Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 02, 2026

02/02 Links Pt2: Bondi A minute-by-minute account of Australia’s worst terrorist attack; Anti-Jewish hate crimes up 182% in New York City in January; Avdija named NBA All-Star, a first for an Israeli

From Ian:

David Collier: The BBC Sides With the BDS Agenda

The Extremists Within the “Minor” NGO
Both the BBC’s legitimisation of the UNHRC, and the whitewashing of the SPSC were inexcusable. This leaves the article’s remaining credibility resting almost entirely on Uplift, the minor NGO which commissioned the legal report.

Uplift is not a neutral or detached actor either. A brief review of some of its personnel highlights serious concerns. Its Digital Content Manager, Oliver Goulden, also serves as a trustee of Take One Action, an organisation with a documented history of supporting BDS initiatives, including campaigning alongside Mick Napier’s group, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Other figures associated with Uplift reinforce the same pattern. Lauren Macdonald, the group’s Lead Stop Rosebank Campaigner, maintains public timelines containing demonstrably inaccurate and demonising claims about Israel that are entirely unrelated to the Rosebank project. Meanwhile, Uplift’s Head of Strategic Communications, Tamasin Cave, previously led Spinwatch, a research group with a longstanding fixation on Zionism and lobbying, alongside the conspiracy theorist David Miller. Cave was a director of “Public Interest Investigations” the legal entity behind both Spinwatch and Powerbase, and her footprint is still visible in numerous documents focused on pro-Israeli lobby groups.

Eddy Quekett, Uplift’s Social Media Officer, has posted imagery containing the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“. The image incorporated a “Friends of Al Aqsa” (FoA) Palestinian flag. Friends of al Aqsa is a hard-line Islamist organisation led by Ismail Patel, and opposed to many of the fundamental freedoms taken for granted in the West. FoA seeks Islamist control over Jerusalem. This post has nothing to do with climate issues. It was a straightforward call for the destruction of Israel.

At this point the final pillar collapses. This is not a collection of disinterested experts raising a narrow legal concern. It is a network of highly politicised climate activists with a clear and established record of engagement in anti-Zionist campaigning. Treating their claims as though they carry inherent national news value, without disclosing that background, materially misleads the audience.

The undeniable pattern at BBC News
British Jews have seen it all from the BBC:
Repeated attempts to rewrite Holocaust history.
The shifting of blame onto British Jews for the violence directed at them.
The sanitisation of Hamas operatives by presenting them as medical staff.
The production of a documentary that concealed the Hamas ties of its central figure.
The creation of misleading reports about Israeli military actions in Gaza.
The reframing of an errant Islamic Jihad rocket into an Israeli strike on a hospital.
The use of Iranian IRGC-backed figures as impartial media sources.
The presentation of children with underlying illnesses as starving victims of famine.
The creation of a flagship “BBC Verify” populated by hacks spreading false claims about Israel.

The situation is so hostile that the Jews left working in the BBC village have become targets of internal campaigns to smear them and force them out.

There is an undeniable pattern here. This is a one-way traffic pattern which demonises the Jewish state, acts as a mouthpiece for terrorist factions, invents stories, revises Holocaust history, and invariably places Jewish people as hostile actors who incite whatever violence befalls them.

Yet in some respects, this latest article is even more revealing than those earlier institutional failures.

Creating a BDS narrative
First, a non-story is elevated into national news. Then, institutional authority is imported through an unqualified reference to the UN. Finally, activist groups are presented without disclosing information that would materially affect how readers assess their claims.

The result is a familiar pattern: activist lawfare against Israel, repackaged through climate discourse and laundered through respectable-sounding institutions.

But this is taking place on the BBC website, not in some fringe student-led magazine.

The BBC will respond by claiming it has placed dissenting voices inside the article, but this is a false position. The BBC does not need to explicitly endorse boycotts or anti-Israel campaigns. It achieves the same effect by deciding which claims deserve oxygen, and by stripping away the context that would allow audiences to judge those claims critically.

What the BBC has done here is elevate the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign into a conversation for the day.

This is not journalism exposing power. It is journalism amplifying it – selectively, predictably, and at Israel’s expense.

Jewish groups warn of ‘agenda-driven’ anti-Israel programming at US universities

There is a “disturbing” pattern on U.S. college campuses of academic programming that prioritizes political, “agenda-driven” activism over scholarship, according to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and the American Jewish Medical Association.

In a joint statement issued on Monday, the organizations cited a January speaker series at Harvard Medical School focused on Gaza and an upcoming “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University.

“When Boston University lends its name and resources to a slate of speakers who minimize the scope of antisemitism and spin the Oct. 7 massacre as a moral indictment of Israel and its supporters in the Jewish community, it suggests university support for rhetoric that targets the identity and safety of Jewish students,” the organizations stated.

Jewish student leaders at BU told CAMERA that they fear for their safety, concerns echoed by the campus Hillel chapter. A university working group formed after Oct. 7 found Jewish and Israeli students had been targeted by aggression and cited insufficient protections.

Last year, Douglas Hauer-Gilad, an adjunct professor, said he resigned from Boston University’s law school after facing hostility for being Israeli and opposing anti-Jewish rhetoric.

A member of BU Students for Israel stated that the conference reflects a broader trend on campus.

“After everything that has happened on campus this year, it’s hard not to see this conference as part of a pattern,” he said. “Jewish students are repeatedly told these events are ‘academic,’ even when the rhetoric involved mirrors the hostility we experience day to day.”

Bar-Ilan University to award Jonathan Sacks Prize to historian Deborah Lipstadt

Professor and Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism from 2022 to 2025, is set to receive Bar-Ilan University’s 2026 Jonathan Sacks Institute Prize for Outstanding Achievement as a Public Intellectual.

The award, established by the Gewurz family of Montreal in memory of Samuel Gewurz, honors figures whose work advances the ideas and moral vision of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, who died in 2020.

It comes with $32,500, which will be presented to Lipstadt at a Bar-Ilan ceremony in May, where the 78-year-old is slated to deliver a public lecture titled “Antisemitism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”

“Professor Lipstadt exemplifies the rare combination of intellectual rigor, moral courage, and public engagement that Rabbi Sacks so deeply admired,” said Jonathan Rynhold, professor and academic director of the Jonathan Sacks Institute. “Her work has shaped global discourse on antisemitism, truth and democratic resilience at a moment when these issues are more urgent than ever.”

Professor Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that “Lipstadt’s work reminds us that standing up for truth requires courage, clarity and persistence.”

Lipstadt, a longtime Emory University professor, is known for her successful legal defense against British Holocaust-denier David Irving. In the announcement from the university, Bar-Ilan highlighted her books Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and Antisemitism: Here and Now.

“I have been blessed to receive many honors in my life,” Lipstadt said. “But this one, to paraphrase the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, surpasses them all because of its connection with Bar-Ilan.”

02/02 Links Pt1: This ayatollah fanclub heaps shame on London; Anti-Israel, former president of Chile nominated to be next UN secretary-general; 6,000 Miles of Context: Why the U.S. Comparison Collapses in Gaza

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: This ayatollah fanclub heaps shame on London

We need to grapple with the seriousness of what happened in London on Saturday. Mobs of people sided with Islamist fanaticism. They cosied up to the killers of women. They aligned themselves, publicly and proudly, with the venal ayatollah classes who are content to lay waste to thousands of lives if it will help them to preserve their Koranic power. Rarely has the moral decay of the protesting classes been so starkly on display – a psychotic religious regime massacres thousands and these people either say, ‘But what about Israel?!’ – or worse, ‘Good’.

Saturday’s march was a funeral for moral decency. No one of good conscience, no one of sound moral standing, can be the least bit confused as to what side to take in Iran. This is a theocracy that savagely punishes women for living freely, and which ruthlessly locks up dissenters and apostates, and which has brazenly slain thousands for daring to desire freedom. If you look at this and think to yourself, ‘It’s complicated’, then you have fully vacated the realm of reason. You have made your peace with barbarism.

Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.

For how much longer will we surrender our streets to the Israel haters and the ayatollah fanclub? To the intifada-cheering middle classes and the mullah-loving Islamists? To those who think the Jewish nation fighting back against its invaders is ‘genocide’ but the mass murder of protesters by tooled-up theocrats is nothing to get worked up about? Mass solidarity with Iranians is what we need right now. The only time I want to see the flag of the Islamic Republic on the streets of London is in the minutes before someone sets it on fire.

Anti-Israel, former president of Chile nominated to be next UN secretary-general

Backed by Mexico and Brazil, Gabriel Boric, Chile’s outgoing president, nominated former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, a harsh critic of the Jewish state, to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations.

Boric, who is also anti-Israel, made the announcement on Monday. José Antonio Kast, a right-wing politician who is set to assume the Chilean presidency next month, would be unlikely to nominate Bachelet, 74, for the role.

Bachelet, who was Brazil’s president twice—from 2006-10 and 2014-18—was the first head of U.N. Women and served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

She was a frequent critic of the Jewish state, which broke ties with her office in 2020 over her decision to implement a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution mandating the publication of a blacklist of companies engaged in business in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

According to U.N. Watch, Bachelet issued 14 comments about Israel, more than any democratic country. She made the same number of statements about Syria and fewer about Iran, according to the watchdog.

Bachelet used her final hours in office to decry Israel over its denial of visas to her staff. She ignored antisemitic comments made by a member of the Human Rights Council’s commission of inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for which the commissioner later apologized.

New York Times Misleads Readers on Gaza Death Toll

Edward Wong, who covers the State Department for the New York Times, has a news article in the Feb. 2 newspaper that says "the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants."

That’s more or less standard Times language. It’s problematic in its own right, failing to disclose that the health ministry is part of the Hamas-controlled Gaza government, and using the term "combatants" instead of "Hamas terrorists."

What really caught my eye, though, was the new language in the following paragraph. It says, "A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number."

This is scraping the bottom, even by the Times’s own very low standards—relying on what an anonymous source supposedly told some other journalists. For verification, the online version of the Times article links not to anything written by "Israeli journalists" but rather a piece in the far-left British newspaper the Guardian by a former visiting scholar of Chinese literature at Peking University who "also worked in Cuba for a year," Emma Graham-Harrison. That Guardian article relies largely on the far-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose own published articles on the topic say nothing about "a senior Israeli security official." The Guardian also links to an article from the Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian, who mentions an anonymous "senior Israeli military official."

Even the Times’s "senior security official" is a vague term and could apply to a variety of figures, including political rivals of the current Israeli prime minister and disgruntled former military officials who have been ousted.

Meanwhile, the official Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on Jan. 30 to debunk the false claim that the IDF has accepted the casualty figures. "The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data," Shoshani said. "Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels." The Times didn’t share that denial with its readers.

EoZ cartoons from September (yes, I'm behind)

I have fallen way behind on posting these here. Here are some to help catch up.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Iran wants the world to adapt Sharia as enforceable international law

For decades, Muslim-majority states have learned how to use the language of international law very effectively.

They did not try to overthrow the system. They learned how to work it.

International law was supposed to be procedural and neutral. In practice it has become highly political. Technical legal mechanisms are used to achieve outcomes that would be impossible diplomatically. Israel is treated as a permanent defendant while regimes with far worse records often escape sustained scrutiny.

The International Criminal Court provides one clear example. During negotiations over the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Arab states successfully inserted language that elevated voluntary civilian settlement activity into a specific war crime. That clause had only one real-world target. It converted a territorial dispute into a criminal offense and built a specifically anti-Israel law directly into what is supposed to be an impartial, universal statute.

The same pattern appears at the International Court of Justice. Friendly governments repeatedly request advisory opinions designed to shape doctrine against Israel. Each case helps construct new “international law” precedents while Israel is disproportionately cast as the accused. Meanwhile, mass slaughter in places like Syria or Yemen rarely generates comparable legal creativity. Procedure has become politics carried out in robes.

Muslim states followed a different strategy for human rights law, one meant to inoculate them from scrutiny. When accused of discrimination against women, restrictions on speech, or punishment for apostasy, they argued that Western standards did not reflect their values. Their response was the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1990.

The Cairo Declaration subordinates every right to Sharia. Speech, religion, family law, and gender roles all operate within Islamic legal limits. That structure allowed governments to say they were not violating human rights. They were applying a different, culturally authentic model. The declaration functioned as a shield against outside criticism.

For decades, that seemed to be the whole point. Iran is now proposing to turn that shield into a weapon.

A recent Persian-language paper published in Iran's Contemporary Political Studies, argues that what they call the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights should be transformed from a symbolic statement into a binding international instrument.

The authors do not simply want recognition. They want enforceability. They explicitly call for a convention or treaty with monitoring bodies, legal obligations, and coercive mechanisms. In other words, they want something that operates like existing UN human rights treaties or the ICC, where states can be investigated, judged, and penalized.

This is the critical step. They are proposing an alternative legal regime with teeth. and they admit that their target is Israel. But it would also enshrine Islamic violations of human rights allowed under Sharia law.

If that system becomes binding and enforceable at the international level, then Sharia-based governance becomes “human rights compliant” by definition. Arresting apostates, policing dress codes, jailing dissidents, and restricting speech would all fit comfortably inside the new standard. External criticism could be dismissed as illegitimate interference.

At the same time, the same system could be used aggressively. Israel could be accused of violating Islamic human rights norms, committing crimes against the Muslim community, or occupying sacred land. Legal proceedings, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure could be justified under a supposedly universal Islamic framework.

The result would be a structure that protects Islamic regimes at home while creating new legal tools to prosecute Israel abroad.

Only after you read the details do you see who is writing this.

The article comes from the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, a state-affiliated body. One of the authors, Sakineh Sadat Paad, served as an aide to President Ebrahim Raisi on “social rights and freedoms” and publicly defended the regime’s response to domestic protests. These are insiders connected to the machinery that justifies arrests, beatings, and executions.

This isn't independent scholarship by obscure academics. This is a policy concept backed by the Iranian regime.

The odds of Islamic law becoming formal international law anytime soon are close to zero, but that misses the point. Papers like this normalize the idea. Once a proposal enters academic journals and diplomatic language, it stops sounding radical. Then, in international forums, Western governments often prefer compromise to confrontation in order to avoid accusations of cultural intolerance or Islamophobia. A seemingly harmless sentence gets inserted about respecting local traditions. Later someone clarifies that those traditions include Sharia. Each small concession widens the opening.

This is how norms shift. The change comes incrementally, through language, committees, and resolutions.

The Islamists play the long game. The consequences are serious.

Iran is currently engaged in one of its harshest crackdowns in years. Protesters are imprisoned, women are punished for removing hijabs, and dissent is treated as a crime. Thousands have been detained or worse.

At the same time, regime-linked figures who have defended attacking protesters in the past are arguing that their interpretation of Sharia should become the basis for enforceable international human rights law.

A government that shoots demonstrators in the streets is proposing to police the world’s human rights compliance.

That tells you everything you need to know about how this “upgrade” would work in practice.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From RT Arabic:

A new book titled Israel: Magic, Religion, and Blood by the Egyptian writer and analyst Mohamed Aboud — an expert on Israeli affairs and professor of Hebrew language and Israeli studies at Ain Shams University — has recently been published.

The book uncovers secrets about Israeli society, which presents itself as a secular, democratic society, yet plunges into turbulent seas of the occult and religious conceptions that raise questions about the true nature of Israel.

According to Aboud, every major historical event has a bizarre interpretation in Israel. While the causes of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser's death on September 28, 1970, remain shrouded in mystery, the strangest and most astonishing narratives come from Israeli religious circles themselves, accusing Jewish religious figures of being responsible for assassinating Abdel Nasser through supernatural forces, sorcery, and black magic!

Dr. Aboud told RT that the head of the Supreme Talmudic Academy in occupied Jerusalem claims that three senior rabbis carried out the assassination of Abdel Nasser! All three belong to the Kabbalah movement, which is notorious for mastering black magic, charlatanism, and the creation of amulets and talismans.

According to the Hebrew narrative, these rabbis slaughtered an animal and brought its liver, heart, and lungs into a carefully prepared sealed room for black magic rituals. They began invoking higher powers to carry out "Jewish retribution" against Abdel Nasser. The three rabbis used the divine Hebrew names of God mentioned in a rare religious manuscript, considered the primary reference for all Jewish sorcerers.

Aboud explained that, in light of this story circulating in Israeli circles, the book Israel: Magic, Religion, and Blood aims to peel away the secular veneer surrounding the Israeli project to reach the heart of Israel. It wanders through its streets, exposes its institutions, and delves into its subconscious.

At least our secret about how we put a red string on each Iron Dome's interceptors hasn't been revealed!

The book was featured at the Cairo International Book Fair.

The blurb says the book includes::

1️⃣ Kabbalistic Roots: How incantations and names are used in contemporary politics.
2️⃣ Political Theology: Religious infiltration of state institutions and the military.
3️⃣ The Element of Blood: How war transforms into a "sacred ritual" and soldiers into "killing machines" driven by biblical texts.

"True victory is not achieved by weapons alone, but first and foremost by knowledge."

Yes, this "expert" has uncovered a Kabbalistic conspiracy so vast and to pervasive in all levels of Israel's government and military that even Israeli anti-religious media like Haaretz has no idea that it exists!

The sobering truth is that the structure behind this insanity is the same as that behind Western claims of unique Israeli evil. When it comes down to it, both the idea of Israel being run by black magic and Israel being guilty of genocide are based on the same type of thinking:

1. Israel/Jews are uniquely evil as the starting point.

2. Anything bad that happens must be viewed through that lens to figure out that the primary explanation is something done by Jews (and only Jews) with malicious intent.

3. Evidence that supports the theory is widely publicized while anything that refutes it is dismissed as part of the conspiracy.

And, as I proved, "genocide" is being presented as a conspiracy theory, just like "Kabbalistic sorcery" is.

The Western antisemitic conspiracy theories have a more respectable academic-sounding veneer, but they are exactly as ridiculous as Dr. Aboud's.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/01 Links: For Decades, Israelis Were Told There Were "Partners for Peace" in Gaza; Responsibility for Death Toll in Gaza Lies with Hamas; Why the West abandons Iran to the ayatollahs

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Genocide once meant something. Now the term is just political invective

Of the many examples of moral collapse that followed October 7, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts and fighting an enemy that used human shields. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. If the meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.

As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives. As in London and Strasbourg, so in the Hague. On Thursday, judges at the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, finished hearing a genocide case against Myanmar. Given the appalling atrocities against the Rohingya, few would dispute the verdict if the crime is confirmed. Scratch the surface, however, and trouble is brewing.

Genocide as a modern legal concept first emerged in print in Axis Rule In Occupied Europe, a 1944 book by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Crucially, it described mass violence with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Lemkin was influenced by the 1915 Armenian massacres, but it was the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews – in which 49 members of his own family were murdered – that provided the catalyst for its inclusion on the statute books.

Since 1945, only five legally-confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.

As part of the hearing this week, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying upon such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts, especially as the ICJ’s next case is against Israel.

Aggressive posts and videos of soldiers chanting bloodthirsty slogans already form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against the Jewish state. Are these really evidence of genocidal intent in an army that warns civilians to flee before it attacks? The Myanmar precedent may lead judges – who are human, after all – to give such things undue weight.

Similarly, NGOs giving evidence against Myanmar included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which have a well-established bias against Israel. None of this necessarily invalidates the case. But it reveals the weakness of the court.

Ben-Dror Yemini: Responsibility for Death Toll in Gaza Lies with Hamas

Recently, multiple media outlets reported that unnamed sources within the IDF were inclined to accept Hamas's casualty figures from Gaza.

But who exactly were these sources? I repeatedly contacted the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and was told: "That's not our position."

The IDF spokesperson to the foreign media, Nadav Shoshani, said: "The details published do not reflect the official data of the IDF."

An investigation reveals that, indeed, an IDF source did say something in a background briefing. But he wasn't an authorized spokesperson.

He didn't intend for his words to be understood the way they were. And his comments were twisted and distorted. But the damage? Enormous.

Hamas Health Ministry figures on the numbers of dead in Gaza identify no Hamas fighters, no deaths from natural causes, or those killed by rockets misfired by Gaza terror groups. They do show that the majority are men of combat age.

Hamas alone is to blame. It is Hamas that for years incited genocide against Jews. It is Hamas that launched a murderous rampage on Oct. 7.

The silence of the graveyard: Why the West abandons Iran to the ayatollahs

In January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out what may prove to be one of the largest episodes of state violence against its own population in modern history. Reports from within the Ministry of Health and independent monitors suggest that on the nights of January 8 and 9 alone, the death toll exceeded 30,000.

It was a methodical, ruthless slaughter of students, workers, and women whose only crime was a refusal to submit to theocratic cruelty. The regime plunged the country into digital darkness to shroud the carnage, yet the subsequent mass executions have been met in the Western public sphere with a curious, stifled silence.

Contrast this with the totalizing mobilization surrounding Gaza – a cause that has dominated Western activism, academia, and media ecosystems for over two decades. Rather than a mere shortage of facts, this staggering disparity represents an active ideological filter that renders certain atrocities invisible.

The Foucault ghost and the red-green alliance
The roots of this silence run deep into the bedrock of French Theory. When Michel Foucault traveled to Tehran in 1978, he famously romanticized the Islamic Revolution as a “political spirituality” that could challenge Western modernity. That intellectual legacy persists today.

Modern activists have inherited a neo-Marxist framework that has replaced the old class struggle with a rigid hierarchy of identity groups. In this moral cartography, social legitimacy is derived from one’s place in the “Oppression Olympics.” Because the Iranian regime frames itself as an opponent of the West – the source of all evil in the world – its crimes are “decoded” or contextualized away. To stand with the Iranian people would require activists to admit that an anti-Western regime can be a totalitarian engine of slaughter. For many, that admission is ideologically intolerable.

London Palestine rally says murdering thousands of Iranians is the "right side of history"

Yesterday there was one of the regular anti-Israel rallies in central London. But at the demonstration we see these signs:

That particular sign with Ayatollah Khamenei saying "Choose the right side of history" was created by the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The irony of that name in light of the murder of thousands of Iranian protesters is almost too much to bear. They are the real resistance, but the "Resistance by any means necessary" signs only apply to those who repress freedom.

Not coincidentally, Khamenei wrote an antisemitic letter to student protesters in 2024 congratulating them on joining the "resistance front" by saying, "The global Zionist elite – who owns most US and European media corporations or influences them through funding and bribery – has labeled this courageous, humane resistance movement as 'terrorism'." And in the same letter he said, "As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it."

The "human rights protesters" are not bothered by this at all. I see no pushback from within the supposedly pro-peace, pro-justice, pro-Palestinian movements about being allies with the worst repressors of human rights in the world today.

Claiming to be on the right side of history and actually being there are two very different things .

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Jordanian government affiliated newspaper denies the Holocaust - and celebrates that may EU students deny it

Ad Dustour is a Jordanian newspaper that is partially owned by the Jordanian government, which means that it will never publish anything the Kingdom of Jordan disagrees with.

It regularly publishes the most vile antisemitism.

This weekend, it published an op-ed by Izzat Jaradat that calls the Holocaust a myth.

The Holocaust narratives, or the Jewish Holocaust, have become one of the founding myths of the Zionist movement as a means of blackmail under the banner of “anti-Semitism,” and anyone who criticizes Israel, its practices, and its crimes is labeled an “anti-Semite.”

Global academic circles remain concerned with the bold question: How true and credible is this Holocaust that has been established as a blackmailing pretext by the Zionist movement and state?

It also discusses the UNESCO survey of EU teachers I examined recently, and celebrates that more students are denying the Holocaust in Europe.

The aforementioned UNESCO survey is considered an entry point for the return of objective research towards the truth, as the survey revealed the truth about those feelings, especially among school generations.

This isn't an extremist newspaper. This is the message the Jordanian government endorses. Because if it didn't agree, it would never be published.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/31 Links: The new Holocaust revisionism; 'Hamas planned to hold Israeli hostages for 10 years'; Gaza ‘doctor’ who slammed Israel in NY Times op-eds is Hamas colonel

From Ian:

Dave Rich: The new Holocaust revisionism

It is striking just how much these arguments, on left and right, have in common, even though they are diametrically opposed in so many ways. Mishra, for instance, seems to suggest that Holocaust memory has been used to keep the doors of western power firmly closed to outsiders. Cooper, meanwhile, believes Holocaust commemoration has flung those doors wide open, enabling mass immigration and the dilution of white, western societies. Despite these profound differences, however, both appear to share the belief that, as the international order that has shaped our world since 1945 comes apart, the status of the Holocaust in our moral and cultural imagination is central to the question of what will follow.

While establishment politicians and institutions continue to treat the Holocaust as the pivotal moral event of the 20th century, out in the discursive undergrowth ever-larger audiences increasingly seek alternative explanations for the world, and radical visions of how to remake it. In these circles, the sanctity of Holocaust commemoration is what makes it such an enticing target. “Are we closer”, Mishra writes, “to finding a replacement for the Shoah as a universal symbol of human and moral evil?”

Why this all matters ought to be obvious. The late Yehuda Bauer, one of the great scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust, warned many years ago that “a reversion back to ’normalcy’ regarding Jews requires the destruction of the Holocaust-caused attitude of sympathy”. It is not difficult to find evidence that this reversion to an antisemitic “normalcy” is occurring. Last year, the massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, following the killing of two Jews at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the shooting of two Israeli embassy employees outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC in May, were just the latest lethal incidents in a global surge of hatred that itself feels like the end of an era. Jews have been shot, stabbed, kidnapped and burnt, and synagogues and schools torched on multiple continents since the 7th October attack. Less visible is the daily grind of racist comments, slurs and exclusions that never make the news but lead Jews to shrink inwards and rethink their futures. Almost a third of all British Jews were directly targeted with antisemitic violence, harassment or abuse in 2024, according to polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.

The rise of antisemitism, conspiracy-driven populism and authoritarian demagoguery makes Holocaust commemoration more essential than ever. But there is an urgent need to rethink how it is done. The long-held fear that it would become harder to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive once the last of the survivors are no longer with us might soon be surpassed by a greater danger: that people stop thinking the Holocaust matters, not because they don’t know what happened, but because they no longer care.

Perhaps “Never Again” was always a forlorn hope. It implies an optimistic assumption of progress, as if we can leave unwanted human behaviours and attitudes in the past, when history—and the current Jewish reality—suggests the opposite is true. Still, whether the existing international order survives this crisis or not, the memory and dignity of the six million who were murdered, and the vital lessons for humanity that we take from that darkest of times, must not be sacrificed in the process.

Gal Hirsch: 'Hamas planned to hold Israeli hostages for 10 years'

Hamas planned to keep Israeli hostages for as long as a decade, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch said in an in-depth interview, describing what he called the terror group’s long game of using captives, living and dead, as strategic leverage meant to grind down Israel over years.

Hirsch, whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed on October 8, 2023, as coordinator for the captives and missing, said his own internal assessment early on pointed to a far shorter timeline than Hamas’s, yet still measured in years. “I thought it would take double,” he said. “At least four years.”

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he also disclosed that Israel repeatedly prepared covert hostage rescue missions that never took place. Some were canceled because planners doubted they could succeed, he said, and others were shelved out of concern that rescuing one captive could endanger others held nearby. “If there was doubt about success,” Hirsch said, “take them out through negotiations, even if it takes time.”

The interview came days after Israeli forces recovered the remains of police officer Ran Gvili from Gaza, a development that, according to Israeli officials and multiple reports, closed the file on those abducted on October 7, 2023, whose whereabouts remained unresolved. Hirsch recalled calling Netanyahu with the update and telling him, in English, “Mission accomplished.”

Gaza ‘doctor’ who slammed Israel in NY Times op-eds is Hamas colonel, seen in military uniform: watchdog, IDF

A Gaza doctor who slammed Israel in a pair of New York Times op-eds is a colonel with terror group Hamas, according to an Israeli watchdog group and the Israeli Defense Forces.

Hussam Abu Safyia was photographed wearing a Hamas camo military uniform while at a gathering of Hamas elites to celebrate the completion of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in 2016, according to the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor.

Safyia’s photo appeared on the Gaza Medical Services‘ Facebook page — a group overseen by the Hamas-run health ministry.

The ceremony was attended by ranking members of the brutal terror group, including Gen. Abu Obaida Al-Jarrah, Director of Military Medical Services Saeed Saoudi and National Security Forces commander Col. Naeem Al-Ghoul, according to the post.

Following Hamas’ massacre of over 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the war in Gaza, Safyia penned two screeds in the Times bashing Israel on Oct. 29, 2023, and Dec. 2, 2024.

“We are suffering and paying the price of the genocide that is happening to our people here in the northern Gaza Strip,” Safyia wrote in one op-ed.

Critics decried media giving the alleged Hamas member any ink.

“Those who platformed Abu Safyia must do some serious soul-searching, and figure out how they ended up promoting the propaganda of a literal Hamas terrorist,” NGO Monitor senior researcher Vincent Chebat said.

The Times referred to the colonel as a “pediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza” in each op-ed.

An IDF spokesman said Safyia was a ranking member of Hamas, and that the hospital was teeming with hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Neither NGO Monitor nor the IDF accused Safyia of participating in any specific terrorist acts.

01/30 Links Pt2: Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’; Stealing the Holocaust from the Jews; Yoram Hazony’s 15 Minutes

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: For U.S. Jewish Groups, There’s No Going Back to the Old Ways

No one in their right mind will ever again pay into that racket. It was, in a sense, an expression of organizational decadence, mixed with complacency. Anti-Semitism was at low tide, and instead of remembering that the tide always turns, Jewish groups believed they could afford to chip in and show solidarity with fellow “marginalized communities.”

Regardless of the merits of this thinking before October 7, it is clear now that such a strategy cannot be employed again.

So where should the money go instead? A good place to look for answers remains Jack Wertheimer’s 2024 Mosaic essay on the American Jewish community’s post-October 7 philanthropy, since the overall trends remain the same even if the dollar figures have changed since then.

One area Jewish donors have turned to is groups that do nothing more than seek to combat anti-Semitism in the public square. One of Wertheimer’s sources in the philanthropy world told him: “The eyes of funders are now open in new ways; anti-Zionism is well-funded and pervasive in certain sectors. For the first time, funders realize how much those ideas have captured institutions.”

Indeed, this has only become more apparent since the essay’s publication. Anti-Zionism, it turned out, has been molded into a full-fledged ideology, more prevalent on the left than the right. That ideology has little or nothing to do with what Zionism actually is; instead, it’s a movement that sets itself in opposition to Zionists. That is, rather than participate in a debate over Zionism, anti-Zionism is a mercenary ideology that targets people who identify as Zionists—and, crucially, people the anti-Zionists accuse of harboring Zionism in their hearts.

What that means in practice is classic anti-Jewish discrimination in the professions, in academia, and the media. That’s because most Jews believe that Jews have a right to self-determination. So targeting self-identified “Zionists” is a way of targeting Jews.

Anti-Zionism is preposterously well-funded, because it has become a catchall progressive tag, and so some of the mountains of dark money set aside for progressive activism falls in the lap of any group that claims the anti-Zionist mantle. Which, at the current moment, is most of them.

So that’s one place Jewish communal resources must go toward: The battle against anti-Zionism must be joined in earnest. This also means that Jewish organizations should stop playing footsie with Jewish anti-Zionists. Even a big tent must draw the line at those who want to tear the tent down.

Andrew Fox: How academic propaganda is made

The intellectual lineage of this project is obvious: it is AirWars all over again. The same methodological sleight of hand. The same overconfidence and lack of access to genuine intelligence. The same collection of social media claims and hearsay, presented as forensic truth. AirWars gained a reputation by counting allegations as facts and treating propaganda as data, and this project repeats those errors nearly exactly. The only difference is that the flaws are now so well-documented that repeating them can only be a deliberate act.

Then there is the plan to publish via AOAV, described as “respectable.” This is simply not true. AOAV’s leadership has openly campaigned against Israel for years, including promoting the genocide hoax in Gaza, and they specialise in the kind of partisan hit jobs that are the trademark of the far left. Whilst presented as a neutral research platform, in reality it is an activist ecosystem. Publishing there does not enhance credibility: it indicates that the author knows their work would not withstand rigorous peer review by neutral military, intelligence, or legal professionals. It is a safe ideological bubble where conclusions are celebrated rather than examined.

Remove the academic jargon, and this project is extremely simple. It starts with the assumption that Israel is intentionally killing civilians. It then develops a method guaranteed to “prove” that conclusion by excluding all evidence that might challenge it. Classified intelligence is disregarded because it is inaccessible. Operational context is ignored. Hamas-controlled information is given priority. Anything that is not visible in open sources is considered non-existent. The final product is presented as objective scholarship.

This is propaganda with footnotes, but it is rare for a researcher to be so pompous and confident in his echo chamber that he explains the sleight of hand before the magic show begins. The most charitable interpretation is that its author genuinely does not understand how wars are fought, how intelligence operates, or how the law is applied in combat situations. The less charitable interpretation is that he understands perfectly well – and is counting on his audience not to. Either way, no serious person should take this work seriously. We can only thank him for revealing his hand in advance.

Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one claim: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Not a week passes without another open letter from academics – often amassing hundreds or even thousands of signatures within days – denouncing Israel in the strongest terms. Across Europe, dozens of universities have now severed ties with Israeli institutions, citing alleged complicity in genocide – or at the very least, systematic war crimes.

In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution that appeared to settle the question: the Jewish state, it declared, was guilty of the “crime of crimes”.

In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

A contrived consensus
And yet, there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived, a product of intense social pressure, ideological hectoring, and a “spiral of silence.” The IAGS resolution, for example, is not grounded in any original research and offers little substantive argumentation.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the US. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of American signatories, but only a handful in Europe – primarily in Germany and around a single London-based centre for antisemitism research.

In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on Gaza has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. The rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my view on Israel.

A spiral of silence
And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarised as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet – I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel has become so intense that many “dissidents” no longer dare to speak out.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent, as Steven Pinker notes in his book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.

I wanted to see if there was a way to break the cycle. What if people could speak honestly without risking their careers? I tested this by inviting primarily Dutch-speaking academics to share anonymous views on Israel and Gaza. What arrived was sobering – and chilling.

'Nothing Less Than Holocaust Inversion': Prominent Holocaust Scholars Denounce Israel-Bashing Nonprofit Named After Holocaust Survivor

More than 100 prominent Holocaust and genocide scholars are sounding the alarm on an "extremist" Israel-bashing nonprofit named after a Holocaust survivor who coined the term "genocide," according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Exploiting the survivor's name while accusing the Jewish state of genocide, the letter's leader said, is "nothing less than Holocaust inversion."

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, was established around 2021 without permission from its namesake's family. It has since used the late lawyer and activist's reputation to undermine Israel on the international stage, the scholars wrote ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The institute began accusing Israel of "genocide" just 10 days after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, later claiming Hamas did not commit sexual violence against Israeli civilians.

"As scholars who have written about the Holocaust or other genocides, we share your family's concern about extremists exploiting Raphael Lemkin's name to attack Israel," the experts, led by Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wrote in a letter to the Lemkin family. "Israel's counter-terror campaign in Gaza is not genocidal, either in intentions or actions. The civilian deaths there are the result of Hamas embedding itself in residential areas and using the population as human shields."

Medoff told the Free Beacon that the institute's "false accusation of genocide in Gaza" amounts to "nothing less than Holocaust inversion," adding that "the fact that extremists are exploiting Lemkin's name to do so adds insult to injury."

The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family's months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin's name, saying the institute's "policies, positions, activities, and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin's belief system." The family, with legal backing from the European Jewish Association, petitioned Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) and the state's Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations to intervene on their behalf, though the governor and state have not taken yet any action. As Free Beacon senior writer Ira Stoll reported in late 2024, a Lemkin family member said he was "totally outraged" to see his relative's name used for anti-Israel activism.

01/30 Links Pt1: UN Chief Guterres warns of UN's 'imminent financial collapse'; MSF withholds staff lists from Israel; It’s not war in Iran, it’s mass murder on a scale close to Babyn Yar

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Stop chasing after the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords

That has been a key element of the price tag the Saudis put on their joining the accords. That sounded right to an American foreign-policy establishment that continued to believe that a two-state solution was the only way to end the conflict. Of course, as Palestinians have made clear, over and over again, they have no interest in the idea if it means they’ll have to commit themselves to living in peace with a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn.

After the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and then Oct. 7, the once broad Israeli support for the concept has evaporated. Even most left-wing Israelis know that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. Acquiescing to demands for Palestinian statehood would have meant repeating the same catastrophic blunder made by the late Ariel Sharon when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, thus setting in motion the events that allowed Hamas to seize control of the coastal enclave and eventually to be able to commit the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Doing so in the far larger and more strategic areas of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) would have endangered the very existence of the state.

It’s equally true that the Saudis have no real desire to help create another failed Arab state that would, in all likelihood, be a perfect target to be taken over by Islamists—in this case, Hamas. Yet even before the Palestinians won general Arab and Muslim sympathy by launching a war on Oct. 7 with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction, the Saudis were only using the statehood issue to help deflect pressure to join the Abraham Accords.

That should serve as a reminder to Israelis and Americans not to be too disappointed by the Saudis’ decision to attempt to reclaim their status as the leader of Islamist rejectionist forces in the region, a stance that, in recent years, they surrendered to Qatar.

Would it ever have been worthwhile for Israel to have made such a grave sacrifice of its security concerns in exchange for Saudi recognition?

For Israelis, having the Saudis embrace them fully and openly as partners would have signaled the end of the Muslim world’s refusal to accept the Jewish state’s permanent place in the region. But setting up a situation where the Palestinian Authority would likely have been toppled by Hamas would have been suicidal. The scenario in which Hamas assumes control of the territories is a guarantee of nothing but another and even more bloody round of war.

As much as it’s nice to dream of a world where the region could truly be transformed into a “new Middle East,” such as the one that the late Shimon Peres dreamed of when he agreed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, 33 years later, Israelis still don’t live in such a world.

That’s why it is far better to keep such fantasies out of efforts to ensure that the Saudis remain outside of coalitions bent on Israel’s destruction. The Riyadh regime may still hope to develop its economy and needs to modernize its society to achieve that; however, it is never going to be entirely divorced from the Wahabi extremism that put their family in control of the Arabian Peninsula in the first place.

Riyadh can’t change
And so, Americans and Israelis should stop chasing after the vain hope of getting the desert kingdom to behave as if it is anything other than the Islamist regime that it has always been and likely always will be. The Saudis will always act in their own best interests, and if that lines up with a more Israel-friendly policy, then they’ll do that. And being realists and still desirous of friendly relations with the United States, there will be limits on how far they will go in terms of open hostility to Israel. But they can neither be persuaded nor bribed to give up their basic character.

It’s long past time for Washington and Jerusalem to acknowledge this fact and stop trying to pretend that Saudi Arabia is anything other than what it is. It may not be at war with Israel and may even prefer for it to, along with the United States, continue to act to deter Islamist forces that are hostile to Riyadh, even if they are no longer worried about Iran. But it’s never going to be a real friend or ally of a Jewish state.

South Africa declares Israeli chargé d’affaires persona non grata

South Africa on Friday declared Israel’s chargé d’affaires and top diplomat, Ariel Seidman, persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country within 72 hours, according to an official government statement.

South Africa’s foreign ministry, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), said it had informed the Israeli government of its decision.

South African officials said the move was based on what they described as “violations of diplomatic norms,” including the alleged use of official Israeli platforms to criticize South African leadership and a failure to notify authorities about visits by senior Israeli officials.

“These violations include the repeated use of official Israeli social media platforms to launch insulting attacks against His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, and a deliberate failure to inform DIRCO of purported visits by senior Israeli officials,” said the statement.

In response, the Israeli Foreign Ministry designated South Africa’s top diplomat in the country, Shaun Edward Byneveldt, persona non grata, saying he must leave Israel within 72 hours, and that “additional steps will be considered in due course.”

Israel responds to South Africa, declares chargé d'affaires persona non grata

Israel has declared South Africa's senior diplomatic representative, Chargé d'affaires Shaun Edward Byneveldt, persona non grata and has been given 72 hours to leave the country, as announced in a statement by the Israeli foreign affairs ministry on Friday.

The action comes in response to South Africa's earlier decision on Friday, in which it declared Israel's chargé d'affaires, Ariel Seidman, persona non grata, according to South Africa's foreign affairs ministry.

Seidman is required to depart from the country within 72 hours, the ministry said in a statement on its website.

It went on to accused Seidman of "unacceptable violations of diplomatic norms and practice which pose a direct challenge to South Africa's sovereignty."

"These violations include the repeated use of official Israeli social media platforms to launch insulting attacks against His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, and a deliberate failure to inform DIRCO (South Africa's foreign affairs ministry) of purported visits by senior Israeli officials," the ministry said.

Israel's diplomatic mission in Pretoria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Israeli foreign affairs ministry statement referred to South Africa's action against the Israeli diplomat Seidman as "false attacks on Israel in the international arena."

I found yet another academic writing - this one a chapter of a new book - written by a Jewish anti-Zionist. But this one tacitly admits something the other anti-Zionist Jews pretend isn't true: that Zionism is a part of Judaism.

The chapter of Religion, Politics and the New Materialism by Stephanie Gray has the usual dense pseudo-academic/philosophical gobbledygook:

Attention to New Materialist theories transforms how we engage with the political-material effects of religion, including the intersections of white supremacy, fossil fascism, settler colonialism, and climate catastrophe. Climate change apocalypse is both a material and a spiritual concern, especially for those left on the margins. For Judaism, what lessons can we learn from diasporic Judaism rooted in a decolonial land-based politic that would challenge a Zionist ideology that has worked to strip Judaism of its ecological imperative to be in right relationship with the land? Can a Judaism beyond Zionism provide new ways to energize discourses of political liberation, Jewish ritual and practice, and ecological relation to the earth? Here is the potentiality of a kinship that conceives new spiritual and political entanglements that in turn generate energetic possibilities through a process of teshuva, or return. This chapter draws from Jewish and and decolonial studies, to examine the world that is engaged in a genocidal war amid the inescapability of climate change, as well as the world to come, and the world as it could be, in spiritual-material terms.

Hasn't the diaspora been great for the Jews?

Gray's bio says "Stephanie Gray (they/them) ...have have been working for over a decade in grassroots organizing and non-profit consulting, with a focus on accessibility, LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion, and liberatory spiritual practices. "

She once wrote a "dvar Torah" where she found some of the parasha Matot-Masei to be wonderful, but other parts not so much:

“You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land... and destroy all their figured objects... You shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.”

This passage echoes the language and logic of settler colonialism and extraction.

Romans and Byzantines and Mamluks and Crusaders and Ottomans aren't settler colonialist when they conquer areas of the Levant - but Jews are.

The point is that she isn't saying that Judaism isn't Zionist. The Torah passage is clear. She is saying that she wants to make a new "Judaism" that cuts out its heart.

So in a way, the Jewish anti-Zionists who pretend to take Judaism seriously realize that the only way for it to work is to subvert the religion they claim to love.

Which means that they agree with the Zionists on a key point: Judaism has always been Zionist.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The abstract for this paper in Postcolonial Studies is filled with hatred of Israel and American Jews thinly disguised as sober critique:

Emotional politics of Jewish American Zionism: hegemonic feelings and the paralysis of facts

Claire Rosen Sultan - Independent researcher

ABSTRACT
By mapping the emotional politics in circulation today among Jewish American Zionists (JAZs) and the identity constructions and core beliefs therein, this essay explores how those emotions manifest in behaviours and their implications on the capacity for JAZs to engage with facts challenging their core beliefs. This essay traces myriad actors and processes that have led to the normalization of hegemonic JAZ emotional politics, for example, the hegemonic enmeshing of Jewish fears about annihilation with Israel’s fears about (meta)physical security. Engineered emotional politics permeate Jewish American identity formations to such an extent that they are furthering the Zionist mission to violently colonize Palestine. By manufacturing Jewish American repulsions from facts which criticize JAZ identity formations, and by engineering a normalized behaviour response (weaponizing antisemitism) to routinized elicitations of JAZ fear, Zionist narratives are systematically inhibiting engagement with facts revealing Israel as a Genocidal ethnic cleanser. For JAZs to understand Israel as the perpetrator of immense harm, the individual would first need to relinquish the core beliefs upon which their identity formation is constructed. The focus of this essay is the struggle for Jewish liberation from Zionism, which is separate – and inherently linked to – liberation and justice for Palestine.

The amount of psychological projection by Claire Rosen Sultan is off the charts. Anti-Zionists are the ones who refuse to engage with acts that contradict their deeply held positions. And Sultan herself is an anti-Israel activist, saying in November 2023 that the "Gaza genocide" was worse than anything anyone had ever seen before.

The paper itself is just as unhinged as the abstract, as Sultan writes how disturbed she is about being given a JNF charity box at her bat mitzvah to steal Palestinian land.

But one part of the article is even more troubling in that it was allowed to be published altogether.

Throughout the article, the word "genocide" is capitalized when referring to Israeli actions, and a footnote gives the rationale:

The United Nations International Commission of Inquiry (UN COI) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) have adopted the capitalisation of Genocide as marker of the ongoing event's elevated status to a proper noun akin to a named historical event, signalling a direct accusation of the most serious international crime against the Palestinian people (United Nations General Assembly, 2024; International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2025)

I looked up the reports referenced, and other UN reports, and never do they capitalize "genocide" when they are accusing Israel of that crime. This footnote is a lie.

But while the paper consistently capitalizes "genocide" when referring to Israeli actions, when it refers to the Holocaust, it deliberately places it in lowercase!

This means that the author does not consider the Nazi Holocaust to be worthy of having an "elevated status to a proper noun akin to a named historical event" - but a war started by Hamas is.

She is saying that the Gaza war was worse than the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust was not unique but just one of many.

Not capitalizing "Holocaust" is, fundamentally, Holocaust denial - in the sense that it is denial that the Holocaust was a unique event. Capitalizing "genocide" continuously indicates that the Gaza war was more consequential and more devastating than the Holocaust was.

Claire Rosen Sultan may have been borna Jew but she is an antisemite.

How can Postcolonial Studies have allowed publication of a paper that violates normal standards of English language capitalization to minimize a real genocide?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)