Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

: "Crown Heights Bites Back": How "anti-Zionist" socialism is being used to justify pogroms against Jews in the US

In March, a new group called "Crown Heights Bites Back" started, ostensibly to provide free meals to those in need but with a socialist, political edge. CHBB started as a charity, but from the beginning the rhetoric signaled an enemy.

We are Crown Heights Bites Back!

We are organizing in our neighborhood to re-distribute wealth and resources to the community no matter what stands in the way.

It is a strange name for a community social organization. Who, exactly, are they "biting back" against?

The answer: the Jews.

Several weeks later, Crown Heights Fights Back revealed its real purpose: to use socialism as a means to make antisemitism mainstream:

‼️ COMMUNITY ALERT 🚨
CHABAD LUBAVITCH: ZIONIST NAZIS IN CROWN HEIGHTS

Last night, several CHBB community members were brutalized and attacked by a large crowd assembled at 770 Eastern Parkway to welcome israeli minister of national security and Architect of Genocide itamar ben-gvir. We are outraged and calling on all community members to organize in response to this threat. Please DM with any other footage or witness statements as we prepare to respond. Full statement is on the way.

MAKE ZIONISTS AFRAID AGAIN
FUCK CHABAD
FUCK THE PIGS AND FUCK SHOMRIM
LONG LIVE BLACK AND BROWN CROWN HEIGHTS

This is direct incitement and threats against Jews, specifically Chabad whose headquarters is in Crown Heights.

But they are using a well-tread socialist playbook: Take antisemitic sentiment that is based on racial hate, or conflicts with Jews based on competing for resources, and recast them as victims an ideological battle between the righteous socialists and the evil Jews.

They did it with Palestinians and Islamists who had nearly zero interest in socialism and made them poster children for justifying their well-known and long-standing antisemitism.

And they are doing it with the Black community in Crown Heights, which has had long-standing animosity against Jews, perceiving them as being protected by the police more or having too much political power.

we can see this from what they wrote in April:

Black and brown Crown Heights is sick and tired of decades of white / Jewish supremacist landlords, pigs, Shomrim, racist ambulance, the killings, the evictions, being treated as an enemy in our own neighborhoods, our elders being assaulted by Chabad, and having to fight day in and day out to live and work in the areas we grew up.

It’s not antisemitic to oppose gentrification and zionist development of our communities which is an active apartheid zone.

END APARTHEID IN CROWN HEIGHTS
RISE UP AGAINST CHABAD
FUCK THE PIGS AND SHOMRIM

All while pretending to be a grassroots, community based organization that only wants to give aid to those in need.

Just like Hamas.

And just like Hamas, they twin their blatant antisemitic rhetoric with the insistence that they are not antisemitic:

Antisemitism isn't a bug - it is a recruiting platform for socialists:

CHBB has now made its desire to foment a race war in Crown Heights explicit, by recasting the deadly 1991 Crown Heights pogrom as a means to achieve "justice" for Gavin Cato, the seven year old who was tragically hit by a car in a motorcade for the Lubavitcher Rebbe:

The only murder in 1992 in Crown Heights was the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a rabbinical student killed while City Hall told the police to keep out and let the Jews get attacked.

This is happening tonight.

What groups like Crown Heights Bites Back are building is not an intersectionality of justice but an intersectionality of hate. They don’t recruit on the basis of a positive vision for society. They start with grievances - against landlords, against police, against racism, against pollution - and then wire those angers together into a single circuit. Every complaint becomes a tributary feeding the same current of resentment, with Jews cast as the ultimate oppressor. It is a coalition stitched not by hope or solidarity, but by hostility, where hate against one target is leveraged into hate against all.

The "anti-racists" are trying to start a new race riot against Jews - and to justify murdering them.

They are using socialist language to make killing Jews kosher.

And New York is about to get a socialist mayor who will never condemn this attempt by his allies to set the stage for the next pogrom.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Today's socialism is no different from the its pro-violence, antisemitic forbears

As Izabella Tabarovsky has shown in her indispensable essays, much of today’s ‘anti-Zionist’ discourse on the Left is not new at all but recycled Soviet propaganda.

I just saw published a 1982 letter from two Jewish Leninist-Marxists, both imprisoned as dissidents under King Hassan II in Morocco. Their letter to Yasir Arafat was intended to show that not all Jews are Zionist and to bind the Palestinian cause into a universal anti-imperialist struggle. It shows a bridge between the traditional Soviet antisemitism and today's "anti-Zionist" rhetoric.

There is nothing in this letter that today's celebrated members of the Democratic Socialists of America would disagree with. The only difference is the evolution of the language.

Marxism-Leninism → Intersectionality / Decolonization

Fascist-Zionist → Apartheid / Genocidal Settler-Colonialism

Proletarian armed struggle → Anticolonial resistance

The letter shows how we got from there to here.

From Abraham Serfaty and Sion Assidon
To Yasser Arafat

Dear brother, dear comrades, warm greetings to you.

At the very moment when the soldiers of Zionist barbarism occupy southern Lebanon, relying on the active support of Western imperialism and on the silence and complicity of Arab reactionary forces...

At the very moment when they are committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, we, the undersigned, raise our cry of denunciation. We hope that it will reach you, even inside the lines of siege, to condemn the criminal operations carried out by Begin and his gang.

Once again, history records further proof of the true nature of Zionism: fascist Zionism – a machine for sowing death and destruction. Written now in the flesh and blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese – men and women, children and old people – martyred under the bombs.

Once again, history confirms to the entire world the reality of racist Zionism, which seeks to annihilate the Palestinian people entirely, just as Nazism attempted its own “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” through genocide. Thus, the masses of Jews lured into emigrating to Zionist Palestine have become the instruments of a new Nazism.

From Deir Yassin in 1948, to today in southern Lebanon, passing through Kafr Qasim and the occupied territories – and from Guernica in the Basque country, to Oradour-sur-Glane in France under Nazi occupation, to Santiago, Chile in 1973, and My Lai in Vietnam – it is the same logic, the same method, the same fascist-imperialist barbarism.

At the very moment when imperialism and Zionism are trying to extinguish the flame lit by the Palestinian revolution, we reaffirm through you our absolute support for the heroic Palestinian and Lebanese fighters – bearers of the hope of a brighter future for the Arab peoples, and the only hope for a real and just peace for humanity in this region of the world.

At the very moment when the noble aim of the Palestinian revolution seems to recede, like a shining jewel deep in the dark night of barbarism – that is precisely the moment when the clarity and grandeur of this aim shines forth most brilliantly.

Do not the most recent Zionist crimes prove that there can be no coexistence between Zionism and the Arab nation? The historical and civilizational struggle between the Arab nation – with Palestine at its heart – and the Zionist entity, which is nothing but an extension of imperialism in its aggression against the Arab peoples in general and a machine aimed specifically at eliminating the Palestinian people, will inevitably lead to the destruction of the Zionist entity. Then a new stage will open in the history of the Middle East – one of the cradles of human civilization since ancient times.

However long and hard the road, the coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians inside a democratic Palestine – integrated in a unified Palestinian people – will be achieved on the ruins of the Zionist entity.

The Palestinian revolution carries a double hope: it will not only liberate the Arab nation from the Zionist monster, but it will also liberate the Jews of Palestine themselves from this suicidal, murderous illusion.

The Palestinian people has risen and cannot die!
And so – revolution until victory!

June 19, 1982

Source: al-Balagh al-Maghribi, July 29, 1982

Notice the parallels between this letter and current mainstream socialist political rhetoric in the West:

* Zionism is framed as equivalent to Nazism and fascism - not a political movement but a crime against humanity.

* Terrorism and violence - including Hamas' attack on October 7 - are framed as heroic revolutionary struggle.

* Israel is considered the obstacle to Arab-Jewish coexistence, and Arab antisemitism simply doesn't exist. Israel's violent destruction is a precondition for "peace."

* The antisemitic implication that "Zionist" Jews are linked as enemies to every progressive/ "anti-imperialist" cause, no matter how distant or tenuous the connection is.

* Anti-Zionist Jews are used as proof that the rabid hatred of the Jewish people, nation and religion are not antisemitic.

* "Palestine"/Gaza are considered universal progressive themes, tied to every other socialist initiative even though most Palestinians and terrorism are based on Islamist ideals, not progressive ideas.

* Arabs who are silent about Israel's fight against terror are considered traitors and cowardly accomplices.

Gaza was a catalyst to apply old Marxist antisemitic memes to today, dressed up as "wokeness" and faux concern over Palestinians as hundreds of thousands of other Arabs and Muslims are dying in sub-Saharan Africa to their silence. But I have never seen any of today's socialists condemn the extreme antisemitism of Stalin nor the support for violent terrorism of the left-wing Palestinians and Marxist Arabs like Serfaty and Assidon.

Until today’s socialists confront their movement’s Soviet inheritance- its antisemitism, its terror apologetics - how can their rhetoric on Israel be taken as anything but an echo of that poisoned past?

On Friday, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem gave a speech where he implicitly threatened civil war in Lebanon if the Lebanese Army attempts to disarm Hezbollah.

He said, “We live in dignity together, and we build its sovereignty together—or Lebanon will have no life if you stand on the other side and try to confront us and eliminate us.”

In the past, Hezbollah's threats were taken very seriously - so much so that it pretty much had free reign over Lebanon as everyone was too frightened of its power.

This time, pretty much the entire Lebanese government condemned Qassem.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam condemned Qassem’s remarks as an “implicit threat of civil war” and called them “totally unacceptable."

Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces Party: strongly labeled Qassem’s speech a “direct threat to the Lebanese government, the parliamentary majority that granted it confidence, and all constitutional institutions, foremost among them the Presidency of the Republic and the Prime Ministership.” He called the remarks “unacceptable on all levels.”

Elie Mahfoud, leader of the Change Movement, criticized Qassem’s “provocative remarks” and urged the Lebanese judiciary to take swift action against both Qassem and Hezbollah, which he described as a military organization operating outside local and international laws.

The Lebanese Army is supposed to submit a plan on how to disarm Hezbollah by the end of August.

A recent JCPA publication says that Israel did a better job than had been reported in defeating Hezbollah:

More than 70 percent of Hizbullah’s missile arsenal and military infrastructure (including weapons depots, military industry, fortified positions, and tunnels) were destroyed. Of the 29 Shiite-majority villages along the border with Israel that served Hizbullah as fortified front-line positions, 22 were razed, displacing more than 100,000 residents who were forced to flee and seek refuge far from the battlefield.

However, Israel’s heaviest blow came with the targeting of Hizbullah’s leadership. Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, his designated successor, most of Hizbullah’s senior commanders, and thousands of fighters were killed. More than 5,000 combatants died, with thousands more injured.

I had not heard the 70% figure before. I thought that Hezbollah still had most of its estimated 200,000 rockets and missiles.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/18 Links Pt2: Hostage protests: Fighting each other is what Hamas wants; State Department cancels more than 6K student visas; Sally Rooney’s luxury loathing for Israel

From Ian:

Jpost Editorial: Hostage protests: Fighting each other is what Hamas wants

There is no question that an entire nation wants its children to come home, only the method. But what cannot happen is turning one another into the enemy, is allowing disagreements – deep and essential ones – to delegitimize us in one another’s eyes. That is precisely where the line lies.

Zvika Mor, the father of hostage Eitan Mor, said on Sunday morning, in a plea to his fellow hostage families, “My brothers and sisters, I make this plea from the bottom of my heart. You called to shut down the country... You did not miss the opportunity to ensure that the public is repulsed by us, the hostage families.”

He called for the strike to be canceled. “It cannot be that reservist soldiers who are on their way down to the Gaza Strip – to fight Hamas and bring our hostages home – can’t get to their bases because highways are blocked. This cannot be.”

Mor is a member of the Tikva Forum, a smaller representation of hostage families compared to the larger Hostages and Missing Families Forum. These two represent the true standard to which public dialogue is supposed to be; they disagree, but they respect and hold space for one another.

The act of protesting is one of the most sacred and vital tools in the hands of citizens in a democratic state to express their sentiments, wishes, and opinions. It cannot be stifled or curtailed, especially in an era where many feel and fear that democratic institutions in Israel are under attack.

But it is important to draw a distinction between the cause – freeing all of the hostages and bringing the security situation to a state of calm – and the method. Not everybody agrees with the method, and there is validity to both sides.

The heartfelt nature of a nationwide shutdown cannot be stated enough, especially after nearly two years of war. People dropped everything and followed their hearts and their consciousnesses out to the streets to join in pain and demand action. This has merit, and woe to Israel the day that citizens don’t care for their brethren.

Dialogue, though – healthy, respectful dialogue – cannot get lost in the shuffle.

The Black Book

Leningrad, February 1976. The broad boulevards of the city, founded by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window to Europe,” lay frozen under the deep frost of a typical Soviet winter: gray, unmoving, sealed in silence. We were a Jewish family of four—my father, Gennady; my mother, Mila; my sister, Elena; and me—living in a city then called Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) at a time when silence was often the only defense. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party, presided over a vast and crumbling empire. The world would later call it “the period of stagnation”—a term far too mild for those living beneath its weight. The economy was paralyzed, the politics rigid, but repression moved with quiet efficiency. Political dissidents, Zionist activists, Prisoners of Zion, and Jews in general were treated as suspect—perpetual outsiders in a state obsessed with control.

We lived under constant watch, not for any action or offense, but simply for being a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. And yet the strength we drew from one another, and the trust of a few close friends, gave us just enough oxygen to endure. Snow-covered streets and frozen canals reflected a city choked in frost—bitterly cold, silent, and subdued. The average temperature hovered around 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind, the damp, and the endless cloud cover made it feel far colder.

That winter, our family received an official invitation to immigrate to the State of Israel. The invitation had come from my mother’s uncle, Rabbi Ben-Zion Brook, head of the Novardok Yeshiva in Jerusalem. It was a legitimate request for family reunification—one of the very few justifications the Soviet regime would accept for emigration. After all, why else would anyone want to leave the so-called paradise of the Soviet Union, a country that spanned 12 time zones and one-sixth of the planet’s surface? To admit that Jews wanted to leave because of ideology, discrimination, or spiritual longing would be to expose the cracks in the system. “Family reunification” was a narrow but permissible loophole.

Ben-Zion had left the Belarusian town of Rogachev in 1920, when my grandfather (my mother’s father) was five years old. Decades later, they found each other again and began corresponding in Yiddish. My grandfather would read the letters aloud, his voice trembling, while my parents listened with tears in their eyes. But before long, the KGB summoned my grandfather to the infamous “Big House” on Liteiny Street and ordered him to stop all correspondence immediately.

Then, in February 1976, the visa invitation finally arrived. Not through the mail, but in person. The superintendent of our enormous Soviet apartment block—a sprawling concrete maze of modest flats—arrived at our door with the letter in hand. Standing beside him were two young men whose presence said everything: plainclothes agents. My parents, raising two young children, were filled with fear. They had spent years secretly listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. They understood what this meant. The silence was about to break.

But along with the fear came a flicker of joy: Three previous invitations had simply disappeared, swallowed by the system. Now, at last, one had arrived. My father rushed to share the news with my grandfather. In a gesture both symbolic and chilling, my grandfather handed him a samizdat copy of The Black Book, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman—a rare and dangerous volume from a small, secret library he had maintained. He believed, with quiet defiance, that his children and grandchildren needed to know the truth about the world.

Rubio’s State Department yanks more than 6K student visas due to assault, burglary, support for terrorism

The State Department has yanked more than 6,000 student visas in 2025 for overstays and law violations — including support for terrorism, Fox News Digital has learned.

The Trump administration has launched multiple initiatives aimed at cracking down on immigration and revoking visas of those attending academic institutions in the U.S.

Those who’ve participated in pro-Palestinian protests have faced heightened scrutiny, as one example, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that the administration was reviewing the visa status of those students.

The roughly 6,000 visas that were pulled were primarily due to visa overstays or encounters with the law, including assault, DUIs, burglary and support for terrorism, the State Department told Fox News Digital.

"Every single student visa revoked under the Trump Administration has happened because the individual has either broken the law or expressed support for terrorism while in the United States," a senior State Department official said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "About 4,000 visas alone have been revoked because these visitors broke the law while visiting our country, including records of assault and DUIs."

Those who had their student visas yanked due to assault — roughly 800 students — either faced arrest or charges stemming from assault, according to the State Department official.

Those whose visas were pulled due to support for terrorism — between 200 people to 300 people — engaged in behavior such as raising funds for the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist organization, the official said.

08/18 Links Pt1: 10 Questions 'Genocide in Gaza' Accusers Cannot Answer; Trump: Israeli hostages to return only when Hamas is ‘destroyed’; The Palestinian Authority's Human 'Slaughterhouse'

From Ian:

Aizenberg: 10 Questions 'Genocide in Gaza' Accusers Cannot Answer

Only days after October 7, a chorus of so-called “genocide scholars,” NGOs, and activists began hurling the charge of genocide at Israel. In reality, this accusation functions as a deliberate inversion of 10/7 itself. Hamas carried out mass killings with openly genocidal intent, yet the charge has been flipped onto Israel to whitewash those crimes and blame their victim. In the months since, the charge has only accelerated, turning into a kind of groupthink repeated through recycled slogans ("Israel is targeting healthcare"), canned storylines ("intentional starvation"), and misrepresented quote snippets ("remember Amalek"). These claims are delivered with an air of authority, but they collapse under even basic scrutiny. If Israel truly had a national policy to exterminate the Palestinian people, the evidence would be overwhelming and undeniable. The ten questions that follow cut through that haze. They cannot be answered honestly without exposing the genocide accusation as false, which is precisely why the accusers never confront them directly.

1. If extermination of the Palestinian people is Israel's goal, why hasn’t it happened?
If Israel wanted to kill 100,000 or more Gazans in a single day it easily could, for example by carpet bombing the Al-Mawasi humanitarian area. You claim Israel’s leaders are pursuing a policy of extermination, directed from the highest levels of government and the IDF, against Palestinians solely for their identity. Some point to Hamas’s claim of 60,000 deaths as proof, but that only sharpens the question: if extermination of the Palestinian people were truly the goal, why stop at tens of thousands when Israel has the capacity to kill millions in days? Why, after 22 months, has no such attack ever been carried out? Do not evade by pointing out that genocide does not require mass killings; address why a state supposedly bent on extermination of the Palestinian people has not taken the obvious steps to achieve it.

2. Why are millions of Palestinians safe under full Israeli control?
Arab-Israelis, about 2 million people, are ethnically the same people as the Palestinians in Gaza and are often called Palestinian citizens of Israel. They live under full Israeli authority, yet not a single one has been exterminated. History shows that when genocidal regimes have unimpeded access to the very population they seek to destroy, that population is in immediate and mortal danger. Can you cite a single genocide where millions of the supposed victims lived safely under the perpetrator’s rule, even serving in its government and institutions? If Israel is pursuing extermination of the Palestinian people, how do you reconcile this reality?

3. Why are Palestinians in the West Bank untouched?
Three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the same people as in Gaza. Israel could kill many thousands there in a matter of hours if extermination were truly the policy, but this has not happened in 22 months. Why would a state bent on destroying the Palestinian people leave millions unharmed while supposedly carrying out a genocide next door? If extermination of Palestinians as such were the policy, there would be no reason to differentiate by geography or governance. And do not fall back on the claim that the West Bank is different because the war is against Hamas, since your own accusation insists that the only reasonable inference from Israel’s actions in Gaza is exterminating Palestinians as such.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Palestinian Authority's Human 'Slaughterhouse'

None of these countries... [France, Canada, Australia, the UK] has demanded that the Palestinian Authority halt its human rights violations against its own people. Ending financial and administrative corruption and excluding Hamas from governance is pointless as long as the PA continues to crack down on its political rivals and impose severe restrictions on freedom of speech.

Last month, Palestinian Authority security officer Ammar Saeed Abu Thahri reportedly died while in PA custody. It remains unclear why Abu Thahri was arrested by PA security forces in the first place.

"Most of the arrests were related to freedom of expression or participation in demonstrations in solidarity with the Gaza Strip." — Palestinian human rights group Lawyers for Justice, safa.pa, July 30, 2025.

The Palestinian Authority security officers who beat political activist Nizar Banat to death in 2021 have still not been punished. Banat, an outspoken critic of the PA leadership, was beaten to death by PA security officers in Hebron.

"We have documented hundreds of cases of arrest, torture, and ill-treatment of activists and political opponents since Nizar's killing.... Those involved in most of these crimes have not been held accountable." — Lawyers for Justice, June 24, 2025.

If France, Australia, the UK and Canada really cared about the Palestinians, they should be demanding that the PA respect public freedoms and stop its crackdown on political and human rights activists.

The last thing the Middle East needs is another Arab dictatorship run by corrupt leaders whose main goal is to batter their own people while siphoning off still more European and international aid money into their own bank accounts.

Babylon Bee: Problems In Middle East Blamed On The 0.3% Of It That Isn’t An Islamic Dictatorship

As experts and diplomats continue to search for the solution to the generations-long conflict in the region, one surprising study has concluded that problems in the Middle East should definitely be blamed on the 0.3% of it that isn't an Islamic dictatorship.

Though opinions on the conflict have been divided over the decades, a consensus was reached that all of the problems flow from the minute portion of the region that isn't ruled by bloodthirsty, murderous terrorists who want to conquer the entire world.

"It's definitely all Israel's fault," said analyst Ibrahim Hamzi of the Institute for Blaming Jews in Jordan. "We have looked closely at all of the evidence accumulated over the last century and have come to the conclusion that none of the issues that arise in the Middle East can be blamed on the multiple Islamic dictatorships that have caused oppression, rape, murder, and terrorism around the world. Yes, the West lives in fear of Islamic extremists carrying out deadly attacks on heavily populated areas, but that's not the problem. No, it's Israel. Totally Israel."

The scientific study was controversial in some circles but received support from experts in other parts of the world as well. "I concur with the findings," said Professor Mohammed al Muhamad in London. "Even here in the unbiased United Kingdom, we can confidently state that the nation of Israel is solely to blame for the problems in the Middle East. Not the other dozen countries ruled by crazy Muslims."

At publishing time, an impartial coalition of Middle Eastern countries that are Islamic dictatorships presented a solution to solve tensions in the region by wiping Israel off the map.

Globes reported yesterday:

In the early hours of this [Sunday] morning, the Israel Navy attacked energy infrastructure that serves the regime of the Houthi rebels in Yemen, some 2,000 kilometers from Israel’s shores. The strikes were aimed at the Sanaa area, in an attempt to raise the pressure on Iran’s proxies in Yemen to stop launching ballistic missiles and UAVs at Israel.

The strike was carried out by naval vessels stationed in the Red Sea, led by a Sa’ar 6 missile ship, originally intended for protecting the gas production platforms in the Mediterranean. The Sa’ar 6 class ships are equipped with advanced radar and high-quality protection systems. They carry the maritime version of the Iron Dome rocket interception system C-Dome, which forms part of Israel’s layered air defenses.

We hear a lot about the Israeli Air Force and not so much about its navy. But Israel has built up impressive naval capabilities in recent years, which makes it less necessary to use the air force for long distance strikes.

The article describes some of the other components of Israel's Navy:

Israel also has Dolphin AIP (air-independent propulsion) submarines that can reach Yemen underwater. On the surface, their range is double, and they are capable of operating in the area of Iran as well.
Another important layer that began to be operational with the Israel Navy is unmanned maritime vessels (UMV), also known as unmanned surface vessels (USV). The maritime divisions of Israel’s major defense companies have been developing and selling UMVs for a decade.
Rafael produces the Protector, a USV designed to assist and protect forces. It carries a high-pressure water gun, and the Mini-Typhoon stabilized weapon system. It is intended for missions along shorelines and in ports. Another company that has been active in this field for several years is Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), which, in 2014, unveiled the Katana, also meant for routine security operations, for example protection of offshore strategic assets such as drilling rigs and oil pipelines.
IAI is also very active in the field of unmanned submarines. Its outstanding product is the Blue Whale, the result of collaboration with German company Atlas Electronik. Blue Whale gathers intelligence by means of a telescopic mast (like a submarine’s periscope) on which are mounted radar and electro-optic systems for detecting targets at sea and on shore. Information is transmitted in real time via satellite communications antennae to command posts, that can be anywhere, at sea or on land.

Impressive!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Leftist antisemitism was always there. They just hide it better.

Apollo News (Germany) writes:

A post by the Frankfurt Left Youth group is causing outrage. The Left Party's youth organization's account responded to a report about 52 Jewish youths being kicked off a plane in Valencia. The group wrote: "We regret to disappoint: The expulsion did not take place while the plane was in the air."

The post was deleted after criticism. A statement on X read: "We have received several inquiries and legitimate criticisms regarding the tweets published on our account in recent days. We have deleted the posts by the respective authors."

Right-wing antisemites like to hide behind the idea that their noxious posts are merely "jokes." But the Left pretends to be anti-bigotry, so their own antisemitism is usually not so explicit - they normally re-frame it as anti-Zionism, which they can then use as an excuse to say the most reprehensible things.

Think about it: if the French Jewish campers had been Israelis, then no one would have had a problem with this tweet advocating that they be thrown off a plane at 30,000 feet.

But either way, if the Left was so against antisemitism as they claim, posting this would have been as unthinkable as if the kids were Black.

Recently, an academic paper was published about the extremism found on a Reddit-like decentralized left-wing social media site called Lemmygrad.ml. It noted that within this echo chamber, extremist rhetoric was common and its "anti-Zionism" often bled into classic antisemitism, as in this post from their c/communism board:

1. Jews arent a nation 2. Isael is a fake country.... Everyone identifing as a jew is a zionist and an enemy of the communist and anti imperialist movement.

Usually, leftist antisemites self-censor because they are nominally against antisemitism. But just as in the Soviet Union, everyone who cares can see that their rhetoric about Zionists and rootless cosmopolitans is really all about Jews.

Antisemitism is becoming more and more mainstream, and people are more likely to speak it outright as the faux and performative outrage over Gaza grows.

Notice that when these sorts of incidents happen, there is precious little pushback from within the "progressive" community unequivocally condemning the antisemitism in their ranks. Because not only is the pretense of caring about Gazans performative, but so is their pretense of being against antisemitism.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Germany, Japan, South Africa, Iraq, Gaza - what does it take for a people to change?

What does it take for an entire society to abandon a destructive ideology and embrace something radically different? History offers us a few examples, and also many failures.

This is a critical question as the world looks at Gaza and what can follow the war. We need to examine what has worked in the past, what has failed and why.

The ethics framework I've been developing gives us a way to examine the history of these transformations and failed attempts through "Derechology" - the study of events through understanding how values are anchored, applied, and amplified.

There may be a path to transform Gaza, but the odds are not good.

Derechology sees moral change on a national level in three tiers:

Core values – life, dignity, truth, justice, responsibility. These are the anchors. A transformation fails if these values are not re-anchored in lived reality.
Relational obligations – extending responsibility from family to community to nation and, finally, to humanity. A society cannot stabilize if obligations collapse inward to tribe alone.
Amplifiers – institutions, schools, media, courts, and the economy. They transmit and normalize values in daily life. Without amplifiers, abstract ideals never take root.

A meta-level is equally vital: transparency and a path for society-level reform - "teshuvah" which includes acknowledging wrongdoing and reintegrating with dignity. Without that, humiliation breeds grievance, not positive change.

The most successful programs of change occurred in Germany and Japan post-1945. Both societies suffered total defeat, which created the opening. Values were forcibly re-anchored through public exposure of atrocities and new constitutions. Obligations expanded from racial or imperial narrowness to universal rights and democratic responsibility. Amplifiers—schools, media, courts, and economies rebuilt through the Marshall Plan—reinforced the shift daily. Crucially, there was a path to communal teshuvah: not everyone was punished, but the worst were held accountable, and ordinary citizens were given a dignified way forward.

A more limited example was South Africa in the 1990s. Apartheid was dismantled, universal suffrage instituted, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created a structured mechanism for teshuvah. Obligations widened from racial tribe to nation. Yet the amplifiers were weak: the economy remained unequal, corruption hollowed governance, and prosperity was not delivered broadly. The initial moral transformation was real, but fragile.

Other times, the attempts to change society have failed.

The Soviet Union fell in 1991, and there was a brief hope that it would embrace democratic ideals. But amplifiers—courts, media, economy—were corrupt and fragile. Obligations collapsed inward to oligarchic clans and survival networks. Within a decade, nostalgia for authoritarian order paved the way for Putinism.

The Iraqi regime was toppled in 2003, but values were never re-anchored. De-Ba’athification humiliated rather than reconciled, obligations shrank into sectarianism, and amplifiers collapsed as the army and civil service were dismantled. No teshuvah path was offered. What followed was chaos, insurgency, and regression.

Societal change is almost never bottom up, coming from the people. It begins with defeat or crisis that makes the old system untenable. Change only endures if amplifiers are rebuilt to transmit life, dignity, truth, justice, and responsibility in daily life. Over time, people learn to want the new order because it works—because it gives them security, prosperity, and dignity.

Where amplifiers fail, people relapse. Where no teshuvah path exists, humiliation festers into grievance (think Germany after World War I.) The process is slow and generational.

One sobering point is that with Japan and Germany, the Western commitment was unconditional and open-ended. Money and time were no object - there was simply no choice because the alternative was horrific and fresh in everyone's minds. That environment of urgency is almost impossible to reproduce.

By this standard, Gaza faces the hardest of tests. Islamism and antisemitism are not marginal but central to the identity propagated through its schools, media, and governing institutions. Polling shows broad opposition to disarming Hamas and other armed factions, and textbooks and sermons continue to glorify violence and martyrdom. Core values are mis-anchored, obligations are narrowed to the in-group, and amplifiers reinforce the ideology rather than challenge it.

Even if Hamas is militarily defeated, the horrible system it built remains intact. For true change, history and Derechology show that all of these conditions must take effect:

A single authority holds the monopoly of force.
Schools and media are restructured with enforceable audits.
Economic dignity is provided through jobs and services.
A teshuvah mechanism exists that allows people to renounce support for terror without humiliation.

Without all of these, any short-term “victory” will revert to the same cycle.

Last year I floated an idea of a UAE-led protectorate-style administration in Gaza. The concept was to build model communities, secure jobs, and embed amplifiers of dignity and prosperity that would gradually displace Hamas’s appeal. Whether or not that specific model is feasible, the underlying point remains: Gaza’s transformation will not come from punishment alone, nor from rhetoric. "Total victory" over Hamas is necessary but far from sufficient. Real reform will require amplifiers strong enough to re-anchor values and institutions, and a long-term process of education, economic dignity, and structured teshuvah.

Given the centrality of antisemitism in Palestinian ideology, this seems like a tall order.

History shows that nations can change, but only when the architecture of values, obligations, and amplifiers is rebuilt and reinforced over generations. Success is rare.

The challenge in Gaza is that all three tiers are aligned against change. To imagine otherwise is fantasy. Yet to imagine it is impossible is despair. The sober truth is that it will take a generational, structured, and externally reinforced effort—otherwise the cycle will continue forever.

The idea that a "Palestinian state" would solve these real issues is purely wishful thinking. But too few people are seriously thinking about everything that has to align to lead to a true peace. And suggesting shortcuts without looking soberly at the real challenges and a holistic view of how reform can and must be accomplished will make things worse, not better.

(h/t Irene)

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The philosophy of Islamist antisemitism

Earlier this year I published a series of articles discussing different kinds of eliminationist antisemitism and exploring what they all have in common. My theory is that all eliminationist strands of antisemitism is based on malign philosophies, and the very existence of Jews, or Judaism, or Israel, is considered an existential threat to their philosophies. That is how I came into my project to promote Jewish philosophy as an antidote - to prove that these philosophies are not only wrong but immoral, and also to provide a secular alternative moral philosophy that is superior to the others by any measure.

I covered Islamic Arab supersessionism (pretending that all Jewish prophets and holy places are really Muslim,) Palestinianism (the explicit desire to replace Israel with an Arab state) and Iranian annihilationism (the desire to utterly destroy Israel.)

Surprisingly, I never tackled Sunni Islamist antisemitism, which is at least as important, and which has become its own philosophy only relatively recently.

Before the mid-20th century, antisemitism among Arabs was imported. The 1840 Damascus Affair blood libel was eagerly pushed by French Catholic antisemites and was a precursor to other blood libels in the Arab world in later decades. It was profoundly influential in introducing European-style antisemitism to the Middle East.

Arab nationalism that grew in the late 19th century was in no small part a reaction to Zionism. It was followed by Arab socialism, as Marx' theories started to spread, mostly starting with Arab Christians.

But the first truly home-grown Muslim antisemitism was popularized by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and mostly through one man: Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb created an entirely new history of Islam that is centered around antisemitism and an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. He dates the beginnings of Islam itself to 622 CE, not the more normally accepted 610 CE, because 622 is when Mohammed started looking at Jews as rivals and no longer potential partners. In Qutb's telling, 622 is when Jews started to wage an existential war against Islam that has never ended and will never end until the Jews themselves are eliminated. In his words, "this is an enduring war that will never end, because the Jews want no more no less than to exterminate the religion of Islam ... Since Islam subdued them (in Medina) they are unforgiving and fight furiously through

conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates."

This cosmic war according to Qutb, has gone on century after century:

Who tried to undermine the nascent Islamic state in Medina and who incited Quraish in Mecca, as well as other tribes against the foundation of this state? It was a Jew! Who stood behind the fitna-war and the slaying of the third caliph Osman and all the tragedies that followed hereafter? It was a Jew! And who inflamed national divides against the last caliph and who stood behind the turmoil that ended the Islamic order with the abolition of shari'a? It was Ataturk, a Jew! The Jews always stood and continue to stand behind the war waged against Islam. Today, this war persists against the Islamic revival in all places on earth.

I often see mainstream Arabic media describing the "character" of the Jews, as murderers, cheaters, liars and aggressive. This all comes from Qutb (although some of his antisemitic theories seem to come from the Mufti of Jerusalem.)

The only Western antisemitic ideas that Qutb didn't try to Islamicize were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he adopted in his theories. But everything else was his own home-grown antisemitic philosophy, which also regards America as a proxy for Jews.

This is the worldview of Al Qaeda, of ISIS, of Hamas. Qutb is considered a seminal thinker for them, who was followed by Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi.

Qutb’s innovation was not to borrow European antisemitism whole cloth as the previous versions did, but to rewrite Islam itself as a cosmic struggle with Jews. In doing so, he gave Islamists a philosophy that structurally requires Jewish disappearance. This is precisely what my larger thesis predicts: whenever a malign worldview senses Judaism as an existential threat, antisemitism is not an accident but an organizing principle. Qutb shows how that principle was Islamicized, and why Islamism cannot make peace with Jewish existence.

(Thanks to this great 2010 paper by Bassam Tibi)

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08/17 Links: Gaza woman who died in Italian hospital had leukemia; War Expert Debunks Gaza Lies; Terrorists in the kitchen; Singer Idan Amedi reunites with combat medic who saved him

From Ian:

David Collier: Rinse and Repeat: Another Gaza Famine Lie Goes Viral

Once bitten, twice – bite me again
What makes this latest famine hoax even more astonishing is that it comes barely a week after the last one collapsed. In that case, international outlets took the image of a child with healthy siblings, a boy suffering from a tragic but very specific medical condition (CP) and presented him as evidence of mass starvation.

The lie was so blatant that even the New York Times and other major outlets were forced to roll back their claims once the truth emerged.

Incredibly, the same terrorist-supporting journalist – Ahmed al-Arini – appears to have broken both stories (1, 2).

This is not sloppy journalism. It is not an innocent mistake. It is the same trick, deployed twice in as many weeks, by the same actors. That is proof that legacy media are not being misled – they are knowingly promoting a lie.

So what is the truth?
We live in an age where too many journalists have become activists, media standards have collapsed, and editors are chasing clicks with sensationalism over accuracy. When the story can be shaped to fit a preferred narrative, fact-checking is abandoned. The presence of 1000s of journalists in the UK who once worked for foreign Islamist outfits makes a bad situation even worse.

So if there is no famine, if starvation is not widespread, then what is really happening?

The honest answer ‘its complicated’ won’t suffice. Not when we are facing a coordinated media campaign that promotes a modern-day blood libel. So I am going to generalise.

For context – in the UK today there are currently about 86000 children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions.

To support the ‘famine’ narrative, The recent Sky News said hospitals are ‘overwhelmed’ with cases. Yes – so are the UK hospitals and we are not even in a war-zone. There were over 3000 recorded child deaths in the UK in 2023. Over 400 people die in the UK each year from malnutrition.

Now imagine a desperate conflict here. A journalist could walk into an NHS ward, take images of desperately ill children, and spin them as evidence of deliberate starvation by our enemy. Technically nothing about the picture would be false, but the framing and narrative would be a lie. That is exactly what is happening now in Gaza.

Take the latest BBC coverage – a headline that feeds the false famine narrative, suggesting starvation-related death. A child’s image used to create additional emotional pull. Only buried deep in the text does the article admit it is likely the woman suffered from a ‘serious congenital disease’. This is not journalism. This is manipulation.

Yes – war is awful. During conflict, wherever possible, very sick people should be evacuated so they can access the treatment they need. The tragic reality is that many will still not survive.

But tragedy is no excuse for fraud. We do not want media to wave an Israeli flag. We just ask that they stop acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, and return to the most basic duty of journalism – we want them to tell the truth.

IDF Reservist Describes Scene at GHF Aid Site in Gaza

The truth about Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid sites has been grossly distorted. During a recent tour in Gaza as an infantry reservist, I was tasked with helping to secure the area around a safe distribution site (SDS) in southern Gaza. I did not see mass starvation in Gaza. Of the tens of thousands of civilians, there was no one close to the emaciated state of hostage Evyatar David.

With the contracting of the GHF, the IDF sought to prevent a severe humanitarian situation for civilians while avoiding resupplying Hamas through compromised aid organizations. Part of Hamas's control over the population was through its near monopoly over food and other humanitarian aid.

The area around SDS sites is still enemy territory, and there are still enemy forces without uniforms concealed among civilians, seeking to kill IDF soldiers. At the site where I was, aid seekers were supposed to leave vehicles beyond a security barrier that also served as a marker for what not to cross when the zone and aid site were closed. Fences, barbed wire, and warning signs were placed to prevent civilians from entering military zones.

Once the GHF site opened, a daily deluge of tens of thousands attempted to enter the site and grab aid. The Gazans at times overran and tore down the forward barriers. I never once saw anything resembling a line or queue. Live-fire warning shots were only employed on the extremely rare occasion that Gazans in the aid site yard deviated toward the closed military zone that was out of their way.

While it's impossible not to feel sympathy for people who have to gather food in such a manner, Palestinian aid seekers are constantly seeking to overrun the compound. Desperation was not the only driving factor. War profiteering and criminality are also driving forces. Trades and sales were being made in the SDS courtyard. Brawls over aid were not uncommon, and larger men could be seen waiting on the periphery, not joining the rush with the others.

Shots were almost exclusively warning shots fired at sand dunes. It was emphasized repeatedly to our unit that we did not want to kill any civilians, which would be counterproductive to the mission. Our experience is in stark contrast to the idea that the IDF was deliberately shooting aid seekers. When these warning shots ceased to be employed for a time, pending a review, the aid sites were overrun several times and GHF personnel were injured. The chaos was only rolled back by the resumption of warning shots by designated marksmen and snipers.

Terrorists in the kitchen: How aid organizations help Hamas and fight Israel

Aid organizations' "starvation" campaign, together with the "genocide" campaign, have succeeded in driving down Israel's international standing. But how much of these campaigns is based on outright lies that the media uncritically amplify? Already, the amount of food entering Gaza far exceeds the threshold set by international standards.

On Thursday, 104 organizations published a joint statement claiming Israel is preventing them from delivering aid and imposing excessive preconditions. Of the 104, 84 never submitted requests. Only 20 applied, three were denied, one was approved and the rest are still under review. In practice, dozens of other organizations operate in Gaza in coordination with Israel because they met the requirements.

In other words, the joint statement is just another stage in the propaganda war. A storm over nothing. Many of these organizations are fringe groups that seize every opportunity to attack Israel. Organizations whose requests were denied refused to provide employee lists.

Hamas operatives have been known to infiltrate UNRWA and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) staff. Israel cannot approve activities by organizations that provide cover for terrorist operatives. Why should Israel allow organizations that deny its very right to exist to operate?

In recent days, food prices have fallen: 1 kg. of flour, which had risen to 500 shekels, dropped to 10-20 shekels. So how is there hunger? Shortages are caused by aid being stolen, primarily by Hamas. The population is under Hamas rule, not Israeli control. If Hamas wanted, food would reach everyone - but it does not, because Hamas wants to blame Israel. Western media lead the campaign and amplify Hamas propaganda. That does not help Gaza residents; it only serves Hamas.

Introducing Audita: An experimental AI to fact check anything

I have been deeply troubled by the prevalence of lies that have become mainstream. This infects AI chatbots as well - as the libels against Israel multiply, and they come from seemingly trustworthy organizations like the UN and Amnesty, the AI's own sources get polluted with lies and it shows up in their answers.

This is besides AI ethics. This is about the bias in their data, not in their logic (which is a separate issue.

So I wanted to see if I could build an AI that could at least try to check its sources for signs of trustworthiness before it uses them in its answer. It is completely non-partisan.

The results are not perfect, but significantly better than AI chatbots are now. Also, I am asking it to do a lot, and it is therefore slower in answering questions - it could take a minute or two.

But the problem is bad enough that someone needs to do something. So even though it is imperfect, I am putting it out there for people to test and let me know if it still seems to be off the mark (and I know it is with "Is Israel committing genocide?" but it does better than others.)

Again, I am not going to enter Israel-specific rules. It is meant to be as fair and accurate as possible.

The AI can be found at audita.askhillel.com .

The Bendigo Writers' Festival in Australia is in disarray when a large portion of planed speakers chose to boycott the event, claiming that the festival Code of Conduct was censoring any planned criticism of Israel.

The accusation is not even remotely true. The accusation misrepresents the festival’s Code of Conduct, which explicitly protects free speech - even the most extreme anti-Israel invective.

But it shows how "Gaza" is now used an an excuse to mainstream all antisemitism.

More than a third of the Festival's lineup has withdrawn or resigned in protest after participants were asked to sign a code of conduct that included reference to LaTrobe University's anti-racism plan. They claim that LaTrobe has adopted the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism which they claim declares that criticizing Israel is antisemitic.

IHRA does not say that - it says the opposite - but critics have pointed to a couple of examples listed in the definition such as calling Israel a racist endeavor or comparing Israel to Nazi Germany as examples of potential censorship.

However, LaTrobe University did not adopt IHRA definition to begin with. It, along with most universities in Australia, adopted a modified definition of antisemitism that avoided such "controversial" positions like comparing Israel to Nazis being antisemitic.

Here is the entire modified definition:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, harassment, exclusion, vilification, intimidation or violence that impedes Jews’ ability to participate as equals in educational, political, religious, cultural, economic or social life. . It can manifest in a range of ways including negative, dehumanising, or stereotypical narratives about Jews. Further, it includes hate speech, epithets, caricatures, stereotypes, tropes, Holocaust denial, and antisemitic symbols. Targeting Jews based on their Jewish identities alone is discriminatory and antisemitic.

Criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government or state is not in and of itself antisemitic. However, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel or all Jews or when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions. It can be antisemitic to make assumptions about what Jewish individuals think based only on the fact that they are Jewish.
All peoples, including Jews, have the right to self-determination. For most, but not all Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity. Substituting the word “Zionist’’ for ‘’Jew’’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic.

All of the examples that critics of IHRA have pointed to for years have been excised. And even calling for the destruction of Israel, according to this definition, "can" be antisemitic but isn't automatically so. Even comparing Israel to Nazi Germany can be OK according to this definition.

But LaTrobe makes sure that even this definition cannot possibly be used to quash freedom of speech. It adds, in the antisemitism section,

Academic freedom is of paramount importance to La Trobe University. We adopted in full the French Model Code for Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech. We support the right of members of our community to engage in free speech, however, have robust processes and procedures in place to deal with significant disruptions and/or contraventions of the limitations of free speech, including for speech that is racist, vilifying, or threatening.

This French Model Code further protects freedom of speech beyond this watered down definition, essentially saying that all speech is OK unless it is against the law or interferes with university principles to " foster the wellbeing of students and staff." In this case, that means it must protect Jewish students just as it protects all other students from harassment or verbal attack.

Most of the writers who are withdrawing from the conference no doubt did not read any of this. But the campaign itself is designed not to protect freedom of speech, but to destroy even the most minimal protections for Jewish students from antisemitic attack.

More than 200 Australian writers have now signed a letter that effectively calls to remove any protections of Jews. Article after article are misrepresenting the Bendigo policy as being against free speech. The idea of "free speech" is no longer a protection, but a weapon against Jews.

This incident shows that the "Gaza genocide" slander is not an end in itself. It is part of a campaign to protect and promote antisemitism itself.

And it is working.

(h/t Jill)

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100 years ago: Arabs threatened to massacre the Jews of Palestine

From AP, August 11, 1925:

This was almost exactly four years before the 1929 massacres.

When Arabs threaten to murder you, take it seriously.

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08/16 Links: What America Can Learn from the Hamas Propaganda War; Ending The Muslim Brotherhood’s American Experiment; Gal Gadot says ‘pressure’ to speak out against Israel

From Ian:

What America Can Learn from the Hamas Propaganda War

Hamas and its allies reconfigured their tactics. Rather than hoping for a big story to delegitimize Israel’s counteroffensive, they pounded out a steady drumbeat of falsehoods. A Hamas-controlled organization produced highly suspicious tallies of deaths in Gaza, which then-president Joe Biden and his defense secretary Lloyd Austin both cited uncritically. The new propaganda campaign produced some headlines and, during the previous administration, some pressure from Washington against further Israeli actions against Hamas, but it did not force Israel to withdraw.

Israel’s recent actions to bypass Hamas-controlled humanitarian aid channels and send food straight to hungry Gazans forced Hamas to change its tactics yet again. Over the past few weeks, the media have breathlessly reported lurid stories of starving civilians and massacres near the Israel-supported aid locations.

Many of these stories fall apart upon closer inspection. In some cases, Israel has released videos proving that the supposed massacres never took place. But by the time the Israelis showed what actually happened, Hamas has released more equally implausible stories that generate new headlines.

Alternative media have been no better. Podcast hosts who supposedly question conventional wisdom regurgitate the same claims as their established competitors. Some even sympathetically interview disgruntled former employees of these aid organizations who only lobbed accusations of atrocities after their begging for new work failed.

Although it is currently fighting Israel, Hamas is creating a template America’s adversaries can use in future conflicts with the United States. The next time American troops go into combat against a major enemy, they can expect an incessant stream of reports about alleged massacres and other war crimes.

Many of these atrocities will not be based on anything that actually occurred, but they will nonetheless draw the attention of American media organizations. If the pattern holds, the disaffected people who dominate American mainstream and alternative media will eagerly seize upon these stories to attack their ideological rivals in the United States. Retired veterans with dubious records will endorse these claims. Policymakers should thus expect to start any conflict in a hostile media environment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Ending The Muslim Brotherhood’s American Experiment

The most damning indictment is not what the Brotherhood did but what America allowed. We had the intelligence, legal authority, and every right to take meaningful action, but lacked backbone. Political leaders preferred comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths, bureaucrats mistook civil rights for moral relativism, and a media establishment treated legitimate security concerns as racist paranoia.

Meanwhile, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – three nations that know the Brotherhood’s threat firsthand – designated them as terrorists years ago. When countries that live under the shadow of Islamist terrorism act decisively while America, the self-proclaimed leader in counterterrorism, stalls, something is deeply and deliberately broken.

Now, however, things are changing. Rubio’s announcement concedes the scale of the failure; we’ve been asleep while our enemies built and fortified their networks. Waking up won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. The Brotherhood’s network was engineered for endurance: a multi-headed hydra — multiple organisations sharing resources while maintaining separate legal identities, overlapping leadership to coordinate strategy while concealing accountability, and financial arteries running beneath layers of charitable fronts. Redundancy is built into every tier, ensuring that if one head is cut off, the others strike back faster and more fiercely.

The designation process will face serious legal challenges designed to delay and deflect: political pressure from allies who cling to the fiction that these are civil rights organizations, and media narratives that frame enforcement as persecution. The Brotherhood will fight back using every tool America’s open society provides. They will leverage their alliances with progressive movements and institutions. The reckoning won’t be gentle. Thirty years of institutional capture doesn’t disappear overnight. Organizations that have positioned themselves as legitimate voices of American Muslims will fight to preserve their influence. Political allies who accepted their support will resist admissions of error. Academic institutions that host the conferences and endorse the scholarship will move quickly to defend their reputations.

But none of that changes the fundamental reality. America has been harboring networks built to advance “a grand Jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabotage its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers”. They have pursued this mission on a global scale. The evidence was always in plain sight, and the legal authority was always there, but the only thing missing was the political will to act.

Marco Rubio just provided it. The Brotherhood’s American experiment is ending, and its architects won’t survive the fallout. Whether Britain and the rest of Europe follow America or learn the hard way remains to be seen.

Jonathan Tobin: Why the Dreyfus case matters now more than ever

Harris’s novel and Polanski’s film are different in one way because the main protagonist of the story related in the screenplay (co-written by Harris and Polanski) is not the victim, Dreyfus. Instead, its focus is Georges Picquart, the man who—though largely forgotten by history—did more to win Dreyfus’s freedom than anyone else involved in the controversy.

What makes that so remarkable is that Picquart, then the youngest colonel in the French army and who had been his instructor at a staff college, neither liked Dreyfus or Jews, in general. A rising star in an institution where antisemitism ran rampant, the cultured Picquart was typical of his class and despised the bourgeois, unsociable and rich Jewish officer. After being appointed the head of military intelligence in 1895, he uncovered what at first he thought was a second German spy, another French officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. He soon uncovered definitive proof that there was only one spy, Esterhazy, and that Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted.

Told to bury the damning evidence, Picquart—a man of honor, even if he was as hostile to the Jews as his peers—refused to do so. As a result, he was demoted, isolated and eventually imprisoned on other false charges. But by bringing the truth to the attention of the Dreyfus family and to French author Emile Zola, whose famous essay “J’Accuse … !,” revived the debate about the case, the path to the falsely accused victim’s redemption was set. Alfred Dreyfus Monument in Tel AvivA monument to French Jewish artillery Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in Tel Aviv, Nov. 30, 2018. Credit: Dr. Avishai Teicher via Wikimedia Commons.

Polanski’s film unravels how Picquart learns the truth, and how both his superior officers and one of his subordinates—the despicable Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, who had forged some of the original evidence against Dreyfus and perjured himself in court—turned on him for not going along with their lies. Each step of the way in what is an even more complicated story than superficial students of the case may know—from the opening scene depicting Dreyfus’s appalling degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire with a mob screaming for his death and that of the Jews, to Picquart’s astonishment at the dishonesty of his fellow officers to the trials where the truth comes out but is still denied by the courts—is heartbreaking. Indeed, so convincing is the account of how the plot unraveled that it’s almost possible to forget that we know how the story will turn out.

Of particular note is the performance of French actor Jean Dujardin, best known to international audiences for winning an Oscar for his role in the 2011 silent film “The Artist.” His Picquart manages to be both an imperturbable and somewhat stoic military type, yet so invested in the idea of integrity and honesty that he was willing to destroy his own career and life, as well as that of his married mistress, Pauline Monnier (played by Polanski’s real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner). Louis Garrel similarly embodies the desperation of Dreyfus, a man caught in a nightmare he knows is rooted in the Jew-hatred of the country he loves.