an impetus to always learn more.

Maybe if science classes emphasized more of what we don't know than what we know, it will result not only in increased secular humility but also in more incentive to learn more about the mysteries of the universe.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Catching up on blogging my cartoons

These are mostly from April. Lots more in the queue.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Reporters visited the tunnel underneath European Hospital. Hamas says it is all fake and everyone is lying.

The IDF invited reporters to view the tunnel and room directly underneath the European Hospital in Gaza where Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar and several other top Hamas officials were killed in Israeli strikes.

Reporters from The New York Times, Reuters and AP reported on the tunnel firsthand. So did Israeli newspapers.

So what does Hamas and its fans say? It is all fake! A conspiracy theory! Zionist lies!

The Government Media Office in the Gaza Strip denied the Israeli occupation army's allegations regarding the existence of a tunnel under the European Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip .

It confirmed that army forces had excavated the site and placed a pipe, which they later claimed was a tunnel, and filmed a mock scene near the hospital's emergency department.

The government office said in a statement on Sunday that the occupation's narrative is "fabricated, flawed, and full of loopholes and fabricated allegations, and does not stand up to even the slightest degree of scrutiny and logic."

The office explained that the video published by the Israeli army shows the mouth of the alleged tunnel as "a narrow iron tube, too narrow for even a person to pass through, containing no stairs or equipment, and in no way suitable for a tunnel."

He confirmed that the area shown in the video clip is a "rainwater drainage area."

Refuting the Israeli narrative, the government office said that Israel "previously announced its intention to destroy the health system and admitted to using bunker-busting bombs weighing more than 40 tons to destroy the infrastructure of the European Hospital. So how could intact, unburned bodies be displayed at a site the occupation claims to have bombed with such ferocity?"

The office pointed out that the video clip published by the Israeli occupation army included an unprofessional cut-and-paste process, as the scene at second 14 is completely different from what it appears at second 15.

The first 14 seconds of the video clearly show, in one shot, the camera (apparently a drone) panning from the emergency room entrance of the hospital, down through the hole Israel dug to get to the tunnel (their bombs had sealed off the entrances to stop Sinwar from escaping) and clearly showing a tunnel going underneath the emergency room. .It is not a pipe or a drainage ditch - it looks just like other Hamas tunnels. The edit between 14 and 15 seconds is from switching from the drone camera to a handheld camera where a soldier could take the video.

So Hamas was clearly lying even before the newspaper stories confirming the tunnels were published.

But it wasn't only Hamas that embraced this conspiracy theory. Rami Abdu, the head of the "Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor" that is solidly pro-Hamas, also claimed that the footage was fake. "The clip is clearly a fabricated propaganda video, combining two images from two different locations and showing no tunnel at all."

Remember, the Hamas media office has been quoted for Gaza casualty statistics by the UN, and Euro-Mediterranean pretends to be a real human rights NGO.

Hamas lies about everything. And the media keeps quoting them as if they have credibility.

I did not see any Arab newspaper condemning Mohammed Sinwar for hiding directly underneath a hospital and using patients as human shields (although I saw some complaints on social media.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

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?

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.