Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Resolving the "Rights" vs. "Duties" Philosophical Problem

For centuries, moral and political philosophy has been entangled in the tension between rights and duties. On one side stand advocates of rights, insisting on inherent entitlements to life, liberty, speech, or property, which are often treated as inviolable and absolute. On the other, duty-based systems focus on obligations: what we owe to one another, to society, or to a higher moral ideal.

This conflict is not just academic. It plays out in political debates, legal systems, workplace policies, and personal decisions. Who wins when one person’s “right to speak” clashes with another’s “right to safety”? Are these claims equal? Is one more fundamental? Can either be limited?

Traditions across time have sought to resolve this problem. From Confucian role ethics to medieval natural law to modern personalist philosophy, many thinkers have emphasized that rights only make sense within a network of duties. But even so, contemporary discourse - especially in the West - tends to treat rights as freestanding absolutes. This often leads to moral gridlock, where no claim can yield without appearing to betray justice itself.

My own journey in developing the AskHillel ethical framework began with frustration toward this rights-based thinking. Rights often seemed like floating moral trump cards that are asserted without context, weighed without tradeoffs, and wielded without accountability. By contrast, obligations offered structure, relationships, and clarity. I began to favor a duty-first worldview, where moral coherence came not from what one could demand, but from what one was responsible for. I even wrote that rights themselves are a fiction.

And yet… something didn’t sit right.

Despite its flaws, the language of rights clearly served a vital function. It pointed to something deep in the human moral intuition: the need for protection, dignity, justice, and fairness. Rights language resonates with people for a reason. Could it be refined rather than discarded?

Then yesterday, as I was writing another article, it hit me:

Rights aren’t metaphysical absolutes. They’re values.

The word "rights" is famously ambiguous. It can refer to:

Legal guarantees (e.g. the right to vote),
Moral claims (e.g. a right to be treated with dignity),
Political slogans (e.g. "the right to choose" or "the right to bear arms"),
Or philosophical assumptions about personhood and freedom.

These usages often blur together. That’s one reason why rights-based arguments frequently collapse into shouting matches. People use the same words to mean very different things—and treat all versions as equally sacrosanct.

My reframing resolves this confusion. If all forms of “rights” are understood as expressions of values, then we are no longer debating abstractions. We’re dealing with real, nameable, ethically actionable priorities: the value of autonomy, the value of truth, the value of life, the value of dignity.

This reframing provides a common grammar. Whether we’re debating a legal right to protest, a moral right to privacy, or a political right to healthcare, we can now ask a more meaningful question:

What value is being asserted—and how should it be weighed against other values in this context?

AskHillel is a derech-based ethical reasoning framework that treats values as the basic building blocks of moral decision-making. Its architecture includes:

Tiered prioritization: Values are organized by ethical urgency. Life and truth typically sit at the top (Tier 1A), followed by foundational societal values (Tier 1B), and then amplifying or situational values (Tier 2).
Override logic: When values conflict, AskHillel applies structured override rules to resolve the tension. For example, the value of life can override the value of speech during times of imminent threat or incitement.
Contextual evaluation: All values are assessed relationally—meaning, the weight of a value depends on who is affected, the type of harm involved, and the proximity or immediacy of the moral claim.

By understanding rights as values within this system, we gain an elegant solution to longstanding moral dilemmas. There is no need to debate whether rights are “natural,” “granted,” “inalienable,” or “alienable.” They are simply values that must be weighed—just like all other values—using transparent principles and override logic.

This brings practical benefits:

1. From Stalemate to Moral Triage

Instead of clashing “rights” claims, like speech vs. safety, religion vs. equality, or privacy vs. justice, we can now evaluate which values are at stake, and apply a coherent process to resolve them. This enables principled ethical triage rather than ideological deadlock.

2. Clarifies Ambiguous Debates

Many public disputes rely on buzzwords like “freedom” or “justice,” which mean radically different things to different people. AskHillel’s value-based grammar disambiguates them. For example, one person’s “freedom” may prioritize autonomy, while another’s emphasizes social stability. By making the underlying values explicit, we create space for actual dialogue.

3. Transcends Legal Minimalism

Law may recognize rights, but law is often reactive and limited. “Rights” is treated like a concept that is protected by law and therefore moral. By translating rights into values, we enable deeper ethical reasoning. For instance, a company legally allowed to run offensive ads may still violate the value of public dignity or communal trust. AskHillel gives institutions a tool to think beyond compliance toward integrity.

4. Promotes Responsible Freedom

When rights are treated as values, they are no longer passive entitlements but active ethical priorities. The question shifts from “What am I allowed to do?” and "What is owed to me?" to “What am I responsible for, given the values at stake and who is affected?” This shift nurtures maturity and moral agency.

5. Enables Shared Moral Action

In a fragmented world, shared frameworks are rare. AskHillel offers a common foundation. When communities or institutions adopt the same grammar of values - even if they prioritize and rank them differently - they gain a mechanism for cooperation without coercion.

This reframing of rights as values does not weaken the moral force behind rights discourse—it strengthens it. It allows us to preserve what matters most in rights-based ethics (dignity, protection, autonomy) while discarding the absolutism that leads to gridlock, irresponsibility, or conflict.

Rights are powerful because they name things we care about. But their power becomes destructive when they are treated as untouchable or context-free. Once we recognize that rights are simply prioritized values, the conflict between rights and duties collapses. Duties flow naturally from the values we uphold. And values can be managed, weighed, and balanced—transparently, responsibly, and with moral clarity.

AskHillel doesn’t reject rights. It translates them.

And in doing so, it offers something rare: a path forward.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

When Antisemitism Turns Its Sights on the Druze—And the Media Yawns (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Last week, Elder of Ziyon reported on a disturbing scene that unfolded in Berlin: Islamist Syrian protesters openly called for the rape and murder of Druze—right in front of Berlin’s Red City Hall.

Around 300–400 supporters of Syrian ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as al-Jolani) gathered in front of Berlin's Red City Hall on Saturday, July 19, 2025. They chanted slogans against Israel, Druze, and Alawites—including open calls for murder and rape.

The German group democ.—a coalition of journalists, academics, and media professionals—documented the protest in a video published on YouTube.

They noted that slogans included explicit calls for rape and murder.

This wasn’t a fringe rumor. It was covered in the mainstream German press.

Der Tagesspiegel quoted Berlin’s Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), who condemned the rally unequivocally:

“Anyone who calls for murder and violence has no place in our city. I want these people to leave our country.”
— Der Tagesspiegel, July 24, 2025

The article also noted that demonstrators shouted antisemitic slogans like “Bring us the Israeli flag so we can burn it.” The spark for this display of hatred was the ongoing violence in Syria’s Suweida province, where Druze and Alawite minorities are being targeted by radical groups. According to democ., the calls for violence spread widely on social media.

Further reports revealed that in Düsseldorf, 50 Syrian and Turkish extremists attacked a Kurdish-Druze solidarity rally. Meanwhile, Focus Online provided context: Germany has taken in over 1.2 million Syrians since 2015—including unvetted members of jihadist and sectarian militias. The Berliner Zeitung pointed out a disturbing failure: police failed to bring the usual Arabic-language interpreters, allowing hate speech to go unchecked.

So where were the New York Times and the Washington Post on this story?

Nowhere. A search of their websites for the terms “Berlin” and “Druze” yields nothing. When I asked Grok AI about the coverage in the mainstream media, it responded:

“As of today, Monday, July 28, 2025, there is no direct coverage in major English-language mainstream media outlets (e.g., Reuters, BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, AP News) of the specific anti-Druze protests by Syrians in Berlin on July 19, 2025.”

This is editorial bias by omission. When the Times claims “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” you have to wonder: fit by whose standards? Too often, their “What to Know” articles really mean “What We’ve Decided You Should Know.”

But this protest is not just another disturbing rally. It’s a case study in how antisemitism metastasizes—turning its venom toward any group perceived as aligned with Jews or Israel.

The organization CyberWell, which tracks antisemitic content across social media, has been sounding the alarm for months. In May—before the recent Suweida violence—they tweeted:

The Druze community is paying the price for their relationship with Israel — facing targeted hate online and offline, including violent attacks on communities in southern Syria. It's a clear example of how Jew-hatred can impact non-Jews who are perceived as allies. pic.twitter.com/XMTVptlAT6
— CyberWell (@CyberWell_org) May 19, 2025

On Monday, CyberWell released a full report titled Southern Syria’s Sectarian Violence: A Digital Reflection of Antisemitic Narratives Targeting the Druze.

They documented a massive spike in hate speech that blends antisemitic tropes with anti-Druze incitement, including 3 key categories:

I. “Greater Israel” Conspiracy Theory

Druze self-defense or humanitarian aid is twisted into “proof” of an Israeli plot.

Posts combining “Greater Israel” + “Druze” surged by 3,529% from July 13–20, peaking at 3,700 posts in a single day.

II. “Jewlani” Puppet Allegation

Al-Julani (al-Sharaa) is smeared as a “Jewish puppet”—with Druze as his collaborators.

The slur “Jewlani” appeared in 900 posts, reaching 40.7 million users. That’s a 5,500% increase over the prior six months.

III. “The Druze Deserve It”

Druze are accused of “betrayal” simply for holding Israeli citizenship, serving in the IDF, or not opposing Israel.

The Arabic slur “Zionist dogs” directed at Druze appeared over 300 times.
The hashtag “#إسرائيل_عملاء_الدروز” (“The Druze are Israeli spies”) had over 5,700 posts and 4.2 million reach.

CyberWell notes that under the IHRA definition of antisemitism, these narratives remain antisemitic even when targeting non-Jews—because they rely on classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

The anti-Druze protest in Berlin is not just a story about "sectarian" hate—it’s about how online antisemitism bleeds into real-world violence, targeting both Jews and those associated with them.

And yet, the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major English-language outlets are silent. They just couldn't be bothered.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

More European countries are moving towards or already recognizing "Palestine."

The irony is that these countries are pretending that this would be a boon to justice and are framing this recognition as promoting human rights. Yet we have thirty years of seeing how the Palestinians govern themselves post-Oslo, and human rights has been a disaster under their rule.

In the Human Rights and Rule of Law Index, Palestine scored 7.8 in 2022, significantly worse than the world average of 5.41 (higher scores are worse.)

Palestine is considered "Authoritarian" and ranks 112 out of 167 countries in The Economist Democracy Index.

The West Bank scores 22 out of 100 in the Freedom House scoring, and Gaza gets only a 2.

The story doesn't tend there, though.

The Wikipedia article Human Rights in Palestine, dedicated only to Palestinian Authority human rights violations, has not been meaningfully updated in years. For example, the it quotes the Freedom House report from 2002 and the Democracy Index from 2020. Most of the examples of human rights violations in the report are nearly 20 years old.

Not one of the tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors care enough about human rights under Palestinian rule to even update this page.

It isn't as if there are no current human rights issues under the Palestinian Authority - the entity that would presumably rule a united Palestine. Here is how the US State Department summarized human rights under the PA in 2023:

With respect to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the Palestinian Authority; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations; inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious high-level corruption; serious restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic or intimate partner violence; violence or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and existence of the worst forms of child labor.

This is not just a few problems here and there. The entire government is corrupt and systematically violates the rights of its people in virtually every possible way.

This is what a Palestinian state would look like.

Amnesty, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch are virtually silent, issuing next to zero reports on these issues.

Human rights advocate Bassem Eid created the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996 specifically to shine a spotlight on human rights violations under the Palestinian Authority. The NGO was dissolved in 2011 because of lack of funding. He told an interviewer several years later, "If I want to establish an anti-Israel NGO, I promise you tomorrow I would get a half a million dollars from Sweden."

This is not an exaggeration. I once found an obscure, one-person NGO dedicated to criticizing Israel that gets tens of thousands of dollars from Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha Foundation, medico international, CCFD-Terre Solidaire and the .Open Society Foundations.

Dozens of NGOs have hundreds of people employed to find or fabricate Israeli violations of human rights of Palestinians. - and literally no one is dedicated to exposing human rights violations of Palestinians by their own leaders.

Which means that the world - including the Western European countries that are cozying up to the Palestinian Authority - really isn't interested in Palestinian human rights. It just wants an excuse to rake the Jewish state over the coals, using Palestinians as convenient pawns to achieve that goal.

Palestinian Arabs want to live in Israel. Israeli Arabs do not want to be citizens in a state of Palestine (although they will buy vacation homes there.) That tells you everything you need to know about who cares more about human rights in the region.

The world simply doesn't give a damn about Palestinian human rights unless Jews can be blamed.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Professor Aaron Koller was appointed as Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, the first Jew to hold the position in its 485-year history.

He spoke to The Guardian last month:

“One of the challenges we’ve had, politically and educationally, is that the idea of Hebrew has been tied in with a particular nation state in the past 75 years. While that has some advantages – suddenly you have 10 million native speakers of the language – it also has educational disadvantages because people are thinking Hebrew is quite a political thing. Whereas no one thinks that about Latin, it’s easier to sell it as politics-free than Hebrew, which immediately makes people think: what am I doing with this country of Israel? Do I like it? Do I want to go there?

“But part of my role is to say: Hebrew has a massively and really fascinatingly long history, and has nothing to do with the nation state that happens to exist today in the 21st century. You can study medieval Hebrew and be enthralled by the poetry and the philosophy without coming across as taking a stand on a contested issue.”

On Sunday we will mark Tisha B'av, and recite Kinot - liturgical poems written in medieval times. And many of those are centered around the destruction and return of Jews to Zion.

The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia has an entry on the entire class of poetry extolling Zion, starting with Psalms and going through the piyyutim of Tisha B'Av and onto what was then considered modern Zionism. It calls these poems "Zionides."

During the Middle Ages, Zionides from the pens of the greatest poets formed the chief comfort and consolation of the people. As early as the time of Ibn Gabirol (11th cent.) songs of Zion were incorporated in the liturgy, partly as lamentations for the Ninth of Ab and partly as tefillot and piyyuṭim. Among the songs of lamentation for Zion which are sung on the Ninth of Ab the following may be specially referred to: a song beginning with the words and giving a vivid description of the destruction of Zion; the well-known song which begins with the words , and in which Samaria and Jerusalem try to excel each other in the description of the misfortune which has fallen upon them; and, above all, the song with the refrain:

("Zion and her cities wail like a woman in childbirth, and like a virgin clothed in sackcloth for the man of her youthful choice").
The most important of Ibn Gabirol's Zionides are the poem beginning with the words:
("Send a prince to the condemned people which is scattered hither and thither").
Judah ha-Levi (1140) was the author of the Zionide beginning:
"Zion, wilt thou not send a greeting to thy captives, Who greet thee as the remnant of thy flocks? From West to East, from North to South, a greeting, From far and near, take thou on all sides. A greeting sends the captive of desire, who sheds his tears Like dew on Hermon; would they might fall on thy hills."

The encyclopedia entry goes on to say that the Zionides continued into the late 1800s with Zionist poems and songs, including Hatikvah.

These songs of Zion show a continuous and unbroken love by Jews of the Land of Israel and Zion. Maybe this makes students at Cambridge uncomfortable, but the connection is unmistakable - in fact, the medieval poetry of Zion is the best proof that Jews have always yearned to return to their land.

(h/t YMedad)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/28 Links Pt2: Civilisation fails the test, again; The battle of misinformation; Former Hostage joins Israeli team for final stage of Tour de France

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Civilisation fails the test, again

The echoes of October 7 were unmistakeable and horrifying. For several days last week, the Druze of Suweida in southern Syria were subjected to a barbaric onslaught by government troops controlled by the new Syrian president, Abu Mohammed al Jolani, as well as attacks by Bedouins and other jihadists. An estimated 1,000 Druze as well as Christians were slaughtered. Men were beheaded, women raped, children shot in front of their parents. An elderly Druze man was burned alive in his wheelchair.

From all those who over the past 21 months have posed as driven by conscience to support the “oppressed” Arabs of Gaza, there was now only silence. There was no condemnation from the likes of Amnesty or – until several days after the massacres – Human Rights Watch that constantly flay Israel over fabricated crimes against humanity. There was muted protest from church bodies, even though a Christian pastor and his entire family of 20 were slaughtered.

Instead, there was outrage over the accidental damage done by the IDF to a Catholic church in Gaza, when shrapnel from a strike on a nearby terrorist target hit part of the church and tragically killed three people.

The new Pope shamefully misrepresented this as an “attack by the Israeli army on the Catholic Parish of the Holy Family in Gaza City, which as you know killed three Christians and gravely wounded others”. Yet on the deliberate slaughter of his Syrian co-religionists he is, so far, silent.

On the BBC and other media the Syrian atrocities were barely reported, with the attacks falsely characterised as “sectarian” battles between Bedouin and Druze. Israel, the only country to come to the defence of the Druze by attacking Syrian military targets, was portrayed as bombing them for no particular reason other than yet more Israeli aggression. The Syrian pogrom wasn’t allowed to interrupt the steady stream of anti-Israel libels about aid supplies to Gaza.

Almost every day, Hamas has claimed Israel is deliberately killing Gazans queuing for food. It is, in fact, mainly Hamas that’s been killing hundreds of them to prevent them from receiving the aid that threatens to bring about the terrorist group’s final defeat.

Natasha Hausdorff: The battle of misinformation

For all of Israel's remarkable and inspiring victories across the seven kinetic fronts of this war against the forces of evil, Iran and its proxies have been gaining significant ground on the eighth front, in the realm of international media and diplomacy. It is a front Israel cannot afford to lose. The battle of misinformation and the propaganda campaigns of terrorist organizations has an undeniable effect on Israel's ability to defend itself. Pressure from international players for Israel to cease its self-defence has increased as a result of false accusations of "genocide" or "disproportionate force", and Hamas has been emboldened at the negotiation table, rejecting US-brokered hostage release deals. Every aspect of the ongoing war has been impacted by the increasingly dangerous and damaging anti-Israel rhetoric of supposed allies in the West, predicated upon falsehoods.

For too long, there has been an inclination to give credence to lies, treating them as valid talking points that require a response, as though false narratives and the truth are of equal value. This attitude and approach are having a dire impact on the public's understanding of the facts and the law.

Two messages need to be advanced with urgency in the international community. The first: "You have been lied to". Whether it is the revival of ancient blood libels with the false claim that Israel targets civilians, or the photos of very sick children falsely presented as victims of starvation, the public and the politicians around the world need to understand they have been taken for a ride. The second: "you're next". Lest those in the US, UK, or Europe think that this propaganda war is just about Israel, they should understand that this propaganda campaign of manipulation will have a dire impact on their ability, not just Israel's, to defend themselves against terror in the future.

Israel has set records and unprecedentedly high standards in the protection of civilians in armed conflict, facilitation of aid, and the painstakingly precise focus on terrorist targets. Military experts confirm this; all Israelis should know this. It is time the rest of the world appreciated it too.

The Palestinian national project is the REAL genocidal campaign...

International Enablers, The Global Multiplier
This campaign would not have reached its current potency without international complicity. The Soviet Union’s cultivation of the PLO gave the movement its narrative tools. The United Nations, through resolutions like the infamous “Zionism is racism” (3379, 1975) and UNRWA’s perpetuation of refugee status, institutionalized the political and demographic mechanisms of the campaign.

State sponsors like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey furnish the funds, weapons, and diplomatic cover to sustain Hamas and PIJ. Tehran supplies rockets and training through the IRGC and Quds Force. Qatar hosts Hamas leaders in Doha, funnels hundreds of millions into Gaza, and amplifies their messaging through Al Jazeera. Turkey grants Hamas operatives safe haven and even citizenship, legitimizing their agenda as “resistance.”

Western media and NGOs, often unwittingly, launder Palestinian propaganda into global discourse. Casualty figures supplied by Hamas-controlled agencies, despite their manipulation, are treated as gospel. Staged or recycled images, “Pallywood,” circulate widely, shaping public opinion of Israel as a reckless aggressor and Palestinians as helpless victims. Reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, echoing Soviet-era framing, label Israel an “apartheid state” while downplaying or ignoring the explicitly genocidal doctrines of Hamas and PIJ.

None of these actors may be pulling a trigger, but each plays a role in sustaining a campaign that, by intent and by act, seeks the destruction, in whole or in part, of the Jewish people as a sovereign nation. Under the Genocide Convention, facilitation and incitement are themselves prosecutable when tied to such a campaign.

Why Naming It Matters
Labeling the Palestinian national project as a genocidal campaign is not rhetorical escalation. It is clarity. So long as this movement is treated as a legitimate expression of self-determination, international institutions, state sponsors, and NGOs will continue to subsidize and shield it, mistaking a campaign of elimination for a quest for freedom. Recognition has concrete implications. Governments and courts must classify Hamas, PIJ, and affiliated entities not just as terrorists, but as genocidal organizations under international law. State sponsors like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey must face sanctions and prosecutions for aiding and abetting genocide. UNRWA must be reformed or dismantled, ending its role as a demographic weapon.

Most importantly, the world must affirm the Jewish people’s indigeneity and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, not as a concession to Israel, but as a safeguard against the very outcome international law was designed to prevent. The destruction of a people’s existence as a nation.

The Palestinian national project, as it exists today, was not built to create a state. It was built to destroy one. And unless the world confronts that fact, it risks enabling the very crime it swore, after the Holocaust, would never again be allowed to happen.

07/28 Links Pt1: The myth of obstinate Israel; How the West prolonged Gaza’s misery in the name of virtue; Israel's wartime Gaza aid is historically unprecedented

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Why the Truth Matters

In an episode of the drama House M.D., the patient at the center of the medical mystery is a brilliant physicist who has intentionally made himself dumber. He takes a careful mix of the drug dextromethorphan and alcohol every day, which lowers his IQ—but only while under the influence of the cocktail. He does this because he finds it less stressful and less lonely to live in ignorant bliss.

The Gaza discourse is filled with such people. Over the weekend the journalist David Collier revealed that the Palestinian child who’d been used by nearly every major news organization as the living representation of the mass starvation of Gazan children was in fact suffering from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, plus apparently a genetic disorder.

The ubiquitous image of the boy’s skeletal frame in his mother’s arms is indeed heartbreaking. Terribly sad as well is the fact that the boy is now fatherless. But it does not appear to be the case that, as has been reported, the boy’s father was killed by the IDF while looking for food. Videos and contemporaneous reports strongly suggest the father was killed while looking for Israeli soldiers to engage in battle. Many scenes of urban warfare are deeply tragic, and Gaza is no different.

Where Gaza is different is in the desire by global information institutions to lie about what specifically is creating those scenes, and for otherwise intelligent people to embrace those lies, because it’s less stressful and less lonely to live in an online world where the Israelis are always monsters and the truth is treated as a distraction.

A baby starving to death whose father was shot by Israelis while searching for food for his suffering child: It’s the kind of story that so completely flatters a certain worldview that the holders of that worldview ought to treat it with respectful skepticism. Again, the child’s suffering is real and tragic. But it was not deemed useful, and so it was falsified in service to The Cause. One can forgive the desperation of a parent; one cannot forgive a journalist or a “humanitarian” NGO official who finds it easier to join the mob than to be honest.

Lying about famine in Gaza is a tactic that Hamas and its useful idiots have used repeatedly, because the truth is disadvantageous to Hamas’s war and propaganda machines. And the truth is that there are real concerns about possible near-term hunger and malnutrition in Gaza because Hamas steals aid, hoards food and medicine away from civilians, and punishes dissent.

The truth, then, is that Hamas has engineered real suffering in Gaza, and the lie—that Israel is intentionally starving children—enables Hamas to engineer more suffering by creating global pressure on Israel to let Hamas control the aid again. That way Hamas can keep the cycle going.

Matti Friedman: Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War.

Because the GHF is an acute threat to its power, Hamas has been doing what it can to foment unrest around its distribution sites, kill its workers, and intimidate people accepting its food. The Americans running the sites have reported the distribution of more than 90 million meals directly to Gazans.

But on the ground, the word directly—according to friends of mine serving with reserve army units close to GHF operations—has often meant chaotic scenes of thousands of men descending on the distribution sites and picking them clean, coming into dangerous and sometimes fatal contact with Israeli soldiers who are understandably scared of disguised Hamas fighters and unprepared for the kind of mass chaos they’re expected to control.

It’s impossible to know how many Palestinians have been killed in these incidents, because Hamas numbers are part of the group’s information war. But my friends serving nearby told me that there have been fatalities in multiple incidents, and that poor Israeli planning is partly to blame. One friend, a committed and capable officer, told me despondently that the distribution effort “isn’t working and can’t work.” It’s not that they’re not trying. The army simply doesn’t have the ability to run orderly food distribution in a hostile and war-ravaged territory that has devolved, to a large extent, into the rule of gangs and clans.

An experienced Israeli civilian involved in the aid efforts, from an organization that works both with international aid groups and the Israeli military, said on Friday that mass starvation is not yet the reality but could be in the near future. There are already “pockets” of malnutrition and real hunger, he told me. The only way to avert a deterioration, he said, is for Israel to abandon the mistaken idea that withholding aid weakens Hamas, and to urgently flood Gaza with food. It’s the right move morally, he said, but also strategically, because the humanitarian crisis is devastating what’s left of Israel’s international support. He praised efforts by the United Arab Emirates and American-led groups like the World Food Program. Israel needs to work with them, he said, rethink its own policy, and move fast before things go from bad to worse.

This is already happening. In the meantime, news consumers worldwide were galvanized over the weekend by disturbing photos like those of the Gazan child Muhammad al-Matouq, who appeared on the front page of Britain’s Daily Express and then on that of The New York Times and elsewhere as the symbol of Israel’s cruel starvation of innocents. After the photographs were seen around the world it became clear that the child in fact suffers from cerebral palsy and other conditions unrelated to starvation. The suffering child ended up being less the intended symbol of Israeli evil than of how genuine misery can be put to use by practitioners of narrative war.

You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true: The disaster they’ve engineered in Gaza fuels the global campaign against Israel. That’s presumably why the crescendo of hunger stories coincided on Friday with reports that Hamas has now hardened its positions in the talks, leading to their suspension. (One of Hamas’s top demands, according to an American official cited by The Wall Street Journal, is shutting down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.)

One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won’t act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop.

John Spencer: Israel's wartime Gaza aid is historically unprecedented

There is no precedent for this. None.

Throughout history, wars between nations or between governments and insurgent groups have often involved humanitarian disasters. And in most of those wars, the fighting side does not provide relief to the enemy’s population. In World War II, the Allies provided no aid to German or Japanese civilians while those governments were still fighting and in control of their territory. In Vietnam, the United States never delivered humanitarian assistance to North Vietnamese or Viet Cong–held areas. Even during battles against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-backed forces facilitated aid only after clearing territory, not while ISIS still held it.

But Israel is doing what no military has done. It is facilitating direct humanitarian aid to the population of a territory governed by a terrorist army that it is still fighting in close-quarters urban combat.

Whether this fact is recognized or not by the international community, it is a historic first.

At the same time, this war has produced another anomaly. One that should deeply trouble anyone who cares about humanitarian norms. There is no historical precedent to a non-warring party with the sole ability to assist, Egypt, not allowing civilians to flee a war zone.

Egypt has refused to open the Rafah border crossing to allow Gazan civilians to escape, even as active combat, food shortages, and humanitarian collapse have worsened. This is not a case of reluctance by a distant country. This is the only nation that borders Gaza besides Israel. It is not a party to the war. And it is not constrained by law, logistics, or inability. It is constrained only by political choice.

In almost every other modern war, neutral countries have opened their borders to civilians seeking safety. Poland did so during the war in Ukraine. Jordan and Turkey took in millions during the Syrian civil war. Tanzania and Congo (then called Zaire) accepted refugees during the Rwandan genocide. Egypt is doing the opposite. It is keeping the gate closed and leaving civilians trapped while the world blames Israel for what happens inside.

This too is without precedent.

It is easy to criticize Israel for the humanitarian costs of its war. It is much harder to hold Hamas accountable for embedding its fighters in schools, hospitals, and civilian neighborhoods. And harder still to acknowledge when a military is doing something not just legal, but extraordinary.

The truth matters. And the truth is that no military in modern history has delivered more aid to an enemy population during active war than the Israel Defense Forces have to Gaza. That fact stands, regardless of whether anyone wants to say it out loud.

Does Islam as practiced today have the ability to be a reliably moral system? An ethoskeletal analysis

A recent British survey shows that more than half of the public think Islam is not compatible with British values.

As my followers know I have been working on universalizing Jewish ethics, and this includes a value-centric view of humanity. Every person, organization, political entity and defined group of people have a value system - a set of values that is both explicit and often implicit.

In the course of my work on universalizing Jewish ethics, I came up with the concept of an ethoskeleton. This is a set of attributes that are a prerequisite for a moral system to work in a positive way. The concern is not with sincerity or piety, but with systemic architecture: the ability of a moral system to self-regulate, prevent abuse, and resolve moral conflicts transparently

They include:

Corrigibility (Can self-correct)
Transparency (Explainable logic)
Dignity (Respects human worth)
Relational Integrity (Contextually aware)
Override Logic (Can resolve conflicts)
Anavah (Epistemic humility)

This is a fairly high bar. But without each of these in place, any moral system can degenerate into immorality. It can be hijacked by malicious actors, minor values can be exaggerated to override major values, it can be poorly interpreted without a transparent process to keep it on course.

Christianity and Judaism as they exist today pass most of the tests, so the ethoskeleton is not biased against religion. However, Islam as institutionally practiced in much of the Sunni world, and often imported uncritically into diaspora contexts, lacks key elements of the ethoskeleton. (This does not apply universally to all expressions of Islam to my understanding.) Sharia law cannot evolve within Islam today, Islamic legal rulings are inaccessible to non-scholars so their logic is not widely available and opaque, and most flavors of Islam asserts epistemic superiority, not humility.

As examples, Islam as it exists today can assert that martyrdom is the highest purpose of man, or that honor is worth more than life itself, or that Islam's support for bigamy is a higher value than a national law against the practice. These are nor moral positions that value life and human dignity above all. They may be consistent but they cannot easily coexist with other ethical systems, and there is a straight line from Islam's ethoskeletal failures and the values going awry.

When looked from this perspective, Islam, as practiced today, cannot be guaranteed to be a moral system.

The British people's instinct that Islam is incompatible with British values seems sound. British values include celebrating satire including of religion while Islam rejects of any blasphemy, mocking prophets or drawing Mohammed. That by itself is a serious value clash.

If the Muslim community would adopt the ethoskeleton as a basis for any moral system, things would be much different. Fiery preachers could be held to account and criticized publicly, forcing them to publicly and transparently defend their positions. Value clashes like importance of human life vs. martyrdom and honor could be well defined.

I am not saying here that this proves that Islam is immoral. I am saying that it does not have the minimum requirements necessary to resist it being perverted into an immoral system.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

As antisemitism and other forms of hate proliferate in social media, mainstream media and elsewhere, the question is how this can be handled without hurting the concept of free speech itself?

Looking at this through the lens of values can help both define the problem more precisely and lead to a potential solution.

When one uses the language of rights, with respect to free speech and everything else, it implies that the right is an absolute good. But rights are not inalienable. They are always limited in some way - right to property does not justify theft, right to life doesn't mean an army cannot send one into a dangerous situation, and right to liberty doesn't mean that you can drive through a red light.

It is much more accurate to think of these in terms of values. Free speech is a value, and an important one, but like most values, it can clash with other values - the value of life, the value of privacy, the value of living one's life without harassment. When values conflict, rules must be made to navigate these competing values. And when we change from the language of rights to that of values, it is much easier for people to see the reality - rights sound inviolable while values must be weighed.

Free speech doesn't only conflict with other values - it can also help strengthen other values like truth-seeking, accountability, exposing injustice, and individual conscience.

As such, speech is never morally neutral. Words shape behavior, culture, and society. They can build or destroy, clarify or confuse. How can we strengthen speech that contributes to society while combating speech that is detrimental?

Most people understand that free speech is not truly unlimited. Direct incitement to murder or genocide is not free speech in any jurisdiction I am aware of. There are existing laws against those, if only sporadically enforced.

Yet some of the most dangerous speech does not call for violence directly. Instead, it prepares the ground for violence by dehumanizing others, spreading conspiracies, or creating an atmosphere of fear and rage. This kind of speech - what we might call enabling speech - does not always break the law, but it erodes public safety in predictable ways.

When this speech spreads during times of heightened tension or real-world threats, it is not enough to defend it in the name of abstract freedom. If we know that certain patterns of speech regularly precede violence or discrimination, then allowing them to go unchecked is a form of moral negligence. Calling speech a "right" muddies the waters here - when speech creates an environment of hate it cannot be let off the hook as an unchallenged, unlimited value.

This isn't a theoretical concern. Increased levels of hate directly contributed to the deaths of Jews in the fatal firebombing in Boulder and the shooting outside the Jewish museum in Washington. People's lives are at risk, and speech is part of the pattern that lead to murder.

This is where artificial intelligence can play a constructive role. Rather than acting as a digital judge, AI can serve as a kind of moral sensor: tracking when real-world incitement is rising and temporarily limiting the amplification of speech that historically contributes to it.

So, for example, when an AI on a social media platform sees more posts that directly call for harm to a group of people, it can trigger a protocol where posts that demean that group, or that call for attacking a subset of that group, or that in general can contribute to an atmosphere that can prompt viewers towards hate, to put guardrails in place.

These guardrails can include limiting the reach of such posts, telling the posters that their specific post is enabling harm and may be re-written and adding notes to posts pointing out their use of harmful stereotypes. It must be made clear that these steps are temporary, only as long as the hate and incitement are endangering real people.

This is not a system of permanent censorship. It is a form of ethical triage - prioritizing safety and dignity when the moral climate becomes dangerously unstable. The approach is not about banning ideas or silencing people. It is about recognizing patterns of harm and acting with caution when danger levels rise. Just as societies adjust behavior during natural disasters or public health emergencies, we can adjust how speech is managed during periods of heightened social risk.

Critics will ask whether such a system could chill legitimate dissent. That is a fair concern. But the goal is not to suppress criticism or unpopular views. The system focuses only on times and contexts where certain types of rhetoric, even if legal, predictably contribute to real-world danger. It uses moderation tools sparingly, applies them transparently, and provides opportunities for correction.

Speech, in this model, is not treated as untouchable, but as a serious moral act. Like all powerful acts, it carries responsibility. And when the stakes are high - when lives or public trust are on the line - that responsibility must be taken seriously.

In a moral society, no single value can stand entirely alone. Free speech matters deeply, but it must walk alongside other values like human dignity, public safety, and truth. When those values come into conflict, responsible societies do not pick favorites. They balance, they weigh, and they respond with care.

Free speech is not sacred because it is untouchable. It is sacred because of what it protects. And when it stops protecting and starts enabling harm, a moral society must step in: not to silence, but to correct, to heal, and to preserve what really matters.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Understanding today's surge of antisemitism

In recent weeks, antisemitism has surged with shocking boldness. A New York Times op-ed today openly calls for the end of Israel via a rebranded “right of return.” A Spanish airline deboards Jewish passengers without reasonable explanation. Podcasts now praise Hitler without shame. Jews are being excluded from academic spaces, publishing circles, and professional associations in therapy and law. A major NGO like Amnesty and a country like Ireland can openly engage in Holocaust inversion, accusing the Jewish state of genocide, reluctantly admitting that they had to change the definition of genocide to support the entire edifice. And the rhetoric that fuels this climate like claiming that Israel uses starvation as a weapon when it does more to facilitate food deliveries to their enemies than any nation at war in history - has gone from fringe to mainstream.

Most observers try to explain this with various ideas. Perhaps latent antisemitism was always there, just waiting for a trigger. When global events get overwhelming, people are attracted to theories that can explain everything, and antisemitism as a conspiracy theory is a simple, overarching explanation. Social media monetizes and amplifies the most outrageous hate.

All of these contain truth. But they don’t explain why antisemitism, specifically, is the narrative that gains traction across the far-left, far-right, and mainstream institutions. And they don’t explain why it erupted so quickly after October 7, when the moral horror of a terrorist massacre was almost instantly inverted into global condemnation of Jews.

To really understand what’s happening, we need to recognize something deeper: Judaism is not just a religion or ethnicity. It is a moral system. And that system poses a direct challenge to the dominant ideologies of our time.

Judaism offers a structured ethical worldview rooted in covenant, obligation, peoplehood, and particularism. It resists, and indeed disproves, the dominant ideologies of today:

Universalism that erases difference
Simplistic oppressor/oppressed binaries
Utopian theories of justice unmoored from responsibility or process
Movements that define moral worth by who appears more victimized

In contrast, Jewish moral reasoning is complex. It prioritizes life but balances it with justice. It respects both universal dignity and particular commitments. It demands transparency, self-correction, and humility. And crucially, it insists that morality must be acted out through real-world obligations, not just feelings or slogans.

That makes Judaism - and by extension, the Jewish people and the State of Israel - a threat to any ideology that demands total allegiance to its own narrative of good and evil.

This is why accusations like “genocide,” “apartheid,” or “settler colonialism” are so powerful. They aren’t about empirical truth - they’re about moral frame control. These terms are deployed not to describe reality, but to redefine it: to cast Jewish self-preservation as inherently immoral and to erase the moral legitimacy of the Jewish people and Jewish philosophy.

The function of these accusations is not debate. It’s delegitimization. They allow ideological movements to maintain their internal logic, even if it requires rebranding Jewish families burned to death in their homes as obstacles to justice rather than victims.

If you reduce a worldview to a single perceived and self-defined value like "justice" while ignoring other values like the obligation of self-defense, the sanctity of life from all sides and not just one, or the evil of demonizing entire classes of people, you are immoral.

The massacre committed by Hamas was not just ignored — it was reframed instantly. Instead of moral clarity, the antisemites that position themselves as today's ethical arbiters world rushed to moral inversion. Jews defending themselves were instantly pathologized. Palestinian violence was contextualized and excused. Jews who live inside the unquestioned borders of Israel were cast as "settlers." Anti-Israel narratives were amplified. Justified Jewish anger was weaponized against Jews.

This reversal wasn’t spontaneous. It was preloaded. The ideological frameworks, from progressive academia to Islamist propaganda to “decolonial” and "settler colonialism" theory, had already flattened Jews into a category: oppressors with no moral claim.

All they needed was a spark.

Judaism and Jewish ethics refuses to play the good vs. evil game. It teaches that multiple truths can exist in tension, that everyone has moral obligations even if they are cast as "victims," that justice is not a mere slogan but a multifaceted concept that must be balanced with mercy and humanity. Judaism resists simple answers and engages in debate and argument to find the best path forward given the complexities of real life.

This is morally intolerable to ideologies that require emotional absolutes and flatten the world into simplistic, childish black and white categories. Progressivism says everyone is an oppressor or oppressed, decolonial theory flattens everyone into colonizer or colonized, Marxism says you are either bourgeoisie or proletariat, critical race theory paints everyone as either white or non-white. Jews and Judaism, especially when embodied in a sovereign, unapologetically Jewish state like Israel, dismantle these false binaries and become the ultimate irritant. This is not because of what Jews do but because of what Jews stand for - we cross all these artificial boundaries and remain one people.

We cannot fight antisemitism with PR campaigns, fact sheets, or hashtags alone. Even Holocaust education can be weaponized against Jews. The answer is not to defend Jews as victims - which is playing the haters' "victim/victimized" game - but to reassert Judaism as a moral civilization.

Teach Jewish ethics not just in religious spaces, but as a counter-framework for moral reasoning (which is the basis for my AskHillel project.)
Call out moral inversion - clearly, calmly, and structurally.
Show that Jewish particularism is not an obstacle to universal justice, but the only real check against moral tyranny. If your philosophy cannot accommodate Jews, it is illegitimate - period.
Stop apologizing for being complex in a world addicted to simplicity and conspiracy theories.

If we don’t defend moral complexity itself, and lose the ability to discuss what exactly "good" means in the real world, we lose more than public sympathy.

We lose civilization.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From El Watan (Egypt):

Dr. Wassim El-Sisi, an Egyptologist, stated that the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud, despite being Jewish, acknowledged in his book "Moses and Monotheism" that "the Jews' eternal complex is their ancient Egyptian civilization." He explained that this complex drives them to distort Egyptian history and accuse it of paganism or injustice.

During his interview with journalist Lama Gabriel on the " Studio Extra " program on the "Extra News" channel, Wassim El-Sisi added that monotheism was known in ancient Egypt since the First Dynasty, stressing that the accusations directed at Egyptian civilization are subjective and ignore historical facts.

He pointed to what was mentioned in the book "The Philosophy and History of Ancient Egypt" by Dr. Mahmoud El-Sakka, Professor of Law at Cairo University's Faculty of Law, in which he described Egyptian civilization as "the only civilization that has endured for thousands of years because it was founded on justice."

Waseem El-Sisi pointed out that ancient Egyptians had a goddess of justice called "Maat," who embodied the values of justice, truth, and balance. He asserted that ancient Egyptian laws were formulated from a system of human values, reflecting the sophistication and human depth of this civilization.

This is hilarious.

The article engages in psychological projection. He has no evidence that Jews are obsessed with Egypt outside of a bizarre theory by Freud that no one accepts and he misrepresents: that Moses was an Egyptian who led the Jews, but the Jews murdered him and then felt guilty which led to the Jewish religion (or something like that.)

Jews don't spend all day thinking about Egypt outside prayer and the Haggadah, But it sure seems like Dr. El-Sisi thinks a great deal about the Jews.

El Sisi claims that ancient Egypt was monotheistic long before Judaism - and then immediately praises the Egyptian goddess of justice (Ma’at). These two ideas contradict each other: monotheism and a pantheon of gods can’t both be the defining trait of the same belief system at the same time.

The (extended) article presents modern Egypt as the direct heir of ancient Egyptian civilization. In reality, there’s no uninterrupted link—many civilizations, religions, and languages have come and gone since the pharaohs.

Egyptians are obsessed with Jews. The reason is an inferiority complex that they haven't accomplished in 3,000 years what Israel has done in a few decades.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)