03/16 Links Pt1: Glimpsing Victory in Iran; The ‘War on Terror’ Returns; Iran war shows how ‘human rights’ groups now just play vile politics

From Ian:

Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg: Glimpsing Victory in Iran

As military pressure intensifies, the political dimension becomes increasingly important. Washington is targeting its messaging to IRGC personnel, military officers, and senior officials: Surrender brings amnesty; continued loyalty risks ruin. That logic may already be visible in what appears to be Phase 2. Roughly 3,000 members of an elite protest-suppression unit reportedly received warning messages that they were being targeted. Within a day, their headquarters near Tehran’s Azadi Stadium lay in ruins.

Phase 1 degrades military power and holds hostage the regime’s economic lifelines. Phase 2 raises the cost of repression inside Iran. Drones operating over Tehran have reportedly struck and killed IRGC and Basij personnel manning checkpoint units. For the first time, repression forces may fear for their own survival just as protesters have for years.

Phase 3 could present itself in more ways than sudden collapse—perhaps looking more like sustained erosion: a weakened regime, tightening economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and eventually internal upheaval. The announced selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader may accelerate that erosion rather than stabilize it. A polished cleric in the mold of Hassan Rouhani could again provide the IRGC political cover and revive illusions of moderation abroad. Mojtaba offers no such illusion. His elevation signals a harsher, weaker, more corrupt order—and therefore a more fragile one.

Phase 3, however, belongs to the Iranian people. Without sustained American pressure, Mojtaba and the IRGC will declare victory. That cannot be allowed. The regime has always feared domestic unrest more than external attack, which is why it repeatedly shuts down internet access during protests. Restoring connectivity would give Iranians a tool that the regime understands all too well.

Protesters also need the means of self-defense. January’s massacre of more than 30,000 Iranians by regime security forces remains a brutal reminder of what peaceful demonstrators face when confronting a coercive state. The United States should declare its commitment to Iran’s territorial integrity while arming the opposition—not only among Kurdish, Baluchi, and Arab minorities in the periphery, where local resistance could tie down security forces, but also among Persians in major cities.

With continued dominance in the air and deep penetration on the ground, Israel should continue striking the repression apparatus while America supports the political conditions for internal fracture.

The Islamic Republic has survived for 47 years because it has proved adaptive, ruthless, and willing to absorb immense pain. But it has never faced simultaneous leadership decapitation, military degradation, economic strangulation, regional isolation, and internal legitimacy collapse on this scale. That does not guarantee the regime’s end. It does mean that something once improbable is now imaginable: The long arc of the Islamic Republic may finally be bending toward an end. If that happens, military force will have created the opening.

Operation Epic Fury is only two weeks old. The campaign has already delivered major wins for American national security, and more are likely to emerge in coming days. But something much bigger and more historic is starting to come into view—something that can be unlocked with a little more patience from the American public as the United States degrades Tehran’s ability to wage war outside its borders and Israel degrades the regime’s ability to wage war against its own people.

Victory can be defined in many ways when a campaign delivers multiple layers of success in destroying capabilities that threaten the United States. But the ultimate goal should be enabling the Iranian people to rid the world of this radical, terror-sponsoring regime. And achieving that goal—total victory—seems ever more possible.

Josh Hammer: What is Victory in Operation Epic Fury?

At this point in the campaign, it is uncontested that wholesale regime change is the most desirable outcome. The pursuit of regime change as a goal unto itself is often now disparaged, coming in the aftermath of the failed neoconservative boondoggles earlier this century. But it ought to be axiomatic that there are some foreign regimes that behave in a manner that redounds to the American national interest, and there are some foreign regimes that behave in a manner that is contrary to the American national interest. It is natural and logical that we would wish for the latter types of regime to be heavily reformed or outright replaced — especially with the local populace leading the way.

Perhaps even more to the point: One does not take out a 37-year-ruling despot like Ali Khamenei, as the American and Israeli militaries did in the opening hours of the present operation, and not hope for full-scale regime change. Indeed, all people of goodwill should be hoping for that outcome — for the Iranian people to rise up like lions and throw the yoke of tyranny off their necks once and for all, delivering a long-sought victory for the American national interest in the process.

But it’s entirely possible that full-scale regime change won’t happen. The people of Iran just witnessed tens of thousands of their countrymen brutally gunned down during the anti-regime uprisings of late December and early January. They are an unarmed populace facing Nazi-esque regime jackboots, in the form of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij paramilitary.

All of that, then, raises one final question: Is it possible for there to be victory in Operation Epic Fury, and for the Iranian regime to be neutralized as a threat to the United States and our interests, if there isn’t full-scale regime change in Tehran?

In theory, the answer is yes. Venezuela provides a model. But in practice, the answer is murkier.

Delcy Rodriguez, the current leader, is a hardened Marxist-Leninist in the mold of her two immediate predecessors, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. But Rodriguez has been fully cooperative with the United States since the astonishing January operation to extract Maduro for the simple reason that she has no real choice in the matter: She remains in power, yes, but only on the condition of an “offer” presented by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that, to borrow from Vito Corleone in “The Godfather,” she “can’t refuse.” Accordingly, Rodriguez has thus far been fully cooperative in areas such as American oil extraction and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States.

In theory, a similar arrangement is possible with a decimated, chastened regime in Tehran. And some experts predict that such an arrangement will characterize the regime in Iran a year or two from now. In practice, however, there is the ever-thorny problem that has frustrated and perplexed Westerners for decades when they attempt to reason with zealous Islamists: Radical, 72-virgins-in-heaven-aspiring Muslims do not fear death. A socialist like Rodriguez can, ultimately, be reasoned with; an Islamist like Mojtaba Khamenei (or his successor), probably not.

The cleanest solution to the Iran quagmire at this particular juncture — and the one that most clearly fulfills Trump’s “unconditional surrender” victory criterion — is indeed full-scale regime change. That is certainly the outcome that would be best for the neutralization of the Iranian threat and the corresponding advancement of the American national interest. I’m far from certain it will happen. But every alternative scenario only raises additional questions. So, like many others, I pray that the Iranian people seize this unique moment in history and take their destiny into their own hands.

Mojtaba Khamenei escaped death by seconds in same strike that killed his father

Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, survived the February 28 US-Israeli strike on Tehran’s leadership compound because he had stepped outside shortly before missiles hit his residence, according to leaked audio obtained by The Telegraph. The recording, attributed to a senior official in the office of the late Ali Khamenei, provides one of the fullest accounts yet of the strike that killed Iran’s former supreme leader and other senior regime figures.

According to the report, the compound was hit at 9:32 a.m. local time in what appeared to be a coordinated attempt to kill members of the Khamenei family and senior Iranian leadership at the same time. The Telegraph said the audio was independently verified and came from remarks delivered by Mazaher Hosseini, identified as head of protocol in Ali Khamenei’s office, during a March 12 meeting in Tehran.

Hosseini said Mojtaba Khamenei had gone into the yard moments before the strike and was heading back upstairs when the building was hit. According to the report, he suffered a leg injury, while his wife, Zahra Haddad-Adel, and their son were killed instantly.

The leaked recording also described the deaths of other people inside the compound, including Mojtaba Khamenei’s brother-in-law, Misbah al-Huda Bagheri Kani, and Mohammad Shirazi, the chief of Ali Khamenei’s military bureau. Hosseini said the strikes hit multiple parts of the office complex simultaneously, including residences associated with several members of the Khamenei family.

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Armies are not required to risk soldiers' lives to protect enemy civilians

Much of the legal debate about Israel's conduct in Gaza has focused on proportionality — whether the civilian harm caused by specific strikes was excessive relative to the military advantage gained. A War on the Rocks article by Orbach, Boxman, Henkin, and Braverman makes a crucial clarification that has been largely absent from that debate: under international law, proportionality is assessed strike by strike, not cumulatively across an entire campaign. The scale of destruction in Gaza cannot, by itself, constitute evidence of disproportionality. Each attack must be evaluated against its specific military objective and the foreseeable harm at the moment of decision.

But proportionality and distinction — the two principles that dominate public discourse about Gaza — are not the only ethical considerations governing how armies fight. There is a third, and it is the one Israel's critics most consistently ignore: the obligation to protect one's own forces, and the corresponding right to transfer risk away from soldiers when military necessity demands it.

The Law is Not a One-Way Street

Every major Western military manual incorporates force protection as a legitimate — and legally recognized — limiting factor on the obligation to minimize civilian harm. The operative concept is "feasibility." Additional Protocol I, Article 57, requires that precautions in attack be taken only insofar as they are "feasible," defined in authoritative commentary as "practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations." Force protection is explicitly a military consideration. Precautions that would expose attacking forces to disproportionate risk are, by definition, not feasible — and therefore not required.

The British Army's Joint Service Publication 383, the authoritative UK manual on the law of armed conflict, states this plainly and goes further: it explicitly draws an operational lesson from the Second Battle of Fallujah, noting that commanders may accept greater incidental harm to civilians in order to reduce friendly casualties. The American DoD Law of War Manual establishes the same principle: precautions are required only when consistent with "mission accomplishment and the security of the force." The Australian, Canadian, and German military manuals adopt identical frameworks. No major democratic army has ever accepted the proposition that international law requires its soldiers to absorb unlimited casualties as the price of protecting enemy-controlled civilian populations.

It reflects a genuine ethical principle: military ethics does not operate on a single axis. It requires balancing competing obligations — to minimize civilian harm on one side, and to protect the lives of soldiers on the other. A commander who unnecessarily sacrifices his troops to reduce civilian casualties has made the less ethical choice, because he has spent real human lives on a calculation the law never required him to make.

What Gaza Actually Looked Like

To understand why the risk-transfer argument is not merely legally correct but operationally unavoidable, it is necessary to understand what Israeli forces actually faced in Gaza. Hamas did not simply hide among civilians. Over nearly two decades of governing the Strip, it transformed the entire urban environment into a prepared military battlespace. It constructed a subterranean tunnel network of extraordinary scale, depth, and redundancy, systematically integrated with civilian infrastructure — beneath homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Above ground, it embedded weapons caches, command nodes, and ambush positions throughout the residential fabric of Gaza's cities. Israeli forces reported approximately 14,000 booby-trapped structures in Rafah alone by September 2024.

The tactical consequence of this preparation is that in Gaza, almost any building may conceal a tunnel shaft, a weapons cache, a command node, or an ambush — and fighters cleared from one area can reappear behind advancing units through the tunnel network and re-contest or booby-trap previously secured ground. Classical infantry tactics — clear, hold, move forward — become a mechanism for feeding soldiers into prepared kill zones. An army that insists on dismounted infantry operations without standoff firepower in this environment is not making a more ethical choice. It is using its soldiers as human mine-clearance, advancing them into booby-trapped buildings and tunnel systems so that the rubble is produced by their bodies rather than by munitions. The law of armed conflict does not require this. No military manual endorses it. 

The scale of destruction in Gaza that critics treat as self-evident proof of disproportionality is, in large part, the physical signature of Hamas's own military architecture. Preserving those structures was incompatible with neutralizing the threat they contained. This is why the Orbach et al. analysis notes that comparable urban battles — Mosul, Raqqa, Marawi, Nahr el-Bared — produced destruction rates of 65 to 95 percent in their core combat areas, under military forces no one has accused of war crimes for the rubble they left behind.

The Covenant Between Army and Soldier

There is a dimension to this that goes beyond legal doctrine. Every democratic society that maintains an army enters into an implicit covenant with the men and women it asks to risk their lives: the state will send them into danger only for legitimate purposes of national defense, and will do everything within its power to bring them home. This covenant is functional as well as moral. Armies that squander their soldiers' lives unnecessarily destroy the trust that makes military effectiveness possible. Recruitment, morale, unit cohesion, the willingness of soldiers to follow orders under fire, all depend on soldiers believing that their commanders and their government regard their lives as precious.

To risk soldiers' lives not because the mission requires it, but to satisfy the demands of foreign critics or to generate more favorable headlines, is a perversion of this covenant. It treats soldiers as a moral currency to be spent on optics. The argument that Israel should have sent more infantry into Gaza's 14,000 booby-trapped structures — should have accepted more dead soldiers — to reduce civilian casualties and harm to civilian facilities caused by Hamas's deliberate human shielding is a demand that Israel spend its soldiers' lives on a reputational calculation. That is theater, not ethics.

Jenin: The Controlled Experiment

Israel already ran this experiment. In the 2002 Battle of Jenin, the IDF made a deliberate choice to fight building by building rather than use air power, specifically to minimize civilian casualties. The cost was severe: 23 Israeli soldiers killed, including 13 in a single devastating ambush on Salah ad-Din Street when fighters detonated a building they had lured troops into. By any objective measure, this was an extraordinary act of military self-sacrifice. No army was required to fight this way. Israel chose to.

The world accused Israel of a massacre anyway. Palestinian spokesmen falsely claimed hundreds of civilians had been killed. Amnesty International and major media outlets amplified the charge. The United Nations eventually concluded that roughly 52 people died in Jenin, the majority of them combatants.

Israel did not receive any credit for going beyond the law in risking soldiers' lives to reduce civilian harm. 

A standard that cannot be met no matter what Israel does is a constraint whose purpose is condemnation, not protection. Israel fighting with maximum infantry exposure and minimum firepower produced accusations of a massacre. Israel fighting with standoff firepower in Gaza produced accusations of genocide. The variable that produces the accusation is not Israeli conduct. It is the fact that Israel is fighting at all.

Israel should therefore optimize for the actual law — which requires balancing civilian protection against force protection, not sacrificing the latter entirely on the altar of the former. Jenin was arguably the less ethical choice, not the more ethical one. Israel exceeded every legal obligation, spent soldiers' lives it was not required to spend, and gained nothing — on the contrary.

Where the Law Places Responsibility

There is a final consideration the "risk transfer" critique systematically elides. Additional Protocol I, Article 51(8) establishes that the defending party bears responsibility for harm caused by its own violations of international humanitarian law. Hamas's use of human shields — embedding military command nodes under hospitals, storing weapons in schools, running tunnel shafts through residential buildings including children's bedrooms, refusing to construct civilian shelters or grant civilians access to its own tunnels — is a grave violation of international humanitarian law, and the civilian casualties that result from it fall on Hamas under Article 51(8).

An attacking force that takes all feasible precautions, warns civilians, adjusts and cancels strikes when civilian presence is detected, and fights within the bounds of proportionality — as the available evidence indicates Israel did, achieving fewer than one death per munition deployed during the war's most intense aerial phase — has discharged its legal obligations. The deaths that result from a defender's deliberate strategy of shielding military assets with civilian bodies fall on the defender. Hamas built its entire military doctrine around the expectation that the world would assign those deaths to Israel instead. The world largely obliged. This is a failure of moral reasoning, not a failure of Israeli conduct.

The risk transfer critique, properly understood, demands that Israel alone among the world's armies accept unlimited liability for an enemy's war crimes. Every military manual says that is not required. The law of armed conflict places responsibility with Hamas. Jenin proved that meeting the critics' demands produces only more demands. 

When choosing how to attack, military planners must chose the method that minimizes civilian casualties, all else being equal. But risking lives of soldiers in favor of civilian lives is not international law under any interpretation. And the responsibility for the lives of civilians killed belong squarely with the defending force that uses them as human shields.

The conclusion is not cynicism about civilian harm — the manuals, the law, and Israeli practice all demonstrate otherwise.  The conclusion is that the critics' framework was never about civilian harm to begin with.

(h/t Irene)

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The Postliberal Right Has a Theocracy Problem, and Antisemitism Proves It

Integralism is back. 

You may not have heard the word, but you've seen its effects — in the post-liberal intellectual movement, in the Heritage Foundation's ideological realignment, in the network of thinkers who've concluded that liberal democracy doesn't just need reform, it needs replacement.

Integralism is not a new idea. It emerged from 19th and early 20th century European Catholic political thought, where traditionalist thinkers argued that civil governments had an obligation to operate under the authority of the Church — that the liberal separation of church and state was not a neutral arrangement but an active political error, a usurpation of the proper order of things. Its most visible expressions were associated with authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. After the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Church itself moved toward affirming religious liberty, which put official Church teaching at odds with integralism's core claims. The ideology retreated to the margins of academic theology, where it remained for decades.

The revival began quietly around 2012, when Oxford philosopher Thomas Pink argued that the Church had never actually abandoned its pre-conciliar political theology — that Vatican II had been misread. By the mid-2010s a small group of American academics had developed a modern version of the argument. The leading figures were Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard constitutional law professor; Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame political theorist; Chad Pecknold, a theologian at Catholic University; and journalist Sohrab Ahmari. Their online home was a website called The Josias, where integralist political theory was developed and debated in relative obscurity.

Then the political disruption of the 2016 Trump election created a new audience for root-cause critiques of liberal democracy. Deneen's 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed became a significant seller in conservative intellectual circles. At this point the movement made a strategic decision: change the name. "Integralism" carried historical associations with European fascism and antisemitism that made it politically toxic in an American context. The movement's own leaders documented the transition, experimenting with "political Catholicism" and "Christian realism" before settling on "postliberalism" — a label that described what they opposed rather than what they proposed, and sounded considerably less radical. By 2021, Vermeule, Deneen, and their allies had completed the rebrand with a Substack newsletter called Postliberal Order.

Not every postliberal is an integralist. Postliberalism is a wider tent, encompassing Protestant nationalists, Orbán admirers, and various critics of liberal proceduralism who have no particular commitment to Catholic political theology. But a significant wing of American postliberalism overlaps with or descends directly from integralist arguments, even when it avoids the label. And that wing has acquired institutional weight. When Kevin Roberts, the newly appointed president of the Heritage Foundation, attended the 2021 National Conservatism conference and publicly aligned Heritage with the national conservative movement — reversing Heritage's own position from two years earlier — it signaled that this tendency had moved from academic journals to the commanding heights of American conservative institutions.

The diagnosis these thinkers offer is serious and deserves a serious answer. Liberal proceduralism, they argue, was never truly neutral. It embedded substantive commitments about autonomy, about the bracketing of transcendence from public life, about the priority of rights over duties — and then pretended those commitments were just the absence of commitments. The resulting society didn't stay neutral. It dissolved. Family breakdown, opioid deaths, pornography as a mass medium, institutional distrust at historic highs: integralists look at all of this and say liberalism did this, and patching liberalism won't fix it.

They're not entirely wrong about the problem. The problem is their solution. 

Their solution is a specific theological-political hierarchy: God, Church, State, Citizens. The state enforces moral order defined by the Church. Authority flows downward. Legitimacy is doctrinal. Correction, when it comes, comes from ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Any moral-political system needs an internal mechanism to recognize when its own principles are being used to justify persecution, scapegoating, or civic degradation — and that mechanism must function without relying on the goodwill of its current leaders. Call this the correction standard. It isn't a bar any particular system is guaranteed to clear. But any system that cannot clear it is not a moral order. It's an enforcement order waiting for the wrong enforcer.

I have pointed out that antisemitism is a metric to measure the morality of systems. Any political, moral or social system that allow antisemitism is not a moral system, by definition. The hatred of Jews or Judaism or the Jewish nation has been rationalized by sophisticated thinkers across centuries. It has attached itself to high-minded frameworks and emerged from them looking like a conclusion rather than a crime. 

That makes antisemitism uniquely diagnostic. A system that cannot identify why antisemitism is wrong at a structural level — not merely inconvenient, not merely regrettable, but a reasoning failure detectable from within the system's own principles — will also fail to identify other forms of systematic moral distortion. Antisemitism is the stress test precisely because it is so old, so elaborate, and so persistent. Pass it and your correction mechanism is real. Fail it and you've told us something important.

Integralism, unfortunately, fails it structurally.

Classic integralism places Catholic doctrinal authority at the apex of the political order. Jews are, by definition, outside that hierarchy. The best integralism has historically offered Jews is toleration as a subordinate category — the Augustinian "witness people" doctrine, permitted to exist in Christian society in permanently diminished civic status as living proof of the Old Testament's authenticity. That isn't protection from antisemitism. That is antisemitism, in theological dress.

The integralist regimes of the 19th and early 20th century didn't drift into antisemitism despite their principles. They expressed it through their principles. The framework contains no internal audit, no correction mechanism, no appeals process outside the hierarchy itself — which is to say, outside the historical source of the problem.

Modern integralists like Vermeule and Deneen don't espouse explicit antisemitism, and some actively disavow it. But good intentions are not a structural safeguard. Consider what has happened in the broader postliberal space. Candace Owens, who converted to Catholicism and has been warmly received in integralist-adjacent Catholic media, has made statements about Jews and Israel that are antisemitic by any rigorous definition. Tucker Carlson has platformed explicitly antisemitic voices, used demographic replacement rhetoric, and drifted toward treating Jewish institutional influence as a legitimate political grievance. 

Serious integralist thinkers would say these figures represent a hijacking — that they don't understand post-liberal ideas and shouldn't be held against them. But that response misidentifies the problem. The issue is not whether Owens and Carlson are integralist theorists. They aren't. The issue is that a movement explicitly claiming to restore moral order has shown no robust internal capacity to identify or repel antisemitic drift among adjacent allies — not when that drift serves broader anti-liberal goals, not when it's popular, not when calling it out is costly. That is not a hijacking problem; it is a correction mechanism problem. A framework that can be steered toward the oldest civilizational pathology in Western history, without its own principles generating an alarm, has told us everything we need to know about how it would function with state power behind it.

So where does that leave the right? It is philosophically exposed. 

The traditional conservative answer — call it fusionism — holds that free markets, limited government, and religious faith naturally reinforce each other, producing what its advocates called "ordered liberty": a society where people are free because their families, churches, and communities have formed them into people capable of governing themselves. It's an appealing vision. Yet integralists point to fifty years of family breakdown, addiction, and cultural dissolution and ask what exactly got ordered. The vision assumed its supporting institutions would remain healthy without political protection. They didn't.

A more sophisticated conservative answer draws on the political philosophy embedded in the American Founding — the idea that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution already contain a moral order grounded in natural law, the self-evident truths that governments exist to protect rights inherent to human beings as such. This is more robust than simple fusionism because it doesn't depend on economic outcomes. But integralists mount a serious counterargument: the Founders' natural law was a product of Enlightenment rationalism, which is philosophically thinner than the centuries-deep tradition of Catholic moral theology going back to Aquinas. And the practical evidence is hard to dismiss — the Founders' framework has demonstrably failed to reproduce itself culturally across generations.

A third answer, Protestant nationalism, says integralism is a foreign import — that American Christianity is evangelical and biblical, not Catholic and hierarchical, and that restoring Christian moral culture doesn't require taking orders from Rome. This has real political force as a coalition argument. As a philosophical response to integralism it falls short, because it doesn't actually refute integralism's core challenge. It just asserts a different Christian preference.

None of these answer the question integralism is actually asking: where do the values that sustain a free society come from, and what do you do when they erode?

At this point, most people assume there are only two options: ground morality in God and religious authority (and fight out exactly which version of God and religion is the one people must follow), or accept the secular drift that integralists correctly diagnose as catastrophic. That is a false binary, and accepting it is what leaves the right philosophically defenseless.

The Enlightenment tried to derive morality from reason alone and produced frameworks too thin to sustain themselves culturally. But that failure doesn't mean the project is impossible. It means that particular attempt was insufficient. Rigorous moral reasoning doesn't require either divine authority at the top or secular relativism at the bottom. The assumption that it must produce one or the other is itself the error. There is a third path: moral reasoning that is transparent, auditable, pluralism-respecting, and capable of identifying its own failures — not because God commands it or because secular consensus endorses it, but because the reasoning holds and can be shown to hold.

What would that require? A framework in which authority comes from demonstrated coherence rather than institutional position. A correction mechanism that doesn't depend on the hierarchy being virtuous. A structure that accommodates genuine moral pluralism without collapsing into relativism. And — this is the test — a set of principles from which antisemitism can be identified as a reasoning failure, not merely a political liability.

That is the framework I am working on.

That framework doesn't yet have a prominent place in the debate on the right. It needs one. Because the alternative is a choice between liberal proceduralism that cannot defend itself and a theocratic politics that has already shown us, repeatedly, where it leads.

Any philosophy that cannot structurally guard against antisemitism is not merely incomplete. It is, by definition, an immoral philosophy — because it has no reliable way to distinguish moral order from moral catastrophe. That's not a Jewish complaint. That's a philosophical indictment. And it applies with full force to the most intellectually serious attempt the right has yet produced to answer the civilizational crisis it has correctly identified.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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03/15 Links: Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another; Carlson claims CIA is ‘framing’ him as an Iranian agent; Israel rejects South Africa’s ‘blood libel’ genocide case

From Ian:

Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another

The greatest irony of recent Israeli history is that, for all of its brilliance in penetrating and sabotaging Iran, Israeli intelligence failed to pick up the signs before October 7 that the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust was in the offing. But that failure quickly led to profound changes in the scope of the mission against Iran. The senior Israeli war planner to whom I spoke put it like this: “We began rethinking the war plan in early 2023, but after October 7 we focused on a broader war against Iran, not just its nuclear program or missiles.” This represented at least a partial vindication of Dagan’s ideas a decade earlier.

And that is where things stand today. As Israel and America take out Iran’s missiles, nuclear facilities, defense industries, and its political and military leadership from the air, the hope is that after the dust settles, the remaining regime leadership will either surrender or agree to end the Islamic Republic’s war on the Great and Little Satan. As I write at the beginning of March, that may seem like a long shot, and one that invites intolerable risks. After all, without boots on the ground, neither the U.S. nor Israel will have the ability to shape the inevitable chaos that will result after the bombing stops. On the other hand, Israel has proven over the past eight months that it has eyes and ears everywhere in Iran. I wouldn’t be shocked if the Mossad has a plan for what comes next.

Here at home, what is going to come next for those who decided to blame this just American war on the little Jewish state they seem to hate so much? The populists seething about Trump’s war to Make Iran Great Again have shown that they misunderstand recent history and that their audiences are fools to listen to them. Over the past 30 years, Israel has built a capability that is on the precipice of removing a blood enemy of America. It has located and eliminated the clerics and generals responsible for 47 years of terror against our country and her allies.

Trump has not launched a war for Israel. Rather he has joined a war with Israel—a war Israel may have won even before the bombs started dropping.

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump challenged 50 years of Iran fears — and revealed the rotten, decaying truth

So here we are in 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade façade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.

The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival.

All it has is a rope-a-dope strategy that assumes a White House attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.

We are left somewhat confused.

Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility?

Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself, rather than just its terrorist clients?

And what now are the remaining theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?

They intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice via “negotiations.”

They plan to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for a sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

With Trump and Netanyahu out of office, they dream of using their oil to re-arm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb — and this time perhaps using it.

Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled — for a day or two.

Then it would resume business as usual.

And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles at their backs, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow.

Thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients and its unhinged — but effective — threats.

John Podhoretz: They Should Have Listened to My Dad

Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu saw how an Iranian proxy in Gaza had set into motion a plan on October 7, 2023, with the purpose of bringing about an apocalyptic multifront assault on Israel’s existence—the very thing Ahmadinejad had said he had been seeking 18 years earlier. Iran hit Israel with ballistic missiles in 2024. Trump and Israel struck back with unprecedented force in 2025. And when they were done with the 12-day war, Trump said in no uncertain terms that he would go back to the skies if there were indications Iran was working to re-nuclearize. The Iranians had every chance during this time, and every rational reason, to stand down. They could have sued for peace after the 12-day war destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility and Iran’s air-defense system. They could have made a deal after Trump sent a gigantic armada to the waters near Iran and sent his negotiators to Geneva to talk to the Iranians. After all, they had seen Trump do what no other president would do, even though the four presidents who preceded him in office after the Soviet Union’s fall had all said Iran could not be allowed to go nuclear. The Iranians saw him go into Venezuela and extract its dictator, maybe their closest ally, like a dentist extracting a rotted tooth. But the Iranians did not stand down. Instead, they bragged to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that they possessed enough nuclear materiel for 11 bombs. Trump had watched the Iranian people rise up and had seen the Iranian leaders shoot them down. He tried to talk and in response they boasted of their capabilities to do evil. The Israelis had told him they knew the ayatollah and his team were going to be meeting on a Saturday morning all together in one place. Trump said go. Israel went. And then America struck.

In 2007, the Iranian nuclear program was nascent and notional. But we already knew where they had located it and what they were trying to get going. Had we bombed those sites then, as Israel had bombed Iraq’s reactor in 1981, a precedent would have been established. A simple precedent. Stop. Do it again, and we will hit you again. So don’t do it.

But we didn’t. And Barack Obama tried to buy them off. Donald Trump, in his first term, tried to put the Iranians in a cage with maximum pressure. And Joe Biden, well, who knows what Joe Biden did—but he certainly didn’t scare the Iranians. Donald Trump did hit them. And they didn’t stop.

Now they will. But we needn’t have gotten to this point. One strong strike in 2007 and the world would have looked very different. Bush should have listened to my dad.

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"Al Aqsa Is In Danger" - at least 125 year of antisemitic incitement

It turns out the Mufti of Jerusalem was not the first one to incite Arabs against Jews by claiming they intended to destroy the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa in the 1920s.

While there is some indication of general warnings about Jews buying property in the area of the Mount in the 1880s and 1890s, the earliest specific mention of Arabs accusing Jews of having designs on the Temple Mount comes from around 1903, mentioned in The Arabs and Zionism before World War I by Neville J. Mandel (1976) where he recounts an anecdote published in Alliance Israelite Universelle saying "a young (and, it was noted, not very extreme) Muslim told a Jew in Jerusalem: 'We shall pour out everything to the last drop of blood rather than see the Dome of the Rock fall into the hands of non-Muslims.' ”

Since this came from an ordinary Arab in Jerusalem that means that the idea had already been pushed by Arab and Ottoman leaders for at least some years beforehand. (I'm still looking for earlier primary sources; an 1891 telegram from Jerusalem Arab notables to Ottoman leaders may have mentioned Jewish religious ambitions along with economic warnings about Jewish immigration.)  

It has been one of the most effective antisemitic propaganda methods for over 125 years, and now with the Iran war we are seeing it being exploited daily.

Yesterday, the head of the Supreme Islamic Council in Jerusalem and preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, warned of a "dangerous plan" targeting the mosque.

French Arabic site Aqlame has a columnist saying:

The fall of Iran, or its suffering a severe strategic defeat, would undoubtedly mean—from our perspective today—the removal of one of the biggest geopolitical obstacles to this [Third Temple]  project. For years, Iran has been seen as the most vocal regional power in defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it has adopted a political and religious discourse that links Jerusalem to the conflict with Israel on the level of identity and civilization. 

The Greater Israel project cannot be realized without the construction of the Third Temple; this is a clear geostrategic fact. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the Temple is what will achieve symbolic balance among the major religious and cultural centers, alongside Mecca and the Vatican. Ignoring this point in Islamic political discussions, if not out of ignorance, is either negligence or fear. 

Palestinian site Madar News took a joke post by Jewish right wing activist Baruch Marzel seriously as a method to get Iran or Israel to attack the Dome of the Rock.

It reports that the Palestinian "Jerusalem Governorate"  

stated on Saturday that the extremist rabbi Baruch Marzel published an AI-generated image showing an aircraft base under the Al-Aqsa Mosque, accompanied by a sarcastic comment claiming the existence of a “secret air force base in Jerusalem,” in a move considered a dangerous incitement that paves the way for justifying targeting the Al-Aqsa Mosque .

It is amazing that Israel has held off on demolishing Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock for so many years but now the only thing stopping it is Iran. Usually the excuse is Palestinian steadfastness.

The "Al Aqsa is in Danger" meme is one of the most durable slanders, used cynically by Muslim leaders for over a century to incite antisemitism. And it works, even today. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Antisemitism Is the New Edginess

Alvin Rosenfeld's recent Commentary essay, "The Pornography of Anti-Semitism," identifies something real. Today's Jew-hatred has a performative, exhibitionistic quality - loud, profane, addictive, and publicly enacted for an audience. The pornography analogy captures the texture of it well. But his analogy isn't explanation, and Rosenfeld stops just short of the mechanism that would make his insight actionable.

Antisemitism isn't like regular pornography, because pornography has become trite. There is no thrill in it anymore. If there is an analogy, it is more like incest porn, a genre whose entire appeal is the violation of a specific and powerful social taboo. The content itself is almost irrelevant. What matters is the frisson of crossing a line that society has marked as especially forbidden. Many of the "anti-Zionists" nowadays embrace the label "antisemite" as a kind of badge of honor, proving their supposed bravery at crossing lines and "truth telling."

And crucially, for both the producer and consumer,  there is no real risk. No one is getting arrested for writing incest stories and no one is getting jailed for calling Jews "Nazis." You can indulge the transgression from complete safety.

It's not hate - it's "edgy."

That combination - maximum taboo violation, minimum personal cost - is precisely what makes antisemitism so attractive to a particular type of performer. Amplifying content that contextualizes synagogue attacks as understandable grief responses carries enormous symbolic weight as a transgression. And yet Jews are a small, geographically dispersed, non-violent minority with no credible capacity for retaliation. They write letters to the editor. The transgression feels enormous. The actual risk is negligible. It's the perfect trade.

Rosenfeld focuses, understandably, on the most extreme manifestations: the campus mobs, the Park East synagogue harassment, the murderers who traveled across state lines to kill Jews for Palestine. These are real and frightening. But they represent the far end of a continuum that begins somewhere much more banal - with podcasters and former cable news anchors who have discovered that a little performative hostility toward Israel is excellent for business.

Consider Megyn Kelly, who reposted content from a Hamas-sympathizing outlet framing a synagogue truck attack as an understandable act of grief, and responded to substantive, factual pushback with "this shit doesn't work on me anymore." The dismissal is the performance. She is announcing her liberation from the constraints that being factual once imposed on her. The facts themselves are irrelevant; what matters is the gesture of imperviousness to them. "Look how edgy I am," she is telling her fans. 

And her fans are flocking to this performance. While she whines that Ben Shapiro is trying to "censor" her, her audience has increased dramatically in concert with her deciding that mainstreaming antisemitism is good business. Her YouTube channel subscribers increased from by 1.7 million between 2023 and 2025. and 176 percent year-over-year, accumulating over four million YouTube subscribers and vaulting to the third-largest conservative podcast in America. She is, by any measure, one of the great success stories of independent media.

If that is censorship, most influencers would love to have that problem. And indeed, many are following in the same pattern - attacking the Jewish people, claiming bravery, and simultaneously claiming victimhood while their transgressive content makes them money. 

This is the business model for both the left-wing and right-wing "anti-Zionists."  The victimhood claim and the massive audience are not in tension; they are mutually reinforcing. The persecution narrative is itself a transgression amplifier, allowing them to  simultaneously claim to be brave truth-tellers and the scrappy underdogs, persecuted by a supposedly powerful Jewish lobby that in reality cannot touch them. Every Jewish voice that pushes back confirms the narrative. Progressives say facts are weapons of white supremacy; far-right influencers are saying facts are the weapons of Jewish supremacy.

This is why the standard response toolkit fails so completely. Pointing out the truth doesn't dissuade people whose primary motivation is the performance of transgression. Moral counter-argument doesn't touch them. Factual correction actively helps them. Being called antisemitic, which once carried genuine social cost, is now a trophy in many circles - proof that the taboo was successfully violated, that the performance landed.

The problem with relying on perceived transgression for clicks and revenue is that it normalizes the transgression - meaning that new taboos must be found. What starts off as accusing Israel of apartheid ends up justifying attacking Jews in synagogues, or "asking questions" about the Holocaust. Only a year or so ago the self-proclaimed anti-Zionists were still at least pretending not to cross the line into antisemitism, now we are seeing people proudly claim that synagogues are fair game for attacks because they virtually all support Israel. Attacking Jewish institutions is now a daily event. 

Which means the honest conclusion of this analysis is uncomfortable: there is no rhetorical counter-strategy that solves what is fundamentally an economic and legal problem. As long as antisemitic transgression is profitable and cost-free, the market will supply it in increasing quantities. The response that actually matters is not a better argument - it is making the transgression costly again. That means advertiser pressure, platform consequences, and where applicable, prosecution. Not because those tools are pleasant or easy, but because they are the only ones that operate on the reward structure rather than the content.

Rosenfeld is right that unless it is effectively curtailed, we will see an ongoing stream of moral horror. He is right about the urgency. What he doesn't quite say is that curtailment requires targeting the business model, not the argument - because for most of these performers, there is no argument. There is only a performance, and performances stop when the audience stops paying.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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03/14 Links: The despicable disgrace of the ‘call off the war’ crowd; Michigan: a case study in the new Jew hatred; Ashab Al Yamin? New Shi’ite terror group claims synagogue attacks across Europe

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: The despicable disgrace of the ‘call off the war’ crowd

We’d like to believe that the negative coverage of the Iran war so rampant in the media is simply more Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s plainly also about how the president’s firm actions expose how pathetically the same elites applauded President Barack Obama’s misbegotten Middle East policies, and not just his sad nuclear deal with Tehran.

To simplify things, consider The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the dean of elite liberal political analysis, who’s actively sneering at the joint US-Israeli effort to defang an entity that for five decades has called them “The Great Satan” and “The Little Satan.”

“Both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about ‘imminent’ threats that require ‘preemptive’ strikes,” he huffs, “but we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel.”

No, because the two nations took out Tehran’s nuclear program last year, as it was weeks from producing usable weapons, and they’ve acted before it could rebuild its defenses and offensive conventional forces to shield it as it recovered that capability.

The imminent threat was to become too tough to take out.

And Iran’s lunatic bombing of almost every country now within its range proves that it was and is a threat to the entire civilized world: Just imagine it with the long-range missiles and nukes that it never stopped developing.

But of course Jeff Goldberg was one of Obama’s chief media sycophants

He asked Obama how he could possibly understand the Iranian regime as both thoroughly antisemitic and “practical,” “responsive to incentive” and “rational” — and accepted without question Obama’s blithe reply that “the fact that the supreme leader is antisemitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

What poppycock: Those “other considerations” centered on a determined drive at regional domination and a certainty that going nuclear was the only sure way to ensure the regime’s survival.

Obama & Co. simply fantasized that a mature Islamic Republic would happily become a normal power if bribed sufficiently — and fanboys like Goldberg swooned.

Jake Wallis Simons: How Israel could spark regime change from the air

In a video speech last week, Benjamin Netanyahu disclosed that the IDF had “many surprises” in store for the regime. According to insiders, these have been delayed by Israeli infighting over which agency will take the credit. But they are on their way.

These surprises, thought to number about four or five, are unlikely to feature anything on the scale of the pager operation that castrated Hezbollah in September 2024. Instead, we are likely to see a sequence of creative subversions of the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

“With one hand, we grip the regime’s throat with force,” a security official said, referring to the conventional air campaign. “With the other hand, we shake it unexpectedly, again and again and again, until its neck snaps.” The objectives are clear. If all goes well, Israeli surprises will both demoralise the regime’s troops, tempting them to desert, and embolden the Iranian people to overthrow them.

But what about boots on the ground? Never before, etc. Well, keep your eyes on the Artesh, Iran’s regular armed forces which, unlike the fanatical Revolutionary Guards, descend from the time of the Shah. These troops tend to be of a nationalistic temperament, not an Islamist one, and they have largely held back from the fighting.

If the humiliation of the regime reaches a tipping point, the Artesh may revolt. This would resemble a traditional coup, empowered by homo digitalis and the Mossad. Another first. As if by magic, the Iranian people would find themselves with a great many boots on the ground.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. None of this is guaranteed and, as Netanyahu pointed out this week, “you can lead someone to water, but you cannot make him drink”. Donald Trump echoed these sentiments, telling Fox News on Friday that an uprising was “a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons”. He added: “It’ll happen, but it probably will be maybe not immediately.” Post-2003 Iraq always lurks around the corner.

But what was the alternative? Diplomacy had failed. Sanctions had failed. Covert action had slowed Tehran’s progress towards a bomb, but was powerless to stop it. Even after the hammering it received in June, the regime immediately began building back its missile stockpiles and proxies, like zombies knowing only death, and went on to butcher more than 30,000 people in two days, not to mention the atrocities it plots on our shores.

Seen from our rainy isles of appeasement, Mossad and homo digitalis stand like greyhounds in the slips. With or without our support, the game’s afoot. They will follow their spirit, and upon the charge, cry: “God for America, Israel and Iran!”

Brendan O'Neill: Michigan: a case study in the new Jew hatred

Dearborn is like a microcosm of the supine culture that has reigned in the post-7 October West. In the US, the UK and Europe, we’ve witnessed an explosion of the twin forces of Islamism and Islamo-censorship. We’ve seen mobs cheer anti-Semitic terrorism and wallow in the violent dream of Israel’s fiery demise. And yet you’re called ‘Islamophobic’ if you fret about it. Islamism is treated as a reasonable reaction to the behaviour of ‘the Zionist entity’ while concern about Islamism is damned as bigotry. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral deceit, where those of us worried about the rebirth of an ancient hatred are ourselves called ‘hateful’.

It remains to be seen what Ghazali thought he would achieve with his butchery at Temple Israel. Whether he fantasised that he was avenging Lebanon or whether his anti-Jewish animus flowed from the Islamist pox in Dearborn. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Dearborn’s virulent Israelophobia pushed this man deeper into the cesspit of anti-Jewish hate. A striking feature of our time is that leftists and liberals will always go looking for the ‘architecture of hatred’ that inspires racist attacks on blacks, Muslims or Latinos – but they never do that when there are attacks on Jews. In fact, they warn against it. Don’t ‘weaponise’ this attack by raising concerns about the broader public culture, they say. It’s only ever Jews who are accused of ‘weaponisation’ for wondering if their persecution might spring from social trends.

Does the cultural elite really expect us to believe there’s no link between its own frothing hysteria over the Jewish State and the march of hostility against Jewish people? It’s a childish delusion, and a dangerous one, to think you can spend your every waking hour lamenting the supposedly unique cruelty of the world’s only Jewish nation and that there will be no consequences for Jews. The ceaseless libels against the Jewish homeland, the cries for more ‘intifada’ – these have consequences. You would think an activist class that says it’s vile bigotry to call ‘transwomen’ men would understand that the bourgeois clamour for the violent dismantling of the Jewish homeland is likely to entail blowback for Jewish people.

This is why it’s sickening to hear the likes of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani mourn the events in Michigan. This is a man who refused to condemn the cry ‘Globalise the intifada’. This is a man whose wife liked Instagram posts celebrating an orgy of anti-Jewish violence far worse than Michigan’s – 7 October. Then there’s Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, wringing his hands over the ‘horrific news’ from Michigan. Mate, your deputy leader is a man who celebrated the pogrom of 7 October. A party that cheers the murder of Jews in Israel has no business lamenting the attempted murder of Jews in Michigan.

Things are getting serious. Over the past week there have been violent incidents at synagogues in Liege in Belgium, in Toronto, and now Michigan. Violent Jew hate is spreading. And the first step to tackling it is to dismantle every snivelling effort to censor public concern. The Orwellian forces who call us bigots for speaking about bigotry need to be put back in their box. The stakes are too high for such slippery, tyrannical games.

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03/13 Links Pt2: Normalizing the grotesque; The Concept of Jewish Collective Guilt Goes Mainstream; US defends Israel at ICJ against South Africa’s allegation of genocide

From Ian:

Normalizing the grotesque

Provoking outrage was the point. Mamdani wanted to take the photo of his love-in with his anti-American friend and shove it into the public’s face, implying, “Suck it up, America, because you can’t do anything about it. We have the power now, and we’re getting stronger.”

Mamdani’s goal was to normalize the grotesque. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a very different kind of New York Democrat, called this “defining deviancy down” 33 years ago in an essay about American culture and society being pulled apart. That’s what Mamdani, Duwaji, and Khalil are doing — trying to pull our culture, society, moral framework, and self-assurance apart.

Like the Islamist forces they support, their deepest desire is to change — that is, destroy — who we are, what we believe, and how we conduct ourselves. That’s why Duwaji posted in joyous celebration of Hamas’s tortures, rapes, and massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The point of Mamdani’s dinner and photo, of Khalil’s activism, of Duwaji’s delight in slaughter is to repudiate the norms that have always guided public speech and conduct in America.

Hamas terrorists did the same on Oct. 7, normalizing the grotesque. They didn’t just slaughter Jews, but captured their enormities on video — they hacked off the head of one victim with an agricultural hoe — and published the evidence on social media around the world. They calculated, rightly to the shock and horror of many of us, that this would attract rather than repel support.

TRUMP GETS THE LAST LAUGH
Horrors, the perpetration of which would once have revolted and alienated every sane person in the West, instead sparked mass support. Hamas terrorists, like their supporters in Gracie Mansion, defy norms to normalize what used to be utterly unacceptable. They seek to wreck the moral parameters of Western civilization. The more that extremists, especially public figures on the Left, reject the traditions of a coherent society, the more they sow doubt in the minds of the population.

It should be disqualifying for the New York mayor to sup with a terrorist sympathizer, but Mamdani wanted to jam his crowbar deeper into a fissure splitting our society. He expected this to encourage his leftist base and demoralize his foes. It probably has. It is a measure of the fantastic success the Left-Islamist alliance has had in its campaign to undermine this couvntry.

Maryland Dems propose bill targeting nonprofits tied to Judea and Samaria

Maryland Democrats introduced a bill that would prohibit certain nonprofit organizations registered to solicit charitable donations from supporting “Israeli settlement activity” in Judea and Samaria and allow lawsuits against groups that violate the measure.

Titled the “Not on Our Dime Act,” HB 1184 was introduced on Feb. 11 by Gabriel Acevero, Ashanti Martinez and Caylin Young, Democratic members of the Maryland House of Delegates. At a March 11 hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations debated with Lauren Arikan, a Republican delegate, on whether the legislation should also include charitable organizations that support Iranian-linked causes.

“We’re going to have to have these difficult conversations,” Sean Stinnett, a Democratic delegate, said at the hearing, asking supporters of the bill why Jewish advocacy groups felt it was “singling out Israel.”

“There is no other country that is currently building illegal settlements that is condemned by the United Nations, by the ICJ, by the U.S. Department of State under the Obama and Biden administration,” a CAIR representative responded, claiming that Washington is funding this activity with “billions” of dollars.

The bill says a nonprofit registered with the state “may not knowingly engage in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.”

It describes “unauthorized support” as aiding or abetting actions by the Israeli government or Israeli citizens in what it defines as “the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Under the proposal, Maryland’s attorney general could file civil lawsuits against nonprofit leaders accused of violating the law and seek “not less than $1,000,000 in damages.” Private individuals could also bring lawsuits seeking injunctions and damages.

Nonprofits found liable would be removed from the state’s registry of charitable solicitations. The state would be required to ensure that organizations that are no longer registered stop soliciting in Maryland, according to a policy note attached to the bill.

Turning Terror Into Context by Abe Greenwald

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What about the part that the New York Times isn’t telling you—or at least not in bold type? Where’s the headline reading “More Than 100 Children in Temple Israel Pre-K at Time of Attack”? Or how about this for a story on the terrorist’s family back in Lebanon? “Synagogue Attacker’s Brothers Suspected of Being in Hezbollah”?

Not at the paper of record. The important thing for the Times, and many other outlets, is to bring everything back around to supposed Israeli crimes.

Even if we were to pretend that Israel is guilty of every invented charge hurled at it, what does that have to do with 100 Jewish American children sitting in classrooms in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on a Thursday afternoon? The only moral statement one need make about yesterday’s attack is that it’s right and just that the perpetrator is dead.

From October 7, 2023, to this day, every last bit of the psy-op against Israel and the Jews has relied on inverting both morality and truth. Hamas attempted a genocide, so Israel is accused of genocide. Zionism is, among other things, a means of preventing genocide, so Zionism itself is framed as a genocidal ideology. Hamas targeted innocents, slaughtered babies, and raped women, so Israel is accused of all three. Hamas kept food from Gazans, so Israel is accused of a starvation plot. Jews are indigenous to Israel, so Israel is accused of colonizing a native population. Jews are attacked across campuses and elsewhere in America, so we’re lectured on Islamophobia. The Iranian regime has been waging a half-century-long war to destroy Israel, so Israel is accused of starting a war with Iran.

Here's another regularly inverted truth: Children die in Israeli airstrikes for the simple reason that genocidal Jew-haters keep trying to rid the world of Jews. This is what liberals might call the “root cause.” If the family of the terrorist who carried out yesterday’s attack was killed in Lebanon, that’s entirely the fault of Hezbollah. That his brothers are suspected of being in Hezbollah perfectly encapsulates the larger pathological loop: In their effort to extinguish the Jews, Jew-haters kill their own—at which point they must go out and try to kill more Jews.

Whether they succeed or fail, the media will be sure to get their message out.

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03/13 Links Pt1: Regime Change Without Nation Building; The Strange Coalition Defending Tehran; US strikes Kharg Island in Iran, Islamic Regime 'Crown Jewel

From Ian:

Jonathan Schanzer: Regime Change Without Nation Building

Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been the only experience young Iranians know.

Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been shattered.

Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.

Self-defined experts on these matters look at the prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic, with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.

While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century. That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.

The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.

None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First” won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.

Brendan O'Neill: War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘unprovoked war’. It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s ‘unprovoked war’ in Iran.

Here’s my question: is the rape and murder of Jews not a provocation? Was the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust – 7 October – not a provocation? The tyrants of Tehran were the paymasters of the jihadist brutes who carried out that slaughter. They lavished guns and training on that army of anti-Semites that invaded Israel by air, sea and land not even three years ago. That wasn’t a provoking act?

Is it not a provocation to rain thousands of missiles onto a neighbouring country? Is it not a provocation to subject a nation to a ballistic swarm that causes the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and the deaths of scores of innocents, including 12 Druze kids playing football? That’s what Hezbollah has done these past three years. Hezbollah received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamic Republic to pursue precisely such violent badgering of the Jewish state. That isn’t a provocation?

You can say many things about America and Israel’s war in Iran. Some say it’s valiant, others that it’s reckless. But one thing you can’t say, not if you want to be taken seriously, is that it is ‘unprovoked’. Unless, of course, you think the mass murder of Jews should have no repercussions. That, just like in the 1930s, or the 1490s, mobs of anti-Semites should be free to kill Jews with impunity. If I were you, I’d keep that view to myself.

Traditionally it was the pursuers of war who engaged in linguistic trickery to justify their actions or disguise their true motives. Tariq Ali calls it the ‘grammar of deceit’. Today, such semantic duplicity is more readily found among war’s opponents.

Indeed, President Trump, in contrast with his predecessors who dolled up their warmaking as ‘peacekeeping’, has spoken with uncommon frankness about the nature of war. He has told of the ‘death, fire and fury’ that will be visited upon the Iranian regime. Ugly, but honest. It’s the other side, Trump’s noisy doubters and Israel’s legion haters, who are using language as a weapon not of clarification but of concealment.

‘Unprovoked war’ – that isn’t only factually wrong, it’s intentionally dissembling. It draws a thick veil over the events of the past three years. It absolves the Islamic Republic of its sins of violent anti-Semitism. It memory-holes the war crimes funded by that regime and conditions us to think of Iran as an innocent party under ‘imperial’ assault by the Jewish State and its American lackeys. It is a lie masquerading as a critique.

John Spencer: War Reveals the Truth: Russian and Chinese Weapons Are Outmatched

Modern warfare is no longer defined by individual weapons platforms alone. It is defined by networks. Western militaries have spent decades investing in systems that integrate satellites, aircraft, drones, sensors, cyber capabilities, and precision munitions into a unified battlefield architecture. This allows forces to detect targets faster, share information instantly, and strike with extraordinary precision.

Russia and China have attempted to replicate elements of this model, but the battlefield evidence suggests their systems remain less integrated and more vulnerable to disruption. Battlefield performance carries geopolitical consequences.

In 1982, during the Lebanon War, Israeli fighters destroyed more than 60 Syrian aircraft supplied by the Soviet Union without losing a single plane. Soviet air defenses that had been widely exported suddenly appeared far less formidable. Moscow’s reputation as an arms supplier suffered.

Something similar is happening again today, and the battlefield evidence is mounting.

When Russian air defenses fail to protect Russian forces in Ukraine, defense planners around the world take notice. When Chinese-supplied air defense systems fail to prevent precision strikes in South Asia, potential buyers pay attention. And when Iranian defenses built with Russian and Chinese technology fail to prevent repeated penetrations by U.S. and Israeli forces, the message becomes unmistakable.

The battlefield is the ultimate arms exhibition.

Countries that spend billions of dollars on military equipment are not buying hardware for parades. They are buying systems that must function in the most demanding conditions imaginable. Every destroyed radar, every neutralized air defense battery, and every successful penetration of an air defense network sends a signal to the global defense market.

That signal is increasingly clear.

Western military technology, particularly that developed by the United States and Israel, continues to demonstrate a decisive advantage in real combat conditions. From stealth aircraft and precision-guided weapons to advanced electronic warfare and integrated intelligence networks, these systems are proving their effectiveness across multiple wars.

Russia and China will continue to export weapons. Many countries will still buy them because they are cheaper or politically easier to obtain. But the evidence from modern battlefields is mounting.

Russian and Chinese systems have not saved Iran. They have not protected Russian forces in Ukraine. And they did not prevent India from striking precisely where and when it chose during Operation Sindoor.

War is the harshest evaluator of military technology.

Right now, the verdict from the battlefield is unmistakable.

US military supremacy shines as China fails big in Iran, Venezuela

China has become the laughingstock of the international community.

For years, its leaders showcased their powerful HQ-9B missiles as the best air defense system. But they were lying. In less than a year, their system has failed catastrophically in Pakistan, in Venezuela and now in Iran.

The U.S. remains by far the most modern and feared military power in the world, and President Trump has proven it. In one day, U.S. and Israeli forces wiped out Iran’s military leadership, along with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In one day, U.S. forces entered Venezuela and extracted Nicolás Maduro without a single U.S. fatality.

Recall that it took President George H.W. Bush several days to capture General Manuel Noriega in Panama; the tracking and elimination of Osama Bin Laden took almost 10 years. Here is a historical fact for which no is crediting the current administration: Operations Absolute Resolve and Epic Fury have set a new standard.

Returning to China, the HQ-9B missiles and JY-27A radars were always impressive at military parades, but they have performed poorly in actual combat. They are blind, deaf, and mute.

The HQ-9B, also known as Red Flag 9, is a cheap copy of the powerful U.S. Patriot missiles and the Russian S-300. In theory, they have built-in radar systems to track and engage multiple targets simultaneously. In practice, they have demonstrated the opposite.

Since May of last year, serious concerns have been raised about the HQ-9B’s inadequacy. In India’s Operation Sindoor against Pakistan, the Chinese missiles were soundly defeated for four consecutive days. They were unable to defend, destroy or track anything.

China’s JY-27 radar is a system capable of identifying and scanning targets between 280 and 390 kilometers away. It specializes in the early detection of fast, supersonic F-22 and F-35 fighter jets. But in real combat, when Maduro was captured in Venezuela, the Chinese radars became a point of national humiliation and shame, failing to detect even one of the 150 aircraft that penetrated Venezuelan airspace.

Operation Absolute Resolve also humiliated Russia. Venezuela had invested more than $2 billion in S-300 missiles. Despite their power, they were rendered immobile by powerful American fighters, bombers and electronic warfare aircraft.

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If Jewish "progressives" had their way, scores of children would have been murdered at Temple Israel yesterday

From all reports of the horrific terror attack at Temple Israel in Michigan yesterday, a bloodbath was averted because of the professional, armed security that the synagogue had in place.

In all likelihood this was partially funded, directly or indirectly through Jewish Federations, by the Department of Homeland Security. 

But "progressive Jews" don't like synagogues to be protected by armed guards.

An April 2024 open letter to Congress signed by pseudo-Jewish organizations like the Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Synagogues Rising and others insisted that the best way to protect synagogues - which, they claim, are only threated by white supremacy - is through "Community Based, Non-Carceral Approaches." 

Their "plan" is to partner with other groups and somehow that would stop Hezbollah-aligned actors or Islamist terrorists from targeting Jews. 

They call it "safety through solidarity."

Really.

Oh, by the way, they hate the word "terrorist" altogether, saying 

We refuse to see our family members and friends (or anyone) labeled as “terrorists” or on the “path to radicalization.” We demand community-based, non-carceral safety approaches that leave no one in our communities behind, and actively challenge our society’s reliance on criminalization and surveillance.

See? No one is a terrorist, they are just misunderstood well-meaning people. Including someone driving a car with bombs and guns into a synagogue and preschool.

If only the guards gave Ayman Mohamad Ghazali flowers and an invitation to an iftar meal after he crashed into the building, all would have ended up well. How dare they use guns, treating him like a criminal!

So when you see empty statements of sadness from JVP or Bend the Arc, remember - if Temple Israel had listened to them, there would have been carnage. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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