Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, November 06, 2025

From the Drowning Child to a Drowning World: Moral Proximity in the Age of Power

Introduction: Refuting Singer and Reframing the Purpose of Ethics

Peter Singer's famous thought experiment, first outlined in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," goes like this: imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a child drowning. You can save the child easily, though your clothes will be ruined, and it will cost $200 to replace them. Most people agree they would save the child. Singer then argues that if we are willing to suffer minor inconvenience to save one life near us, we are morally obligated to donate that same money to save, say, 20 lives far away. For a small cost, we can prevent starvation, malaria, or death in poorer nations, yet we often don't. Therefore, we are morally inconsistent.

At first glance, his logic seems unassailable. But Singer's framing is both too abstract and too flat. First, he neglects the time component. The drowning child requires immediate, one-time action. Remote suffering is persistent and structural. Sending $200 does not solve the problem. It inserts a drop into an ongoing crisis that demands coordination, infrastructure, and sustained engagement.

Following Singer's logic, your $200 spread across the entire world of needy children will end up giving each child minuscule fractions of a penny, so you wouldn't save 20 children - you would save none. How does one choose who to give the money to and how much? His universalist ideals do not scale when applied seemingly "fairly." Singer's engaging in the same triage that he is condemning but hiding it.

Most crucially, Singer treats moral responsibility as a universal moral field, ignoring the structured, covenantal, and relational reality of ethical life. He assumes moral action scales linearly, that we can treat all lives as equally accessible units of obligation. Yet one's first responsibility is to one's family and community - an implicit covenant that cannot and must not be flattened by pretending that everyone is equally responsible for everyone else. He assumes that proximity is a flaw to be overcome rather than a feature that guides responsible moral scaling.

The Singer thought experiment is very relevant to America today. The question is what is America's moral role and responsibility in the world?

The Jewish ethical framework, and particularly the derechological model I have been developing, proposes a structured triad of moral obligation: proximity (moral, relational, or cultural, not just physical), capacity (the power to act without displacing higher duties), and covenant (explicit or inherited moral bonds of responsibility, including both moral ties and literal agreements like treaties, alliances, and shared commitments). This triad scales from individuals to superpowers.

The triad doesn't reject global concern. It structures it. It insists that moral responsibility must scale with care, not collapse into undifferentiated obligation. Moral universalism that ignores proximity ends up collapsing under its own weight, justifying either moral paralysis or performative politics.

When we think in terms of one's derech - their observable moral trajectory - we can name our own values transparently, identify which tier of obligation is in conflict, distinguish authentic derech disagreements from disguised reflex, and elevate partisanship into principled moral debate.

The result isn't consensus. It's dignity. A society that debates real values instead of tribal slogans is one that can still correct itself.

Part I: American Foreign Policy and the Shift in Proximity Logic

Modern America, particularly under the Trump administration, offers a fascinating case study in derechological terms. The first and second Trump terms differ not just in policy but in the internal structure of their derech, their observable moral trajectory.

In the first term, derech was inconsistent. Isolationist rhetoric coexisted with interventionist moves. Proximity, capacity, and covenant were each invoked but not in a coherent order. Derech analysis reveals fragmented values driven more by instinct than by tiered moral logic.

In the second term, the derech crystallized. Proximity was redefined as strategic alignment, not geographic or cultural but based on immediate political or economic usefulness. Capacity was treated as leverage, not duty. Covenant became conditional. Treaties, alliances, and shared values were honored only if visibly reciprocal.

In derech terms, this is not isolationism. It's transactional sovereigntism. It isn't a derech of cruelty per se but of hollowed responsibility. The moral triangle is still used, but its sides have been redrawn.

A key derechological concern in this phase is value hijacking, where values are invoked but only to serve pre-existing reflexes, fears, or political instincts. When "security," "tradition," or "freedom" are used as cloaks for fear of loss, racial panic, or anti-covenantal scapegoating, derech is being simulated, not followed. Derechology teaches that true values shape decisions even when they conflict with base instincts. A policy that always aligns with reflex and never with override logic is likely hijacked.

Part II: The Fracture Within the Right

This derech is not uncontested. Within the American Right, we now see a derech fracture.

Traditional nationalists maintain a covenantal derech. They believe America has inherited responsibilities to allies, to liberty, to history. They operate with structured values. Strength, yes, but not at the expense of fidelity.

New isolationists collapse the triad. Proximity becomes domestic only. Capacity is morally inert. Covenant is reframed as entrapment. This faction often draws moral language from tradition, but in structure, it functions derech-wise as self-protectionism cloaked in principle.

Overlaying both is a more disturbing split: between those whose derech includes Jews as moral partners and those whose derech scapegoats Jews as symbols of globalism, elite betrayal, or cultural threat. This isn't a fringe issue. It's a derech-defining fault line.

Here too, derechology applies the Reflex vs. Value Test. Reflex-driven policies arise from fear, anger, or trauma responses masquerading as principle. They shift rapidly, resist override logic, and lack repair capacity. True values, by contrast, remain legible across contexts, resolve conflicts transparently, and produce moral consistency even when inconvenient. Derechology warns: when reflex is moralized, values are weaponized, and derech collapses.

In derechology, this is not just bad behavior. It is a collapse of human dignity recognition, which disables covenant, mutual responsibility, and override logic. A derech that scapegoats cannot sustain moral leadership.

Conclusion: Derech Clarity in a Drowning World

Singer's experiment fails because it assumes that morality is weightless and obligation is frictionless. But derechology insists that ethical action must track structure, history, and relationship. The U.S. is not just a rich nation. It is a powerful actor embedded in global covenants, carrying layered proximities and enormous capacity. When it shifts its derech, the moral weight of that change is global.

The question is no longer: should we save the child far away? It is: who counts as "close" in a world where power expands moral reach, and where ignoring covenantal entanglement invites derech collapse?

Superpower status is a relatively modern phenomenon, but it irreversibly shifts the moral responsibility curve. The ability to shape global dynamics brings with it the ethical burden of prevention. When a morally grounded actor retreats, the vacuum is not neutral. It is filled by ideologies and regimes that reject human dignity, override logic, or covenantal constraint. The rise of China's authoritarianism, the spread of jihadist violence, or the ideological chaos of decolonial radicalism are not parallel moralities. They are derech failures. Abandoning the field allows derech collapse on a global scale.

On the other hand, concentric circles of moral responsibility are essential. Proximity isn't an evasion. It is an ethical anchor. A nation's first covenant is to its own citizens. That is not nationalism. It is moral triage. The moral question is not whether to abandon global responsibility but how to balance it without betraying inner circles. Derechology affirms that proximity and covenant must be respected, not erased.

And here, a real question arises: Does America currently have the capacity, economically, socially, morally, to care for the world without failing its own people? That is a derechological question, not a partisan one. It requires mapping competing duties, testing claims of value versus reflex, and discerning whether foreign action displaces covenantal integrity at home. There is no single answer. But clarity in the triad reframes the debate.

America's future moral integrity depends on its ability to recognize that superpower status is not just geopolitical. It is ethical geometry. You can't shrink the map without redrawing your moral boundaries.

This essay is not a policy brief. It offers no simplistic solution. Instead, it demonstrates how Derechology provides the tools to extract real values, detect value hijacking, and clarify complex moral dynamics, even in politically toxic environments. In place of rhetorical fog, Derechology offers moral structure. And that structure makes real debate possible.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

There have been a lot of articles about Jews voting for Mamdani, making it sound like they were a significant part of his coalition.

The CNN exit poll showed that among Jews, Mamdani received only 32% of the vote compared to the 50% he received altogether.

But like all of these exit polls, it includes Jews who don't consider Judaism to be important at all in their lives. In New York City, that is about 25% of the Jews.

If we assume that the non-committed Jews voted along the same party lines they voted in the 2024 presidential elections (73% Democrat, 27% Republican) then the vote from committed Jews - of whom Orthodox Jews are perhaps 20% - was a far more lopsided 81% against, 19% for.

The Mamdani Jews are the Jews in name only, plus a smattering of Satmars who were immediately denounced by the other Satmars. The "progressive" Jewish groups make a lot of noise but the only Jews they represent are people who decide to weaponize their accident of birth.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/05 Links Pt2: Zohran Mamdani’s Ivy League intifada; The BBC’s Threat to British Democracy; BDS fail: UK-Israel trade GREW; Hollywood A-listers face 'antisemitism' blacklist

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Zohran Mamdani’s Ivy League intifada

Mamdani was swept into the political limelight on a wave of privileged resentment. The depthless self-pity of downwardly mobile millennials meshed with the hipster intifada triggered by the events of 7 October 2023, creating the perfect conditions for the rise of this anti-Zio, woe-is-me rich kid. Look, I agree there is a housing crisis, and that it is awful that so many twenty- and thirtysomethings look destined to rent forever. I just find it hard to sympathise with the section of that generation that has promoted climate alarmism and sneered at working-class Americans, thus making it less likely that mass house-building will take place while pissing off the men who would be called upon to do it.

The most galling thing about the Mamdani phenomenon is its claim to be a working-class uprising. Mamdani himself says he’ll fight for the working classes, though surely he’ll have to meet some of them first. The global left is gushing over his win as if it were New York’s equivalent of the Paris Commune. What we have here is the staggeringly dishonest co-option of class politics by an over-credentialled emergent elite who will in truth be pursuing their own Bushwick bullshit, not the improvement of the lot of New York’s workers. They cosplay as class warriors because that’s sexier than the reality – that they’re privileged members of an activist class that will cancel you if you say lesbians don’t have penises but love you if you say ‘Destroy Israel’.

Mamdani’s campaign has exposed how the faux-socialists of the burgeoning young elite really view the working classes – as the saps of history; as agency-lacking victims who require smart cookies from Brooklyn with two degrees in political studies to rescue them from the moral doldrums. Hence, Mamdani’s ‘working-class uprising’ involves talk of free bus travel and city-run grocery stores. It’s charity masquerading as revolution. To the Uber-taking arts crowd of the downtown Mamdani set, ‘working class’ means tragic little people who can’t afford the bus and who crave an apple from the government. Please stop calling paternalism ‘socialism’.

Across the Anglo-American world, a new class of overeducated, high-status influencers is cribbing from the language of socialism to push a politics that is anything but. Here in the UK you’ll see Oxbridge girls in ‘I’m Literally A Communist’ earrings who say ‘Up the working classes!’ and then faint when the oiks vote Reform. We have Your Party, the Jeremy Corbyn / Zarah Sultana outfit that poses as a class revolt when everyone knows their membership is 99 per cent angry graphic designers who can’t believe their Dalston rent went up again. And now we have Mamdani, mayor of a city with such a great history of working-class rebellion, who dons the mask of class to disguise his crusade of culture. I trust New York’s frank, free-speaking workers will soon see through this charade.

Seth Mandel: Your Friends and Neighbors in the Mamdani Era

It will be great if Mamdani is prevented from carrying out his Jews-on-the-brain agenda. It will be greater still if that happens because of the stiffened spines of American Jewish organizations. But what Mamdani’s election says about what is acceptable to New Yorkers will be much harder to undo. The future can be stymied, but the past cannot.

A good example of this is Mamdani’s campaign plank regarding BDS. The boycott-Israel movement has far more failures than successes, at least in America, but that’s because here it isn’t actually about trade policy. BDSniks in the U.S. don’t expect to destroy Israel’s trade position. BDS in the U.S. is first and foremost about making American Jews feel unwelcome and multiplying the number of environments that are explicitly hostile to them.

On Election Day, Mamdani reiterated his support for BDS on MSNBC. It is through that lens that he sees, for example, an opening to end economic partnerships with Israeli institutions, the most prominent of which is the Technion collaboration with Cornell University. That partnership was opened initially in 2012 by the Michael Bloomberg administration and permanently sited in 2017 under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Aside from the educational benefits, the partnership has produced over 100 start-ups, 84 percent of which are based in New York, according to the Technion.

Mamdani also wants to end the New York City-Israel Economic Council and divest the city’s pension funds from Israel.

The point here is that although he has leveled even more wild-eyed threats—he vows to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example—Israel and the Jews are the only subjects he talks about when he talks about populations he’d like New York to freeze out. Mamdani is not a “human rights activist,” he’s an anti-Israel extremist who uses the language of human rights to crusade against the one Jewish state. This single-minded obsession made even some of his allies in the legislature uncomfortable.

When Mamdani tried repeatedly to push a bill that would outlaw certain Jewish charities, for example, he failed to garner enough support because of how clearly targeted the legislation was. State Sen. Alex Bores, who backed Mamdani but not that particular bill, told the New York Times: “I view with suspicion bills that are written to target one specific country when they could easily be written broadly to apply to a problem.”

That is the sum total of Mamdani’s campaign—it’s about one country, one people. That creepy obsession made it impossible to argue that Mamdani is merely concerned about human rights or conflict prevention or anything else. That Mamdani ran on this obsession with Israel and won is going to make it difficult for Jews to see New York as the city they once knew.

Mamdani’s win shows how Jewish groups failed Jews by dismissing antisemitism on the left

For New York’s Jews, these are the worst of times and the best of times.

The worst part is obvious: it’s not just that 1 million of our neighbors sauntered to the ballot box and cast their votes for an anti-Semite who missed no opportunity to stand with terrorist sympathizers and Jew-haters; it’s also that our very own communal organizations, groups founded specifically to prevent a movement like Mamdani’s from rising, failed miserably.

The city with the largest Jewish population anywhere outside of Israel should’ve seen Mamdani coming. And its Jewish leaders should’ve done much better to stop him.

Instead, with few exceptions, these leaders equivocated. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, for example, embraced a string of virulently anti-Israel Democrats, including Mamdani’s pal, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; President Trump wasn’t so lucky, receiving the group’s sharp criticism for his efforts to deport illegal migrants and keep our borders safe.

The Anti-Defamation League did even worse. The group, previously one of the most revered Jewish organizations nationwide, spent the last few years turning itself into a full-blown arm of the Democrat Party, releasing reports, for example, that argue that anti-Semitism is a problem exclusively on the right and not, say, on radically progressive college campuses.

And as one researcher reported in Tablet Magazine last week, even the group’s attempts to educate Americans about anti-Semitism are a disaster: people who completed the ADL’s anti-anti-Semitism curriculum were 15 times more, not less, likely to express anti-Jewish sentiments.

None of this is hard to understand. For years, America’s organized Jewish community sang the tunes of the left, focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion even as their so-called allies informed them in no uncertain terms that Jews no longer have a place in the gorgeous mosaic of aggrieved minorities orchestrated by the Democrats.

For Mamdani’s victory to have any meaning, then, these organizations and the individuals that lead them must face a very serious reckoning.

In the days after the October 7, 2023 massacre, Israelis spoke of the Konseptsiya, or the thwarted, idealistic worldview that led so many of them to fail to see Hamas’s preparations for the attack.

New York’s Jews now have a Konseptsiya of their own to grapple with, a wrestling that should lead them to hold their leaders accountable. If done right, this process could lead to new and better organizations skeptical of partisan affiliations and dedicated to finding new and faithful partners outside of the traditional political coalitions convened long ago by the left.

So much for the worst of times.

11/05 Links Pt1: Boris Johnson: 'Strange to see intellectuals supporting Hamas'; Douglas Murray: "If there's an American flag at an anti-Israel protest, it's only there to be burnt"

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Israel: A Model Ally, a Model Society

President Trump’s historic Gaza Peace Plan, which stopped the war by making Hamas release the living hostages it held, is a good time to reflect on the broad sweep of the war in Gaza, both in the field and in the arena of public opinion. In the past two years, a country of ten million people, attacked literally from all sides, defied expectations by not only beating back its attackers, but also fundamentally reordering the Middle East. This triumph showed a level of social cohesion and patriotic dedication long unseen elsewhere in the West. At the same time, the country found itself a target of bogus accusations aimed ultimately at delegitimizing any free country’s resistance to a barbarian onslaught.

The Course of the War
Let us start not in Gaza, but with what was Israel’s more formidable foe to the north. Hezbollah’s arsenal of hundreds of thousands of missiles, amassed in southern Lebanon over two decades under the indifferent eyes of UN peacekeepers, was a Damocles’ sword over Israel’s head. Pre-war scenarios envisioned thousands of Israeli fatalities in a confrontation with Iran’s leading proxy force. Yet none of these scenarios came to fruition. Now Hezbollah is in tatters, the feckless peacekeepers are on their way out, and Lebanon’s president is publicly talking about peace with the Jewish state. In the process, Israel eliminated numerous senior terrorists who had been wanted for decades by the U.S. for their role in the mass murder of Americans. Despite the large bounties the U.S. put on their heads, no one could touch them: until Israel did. No other ally in recent memory has avenged attacks on Americans in such a manner.

Now, let’s turn east. Before the war, Iran was on the final lap of its decades-long race toward nuclear weapons, which would put it in a position to extort not just Israel, but the whole world. For decades, international affairs and security experts confidently opined that Israel lacked a serious military option against Iran’s nuclear program and that attacking Iran would unleash what even many on the right predicted would be “World War III.” Instead, Israel broke the illusion of Iranian invulnerability and set the weapons program back by years. In the process, it did not suffer a single military casualty.

The attack on Iran’s nuclear sites forged a historic new military partnership between Israel and the United States. In previous conflicts, the U.S. got bogged down with cumbersome and ineffective “coalitions of the willing.” With Israel, America had a one-state “coalition of the able,” which did most of the heavy lifting against the Islamic Republic (and its Houthi partners). This let the U.S. administer the final blow without putting a single soldier on the ground.

In the year leading up to Oct. 7, 2023, Israel faced a serious internal challenge as proposals for judicial reform led to divisive protests, funded in part by the Biden administration. Some air force pilots dramatically, but it turns out not sincerely, threatened not to defend the country. Social critics (and perhaps Hamas) read too much into this spectacle, which was really a melodramatic family quarrel. Israeli society came together with an unbelievable cohesion from the first day of the war to the last. Responses to call-up for reserve duty ran to 150 percent in the first days of the war. Even two years later, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers with jobs and families called up for hundreds of days, morale and participation remained extremely high.

Israel called up 360,000 reservists at the peak of the war. Yet there has been no large-scale draft evasion and shockingly little grumbling. The heroism, dedication, maturity, and sensitivity of nineteen and twenty-year old recruits stunned even old-timers who have seen their share of wars. The public weathered regular rocket barrages from Gaza and Lebanon, and more terrifying missile attacks from Iran and Yemen, with sangfroid.

What’s even more stunning is that throughout this two-year period, Israel’s fertility rate didn’t waver—in fact, there was a baby boom. Israel has the highest fertility rate in the West, with an average of 2.5 children per woman (more than three if counting only religious women), higher than any other OECD country.

There is a lesson here. Israel serves as an ideal ally for the United States and a role model to America’s treaty alliance partners. Israel mobilized more troops for active duty in this war than the combined mobilization potential of the United Kingdom, France, and a number of other NATO allies. America has spent untold billions on the conflict in Ukraine, which still has not introduced general conscription for eighteen-year-olds (though older cohorts are drafted), afraid the public would not bear it. America has troops deployed to Europe and Asia for countries that may not be willing to fight for themselves. On the other hand, Israel has taken on dedicated enemies of America, like Hezbollah and Iran, singlehandedly.

Israel fought for two years because it realized after October 7th that it could no longer survive surrounded by heavily armed Iranian proxies. It has now destroyed Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” and instead is in peace negotiations with the former Iranian satrapies of Syria and Lebanon. This is the reason President Trump recently called Netanyahu “one of the greatest wartime leaders.”

'Strange to see intellectuals supporting Hamas': Boris Johnson speaks on Palestinian recognition

In a direct attack on the BBC and Britain's recognition of Palestine, former British prime minister Boris Johnson said it was "strange to see intellectuals supporting Hamas."

During a European Jewish Association conference (EJA) in Krakow, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sharply criticized the lack of political leadership in the West, condemned the BBC’s coverage, and called the Labour Party's decision to recognize a Palestinian state "a mistake driven by internal pressure."

The discussion opened on a somber note by EJA chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin, who declared that "this is the worst time for Jews since World War II." Rabbi Margolin noted that recent surveys show that about 20% of Europeans blame Jews for the war in Gaza. "Jews are afraid to live in Europe," he said.

Rabbi Margolin emphasized that all strategic programs, definitions (such as the IHRA definition), and the appointment of envoys to combat antisemitism have resulted in "zero impact" due to the lack of implemenation.

Johnson, who joined the discussion, agreed with the severity of the situation. "It's very sad to see this rising," he said. "Politicians must show leadership... it's not just a matter of enforcement against people who are violent toward Jews."

Criticism of the left and the BBC
Johnson expressed astonishment at what he called a "strange paradox" in Western politics. "It is sad and surprising to see a large number of middle-class intellectuals wearing keffiyehs, marching in the streets of London, and calling for Israel to be wiped off the map," he said.

His finger was also pointed at the media, particularly the BBC. When one of the participants asked about bias in the British broadcasting corporation, Johnson replied that "they made a corporate decision to cover the Gaza conflict in a certain way. I think it was very sad, and I think it caused huge damage."

Johnson urged political leaders "to tell the truth" about the difference between Israel and Hamas, "an organization that still holds to its charter calling for the destruction of Israel."

PM Netanyahu with US Senator Lindsey Graham© GPO/Haim Zach

Senator Lindsey Graham is considered to be one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress. It’s difficult to imagine why. In speaking to the Jerusalem Post at the recent Republican Jewish Coalition summit, Graham trotted out the old two-state solution from its well-earned grave, dusted it off, and insisted that without it, Israel has no sustainable future.

"Being pro-Israel means telling hard truths," said Graham. "The only path that keeps Israel Jewish and democratic is a two-state framework, when the conditions are real. That is the reality friends should say out loud."

Graham claims to be a friend to Israel. But what kind of a friend tells Israel it must give up land, hand it over to bad people, and let them move in and rule it? Does Graham have a God complex? Because God Himself does not seem to have endorsed this plan. God granted that land to the Jews, not to anyone to else, and most especially not to the bestial neighbors.

Therefore, Senator, speaking between friends, I have questions:

What right do you have, Lindsey Graham?

What right do you have to carve up our land and give it away to our enemies—speaking of it so matter-of-factly, as if it were a foregone conclusion, telling us that the only way to get peace is to give away our ancestral lands to the baby-killers who burned, beheaded, and raped our people?

Of what faith are you that you would take the Holy Land away from us? That you would separate the Jews from Judea?"

But apparently, the good senator doesn’t think of himself in this way, as a thief. He has ideas! "Hamas must be gone as a governing and fighting force,” said Graham. “Then you put Gaza in the hands of Arabs who do not want to kill all the Jews—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. They reconstruct Gaza. They change the school system so it does not glorify killing Jews. You devolve authority based on performance. If they cannot meet the metrics, they do not get the power. Meanwhile, Israel gets new security boundaries and the right to act."

How lucky is Graham to have insider information. He knows which Arabs wish to kill all the Jews and which do not. He also believes that world opinion trumps Israel’s, even when it renders Jews unsafe.
“If you want to marginalize the Jewish state, go down that road,” says Graham. “It will do more damage to Israel’s future than any bomb Iran could ever build. You would lose support here in America, and you would isolate Israel from the world.”

Lindsey Graham is smart. He knows that there are a whole lot of Muslims. For some reason he thinks this means that Israel has to let them move in. “There are a billion Muslims. If you imagine a new Middle East with no Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, you are living in a dream world,” says Graham.

In playing the numbers game, Graham somehow misses the fact that there are 22 Muslim Arab states in the region. He wants the Jews to also give them eastern Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. But do they have to live in these places? Is there no arable land left in any of those 22 Arab states where Israel’s nasty neighbors might reasonably reside alongside other Muslims who speak their language and share their culture?

Senator Lindsey Graham professes to be a Baptist and a born-again Christian. How then does he simply ignore the fact that God gave Israel to the Jews? Graham postures as Israel's ally, yet wishes us to accept terrorists as our eternal neighbors and relinquish our ancestral lands to them.

Is this your idea of turning the other cheek, Lindsey Graham?

If so, fine—turn yours if you must, but please, spare the Jews. That doctrine is part of your faith, not ours.

Our Talmud says something else altogether: "If someone is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first."

For us, self-defense is not optional—it's a sacred imperative.

Coming next week, IY"H: JD Vance on the sovereignty bill.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Fac Ut Fiat: A secular update to Pascal's Wager

(Note: As I am writing my philosophy book, this short chapter ended up on the cutting room floor. So I’m publishing it here.)

Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes’ formula stood for centuries as philosophy’s bedrock, the one truth doubt couldn’t shake. Even if an evil demon deceives you about everything else, the act of thinking proves something exists to be deceived.

Then the simulation hypothesis arrived. We could all be characters in a giant computer simulation and we wouldn’t know it. Our instinct that we are even thinking is no longer solid. We might be an unimportant subroutine.

This is where most people either spiral into nihilism or retreat into unprovable faith. If we can’t know base reality, then either nothing matters or we must believe in something bigger than us without evidence. Life itself is otherwise meaningless.

But there’s a third option.

We don’t need faith for life to have meaning. We can create meaning.

We can act morally. We can improve the lives of others. We can help the helpless.

We create meaning by walking values when forces clash. Every time we choose to align with values over instinct and reflex, we are creating a more moral world. We are authoring significance that wouldn’t exist without our conscious intervention.

Meaning isn’t something you discover or prove. It’s something you create through moral action with other people.

Create meaning and you change from an isolated observer into an active creator of our world.

Descartes could not go past a world where only he exists and he cannot know anything else. But we are not passive observers of life. We are not chained in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows. We have agency to act, to create.

This inverts Descartes from cogito ergo sum to fac ut fiat. Do, and through the doing, it becomes.

When we perform actions, it doesn’t only change our world - it changes us. If we choose to tell the truth, then we are more likely to tell the truth in the future. When we go against our nature to help someone, it is easier to make that same choice the next time. Even if we are in a simulation, we are not non-playing characters - we are more like self-learning AIs that behave in a probabilistic way. And we can change our own selves.

Choosing values to override instincts is what separates us from other creations. That override, that moment when you choose value even though it costs you, is what makes you more than mere code. Not because you’re free from deterministic forces, but because you can override those forces when they misalign with values. The capacity for acting morally creates meaning. And the meaning you create through consistent choosing of values in your relationships, the trust you build through truth-telling, the dignity you honor through respect for others, are all experientially undeniable regardless of substrate.

Pascal’s Wager, Rewired

Pascal’s Wager argued that belief in God is the rational choice even without proof. The upside of belief if God exists is huge, the downside is small. And if God doesn’t exist, belief doesn’t hurt you. So choose to believe.

We are updating that wager for anyone who ever doubted whether anything matters, no God required.

You might not be able to prove base reality. But you have a choice: nihilism or a life with meaning?

There is no need for faith in this derech wager. You are choosing to make the life you are in, simulated or not, meaningful. The upside is huge. You are helping to create a better world, real or not.

There is no downside.

The feeling of making a difference is real. The shared joy of being in a relationship based on respect is real. It is something that didn’t exist before you made your decision to act morally. This is true even in a simulation.

The wager isn’t hypothetical. You’re already in it. Every day you’re choosing whether to choose values or let reflex win. The question isn’t “should I start?” It’s “given that I’m already creating or destroying meaning with every choice, will I optimize for meaning?”

If you act as if nothing matters, you are right. If you act as if only you matter, you are right. If you act as if everyone matters, you are right again. That’s how you create your world.

Fac ut fiat. Do so it becomes.

Do, and through the doing, meaning becomes real.

Be the creator of your world.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

For most of modern history, Jews could find shelter in at least one ideological home. When the Right turned against them, the liberal Left offered refuge. When the Left radicalized, conservatives defended Israel as a moral cause. Even amid hostility, there was usually a countercurrent of empathy somewhere—a political camp that saw antisemitism as civilizational decay.

That equilibrium has broken.

Antisemitism now thrives simultaneously on the Left, the Right, and, most disturbingly, in the exhausted center. It no longer needs ideology; it functions as a universal solvent, binding otherwise incompatible movements and manipulating moderates through fear and shame. Each faction rationalizes its version differently, yet all converge on the same outcome: Jews are once again isolated, and defending them has become a thankless act across the political spectrum.

The modern Left built its moral identity on solidarity with the oppressed. But in a political culture obsessed with oppressor–oppressed binaries, complexity is betrayal. Israel’s success as a democratic, self-defending Jewish state violates the purity test.

For the activist Left, the answer is to recast Jews as oppressors. For the moderate Left, the temptation is to avoid conflict in the name of unity. “Yes, globalizing the Intifada sounds extreme,” they say, “but they come from righteous anger.” Confronting antisemitism would fracture the coalition, so it is rationalized away.

This dynamic gives the extremists power far beyond their numbers. They set the moral tone; the moderates absorb it. In the name of keeping the Big Tent intact, progressives surrender control of the conversation to their most radical members. The antisemites set the agenda for the entire movement. And every time they do, the boundaries shift further leftward.

Opposing antisemitism becomes a mark of disloyalty—a signal that one is “not truly progressive.” The result is ideological capture: a movement once grounded in empathy now treats Jewish self-defense as heresy.

On the populist or nationalist far-Right, antisemitism satisfies a different need. Conspiracy offers coherence amid cultural upheaval. Jews become symbols of global manipulation, moral decay, or elite cosmopolitanism—everything that threatens the imagined purity of the nation.

Here too, the extremists drive the conversation. Their numbers are small, but their passion—and their willingness to police purity—give them disproportionate influence. Many moderate conservatives, fearful of dividing their base, learn the same survival instinct as the Left: don’t challenge your own radicals. We saw this only this week with the Heritage Foundation defending platforming neo-Nazi antisemites with the excuse that the Left is a worse enemy.

Thus antisemitism becomes not just tolerated, but useful. It serves as an identity signal: who is “with us” and who is “with them.” To denounce it is to side with the media, academia, or “global elites”—all enemies in the populist imagination.

Like their counterparts on the Left, the moderate Right has been captured by the logic of fear. They justify silence as pragmatism, but every silence moves the Overton window closer to the abyss.

What we haven't been discussing is the Center.

If the Left moralizes antisemitism and the Right mythologizes it, the center normalizes it through paralysis. Centrist antisemitism isn’t driven by hate, but by terror of being seen as partisan.

In a polarized world, defending Jews has been redefined as taking sides. Condemn Leftist antisemitism and you’re branded a right-wing Zionist. Condemn far-Right antisemitism and you’re demonized as an enemy power-hungry globalist.

Both poles exploit this dynamic deliberately. Antisemitism becomes a bipartisan trap—a loyalty test that drags the center toward silence. Each side accuses defenders of Jews of being agents of the other. And so the most ethical act—standing up for truth and decency—becomes politically suicidal in each camp.

But it is worse than that. Otherwise principled centrists are exhausted by the battles that they want to fight. The battle against antisemitism is not considered as important as the others, and they don't want to waste political capital on it. And, latent antisemitism prompts them to think that the Jews are powerful and can defend themselves - they don't need the Centrists to defend them, better to use limited outrage at things that they think are truly outrageous.

The result is a moral vacuum filled by noise. The extremists dominate the conversation, moderates retreat, and the algorithms reward the screamers. It isn’t a steady process - it is logarithmic. Each cycle of cowardice makes the next outburst of hatred louder and more normalized.

Across the spectrum, antisemitism now functions as a moral tollbooth: you can oppose it only by paying a reputational price. To speak out is to invite accusations of betrayal—from your allies, not your enemies.

This inversion is new. In earlier eras, antisemitism discredited the extremist; today, it defending Jews discredits the moderate. The reward structure has reversed: the less you say, the safer you are.

That is why the worst may not be behind us but ahead. As extremists continue to set the agenda, polarization deepens, institutions bend to intimidation, and moral fatigue becomes apathy. The slope steepens with every news cycle.

We are no longer watching a slow march of antisemitism. We are living through its acceleration phase. The catastrophe is much closer than we realize.

Antisemitism was once the measure of a society’s sanity. Now it is the glue of its madness, and in fact has become a political force on its own that transcends the slogans and pseudo-principles that each side spouts. It is a useful tool not only against Jews but a weapon against anyone who opposes antisemitism.

The Left wields it to prove anti-imperialist authenticity. The Right brandishes it to prove nationalist loyalty. The Center treats it as something to be strategically ignored, not a danger to be confronted.

The Jews, as ever, are the first to feel the tremors—but not the last to be buried by the coming earthquake.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Yes, I think she's antisemitic

Last year the BBC invited popular Egyptian commentator Hind al-Dawi on their Arabic channel, even though she had a history of antisemitic statements. She denied any antisemitsm.

Here is what she said this week on Cairo Talk:

Media personality Hind Al-Dawi stated that Zionist thought and Christian Zionism form a central axis in the orientations of a large number of American politicians who believe that Israel is a gift from God to the peoples of America and the West, and that supporting it is a religious duty that achieves God's satisfaction. She explained that this thought has been prevalent in the United States since the first to fourth European migrations, where the migrants adopted a new Protestant doctrine that views God's promise to Abraham in the Torah regarding the land of Canaan.

She added, during an episode of the program "Cairo Talk," broadcast on the "Cairo and People" satellite channel, that the Torah texts did not explicitly mention the Jews but spoke of Abraham's descendants, meaning that the Holy Land belongs to all his offspring, including the Arabs and the original Children of Israel. She pointed out that the texts on which this thought is based were written after the return from the Babylonian exile and are not original, confirming that the real problem began with the establishment of Israel in 1947, when many Westerners considered their support for it a form of religious worship.

She's obsessed with Israel and Jews. Last week she said:

Hind Al-Dawi added, during the presentation of the “Cairo Talk” program, broadcast on the “Cairo and People” channel, that Israel has no history, geography, or antiquities to claim that it is collecting money to preserve what it calls “Israeli antiquities” in the Palestinian territories, stressing that reality proves that not a single stone or coin has been found in the Palestinian territories to confirm the existence of an ancient Israeli kingdom, adding: “Israel, despite its claim of existence for more than two thousand years, has not been able to obtain any archaeological evidence to prove its right to this land.”

She's apparently quite popular - probably for her bizarre antisemitism.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/04 Links Pt2: The horseshoe politics of America is coming for the Jews; Melanie Phillips: New York's fateful choice; BBC’s bias ‘pushed Hamas lies around the world’

From Ian:

The "Jews" Are a Proxy for a Bigger Political Fight over the American Future

Since Oct. 7, 2023, American Jews have found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of the political left and the political right, between progressive internationalists and extreme isolationists.

On the left, antisemitism takes the form of anti-Zionism. Universities that style themselves champions of diversity now host chants for Israel's eradication. Encampments celebrating Hamas set the moral tone. When mobs target Jewish students, administrators avert their eyes and invoke "free speech." Yet the same administrators spring into action when non-Jewish groups suffer even a "microaggression."

On the right, Tucker Carlson has updated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the 21st century. He elevated the podcaster Darryl Cooper to "the best and most honest popular historian in the U.S." Cooper trivializes the Holocaust as a bureaucratic mishap and depicts Winston Churchill as the agent of rich Jews. World War II becomes the first in a series of misguided American interventions abroad - engineered, ultimately, by Jews.

Israel has always carried a special symbolic weight in America. From the beginning, Americans cast their self-understanding in Israel's image. The Puritans saw themselves as Israelites crossing the Red Sea. When Americans talk about Israel, they are often talking about themselves. Evangelicals still see in Israel a covenantal twin.

Progressives give more attention to Israel than to any other foreign nation, casting Israelis as "white colonizers" and Palestinians as "oppressed people." Yet Israel is not a "white" society. Its Jewish population includes, among others, Yemenite and Ethiopian communities - unmistakably people of color. Their very presence highlights the absurdity of the racial binary on which the progressive coalition depends.

Israel is the archetypal nation-state: God, people, land. Covenant and borders. Israel's miraculous rebirth, and its power and flourishing - despite the destruction of European Jewry, and its multiple wars for survival - stir American nationalism. The very existence of the Jewish state and the excitement it provokes in America shatters the dream of a post-national, multicultural world run by a global managerial elite.

Carlson and progressives are firing at the same target: the bond between America and Israel. To sever it is to rewrite the American story. Arguments about Israel are, at bottom, arguments about America. To be for or against Israel is to choose among competing visions of the American future. When Trump embraces Netanyahu while waving off Carlson, he is not just setting Middle East policy - he is declaring who America is.

Melanie Phillips: New York's fateful choice

I left New York last night as the city braced itself for a fateful decision. Today it votes for a new mayor, and the front runner is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani is an individual who believes Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state and who doesn’t see anything wrong with chanting to “globalise the intifada”.

He has claimed that the Israelis are behind acts of violence committed by the New York Police Department — a riff on the ancient antisemitic trope that the Jews are responsible for problems that have nothing to do with them.

His pledge to shut down the NYPD’s strategic response group, which broke up the violent anti-Israel protests at Columbia university, suggests that he won’t protect New York’s Jews against the tsunami of antisemitism to which they are being subjected.

Less than three weeks after the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023, he was rabble-rousing on New York streets inciting the mob against Israel’s “genocide”.

Stephen Daisley: The horseshoe politics of America is coming for the Jews

Alighting on the Jews as the cause of the world’s iniquities is nothing new, but it is significant that both American leftists and rightists draw on antisemitic and anti-Zionist frames for their scorched-earth approach to contemporary politics. Rejecting the gradual reform of liberalism or conservatism, the progressives and the nationalists are as one in their conviction that the reigning order must be toppled. The systemic flaws or injustices that led them to this conclusion no longer matter as much as the zealous pursuit of political destruction.

This year-zero temperament is bound to put its ideologues, whether leftist or reactionary, on a collision course with Jews. Jewish observance and Jewish culture are bound up with ideas of creation and repair, and in the Torah as in Jewish history, destruction is almost always a source of great sadness and loss.

The Tanakh is a story of building, of establishing a people, forging kingdoms, erecting a temple, and instituting laws and customs. The defeat of the kingdoms and destruction of the temple are not cause for abandoning the commandments but the consequence of not hewing to them.

Burning everything to the ground is a punishment, not a plan of action. Destruction is reserved to God, which is why the Aleinu prays for the Lord to obliterate idols and remove false Gods, while it reserves to mankind the duty of tikkun olam — perfecting the world. But the prayer doesn’t stop there. It adds ‘be-malchut Shaddai’, rendering the full phrase as ‘perfecting the world under the sovereignty [or kingdom] of the Almighty’.

That’s the rub. Jewish text and tradition teach an obligation to repair this earthly realm so that it conforms to the designs of the Almighty, not the passing preferences of man. Obligation is exactly what the revolutionaries of left and right are furiously trying to shake off. Obligation constrains and they want to be free to remake the world in their own image and according to their ideological impulses.

There is an angry messianism spreading across American politics, and perhaps our own soon, too. On left and right, among those of all faiths and the fiercely faithless, a zeal to cleanse, purge, smash and bring down — to destroy to save — is taking hold. The world is too defiled to be conserved or reformed. The only salvation lies in smouldering ruins. The tables of the temple must be overturned, and many a self-appointed saviour is only too keen to volunteer.

For those who yearn to destroy, the people of the book and of the laws are a constant reminder of men’s obligations to creation and its perfection. However strong the will to power, there are limits temporal and divine. Those who demolish in spite will be left with only spite for building blocks.

Seth Mandel: Why the Two Parties Have Diverged on Fighting Anti-Semitism

The reason this reaction is important is because the fight against anti-Semitism is a long one. (It’s not called “the world’s oldest hatred” for nothing.) The Labour Party learned the hard way that it could rid itself of Jeremy Corbyn but that would not cure its Corbynism—and it now has no serious internal mechanism to do so.

The Democrats risk falling into a similar trap. The RJC is part of the Republican Party’s immune system. But the Democratic Party was for so long able to take Jewish support for granted that its own partisan Jewish infrastructure atrophied. It had completely let down its guard. Republicans, meanwhile, are benefiting from the fact that they had to build something—arguably beginning in the 1980s—that would be a specifically Jewish part of the party’s organizational world and could withstand resistance from existing groups. Once it had a foothold, it would have the energy of a start-up not a legacy institution.

Start-ups, of course, have their own weaknesses. But at the moment, that start-up energy enables the wider conservative world to multitask. And it’s why those who claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a “distraction” are, for the moment, losing that argument.