Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 05, 2025

From Katrina to Gaza: When the Media Gets Stuck on Stupid (Daled Amos)

Every time the media seems to have achieved a new high in media bias, it just turns around and climbs to ever greater heights. People are still talking about The New York Times and its outsized photo of an emaciated Gaza child that the paper assured its readers owed his condition to an Israel-instigated famine.

They squeezed this picture for all it was worth, and as noted by Elder of Ziyon, the size and placement of the New York Times picture of "Gaza starving child" was virtually unprecedented:

Only a few days later did The New York Times unapologetically point out the boy had "pre-existing health problems":

Editors’ Note: July 29, 2025
This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.

This is all the more malicious considering that The Times chose a photo that omitted context:

Add to this the media's perpetual claim of impending famine, casualty figures so often quoted from Hamas terrorist sources that reports no longer even mention that fact, and accusations of genocide based on questionable premises.

The controversy over media impartiality and objectivity gets worse during a military conflict. The confusion we associate with the fog of war applies not only to military battles but also to journalistic battles.

In response to these journalistic battles, Ralph Pulitzer created the role of newspaper ombudsman in 1913. On the one hand, the competition to get the story first led to the muckraking that uncovered corruption in the establishment, such as Ida M. Tarbell's The History of The Standard Oil Company, which pioneered the idea of investigative reporting. On the other hand, it also produced the yellow journalism of the 19th century, specializing in scandal-mongering and sensationalist reporting. Less than 20 years later, the need for some kind of oversight became clear. One of these incentives was not fake stories about famine or misleading pictures of emaciated children.

The problem was fictional stories about cats:

According to a 1916 issue of American Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness between "that which is true and that which is false" in the paper. He had reason for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau's first director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship's cat. After asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half-dozen accounts of shipwrecks, White was told, "One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat."

It is not always easy to distinguish between yellow journalism and muckraking, between sensationalism and investigative reporting. Back in the day, Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen, was a cub reporter, not a journalist. Are reporters the same thing as journalists? That apparently depends. According to Dictionary.com, journalism can be synonymous with good old-fashioned reporting. But not necessarily:

Journalism can also be:

4. writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing.

The distinction between muckraking and yellow journalism is not always a purely theoretical question. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the US, causing catastrophic damage, especially in New Orleans. It was a powerful Category 5 storm that overpowered the levee system and flooded nearly 80% of the city. Over 1,300 people died, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. The storm’s destruction resulted in $125 billion in damages, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in US history. The storm exposed serious flaws in emergency preparedness, infrastructure, and government response, sparking national outrage and debate.

In addition to harsh criticism of the government's lack of preparation, discrepancies in the number of casualties, and inaccurate descriptions of the dire situation in New Orleans, the media coverage of Katrina was also open to debate.

The mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, said the death toll could reach as high as 10,000 casualties. Based on a simulation, FEMA estimated there would be more than 60,000 casualties and ordered 25,000 body bags. The National Hurricane Center finally adjusted Katrina's death toll downward to 1,392, from an earlier estimated 1,833 deaths.

The Guardian reported that media accounts of violence and looting were exaggerated and interfered with rescue attempts. It quoted Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who coordinated around 300 National Guardsmen to keep order. He complained that he had to deal with “a constant reaction to misinformation...Some of the [media] were giving information that wasn’t correct...Much of it was uncorroborated information, probably given with the best of intentions.” The governor of Louisiana at the time, Kathleen Blanco, had similar complaints:

Blanco said the media amplified stories of widespread violence it could not verify, which impacted rescue operations. For example, she said school bus drivers refused to drive their vehicles into New Orleans to help in the evacuation because of the dangerous situation they heard about on television. Blanco enlisted the national guard to drive the buses instead.

Honore famously told journalists at the time:

Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight. And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why we like follow-up questions.

That didn't prevent journalists from patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

The PBS NewsHour had a special feature on Katrina Media Coverage a month later. Keith Woods, then dean at a school for journalists in Florida, gave his impression. It was favorable, and he explained why:

KEITH WOODS: Well, I did like the aggressiveness of the journalists throughout, I liked the fact that for a good part of this reporting the journalists brought themselves to the reporting a sense of passion, a sense of empathy, a sense of understanding that they were not telling an ordinary story any more than the Sept. 11 attacks were an ordinary story. So I like the fact that journalism understood the size of this story from the very beginning and brought to bear the kinds of resources and the kind of passion in the coverage that we saw.

Hugh Hewitt, a host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show and a blogger, confronted Woods on exactly those points -- aggressiveness and passion -- that Woods saw as the media's strong points. He attacked the media's inaccurate descriptions of the dire situation in New Orleans:

HUGH HEWITT: Well, Keith just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.

I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center — didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in this own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't. [emphasis added]

The response that Woods gives to Hewitt's critique of the media reporting of Katrina does not inspire confidence. For one thing, he does not push back on anything Hewitt said. Instead:

KEITH WOODS: Well, remember that we thought 5,000 people died in the twin towers in New York originally — more than 5,000. We thought the White House had been attacked in the early reporting of that story. The kind of reporting that journalists have to do during this time is revisionist. You have to keep telling the story until you get it right.[emphasis added]

It is unclear how many chances Woods felt the media was entitled to get its facts straight.

The media's misreporting of Hurricane Katrina impeded rescue efforts.
The media's misreporting on Gaza inflames antisemitism and attacks on Jews around the world.

The media coverage of disasters is difficult and taxes their resources, but that is no excuse for them to get stuck on stupid.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The New York Times writes:

Many Jewish Voters Back Mamdani. And Many Agree With Him on Gaza.
Zohran Mamdani won over Jewish voters in New York City who were energized by his economic agenda and unbothered by — or sympathetic to — his views on Israel and Gaza.

Reading the article, you’d walk away with the clear impression that many Jewish voters supported him, and those who didn’t are either scared, confused, or comparing him to Nazis.

That framing isn't just misleading - it’s manipulative. And it follows a playbook that, once you see it, you can’t unsee.

Let’s start with the basics. Mamdani is a polarizing figure because of his aggressive criticism of Israel, including using terms like “apartheid” and “genocide.” That’s a third-rail issue in a city with America’s largest Jewish population. It is a fair journalistic question to ask how he won and what Jews think of him.

But instead of digging into the demographic complexity of New York’s Jewish voters - who range from Orthodox to unaffiliated, politically diverse, and often divided on Israel - the article builds a story around a very specific slice: activist Jews who already support Mamdani and align with his politics.

We hear from a bike mechanic canvasser, a philanthropy exec, a mother at a bus-themed Shabbat event—all Jewish, all pro-Mamdani, all used to build the narrative that Jewish support for Mamdani is meaningful and growing.

What we don’t hear is this: A poll conducted before the election showed Mamdani pulling around 20% of the Jewish vote. That’s not insignificant, but it’s far from the groundswell the article implies. And without that number, phrases like “many Jews supported him” or “double-digit support” are meaningless, designed to feel persuasive, not inform.

The number of words quoted from pro-Mamdani Jews outnumber criticism of Mamdani 435-165. That 2.6-to-1 imbalance portrays the opposite of reality: Most Jews do not support Mamdani and many are frightened about what his election would mean to their day to day lives in New York City. Those voices are minimized or ignored.

I asked a couple of AIs, based only on this article, what their impression of the percentage of Jewish voters appear to support Mamdani. Google Gemini estimated in the 40-50% range, Claude said 30-50%, ChatGPT said 40-60%. Has his support really tripled among Jews since the election, or are we being manipulated?

Then comes the “balance”: a rabbi who compares Mamdani’s win to the rise of the Nazi party in Austria. That’s not a counterargument; that’s a rhetorical trap. By choosing an extreme critic, the article defuses legitimate concerns and makes Mamdani’s Jewish critics look hysterical or out of touch.

This is manipulation of the reader on multiple levels. It is propaganda disguised as news reporting.

I previously looked at who the 20% of Jews who voted for Mamdani likely are. I noted a 2023 poll of New York City Jews:

16% said being Jewish was not important to them
27% said having Jewish grandchildren was not important to them
15% had no connection to the Jewish community
22% did not observe Yom Kippur
48% never participate in any Jewish programs
32% of those who give charity never give to Jewish organizations

Notice how these numbers all cluster around 20-25%.

In other words, the Jews who support Mamdani are the Jews who have already largely abandoned Judaism. They don’t represent the Jewish community: they represent very liberal New Yorkers who, by chance of birth, happen to be Jewish.

The article never defines what it means by “Jewish.” Are we talking about religiously observant Jews? Ethnic Jews? People of Jewish birth who enjoy bagels and lox? Or, in this case, the "as-a-Jews" - activists who only invoke their Jewishness when it’s time to defend anti-Israel positions?

This definitional slipperiness lets anyone with a Jewish identity - no matter how disconnected from Jewish communal life - serve as moral cover. That’s not representation. It’s exploitation.

It matters. This kind of reporting shapes how the public interprets Jewish opinion, antisemitism, and what counts as “mainstream.” When you stack the deck with cherry-picked voices and bury the demographic reality, you’re not just telling a story. You’re building a false moral consensus.

Worse, you are positioning New York Jews with legitimate fears of a Mamdani administration as irrational at best. The reality is that the Jewish majority who care about their people, their religion and Israel are overwhelmingly against Mamdani. Where are the articles about them?

Journalism like this isn’t just biased. It’s structurally deceptive.

And calling that out isn’t about partisanship. It’s about intellectual honesty.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

There’s an unspoken condescension behind how many of Israel’s so-called “friends” talk about the war.

They don’t really believe Israel wants peace.

They’re convinced Bibi is prolonging the war – and the hostage crisis – just to stay in power.

They think Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas is irrational vengeance, not strategic necessity. "Don't worry, they can't hurt you," they tell Israel - which is what Israel thought on October 6.

They believe the Palestinian Authority – one of the most corrupt and abusive governments on Earth – is a viable peace partner. Its own record of supporting terror, antisemitism, incitement, paying terrorists an their families, human rights abuses against its own people - none of that is considered as important as the abstract idea of a state that will fail before it starts. (It is worth mentioning that the EU has sent hundreds of experts to the PA over the past 30 years to teach them good governance techniques. A generation later, shouldn't they know them by now?)

And they’re sure that if Israel really wanted peace, none of this would matter. There’d be a two-state solution by now and Israelis would be dancing in the streets.

How stupid do they think Israelis are, not to accept the utopia the West imagines?

This isn’t just ignorant – it’s deeply condescending. And the suggestion that Israelis prefer war to peace is borderline antisemitism.

Yes, Israel has done a terrible job explaining itself. But that doesn’t excuse the arrogant delusions of Western elites.

So here’s some news: Israelis are smart. They disagree on many things – but nearly all of them want peace. They don’t want war, nightly running to shelters, or loved ones in combat Gaza or Lebanon for months at a time.

Also, Israelis love their country. Their cab drivers care more about Israel's future than the most fervent of Israel's Western friends. And I would trust the cab driver who has to live with life or death decisions than the diplomat who sits behind his desk in Brussels and can say "oops" if hi ideas turns out bad.

Most of all, Israelis are not suicidal.

They won’t gamble the country’s future on a “peace plan” that could hand the region over to jihadists, Iran, or a Chinese-armed terror state next door. No agreement or even Israeli military might can stop a Palestinian state from acquiring advanced missiles from Iran that can reach every corner of Israel. The Judean Hills provide a high ground where Tel Aviv can be shelled with impunity.

The West's answer is that Israel can invade after a bunch of Jews are killed, so what's the big deal? Israel's answer is that we don't want our citizens to be killed at all, thank you very much.

It is utterly delusional to think that a Palestinian state under current conditions is the solution rather than a bigger problem. Hamas is still the most popular political party in both Gaza and the West Bank. Can the Western leaders who are supporting a Palestinian state really not know this basic fact?

Israelis aren’t stupid. But the leaders of France, the UK, Canada, Spain, Ireland, and others might be - if they think a fantasy state of Palestine will bring peace instead of more bloodshed.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/04 Links Pt2: The West is complicit in Hamas’s torture of the hostages; The hilarious breakdown of the Islamo-left alliance; The Red Cross is ‘Abandoning the Very People It Was Established To Protect’

From Ian:

Amb. Michael Oren: Why I Have Hope for Israel

Fifty years ago, I came to a country that had no relations with China, India, and Africa, nor the 12-member Soviet bloc, no peace with Egypt and Jordan, or any Abraham Accords. We had friendly relations with the U.S., but no deep, multifaceted strategic alliance and no high tech. Our major export was oranges.

My historian's eye enables me to see what no people in all of history could have accomplished, rising after two thousand years of statelessness, a mere three years after the Holocaust, to establish an independent nation in our ancient homeland.

I see how that country, shorn of allies and natural resources, repelled a multi-pronged invasion designed to destroy it, absorbed 10 times its original Jewish population in 10 years, created one of the world's only uninterrupted democracies, built seven top-flight universities, a universal healthcare system, and mustered an army more than twice as large as those of France and Britain combined.

I saw Hebrew not merely reborn, but spoken, sung, and written. I saw how a poor, agrarian backwater became a military and technological superpower, the country that could invent Mobileye and Waze while standing up to the lavishly-armed forces of evil.

And during the current war my hope has grown. I've seen close to half a million Israelis leave their homes, their jobs, and their families, pick up a gun and go out to fight for their country, knowing full well that they may come back irreparably altered or may not come back at all. Half a million Israelis is - proportional to the U.S. - the equivalent of many millions more than all the Americans who served along with my father in World War II.

Whether in biblical or contemporary days, we are a nation of flawed heroes, and our miracles often come encapsulated in pain. But based on the empirical evidence, our nation will survive this trying period and emerge, once again, robust. The hope of being a free people in our own land, as our national anthem envisions, has not been lost.

Brendan O'Neill: The West is complicit in Hamas’s torture of the hostages

Hamas’s release of those Nazi-like images of two Jews it abducted, starved and then humiliated for the titillation of the world’s anti-Semites was an assertion of the mad power it enjoys over the Gaza narrative. It knows that no matter the depths of depravity it sinks to, still the story will be that Israel is the problem. It knows it can send a 6,000-strong army to invade Israel, rape Israeli women, kill Israeli civilians, kidnap Jews and subject them to fascistic abasements, and still the influential of the West will point the finger at the Jewish State. David and Braslavski’s suffering was arguably intensified by this ethical disorder in the West – certainly Hamas was exploiting that ethical disorder when it released footage of their suffering in the full knowledge that many would just look the other way.

Worse, Hamas senses that its crimes are not only forgiven but rewarded, too. That it released the clips of David and Braslavski in the days after Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said they would recognise the State of Palestine was striking – and sickening. Hamas has clearly got the message that persecuting Jews has benefits. That carrying out a pogrom can be fruitful. That killing more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis has its rewards. Including the reward of nationhood. Starmer’s promise to recognise Palestine proves ‘victory’ is ‘closer than we expected’, gloated Hamas. Ghazi Hamad went further, cheering Starmer’s promise as ‘one of the fruits of 7 October’.

What Starmer, Macron and Carney have done is unforgivable. Yes, all three paid lip service to the importance of disarming Hamas. But to confer statehood on a territory that is still part-ruled by these barbarous militants who take pleasure in the persecution and murder of Jews is a grotesque betrayal not only of Israel but of basic decency, too. The footage of David digging his grave and Braslavski sobbing in pain should haunt Starmer, for Hamas views his promise of recognition as a prize for such savagery. It believes its brutish violence helped to hurry along the process of statehood. And it is right to. How can Western leaders call for the release of David and Braslavski even as they decorate with statehood the monsters who abducted them? It is perverse.

It feels like Hamas is holding not just 50 Israelis hostage but the West itself. Every press release of this monstrous movement is taken as good coin by our media. Its atrocities are overlooked, even forgiven, in the maniacal rush to damn Israel as the world’s wickedest state. Even clear, self-published footage of its crimes against humanity has not been enough to arouse the influential from their Israelophobic stupour. Now we know: our cultural elites didn’t only take the wrong side in this war started by Hamas – they emboldened that side, too.

The hilarious breakdown of the Islamo-left alliance

A lot rests on the answer to this question, at least for the electoral prospects of the Green Party. In recent years, its vote has been bolstered by Muslims, particularly young Muslims, who share the party’s views on economics and Palestine. In the darker and more ideologically dogmatic sections of this Muslim-Green alliance, anti-Jewish sentiment and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have taken root, too. A Times investigation last year found that around 20 prospective Green candidates at the last General Election had made disturbing statements about Israel, Hamas and the 7 October attacks.

The problem is that the two camps were never remotely aligned on other key issues. These include rights and protections for sexual minorities (such as same-sex marriage), the degree to which queer rights and queer theory should be taught in school, and the sanctity of life – both in terms of abortion and assisted dying. It is no secret that British Muslims are more conservative on these issues compared even with the general population, let alone the progressive left.

The British left could have seen these problems coming a mile off by looking across the Atlantic. That this relationship is fundamentally unstable was made clear in November when Donald Trump was re-elected. Michigan – home to America’s largest Muslim population and its only Muslim-majority city, Hamtramck – voted Republican. Exit polls recorded a surge in support for Trump among Muslims in the state. This came after Hamtramck’s city council – which is also majority Muslim – voted to ban the flying of Pride flags on city property in 2023.

For some time, the Democratic Party had complacently assumed that rising racial and religious diversity in America would play in its favour. But this theory of ‘demographic destiny’ has proved to be hugely flawed. Unsurprisingly, many Muslim voters found themselves much closer aligned with Republicans on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia and trans rights.

Now, it seems that this divorce is about to happen in Britain. Socially conservative British Muslims should not expect progressive liberals to appease them. Nor should they be expected to sacrifice their values, rooted in their faith and cultural heritage, just to please the left.

Political marriages of convenience like this are a recipe for inept governance and confused priorities. The left and British Muslims were never natural allies – and both sides must now face up to this fact.

08/04 Links Pt1: Netanyahu reportedly approves full military occupation of Gaza; Dismantle the UN Aid State; The Failed Logic in Dave Smith’s Morality of War; Albanese Loses “Blue Check” on X

From Ian:

Eitan Fischberger: Dismantle the UN Aid State

What this narrative ignores is that the other distribution processes employed this far are just as – if not more – chaotic and violent. Just this week, for example, the Daily Wire released a video showing swarms of Gazans overrunning multiple trucks belonging to the UN, while the IDF released footage of armed Hamas operatives looting an aid truck. “Contrary to Hamas’s false claims that the individuals in the video are security personnel,” the IDF said, “they are in fact Hamas terrorists who arrived to seize the aid from Gaza’s residents.”

But the UN, ever the willing megaphone, amplifies the Health Ministry’s narrative, with a complicit media giving them generous airtime.

Even more counterproductively, the IDF claimed this past week that the UN has insisted it will only distribute aid if the process is secured by Gaza’s “Blue Police,” a sanitized way of describing Gaza’s Hamas-run police force. Back in November 2024, a UN spokesperson stated that their workers would become “an even greater target” if surrounded by “armed soldiers from one of the two parties in this conflict.”

Why then would the UN oppose another group handing out food and rely on Hamas’ police force to secure distribution, even after repeatedly accusing the terror group of stealing aid? Why would it echo Hamas’ unproven claims of “aid massacres,” despite the IDF and GHF denying them, and rail against GHF for doing the very thing the UN is supposed to do?

Because GHF’s success is existentially threatening to the UN’s model. If GHF works, the entire paradigm collapses. No more “working through partners” who happen to be terrorists. No more junkets and photo ops for UN officials who get feted around the world for overseeing human misery. And most importantly, no more Hamas exploiting aid to fill its coffers and maintain domination.

In 2024 alone, Hamas made over $500 million from the aid racket, according to both Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and US House Speaker Mike Johnson—by extorting civilians, skimming off the top, and using food as a tool for recruitment. Johnson has said this revenue accounts for half of Hamas’s annual budget.

According to a U.S. official quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Hamas made shutting down the GHF the second item on its cease-fire negotiation list—which tells you everything you need to know about how UN aid fuels Hamas and how successful the initiative has truly been. Another official added that GHF has “caused Hamas more fear than anything else has in the past two years.” That’s because GHF does what no UN body dares to do: deliver aid directly to civilians, cutting out the Hamas middleman.

The UN’s own data reveals just how broken the system has become: between May 19 and July 27, only 13 percent of all aid trucks that entered Gaza actually reached their intended destinations. The rest were intercepted or diverted inside Gaza.

While the UN’s system collapses under the weight of its own dysfunction, GHF distributes aid daily—and films it. Their videos show the (far from perfect) delivery of hundreds of thousands of aid packages per day, totalling nearly 100 million so far.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza isn’t the narrow result of Israeli policy, but of the international system that treats Hamas like a partner and those trying to bypass Hamas like traitors. And while media outlets and the United Nations insist Israel is starving Gaza, it’s actually the UN that is failing to distribute aid. Not because of war. Not because of the siege. But because of pride, politics, and power.

The fight over aid in Gaza isn’t just about food. It’s about who controls the narrative— and who profits from it.

Richard Kemp: The murderous, thieving overlords of Hamas are the true oppressors of the Palestinians

Israel has no choice but to continue to suppress terrorism in the West Bank, in which Hamas is also heavily involved, to prevent the territory going the way of Gaza. Likewise in Gaza itself there is no political solution; Hamas can be dealt with only by military destruction. That means continuing the war until they are no longer a threat. That might include fostering internal military opposition, which is being tried, and forcing the leadership out of Gaza to a country willing to take them, which is also being planned.

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s demands that Israel ends the war on pain of recognition of a Palestinian state means the fighting is likely to go on longer.

Not only do these politicians encourage and empower Hamas for the immediate fight, they also validate their terrorist tactics. Unfortunately the leaders of Britain, France and Germany are not breaking new ground in their miscalculations. For decades, in the face of violence against Israel, the first resort of the professional peace processors, politicians, diplomats and UN officials has been to appease the aggressors and attack and vilify Israel, demanding concessions while never demanding anything of their enemies. At the same time they have perverted international law to paint Israel as the oppressors and those who oppose them as the victims. That has led to Hamas intensifying and developing their human shield tactics knowing Israel will be branded baby-killers.

That is also why Hamas, in cahoots with the UN, have weaponised hunger in Gaza leading to a successful propaganda campaign falsely accusing Israel of yet more war crimes. This, often disgracefully utilising photographs of young children suffering from unrelated genetic medical conditions to falsely show starvation, is among the most powerful levers applied to push Keir Starmer into his recent actions against Israel. After visiting Gaza, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff confirmed yesterday that “There is hardship and shortage, but no starvation”.

The shameful truth is that Starmer, Macron and Carney do have sufficient insight into the same reality as Witkoff, but lack the moral courage to stand up against the hurricane of lies about starvation, unlawful killing and the other trumped up charges against Israel. In each case their priority is to appease the anti-Israel mobs among their own electorates. Their eyes are not on aiding an ally under pressure or the dire consequences at home of encouraging jihadism abroad, but on the ballot boxes.

Seth Mandel: When the Narrative Collapses

Last week’s Mideast discourse was dominated by revelations of falsified accusations of war crimes against Israel, this time regarding the lie that the Jewish state is intentionally starving Gazan children to death. Since then we’ve learned more about the photographic hoax at the center of the controversy—and specifically how this new information demolishes the feeble justifications so many of Israel’s critics put forth.

As is now known, a wide array of media outlets used a picture of a boy suffering from cerebral palsy as an example of a child “born healthy” and being starved by Israel. Many of those defending the use of the photo did so based on the premise that even if the media knew it painted a false picture, publishing the image was still a defensible act because the child is suffering from even more than malnutrition, therefore the malnutrition part makes the photo true enough.

But it doesn’t, of course. And it turns out that New York Times editors tried desperately to avoid using a photo of a child with preexisting conditions precisely because they understood it to be unethical. Semafor relates some of the behind-the-scenes discussions at the Times:

“Last Thursday at 3 pm, the Times was preparing to run images of Youssef Matar, a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy who was suffering from lack of nourishment, alongside its July 24 story that cited doctors in Gaza finding ‘an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying — from starvation.’

“But the Times’ topmost editors wanted to err on the side of caution. After viewing the gutting photo, according to communications viewed by Semafor, they worried that it might inadvertently call into question the paper’s reporting, which said that many of the children suffering from hunger did not have preexisting health issues.”

According to Semafor, the Times‘ managing editor Marc Lacey asked why they would use a misleading picture “when there is presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?” Executive editor Joe Kahn, per internal communications seen by Semafor, put it simply: “The story isn’t framed around people with special needs and the lead art really should not do that, either.”

Absolutely correct, as anyone who has worked in news reporting would know.

Yesterday I wrote about an article in Educational Philosophy and Theory in which a group of academics presented different essays that all agreed on the same thing: Israel is fundamentally evil, and the war in Gaza is the most important moral issue of our time. There was no dissent, no uncertainty, and no acknowledgment of complexity—just a chorus of moral condemnation dressed up as diversity of perspective.

What I didn’t fully articulate is how these essays reflect a deeper crisis in education: the replacement of critical thinking with ideological performance. These supposed educators are not reasoning. They are not testing ideas. They are adopting a narrative and policing allegiance to it. And they are justifying this as morally urgent.

In short, they are doing exactly what educators should not do.

This isn't just happening in elite academic journals. It’s becoming the norm in public education as well. In the United States, what is taught in red-state schools is increasingly different from what is taught in blue-state schools. In many Western school systems—especially in the U.S. and Europe—decolonial theory, Marxist frameworks, and identity-based politics are presented not as topics for debate but as moral baselines.

The loss of factual accuracy is not the biggest problem. It is that the students are not learning to think for themselves. They are being force-fed simplistic, and often wrong, ideas as moral.

What passes for debate today is often just factional disagreement within a shared ideological frame. The EPAT essays, for instance, were not debating whether Israel might be justified in defending itself, but whether Israel’s supposed crimes reach the level of genocide or not. That is not debate. That’s like arguing whether a man abused his wife emotionally or physically—without asking whether he did it at all, or whether she might have attacked him first.

We need a better framework. And that’s where the AskHillel model of ethical reasoning comes in.

AskHillel offers a structured, secularized ethical system built on three tiers:

🔹 Level 1: Core Ethical Anchors: These are universal, non-negotiable values that frame all moral discourse:

Human Life – protection of life and well-being
Dignity – every person has inherent worth
Truth – honesty, accuracy, and intellectual integrity
Justice – fairness, both procedural and substantive
Responsibility – mutual care and accountability

🔸 Level 2: Primary Civic Duties: These are the active obligations of ethical citizenship:

Do Not Enable Harm – prevent systems that cause or conceal damage
Care for the Vulnerable – active support of those at risk
Responsible Speech – avoid dehumanizing or dishonest rhetoric
Support Family and Community – recognize embedded roles and duties
Care for the Self – health and self-respect as public goods

⚖️ Level 3: Contextual Amplifiers: These shape tone, restraint, and wisdom in difficult situations:

Benefit of the Doubt – generosity in interpreting others
Beyond the Rule – ethical flexibility beyond minimal compliance
Moral Modesty – humility and acknowledgment of uncertainty
Gratitude – awareness of moral debts and context
Learning as Duty – curiosity and intellectual growth as ethical imperatives

This approach changes everything.

Rather than fighting over outcomes or partisan identities, classroom debate would focus on what values are in play, and how they were applied. Did each side uphold its stated values? Did they abandon one to serve another? Was that justified?

Students can learn to trace hidden values, not just judge surface opinions. For example:

In studying slavery and segregation, don’t just say the South was wrong. Ask: What values did the South claim to uphold—order, law, culture—and how do those values compare to justice and dignity?
In studying protest movements: When does loyalty to community outweigh personal conscience, and when must that loyalty be broken?
In studying global conflicts: What is the line between national defense and collective punishment? What does “truth” mean when both sides claim it?

Students naturally gravitate toward the better moral path when given the chance to think in value terms - but they also gain respect for the structure of opposing arguments. And nearly every historical conflict is a conflict of values.

Even the worst regimes in history cloaked themselves in values:

Nazi Germany justified itself with appeals to national pride and racial health.
The Soviet Union claimed to uphold worker dignity and economic fairness.

Instead of dismissing them as irrational evil, we should help students analyze how seemingly noble values, when unmoored from other ethical anchors, can be twisted into justifications for atrocity.

This isn’t just about history. Students deal with value conflicts every day:

Do I go home for dinner as my parents asked, or keep playing with my friends?
Should I defend a friend with unpopular views, or distance myself to avoid social blowback?

When students learn that every decision is a balance of values, they develop ethical literacy - a lifelong skill more powerful than any ideology. They also learn to make better decisions and advocate for themselves more clearly.

AskHillel also allows for cultural and moral pluralism. Different communities may prioritize different values. That’s fine, as long as none of those values violate core ethical anchors like dignity and life.

Students can be taught to respect others’ frameworks without losing confidence in their own. This opens the door to real dialogue—not just tolerance, but moral conversation.

Some classical education theorists have proposed cultivating individual virtues like courage or wisdom. But AskHillel is different.

Virtue education centers on personal growth. AskHillel centers on relational obligation - how you affect and answer to others: your family, your community, your country, and the world.

It doesn’t just ask, What kind of person are you becoming? It asks, Whom do you owe? What must you uphold?

This is a better moral foundation for education—because it teaches responsibility before pride, clarity before ideology, and accountability before performance.

Without a coherent moral framework, students are left vulnerable - to propaganda, peer pressure, and moral confusion. They are told what to believe without being shown how to reason. They are punished for dissent without being taught how to argue.

AskHillel offers a solution: a values-based, relational responsibility system that scales from personal life to global politics. It is the foundation of an education system that builds thinkers, not followers—and moral adults, not ideological weapons.

We need this in classrooms now.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

EoZ interviewed by A Philosophical Jew (video)

I had a fun discussion with A Philosophical Jew about my AskHillel Jewish ethics AI project on his podcast. Check it out!

Let's call anti-Zionism what it really is: political antisemitism

We have been looking at anti-Zionism the wrong way. Too many have tacitly accepted the idea that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are separate ideas, perhaps related, but anti-Zionism is a new concept that doesn't fit with traditional antisemitism and therefore should not be judged the same way.

In fact, however, anti-Zionism is not a new concept. It is simply political antisemitism, and it has been around since at least the 19th century.

Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote an essay about how the word "antisemitism" is being misapplied to valid political expression. He wrote it using the firebombing of the peaceful and mostly elderly Jewish demonstrators in Boulder as a backdrop:

The statements coming from Boulder’s institutions and leaders, from news editors and politicians I have known for years, keep repeating the word “antisemitism” to explain why someone would attack peaceful Jewish demonstrators. But it is a word that draws a line, beyond which lies the unspeakable.

This word has morphed from naming the persecution of a diasporic civilization into justifying the policies of a nation-state backed by the most powerful military in the world; from a cry against genocide into a way to excuse it. The U.S. government, under both major political parties, has used “antisemitism” to carry out assaults on human and constitutional rights—on political protest, on academic freedom, and on immigrants and asylum seekers.

The change that has come over the word is itself unspeakable. One must pretend that the word has not changed or risk accusations of antisemitism. But changed it has. As someone who lost Jewish relatives in the Holocaust, I now fear the exploitation of “antisemitism” to silence and deport political opponents more than I fear actual antisemites.

His support for this thesis actually undermines it:

Locally, the explanation of antisemitism doesn’t compute. When I hear it, I think of a retired Jewish professor in Boulder whom I last saw from a distance, with a sign calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The professor’s ceasefire group was not attacked, although it also demonstrates regularly in downtown Boulder. Both groups include Jews. Why was one group and not the other a target? “Antisemitism” makes this question unspeakable.

His argument then goes to the unspeakable itself - tacitly justifying attacking Zionist Jews:

It is unspeakable that terrorism might have a cause—that however categorically wrong terrorism is, the chances of it rise when our government enables atrocities elsewhere. It is unspeakable that the eventual attacker may have been stewing in helplessness and rage, watching day after day the scenes of families and homes annihilated in Gaza, while hearing again and again in this country that the real problem is “antisemitism.” Every day the flows of media and the speeches of politicians ignore simple evidence.

This is immorality disguised as a philosophical and semantic argument.

The question isn't why Jews who demonstrate for hostages are attacked and those who demonstrate for Gaza are not. The question is why Zionist demonstrations are subject to violence while very few other kinds of political demonstrations would be.

The reason has everything to do with the attackers and not with the attacked. It is perverted to look at a terrorist attack through any other lens. And notice that while he is willing to understand the motivations of terrorists, he shows no such understanding of Israel's ethical imperative to target and destroy Hamas.

Schneider - who mentions that he lost Jewish relatives in the Holocaust - wants to distinguish between the anti-Zionism that he believes motivated the attacker in Boulder and antisemitism, which he carefully redefines as "the persecution of a diasporic civilization" rather than, you know, Jews.

There are two levels of deception by definition here. One is how Schneider redefines antisemitism as "the persecution of a diasporic civilization" rather than the more straightforward "persecution of Jews." He wants to exclude the half of the world's Jews in his definition - the ones who live in the Jewish state.

The other is to define anti-Zionism as justified criticism of Israel. But it isn't. It denies the very concept of national self determination for a group that has been defined as a nation even in diaspora, by Jews, by non-Jews and by the antisemites themselves. It is the only anti-nationalism that justifies attacking the citizens of the nation itself.

There is no problem with trying to create a distinction between traditional antisemitism and politics. But what Schneider and other anti-Zionists do not want to admit is that anti-Zionism is simply political antisemitism.

This puts anti-Zionism in its proper historical context. It isn't a new form of antisemitism at all. Its classic formulation is in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Then as now, Jews are cast as outsiders who support immoral aims and support an ideology of Jewish domination and impunity. Their hidden allegiance is to a group of powerful Jewish political and financial leaders. Today's version is that these Zionist Jews are part of a conspiracy to control Western foreign policy and to dominate the non-Jews - both in the Middle East and in the West. The idea of Jews' disloyalty and their unbridled political greed is a direct line that connects the hate of the past to the hate of the present. Israel represents the Elders of Zion, a tiny group of puppet-masters, and hate for Zionist Jews is an extension of the age-old conspiracy theory that Jews secretly want to control the world.

And this is why political violence against Jews is "understandable" - it is only understandable when you share the premises that underlie the Protocols.

That explains his wonder at why Jews at a pro-hostage demonstration might be attacked while Jews at a pro-Hamas demonstration are safe. It is because anti-Zionism is a subset of antisemitism, and just as no one wonders at anyone attacking Jews, no one is confused by attacking proud Jews who support the Jewish state. The psychology behind the hate of Israel and the hate of Jews is identical, but there is no similar general conspiracy-minded hate of even Hamas.

The question isn't whether a non-citizen should be deported for political opinions. The question is whether those opinions are really just window dressing for hate. And when people style themselves as anti-Zionist that indicates that they are the kind of people who applaud violence against Jews who don't agree with their politics - and as such, deporting them is as reasonable as deporting a German neo-Nazi who is in the US on a green card. And mentioning that there are Jews who agree with them is as perverted as the neo-Nazi saying that some of his best friends are Jewish antisemites.

This characterization of anti-Zionism as political antisemitism clears up the confusion people have over free speech and opposition to Israeli policies. When the attackers call themselves anti-Zionist, and not just critics of Israeli policy, that is the line that they draw themselves to distinguish between valid political expression and rebranding the world's oldest hate.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The International Sociological Association recently suspended its Israel chapter - because it refused to explicitly condemn Israel's actions in Gaza.

ISA Executive Committee Decision on the Israeli Sociological Society
The ISA reiterates its declaration that, as part of its public stance against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, it has no institutional relationships with Israeli public institutions.
We regret that the Israeli Sociological Society has not taken a clear position condemning the dramatic situation in Gaza. In a decision that reflects the extraordinary gravity of the current situation, the Executive Committee has decided to suspend the collective membership of the Israeli Sociological Society (ISS).
Adopted on June 29, 2025.

This is most interesting, because this violates its own Code of Ethics and its own Statutes.

Its Code of Ethics says:

1. Sociology as a field of scientific study and practice
As scientists, sociologists are expected to cooperate locally and transnationally on the basis of scientific correctness alone, without discrimination on the basis of scientifically irrelevant factors such as age, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, language, religion or political affiliation.

Group work, cooperation and mutual exchanges among sociologists are necessary for sociology to achieve its ends. Sociologists are expected to take part in discussions on their own work, as well as on the work of other sociologists.
Sociologists should be aware of the fact that their assumptions may have an impact upon society. Hence their duty is, on the one hand, to keep an unbiased attitude as far as possible, while, on the other hand, to acknowledge the tentative and relative character of the results of their research and not to conceal their own ideological position(s). No sociological assumption should be presented as indisputable truth.
Sociologists should act with a view to mantaining[sic] the image and the integrity of their own discipline; this does not imply that they should abandon a critical approach toward its fundamental assumptions, its methods and its achievements.
The principles of openness, criticism and respect for all scientific perspectives should be followed by sociologists in their teaching and professional practices.

Israelis excepted.

Moreover, their Statutes, ratified in 1949 and still in force, say explicitly:

Article One: Purposes
The International Sociological Association (ISA) is a non-profit association for scientific purposes. Its function is to represent sociologists everywhere, regardless of their school of thought, scientific approaches or ideological opinion.

That is a direct contradiction to their rationale for suspending the Israeli branch.

But, hey, bylaws and statutes and codes of ethics are only optional when dealing with punishing Israel, right?

There is nothing in the Statutes that give a procedure for suspending a group member. They have had group members from Syria, China, Pakistan, Iran and Venezuela. (They did suspend Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and the reasons given were much different - condemning the war, not the Russian sociologists whom they praised - but it still did not fit in with the Code of Ethics and Statutes.)

UPDATE: The ISA's own profile on X says:

International Sociological Association represents sociologists everywhere, regardless of their school of thought, scientific approaches or ideological opinion.

I wanted to tweet this to them, but they have left the platform in favor of Bluesky - for ethical reasons, of course.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/03 Links: The war of moral inversion being waged through the western mind; Hamas: Palestinian state recognition ‘fruits of Oct. 7’; Archaeologists decipher ravaged scenes in Negev after Oct. 7

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The war of moral inversion being waged through the western mind

If the west really wants to stop the war it would start putting pressure on the aggressor, Hamas, by supporting its victim, Israel, in its demand that Hamas surrenders.

If the west really wants to stop the war it should end its utterly perverse indulgence of Qatar as an honest broker in this conflict, an attitude that has made all ceasefire negotiations a lethal farce that has significantly contributed to the hostages’ continued incarceration and the length of this war. It should instead call out Qatar as a sponsor and protector of Hamas and as a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist front. It should require the issue of arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders living lives of luxury in Doha. And it should demand that Qatar force Hamas to release all the hostages immediately on pain of losing its US airbase and all influence in the west.

If the west really wants to stop the war, it should acknowledge the malignant role of the Hamas-loving, Israel-demonising UN which the US should defund and kick out of New York City as an affront to civilised values.

But of course, the west doesn’t want to stop the war. It wants to stop Israel. And it is now being consumed by Jew-hatred on a scale larger than anything seen since the Holocaust.

We are witnessing a confluence of Nazi-Islamist ideology with a Soviet-style inversion of reality that has taken over huge swathes of the west that are no longer able to think at all. The total repudiation of reason that’s created this terrifying, looking-glass world has resulted from decades of cultural attrition waged by elites determined to destroy western identity and values.

With the unspeakable rebranding of atrocities as conscience in the west, we are living through a war of moral inversion being waged not through bombs or missiles but through the minds of millions.

When pictures of the Belsen death camp were published after the end of the Second World War, people in the west were deeply shocked by the revelation of the Nazis’ psychopathic barbarism. Today, as it casts scarcely a glance at the pictures of the Israeli hostages that echo those shattering images of 70 years ago, the west is empowering the Nazis’ heirs.

Andrew Fox: This Is What Civilisational Decay Looks Like

We have forsaken the fundamental contract of citizenship—the notion that governments are responsible for protecting borders, maintaining order, and upholding shared values. Instead, we have offered rainbow flags, decolonisation seminars, and activist judges.

Then came social media, which has been the accelerant on the bonfire. The enemy no longer needed to smuggle in agents or spread propaganda by leaflet: now all they need is a smartphone and a network. They weaponised our freedoms against us, knowing we would defend their right to do so even as they used those rights to destroy us.

TikTok has become the frontline of information warfare. Instagram reels have replaced sermons. Hamas and its proxies now trend more easily than democratic leaders. Western teenagers, raised on cultural self-loathing and algorithmic radicalization, march in lockstep with genocidal theocrats and believe they are fighting for justice.

The Mask Falls
Then came Gaza. The mask was torn away. Civilizational rift revealed. Overnight, Western streets flooded with hatred. Synagogues attacked. Jewish citizens were threatened and assaulted. Political leaders hesitated. Media outlets repeated propaganda. Universities turned into centres of open antisemitism. Much of the public just shrugged, numb from decades of ideological confusion.

The Gaza war did not cause this. It exposed it. It was the decisive blow that drove the spike into the Western heart.

We are not merely witnessing protest. We are watching the product of years of infiltration and decay: in demography, in economics, in politics, in media, in education, in culture. This is what a society looks like when it can no longer distinguish friend from foe, right from wrong, civilisation from barbarism. Is it too late? Possibly.

The boiling point has been reached. The water is scalding. The frog is done for. Reversing this will take more than a change of government. It will require cultural rebirth. Moral courage. Strategic clarity. A willingness to endure pain to rebuild what we have lost.

The question is: do we still have the will, or has the long sabotage already done its work?

Niall Ferguson: Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is a luxury belief— and utterly divorced from reality when there’s a real one happening in Ukraine

This is what makes French, British and Canadian talk of recognising a Palestinian state such a perfect example of a luxury belief. For nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future.

Thirty years ago, under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the beginnings of Palestinian self-government — “a separate Palestinian entity short of a state”, in the words of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of his successors, Ehud Barak, went even further at Camp David in 2000. But then PLO leader Yasser Arafat walked away from the table.

Have the Palestinians strengthened the case for statehood in the subsequent years? No. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is an oxymoron; Palestinians despise it, and it has no authority. Hamas continues to enjoy significant support in both Gaza and (some polls suggest even more) the West Bank. True, satisfaction with Hamas in Gaza was down from 64 per cent a year ago to 43 per cent in May, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, but that was still higher than satisfaction with their rivals Fatah or the PA.

Asked if they supported or opposed the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, 64 per cent of Gazans said they were opposed. Yet the true nature of Hamas was laid bare on October 7, 2023, which should be regarded — and is regarded by most Israelis I know — as an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it. Nine out of ten Palestinians simply deny the October 7 atrocities took place.

A defining feature of with luxuries is that they are expensive. The same is true of luxury beliefs. The belief that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, like the belief that a Palestinian state can be wished into existence by western leaders, is a Hermès handbag of an idea. It is on a par with the belief that peace can somehow be brokered between Ukraine and Russia without the application of meaningful economic and military pressure on Moscow, an idea that is more of a Patek Philippe watch.

Expend energy on such luxury beliefs and you will not notice the help you are giving the axis of authoritarians to bring about the defeat of the West. Nor will you notice the help they are giving you — through the social media channels they know so well how to manipulate — to be the useful idiot you are.

The academic journal Educational Philosophy and Theory recently published a "Collective Writing" set of mini-essays entitled, "Gaza - We Need to Talk!"

The practice of collective writing is meant to offer multiple perspectives on a topic. Unlike research papers, it does not require peer review, only editorial acceptance.

In this case, the "multiple perspectives" all agree that it is philosophically moral for educators to focus on Gaza and demonize Israel, even when there are plenty of other conflicts in the world that students would not ever know about.

The reasons given vary, but all the mini-essays have one thing in common: the absolute knowledge that Israel is evil. The essays don't say this directly, but there is not one perspective that considers that this war is just.

Instead of truly showing different opinions, these essays all argue (with varying affective tones) that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, Zionism is a racist colonial regime, and Gaza is a symbol of civilizational collapse.

We get a chorus: Israel as genocidal aggressor, Palestinians as sacred victims, Gaza as the new Auschwitz. And if you think I’m exaggerating, read Zalloua, Yancy, Robins, or Maldonado-Torres—pieces that trade in Holocaust inversion, dehumanization charges, and sweeping declarations of collective guilt. (Plus a trace of "As-A-Jew" to justify Holocaust inversion.) Every structural check on academic inquiry - comparative reasoning, counterposition, standard of evidence - has been abandoned. This isn’t discourse. It’s declaration. It’s epistemic foreclosure, weaponized through academic format.

The result is a seamless moral consensus masquerading as dialogue.

No essay defends Israel's right to self-defense.
No one explores Hamas’s ideology or war crimes.
No one challenges the use of the word "genocide."
No one considers the pedagogical risks of reducing complex conflicts to moral binaries.
No one notices the basic fact that Hamas' entire military strategy is to maximize civilian casualties while Israel's is to minimize them

Instead, we get Holocaust inversions, totalizing anti-Zionist frameworks, and the idea that any opposing view is not just wrong - but complicit in violence. The collection creates the illusion of multifaceted discourse, but it is in fact ideologically uniform.

This entire issue echoes a cartoon I drew years ago, titled “You Gotta Start Somewhere”. I satirize exactly this: the endless excuses made to justify singling out Israel, while ignoring others who are far worse by every measurable standard.

The language of moral urgency becomes a smokescreen for ideological obsession. And that’s exactly what’s been laundered through this academic journal.

There is one gentle counter-position that doesn’t challenge the overall framing of Israel as aggressor or Gaza as pure victim. He only critiques the form - the lack of inter-author dialogue, missed educational opportunity, and the unsubstantiated Holocaust analogy. But there is nothing to challenge the premise.

And the premise is not just wrong but antisemitic. It doesn't matter how many "scholars" say Israel is guilty of genocide - when all of them admit that they had to change the definition of genocide to shoehorn Israel's actions into that concept, they are not being honest when they use the term and they know it.

Bias is nothing new, but here it is being laundered into how to transmit hate to students. And that is utterly immoral. This issue replaces inquiry with activism, and turns education into ideology transmission.

Propaganda is laundered here through academic legitimacy. Abandon review standards for “open format, ” curate voices from a single ideological spectrum, present variation in tone or emphasis as “diverse perspectives," exclude a major worldview entirely - but don’t say that part out loud.

That’s not educational philosophy. It's hate disguised as educational philosophy. And it is far worse when it is being presented as a sober justification for how to teach students themselves to be biased and unable to think objectively about Israel.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)