04/14 Links Pt1: Seven Myths About the Iran War; Western European Leaders Betray the West; What If Trump Hadn't Attacked Iran?; Israel, Lebanon agree to negotiations in first direct talks since 1993

From Ian:

Michael Doran: Seven Myths About the Iran War

The media elite refuse to credit President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with a win. They portray the operation in Iran as aimless adventurism. In doing so, they advance the very arguments that serve America's enemies, undermining the credibility of a successful deterrent action.

Opponents of the Trump administration have repeatedly called this "a war of choice," a conflict the president launched without cause or coherent purpose. The administration has, in fact, made a clear and compelling case. As the president has stated repeatedly for years, "Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It's very simple."

Moreover, at the outset of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described another factor that drove America to act. "They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 ballistic missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month." Iran would soon have enough missiles and drones to overwhelm the defenses of Israel and every American base in the region. America could let Israel attack alone, in which case Iran would attack American forces and cause significant casualties; or work together with Israel to eliminate an intolerable threat to both countries.

During the Biden administration, between Jan. 2021 and Jan. 2025, Iranian-backed forces launched hundreds of attacks on American personnel and assets across the Middle East, including over 170 strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, plus dozens of attempts against U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In any previous era, a sustained campaign of this magnitude against American bases and naval vessels would have been called open war.

The American-Israeli campaign achieved its core strategic objectives: halting Iran's advance toward nuclear weapons capability and significantly degrading its ballistic missile program, which together had posed a growing existential threat to Israel and the region. Prior to the operation, Iran was rapidly advancing both programs, with much of its critical infrastructure on the verge of being buried too deeply underground for effective strikes. The result was a decisive disruption of Iran's most dangerous capabilities, while leaving Iran economically crippled.

In the end, Israel and the U.S. entered the conflict facing a severe and imminent threat and emerged with that threat meaningfully and verifiably reduced. That is the fundamental measure of victory in war. The window for effective action was closing. Trump acted before it slammed shut.

What If Trump Hadn't Attacked Iran?

By mid-2025 Iran was assessed to have had nearly a thousand pounds of 60%-enriched uranium. This is so close to weapons grade that American intelligence said the Iranians could have fuel for a bomb in under a week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it could make enough for nine weapons. They were likely days, not years, from the bomb.

Now, picture what would have happened if they had actually crossed that line. A nuclear Iran doesn't just get a weapon. It gets a shield. The IRGC and the Houthis could control the Strait of Hormuz (as well as the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait connecting the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden) and forever dictate terms to ships with infinitely more certainty than their threats today are armed with.

In addition, Hizbullah operates with nuclear cover. The Gulf states face a simple choice: bow or build their own bombs; Saudi Arabia has already said it would. A nuclear cascade across the most volatile region on Earth would follow. Worst of all, the conflict we have just seen to defang the regime suddenly becomes impossible. This is exactly why the ayatollahs wanted nuclear weapons in the first place.

Tehran executed a brilliant strategy, with extraordinary patience, over two decades. The regime's genius was to make confrontation always seem premature. There was always another round of talks, another sunset clause, another International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection to wait for. A so-called hardliner would be replaced by a so-called moderate.

Each delay bought another year of nuclear enrichment, another generation of drones (used to such devastating effect by Russia in Ukraine), another $1 billion flowing to proxies.

So when we assess the conflict, we must consider the counterfactual of inaction. What would be the effect on our energy security, our trade and investments - and above all the safety of our people - if this intervention had not happened?

Western European Leaders Betray the West

Iran's regime -- not to be confused with its tormented people, many of whom have sacrificing their lives since 1999 trying to oust it -- has, since its installation in 1979, threatened "Death to America" ("the Great Satan") and "Death to Israel" ("the Little Satan").

For 39 years running, Iran has boasted the prestigious label, conferred on it by the US State Department, of the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." Iran, along with Qatar, is reportedly a principal financier of international Islamic terrorism as well as a leading agent of global destabilization.

Israel and the United States seem to have concluded, as US President Franklin Roosevelt had regarding the Third Reich in 1941, that, "When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him."

The Iranian regime's "a week to 10 days" must have sounded sufficiently like an "imminent threat" and a "clear and present danger" to have the Trump Administration decide that it would be preferable to neutralize the regime before the regime neutralized the United States.

[The] "sunset clauses" in Obama's 2015 JCPOA "nuclear deal"... would have enabled Iran legitimately to have as many nuclear weapons as it liked by October 2025. When Trump cancelled the JCPOA in 2018, that was the bullet he skillfully dodged.

Other American politicians have wrongly accused the Trump administration of violating the arguably unconstitutional 1973 War Powers Act.

There was no point in allowing Iran to become another North Korea. "You want to see the stock market go down?" Trump asked on Fox News. "Let a couple of nuclear bombs be dropped on us."

Most of these politicians in Europe never condemned decades of atrocities committed by Iran's regime. On January 9, 2026 — at the very moment Iran's regime was slaughtering more than 30,000 of its unarmed people on the streets — Starmer, Macron and Merz published a joint statement heroically expressing "deep concern." That was it.

The immigration to Western Europe of increasingly large Muslim populations, who never assimilated and seem quite devoted to a hatred for Israel and Jews -- as well as for Christians -- has contributed to a resurgence in antagonism toward Jews among political leaders seeking votes throughout Western Europe.

"Western Europe is profoundly afflicted by a political and sociological death wish," wrote Conrad Black last month. "The United States will not save them from that; only they can."

Israel — which most West European leaders in power seem to hold in contempt — is clearly the most reliable ally of the United States; it is these West European leaders who deserve to be held in contempt. Under their dismal and unprincipled leadership, and their wanton surrender to demanding newcomers, Western Europe as we know it may well be heading toward collapse.

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Amnesty International is Encouraging Thousands of Civilians to Break International Law and Endanger Themselves

Amnesty International is promoting the Global Sumud Flotilla which it says is "attempting to break Israel's unlawful blockade on the occupied Gaza Strip." 

Amnesty is an organization that grounds almost all of its reports and advocacy in careful legal argument, employing lawyers to parse the Fourth Geneva Convention, ICJ decisions, international conventions and other customary international law. It is not a street protest group making instinctive moral appeals. It is an institution that built its credibility on the claim that the law is on its side.

And in 2011, Amnesty admitted that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal.

Following Israel's interception of the Mavi Marmara, the UN Secretary-General's Panel of Inquiry — chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer — found that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was a legitimate security measure under international law. Amnesty's response published the same day was explicit: "The Palmer report's finding that the naval blockade is lawful should not be interpreted to mean that the entire closure regime imposed on Gaza is legal." Amnesty accepted the legality of the naval blockade finding and aimed its fire at the broader land and air closure regime instead. Israel and many others disagree about the legality of Israel's general policies in Gaza, but Amnesty didn't dispute the Palmer Report's naval finding.

Under the San Remo Manual, the leading restatement of customary law on naval warfare, a properly declared blockade may be enforced against any vessel attempting to breach it, including in international waters. Vessels can be captured; proportionate force may be used if they resist after warning. The cargo's humanitarian character and the passengers' "peaceful intent" are not exemptions. 

Yet Amnesty now calls the naval blockade "illegal," demands states ensure "safe passage" for the flotilla, and frames any Israeli interception as itself a violation of international law. As far as I can tell, it has never advanced a legal argument disputing the Palmer Report.

This means that Amnesty, an organization that prides itself on supporting international law, is enthusiastically supporting breaking international law. 

Which means that a human rights organization is encouraging thousands of civilians to enter a military zone and to risk their lives to do something illegal. 

That doesn't sound like human rights, does it?

A human rights organization's core function is to protect human beings from foreseeable harm. Encouraging unarmed civilians to challenge a military blockade, while omitting any acknowledgment that interception is the predictable and legally permitted outcome, inverts that function entirely. 

But it is even worse than that.

Amnesty has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. It claims Israel targets reporters, doctors, and rights workers.  Amnesty says "Israel persists in its genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza" even after the ceasefire.  If they genuinely believe that — if Israel is an army currently engaged in deliberate mass extermination — then encouraging unarmed civilians to sail directly into its path isn't solidarity. It's supporting mass suicide.  This is a curious position for a human rights organization to take. 

Or it reveals that Amnesty doesn't actually believe its own most extreme accusations — that the genocide rhetoric is agitprop, not analysis

Either way, Amnesty is not protecting human rights here. It is gambling with human lives.

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Some German cartoons making fun of antisemitism

A couple of years ago, a book (and art exhibit) was released in Germany called "Antisemitism for Beginners." it is a satirical take on antisemitism. I translated some of the cartoons here.

The cover image:

Others:

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04/13 Links Pt2: Holocaust Memorial Day has been universalised. Yom HaShoah cannot be; Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism; The Paranoid Prophet of Loserdom; The Arab Case for Israel

From Ian:

Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism

Throughout the early 1950s, the deepening of Qutb’s Islamism, the intensification of his cultural opposition to what he called the ‘Western disease’, meshed with his increasingly vocalised anti-Semitism. This was writ large in Our Struggle Against the Jews, a work that conjured up Jewish people as the eternal, cosmic enemy of Muslims everywhere. For Qutb, Israel was the face not just of the Western ‘crusaders’, but of evil.

As Qutb’s Islamist embrace deepened, Egyptian nationalist forces were in the process of putting an end to British occupation and toppling the monarchy. In the initial aftermath of the Free Officers coup d’état in July 1952, Egypt’s new leader, Colonel Gamal Abdel al Nasser, was seemingly keen to keep the Muslim Brotherhood onside. Qutb himself, his status as an Islamic intellectual rising, was also promoted by the new regime. He spoke at Free Officers events and was given a chance to deliver public radio lectures on the importance of Islamic values.

Yet the secular aspirations of Nasserite nationalists – ‘Religion is for God and the nation for all’, as Nasser put it – always sat uneasily alongside the Islamist dreams of the Muslim Brotherhood and now Qutb. In February 1953, Qutb finally joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He proclaimed: ‘No other movement can stand up to the Zionist and the colonialist crusaders.’

In the months that followed, tensions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptians’ nationalist rulers mounted, culminating in the disbanding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954 and the arrest and eventual imprisonment of hundreds of members, including Qutb. It was in prison that Qutb – ill, embittered and hardened against Nasser and secular nationalism – produced Milestones, arguably the defining document of Islamism. From the start, Milestones is shot through with revolutionary intent. Cosplaying as a What Is to Be Done? – Lenin’s 1901 political cri de coeur – for Islamists, it begins by offering a diagnosis of the spiritual crisis in which mankind finds itself. This amounts to a recapitulation of Qutb’s long-standing cultural critique of the West, of the way in which the elevation of human reason has disenchanted the world, depriving people of ‘any healthy values for the guidance of mankind’. Only Islam has the answer, he writes. Only Islam has the capacity to re-enchant the world, to suffuse it with the breath of the divine.

The problem, Qutb argues, is that the world is steeped in Jahilyyah (‘age of ignorance’). Previously, this was a term scholars used to refer to the supposed moral turpitude of the pre-Muslim world. But Qutb turns it into something more abstract – a reference to any society under the sway of an authority other than that of Allah. Any society, that is, that elevates human reason to a position of authority, or that places a value on freedom or material progress. That goes for all social forms and political ideologies of Western origin, from the liberal to the Communist to the nationalist. All societies are ‘jahili’, Qutb writes, that have ‘delegated the law-making capacity of God to others’ – that have, in short, usurped the ‘sovereignty’ of Allah. There is, he writes, ‘no authority except God’s, no law except from God, and no authority of one man over another, as the authority in all respects belongs to God’.

‘Sovereignty’ is the key concept in Milestones. Adapted from the work of Indian Islamist, Abdul Maududi (1903-1979), with whom Qutb had been corresponding in prison, ‘sovereignty’ in Qutb’s world ought to belong solely to Allah – an assertion he draws from the Muslim declaration of faith, ‘There is no deity except Allah’ (La ilaha illallah). This sovereignty is not limited to spiritual affairs. There is no room for secularism in the Islamist worldview. Allah’s writ applies to every aspect of human reality. As he put it in In the Shade of the Koran, ‘it is not natural for religion to be separated from [the affairs] of the world’. Qutb’s stated ambition in Milestones is to replace every man-made law, custom and tradition ‘with a new concept of human life, to create a new world on the foundation of submission to the creator’. This, he says, is Islam’s ‘revolutionary message’.

At points, Qutb frames this message in terms of freedom and even ‘autonomy’, stating that Islam ‘is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man’. He argues that jahili societies enslave men to laws made by other men, and – in a pointed allusion to what he perceives as Western freedom – enslave them to their own animal-like desires. Islam, by contrast, will liberate men both from secular authorities and from their own impulses. Not by encouraging them to exercise their own reason, as the actual self-governing promise of ‘autonomy’ has it, but through their submission to their only right and true ruler: Allah. This is Qutb’s vision of freedom, ‘the total submission to God alone’.

It is a singular, brutal vision. It not only recognises no other authority, but also, as Qutb makes clear, no other ties, bonds or commitments. It floats free of family, friends and, importantly, nation. It’s a vision that, in its sheer, inhuman abstraction, transcends all boundaries – a vision global in scope, and horrifying in ambition.

And how is this Islamic society to be realised? Through what Qutb calls a ‘vanguard’ of true believers. Those who, in every aspect of their existence, have freed themselves from jahili society and submitted themselves entirely to Allah. Those who live only according to the laws of God, not man. That is who Milestones is aimed at – the revolutionary cell.

The Paranoid Prophet of Loserdom

With his long beard, resonant voice, outgoing personality, and bellicose, mystical rhetoric, Dugin is regarded by his global fan base and by his enemies alike as a kind of geopolitical genius, the most prominent representative of contemporary Russian political thought, and, most of all, the inspiration behind Russia’s foreign policy—Putin’s personal Rasputin. Like most things in the 21st century, the reality is far more childish, more ridiculous, and, because of that, more frightening.

The puerile grandiosity of his book titles, with their aura of esotericism and science fiction—The Fourth Political Theory, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Last War of the World-Island—is in line with their content, which is a jumble of nihilistic fantasies, fascist dreams, totalitarian plans, and ridiculous predictions. In a piece written in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Dugin announced that Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia were about to rally to the side of the Palestinians, who will launch an uprising in East Jerusalem that will lead to the sealing-off of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to World War III, during which Russia will “at last” side with the Muslims against the Israelis, the West, and the forces of LGBTQ.

At their even less incoherent, the so-called neo-Eurasian or fourth-political theories that he presents as original are, in fact, largely copied and pasted from more coherent anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment Western theorists and philosophers. The result is a vision of history that can only be called gnostic and that can be summarized in a simple paragraph:

The present geopolitical situation is the latest episode of an ancestral cosmic war. Two types of societies clash: The evil ones, which he calls “thalassocratic,” are essentially treacherous because they’re governed by the mischievous, untrustworthy “Atlanticists” and are engineered by commerce, exchanges, individualism, and egalitarianism. The good ones, the “tellurocratic” societies, are rooted in soil, knighthood, religion, and vertical hierarchy. The thalassocratists (the United States, Western Europe, protestants, atheists, Israel, and the Jews) are liberal children of darkness. The tellurocratists (the Russians, the Orthodox and the Catholics, and Muslims, especially Shiites) are children of light. At stake is the human soul. Should the Russians (or the Iranians) lose, there is no reason that the world should continue: In a recent interview, Dugin declared that Moscow would provide nuclear weapons to anyone dedicated to fighting “the West.”

The Phantom Base

In an Information State, the struggle centers on who can generate and assume control over these bubbles of attention. The aim is to become expert at producing them so that when one bursts, another can take its place. This has become the work of a strange alliance: nominally pro-Trump figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon joining forces with liberal media outlets. Once shunned for their ties to Trump, Carlson and Bannon are now treated as credible and brave sources by publications eager to amplify stories that cast him in a damaging light.

The result: the enduring trope of a “MAGA base in revolt,” which entered the news cycle even as Trump was winning by a historic margin in 2024 and has never left. Notably, in light of factional skirmishing among right-wing elites, coverage of this supposed civil war relies less on field reporting than on breathless accounts built around overt partisan messaging and leaked quotes from anonymous administration officials.

On a single day in mid-June 2025, for instance, Politico ran one story touting “the MAGA split over Israel,” citing Tucker Carlson’s claim that Israel was dragging the United States into war with Iran, and another headlined: “MAGA Warned Trump on Iran. Now He’s in an Impossible Position.” In a lengthy post on X, Carlson warned that “the first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans.” He called a strike a “profound betrayal” that would end Trump’s presidency and predicted that the United States would lose to Iran’s supposedly superior military. Bannon said that military action would “tear the country apart.” His protégé Jack Posobiec asked followers what a new Middle East conflict would do to summer gas prices—after Carlson had already forecast $30-a-gallon fuel and a “collapse” of the U.S. economy.

To point out that these predictions were inaccurate is too generous. They functioned as threats, issued by the Carlson-Bannon faction and echoed by sympathizers within the administration, aimed at asserting a veto over the president’s policy. When Trump nevertheless ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, his base overwhelmingly backed him. According to a CBS News /YouGov poll, 85 percent of Republicans supported the action, including 94 percent of self-identified “MAGA Republicans.”

Trump’s base faced its ultimate stress test this March, when the U.S. and Israel jointly launched a war against Iran. This time, Carlson, Bannon, and others moved past dire predictions into an open conflict with the president and his party. With the war underway, they were joined by former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, a decorated combat veteran, failed congressional candidate, and member of the Carlson media circle. Kent resigned from his post with a flamboyant open letter in which he blamed Israel for dragging America into the current war; for the death of his first wife, killed in Syria in 2019 by an Islamic State suicide bomber while deployed as a U.S. Naval officer; and for the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Within hours of resigning, Kent embarked on a press junket that had clearly been coordinated beforehand. First stop: an interview with Carlson.

If the premonitions of civil war were valid, this was the moment when the simmering discontent on the Right should have erupted into a full-scale rejection of Trumpism. After all, Trump had betrayed his promise to end “stupid wars” in the Middle East. Yet even as a majority of Americans expressed disapproval of the war, the military action received overwhelming support from Republican voters and proved exceptionally popular with self-identified members of the MAGA base. One poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov between March 17 and March 20 found that 92 percent of MAGA Republicans supported the military action against Iran. Of course, pollsters are often wrong—but so are podcasters. If MAGA sentiments shift, a possibility that becomes more likely if ground forces are deployed in a protracted struggle, that would only confirm the truism that unsuccessful wars are unpopular.

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04/13 Links Pt1: How Israel Derangement Syndrome blinds media to basic Mideast facts; The Amalekite Terrorist Iranian Regime: Why deterrence failed in Islamabad

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: How Israel Derangement Syndrome blinds media to basic Mideast facts

Western media remain utterly incoherent ahead of Tuesday’s Israeli-Lebanese talks in Washington because their Israel Derangement Syndrome renders them unable to acknowledge basic facts.

For starters, the Jewish state is not at war with Lebanon, but with Hezbollah, the terror group that occupies the country’s south and until recently had the government bullied into complete submission.

It’s a war Hezbollah started — most recently, ending a cease-fire by launching missiles at Israel in revenge for Jerusalem’s assaults on Iran in conjunction with Operation Epic Fury.

Israel is in the process of evicting Hezbollah from Lebanon south of the Litani River — as per the accords that ended the 2006 war, though neither the weak government nor the less-than-worthless UN peacekeeping force lifted a finger to make it happen.

Yet most analyses pretend the current Israeli offensive is about something else entirely:

“Did Israel attack Lebanon to spoil Iran war ceasefire?” asked The Guardian last week.

“What is Israel’s war in Lebanon, and why could it shatter the Iran ceasefire?” blared CNN.

Not only was that (obviously) never the point, it was never even a risk: That cease-fire hasn’t even ended as the US Navy blockades the Strait of Hormuz, because Tehran doesn’t dare let the bombing resume.

Plus, the Iran cease-fire deal never included Lebanon, as President Donald Trump made plain last week; Hezbollah and its patrons in Tehran just tried to pretend it did.

Seth Mandel: Which Yemen? Which Lebanon? Which Palestinians?

Israel and Lebanon are engaged in direct talks to resolve the conflict caused by Hezbollah. Iran and the U.S. are negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program and control of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran also, however, wants its talks with the U.S. to include Hezbollah’s fate in Lebanon. And yet no one seems to be struck by the obvious implications: Hezbollah is Iran, and Iran is demanding a degree of sovereignty for its own colony on someone else’s land.

Lebanon has a government. Nobody in the West disputes this. The Lebanese government, therefore, is the only one with a legitimate claim to negotiate over its own affairs of state. And yet somehow, Iran’s insistence that it also speaks for Lebanon because its illegal occupation forces remain on Lebanese territory hasn’t been laughed out of the room.

Iran plays this game of de-sovereignization all around the region, enabled at times by the West. But how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again now that the Islamic Republic has cracked up the Middle East? And does the West even have the desire to do so?

Lebanon is a pretty straightforward case compared to Iran’s other expansionist projects, and yet the West can’t even get this one right. For the past two and a half years, the region has been engulfed in the flames lit by Iran’s Palestinian client, Hamas. European leaders who recognized a “state of Palestine” did so precisely at the moment when Hamas emerged as the only Palestinian governing entity with control over its territory. The IDF has to undertake regular security sweeps in Ramallah, for example, just to ensure that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas can enter one of the PA’s major West Bank towns.

“Recognition” was done to punish Israel rather than help Palestinians, which is why the only beneficiary was Hamas. Which means that even the countries that officially consider Abbas to be the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian polity have nonetheless boosted Hamas at the expense of the PA. Since Hamas is an extension of Iran, it is the criminal regime in Tehran that is being elevated as a voice of sovereignty on behalf of Palestinians. Iran is cannibalizing the dreamed-of “state of Palestine,” just as it has been doing to the actual, existing (for now) state of Lebanon.

One lesson of this, incidentally, is that any “state of Palestine” created at this moment would be created under Iranian occupation and would be divided from the start. Iran’s expulsion from future Palestinian territory, therefore, is a clear prerequisite for Palestinian self-determination.

Meanwhile: If Palestinian-governed enclaves are two not-yet-states, and Lebanon is in perpetual civil war between its government and Iran’s occupation forces, Yemen is a third kind of Iran-caused disaster. It is practically two states at the moment—though both are hanging by a thread.

No Deal, No Illusions By Abe Greenwald Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.

If Iran doesn’t cave to Trump’s maritime jiu-Jitsu—and it might not—it seems more likely than ever that the U.S. will start cratering known dual-use and underground infrastructure sites across Iran. This isn’t even close to a war crime. It’s a legitimate use of military power that we’ve witnessed many times, including in the Allies’ victory over the Axis Powers in World War II. Trump’s been reluctant to do it out of the reasonable hope that the U.S. could win with as little damage and as few Iranian deaths as possible. This hope is commendable, but the remnants of the Iranian regime are bent on extinguishing it.

Meanwhile, over the course of the war, our own anti-Trump politicians and media figures have tied themselves into knot after knot trying to explain the supposed mistakes, crimes, and miscalculations of the U.S. and Israel. They’ve all but bound themselves up in failed and contradictory arguments. We were losing; then the regime was losing but winning by existing. Trump was going to commit war crimes to destroy the regime; then he was chickening out with a cease-fire. Trump had no plan to open the Strait of Hormuz; now his plan to do so is too risky.

Congressman Ro Khanna has long been proffering my favorite brainteaser of the war. He claims simultaneously that the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei forbade the production of nuclear weapons and that Barack Obama’s deal with Iran had successfully prevented the regime from developing the nuclear weapons it sought. It’s no surprise that he’s now calling for Trump’s removal from office.

There’s not much else for the bad-faith critics to say.

Over the weekend, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman just came out and admitted that he was “torn” because, while he wanted to see the Iranian regime defeated, he didn’t want Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu to emerge victorious.

He’ll get over it.

The U.S. and Israel are not torn, neither as an alliance nor as individual fighting forces. They’re set on winning, the Iranian regime is cracking, and the antiwar crowd is cracking up.

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NPR is Hezbollah PR

NPR has an interview with a Hezbollah commander that reveals things that NPR doesn't want its readers to realize.

This Israeli invasion has reignited a long-running conflict that was supposed to have paused with a November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, in which Lebanon's Army promised to disarm Hezbollah in the country's south. The United Nations says Israel violated that ceasefire thousands of times between late 2024 and early this year, with continued airstrikes that have killed more than 100 civilians.

While Hezbollah held its fire during that period, Jihad says they never disarmed. He says they pointed Lebanese soldiers to disused, defunct or damaged old stockpiles they no longer needed, and let them confiscate those. But Hezbollah's real arsenal was largely untouched, he says.

"They didn't confiscate anything! We gave them empty boxes, or a few old items to go blow up," he explains.

The 2024 ceasefire agreement explicitly demanded that Hezbollah give up its weapons and presence south of the Litani River, to be enforced by the Lebanese Armed Forces. This interview shows that this never happened - Hezbollah didn't leave, it rebuilt its arms in the south, and it fooled the LAF by giving it useless locations to pretend to disarm. The entire structure of the ceasefire depended on the idea that Hezbollah would no longer function as an armed force in southern Lebanon.

Moreover, the interview shows that Hezbollah never intended to adhere to the agreement. It always intended to flout it.

Any agreement with Hezbollah is worthless by their own admission. 

Real journalists would highlight that fact. Instead, the commander and Hezbollah is portrayed as somewhat heroic, steadfastly refusing to disarm. 

The article says Israel violated the 2024  ceasefire, not Hezbollah - ignoring their own reporting! Israel's actions were to enforce the agreement that Hezbollah brazenly ignored and the LAF was too incompetent to enforce itself.

The result is a distorted picture of reality. Readers come away with the impression that the ceasefire was primarily being violated by one side, while the other is portrayed as adapting, surviving, or reorganizing. The facts and the framing are from entirely different worlds. 

NPR further fails when it describes Hezbollah's actions during the current war. The commander acknowledges being responsible for shooting thousands of rockets into Israel, which we know aims at civilian areas. NPR doesn't care. Instead of pushback, it humanizes Hezbollah, saying that it even employs people to make sandwiches for terrorists. It's a social service program!

NPR frames the commander hiding in civilian areas along with his colleagues who were killed as "sheltering," not human shielding. It refers to his fellow terrorists he was hiding with as mere "people" to make them sound like civilian victims of random Israeli bombings rather than the military objectives they were. 

Journalism does not require taking sides, but it does require recognizing when a source is describing behavior that is clearly illegal. Here, the implications are embedded in the interview itself, yet they are left uninterpreted.

When an outlet like NPR presents those statements without drawing the obvious conclusions, it is not simply a matter of emphasis or framing. It is a breakdown in the basic function of reporting, which is to help the reader understand what the facts mean.

The facts are all there. NPR twists them to support terrorists and damn the nation defending itself from them.

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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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04/12 Links: Trump orders blockade of Strait of Hormuz; Defending Israel in an Age of Madness; A Palestinian Constitution of Contradictions: Democracy in Form, Exclusion in Substance

From Ian:

Amb. Michael Oren: Defending Israel in an Age of Madness

For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, I have spent most of my time defending the State of Israel.

Standing up for Israel became especially daunting after Oct. 7, 2023, when the victims of a verifiable genocide were baselessly accused of perpetrating one.

Conspiracy theories once considered fringe had become mainstream, and age-old antisemitic tropes had resurfaced in a presumption of Jewish wickedness.

America's national derangement is virtually insurmountable for the defenders of Israel.

Though readily disproven, Israel's guilt for annihilating an entire people is today accepted by more than half of the general public.

Many favor Palestinian anti-American terrorists over America's only dependable, democratic, military ally.

For many decades, advocates for Israel and Zionism wielded the weapon of truth. We produced volumes of "myths and facts" about the conflict. But how should we react when rampant unreason is infused with antisemitism?

In this new, twisted American universe, Oct. 7 was a false flag operation in which Israel massacred and kidnapped its own people as a pretext for occupying Gaza, and ZAKA volunteers staged the rape scenes at the Nova Festival.

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the terrorist who drove his car into a Michigan synagogue, was portrayed by NPR as a gentle, otherwise law-abiding citizen with genuine grievances. The New York Times eulogized Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who butchered his own people.

Amid such bedlam, try to advance a logical argument about why Israelis, threatened by a regime sworn to annihilate us and industriously producing the means of doing so, might not want to sit passively until it strikes.

The classic antisemitic canard of the cunning Jew winding the unwitting gentile around his crooked finger has been embraced by most of the American press.

Yet we must continue to battle the madness - even if we can only dent it here and there.

We can reinforce those who remain moored in morality and believe in the need to defeat evil in the world.

Israel Today Faces Far Fewer Threats than It Did Before

After the ceasefire in Iran, Israel today faces far fewer significant threats than it did before. Iran, in turn, is considerably weaker than it was. While not all of the war's aims were achieved, enough was accomplished to significantly improve Israel's strategic position and security. The inability to remove all the enriched uranium or bring a conclusive end to the rule of the clerical regime in Tehran does not mean that the war has not fundamentally changed the regional reality. It has.

The War of Independence did not end with all of Israel's aspirations fulfilled. Before the war, the Jews did not have a state; afterward, they did. Some 6,000 people - out of a Jewish population of roughly 600,000 - were killed. There was no peace, only armistice agreements. The economy was in shambles. Yet the fundamental reality had changed.

Before Oct. 7, Iran was steadily advancing toward nuclear capability, building ballistic missiles at a fast clip, actively preparing and prepping its proxies for Israel's destruction. Today, Hizbullah and Hamas - the tentacles of the Iranian octopus - have been cut back sharply and the head of the octopus is stunned and battered. Is it a complete victory? No. But is it significant? Unquestionably.

Those arguing that nothing was achieved are, in effect, arguing that Iran will rebuild and rearm, resting on the flawed assumption that Israel will simply sit back and allow that to happen. But Israel has changed. The key lesson of Oct. 7 is that it is no longer possible to assume that those who openly declare their intent to destroy you will ultimately be restrained by your power. They will not, because their calculus is often shaped by ideological, religious, even messianic factors that lie outside conventional logic.

As a result, Israel's doctrine has shifted to actively preventing the enemy from building capabilities. Some argue that the war will only intensify Iran's drive for a nuclear program. That may be so. But Israel and the U.S. have a strong incentive to prevent Iran from doing so. Iran can rebuild its nuclear and military capacities only if they allow it. It is reasonable to assume that they will not.

Iran's claim of victory despite its tremendous losses is reminiscent of Egypt's victory claim after the 1973 Yom Kippur War - a war in which, by most objective military measures, Egypt lost.

Nobody in Israel Dreamed the Americans Would Join the Attack on Iran

Aryeh Deri interviewed by Amit Segal (Israel Hayom)

Shas party chairman Aryeh Deri, after Prime Minister Netanyahu, is the most veteran player on the Israeli political field, with experience across cabinets and governments for 38 years. He sat in the Security Cabinet sessions related to the Iran war.

Q: Did we win?

Deri: "Yes."

Q: A decisive victory?

Deri: "I don't understand the phrase 'decisive victory.' Did we go into this campaign facing a grave threat to the Jewish people, and thank God we pushed back that threat in a very significant way? Clearly yes."

"What did we want to stop all these years? Just the nuclear weapons story. We never dreamed we could strike inside Iran. So we started with Operation Rising Lion [June 2025], when our planes flew through Iranian skies and caused enormous damage and halted the race to nuclear weapons. That's true - they didn't eliminate everything, because the nuclear material was deep underground. But we neutralized most of their scientists, struck heavily at the entire weapons industry, and pushed them back months or years."

"They were already at a stage where they were starting to move their missile industry and their weapons industry underground, too. Within a few months, we would not have been able to do anything. Everyone talks about nuclear weapons, but the ballistic threat is no less dangerous - in some ways even greater - because you don't use nuclear weapons quickly, but ballistic missiles? Freely." "The IDF chief of staff and the Mossad director...asked...that the Americans give their consent and provide protection. Nobody dreamed the Americans would join the attack....I never dreamed the Americans would go with us for 38 days and drop close to 20,000 munitions there....I tell you again with full responsibility - Netanyahu did not say to Trump and to the American administration anything that, God forbid, we didn't believe to be true."

"The goal was to create conditions for the regime's fall, and I think we created those conditions. That's actually why I think the ceasefire is a blessing - there's a greater chance the regime will fall from within. Iran begged for a ceasefire."

Q: Aren't you worried about a growing sense in America that we dragged them into a war that wasn't theirs?

Deri: "That has nothing to do with Iran. We have a problem with the Democrats, and somewhat with some Republicans, too. But precisely because of that, this period with Trump in power is a major opportunity for Israel to cement its regional standing. In the end, the Americans - whatever administration - will understand that their real ally is us."

Who is Peter Magyar, the man who ended Orban's reign?

Orban portrayed Magyar as an envoy of the Brussels-based EU establishment and as a Ukrainian agent, to the point that at times it seemed his real rival was Volodymyr Zelenskyy rather than Magyar. Orban and his allies repeatedly claimed that Magyar would drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine, an issue that worries Hungarians in part because of the country's energy dependence on Russia. In the final stretch of the campaign, pro-government media circulated allegations that Magyar used drugs, prompting him to travel to Vienna for tests at an independent laboratory to disprove them. Earlier, in February, Magyar announced that Orbán's associates were planning to publish a secretly filmed sex tape of him.

Magyar's rise changed the face of the opposition. Left-wing and center-left parties withdrew from the race one after another so as not to split the anti-Orban vote and to give Magyar a chance. The election effectively became a contest between right and right. The scale of the victory is critical: a two-thirds majority in parliament would allow Magyar to amend the constitution shaped by Orbán over 16 years in power, while a narrow majority would leave his hands tied against state institutions Orbán has filled with his own loyalists.

Magyar's victory is expected to shift the balance of power in the European Union. Russia will lose one of its main assets on the continent. For years, Orban served as an almost automatic blocker of sanctions on Moscow and aid to Ukraine, and with Magyar's victory that automatic veto is expected to disappear. Magyar has promised pragmatic relations with Moscow, while at the same time reducing Hungary's energy dependence on Russia and aligning with EU positions.

The election is also especially critical for Israel. Under Orban, Hungary was Israel's closest friend in the European Union and repeatedly blocked anti-Israel initiatives in Brussels. Magyar, by contrast, maintained deliberate ambiguity throughout the campaign on anything related to Israel, and in Jerusalem the assumption is that even if he is not hostile, he will not clash with the European Union on Israel's behalf.

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Jewish anti-Zionists want to censor Zionist books - by falsely claiming THEY are being silenced

Forty-two Jewish authors have written an open letter to the Jewish Book Council accusing it of "bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices" — which is a sophisticated way of saying that a Jewish literary institution is reflecting the views of most Jews.

The JTA story reports that the letter claims the JBC has "narrowed its vision to a Zionist approach to Jewish culture" and that this bias is "not only exclusionary but harmful, contributing to the dehumanization of Palestinians and advancing a system of cultural apartheid." These are strong words. 

One might reasonably ask: which specific Zionist books are doing this dehumanizing and promoting cultural apartheid? 

The letter doesn't name a single one. Because they do not exist.

This is the heart of the fraud. Since October 7, 2023, a substantial body of literature has emerged bearing witness to the Hamas massacres — Israel's National Library tracked 169 books and related publications on the topic by September 2024 alone, with hundreds more in Hebrew by 2025, and at least 29 English-language titles available as of late 2025. These works document survivor testimonies, hostage accounts, military analysis, poetry, and children's books. They center Israeli and Jewish trauma. I searched for reviews or controversies linking any of these titles to the dehumanization of Palestinians and found nothing, because the accusation has no grounding in actual content. The signatories level a charge of collective moral crime against an entire body of literature they apparently cannot be bothered to indict with a single quotation.

What the accusation does rest on is the assumption that Zionism is, by definition, racism — and therefore any Jewish author who holds Zionist views is, again by definition, dehumanizing Palestinians. The signatories don't argue this openly, because it would reveal them as the bigots they are. They simply assert it, treating "Zionist author" and "dehumanizer of Palestinians" as synonyms requiring no further demonstration. This is prejudice operating under cover of progressive vocabulary.

To them, Israel defending itself is an unspeakable crime and one that must never be portrayed as anything other than naked racism and dehumanization.

Their letter is actually worse. The authors complain that "the JBC has been disproportionately vocal about anti-Semitism while neglecting other issues of cultural concern to Jews." Excuse me? A Jewish literary institution is being accused of paying too much attention to Jew-hatred. At a time of record levels of antisemitism in the West.  During the same period we saw a historic global surge in antisemitism following October 7 — harassment of Jewish students, vandalism of synagogues, assaults on visibly Jewish people — these authors' grievance is that the premier Jewish literary organization was too focused on attacks on Jews. One struggles to imagine what level of antisemitism they would consider proportionate enough to warrant the JBC's concern. 

Their demand is that the JBC speak for all Jews — except when speaking for Jews means defending Jews.

One searches the letter in vain for which distinctly Jewish cultural concerns are "neglected" by JBC. The JBC covers Jewish cookbooks, Jewish history, Yiddish culture, Jews in America, Jews in politics, the Holocaust — the full range of Jewish civilization. Which suggests that "neglecting other issues of cultural concern to Jews" is simply a euphemism for "not using its platform to actively oppose Israel."

The signatories present themselves as a silenced minority struggling for representation in an institution that has shut them out. There's just one problem: several of them have been honored by the JBC itself. None have been penalized for their extreme, anomalous political positions. Buried in their own letter is the admission that many of them "refrained from submitting our books for consideration" or "declined to engage" with JBC programs. They self-censored and then accused the JBC of marginalizing them. They chose not to participate, and now complain about not being represented. 

This is the literary equivalent of not showing up to vote and then claiming the election was rigged against them.

The deeper irony is in what the authors are actually demanding. They want the JBC to explicitly state that "criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic," to redesign its antisemitism reporting tool around their preferred definition, and to create programming that centers "non- and anti-Zionist voices." They frame this as a call for diversity.  The vast majority of American Jews identify as Zionist to some degree, which means a Jewish literary institution that reflects Zionist perspectives is representing its community. Demanding that it de-center Zionism is a demand that the institution treat the mainstream Jewish worldview as a fringe position requiring correction.

That is the only censorship being discussed here - a naked demand to silence Zionist voices by calling them "dehumanizing" and "cultural apartheid." This is not an argument - it is a demand for compliance, a threat to label mainstream Jewish authors as racists unless they knuckle under to the new McCarthyists.

This is the same playbook used against PEN America, which caved — replacing its leadership and retracting a statement of solidarity with an Israeli comedian whose shows had been canceled — after months of similar pressure. The leading organization supporting freedom of speech was forced to retract support of freedom of speech. The JBC is the next target. The goal is institutional capture: forcing Jewish organizations to adopt, as their official posture, a stance that most of their constituents reject.

When an opponent's mere presence on an award list constitutes a human rights violation, the demand is not for a seat at the table. It is for everyone else to leave.

The Jewish Book Council has silenced no one. These authors are free to publish, submit, speak, and apparently write extensively for Literary Hub about their grievances. What the JBC should say — clearly and without apology — is this: submit your work, and if it meets our standards for literary excellence, we will promote it. We are a literary institution, not a political one, and we have no intention of becoming one. Instead, the JBC's CEO described the letter as representing a "difference in expectations" — a response so conciliatory it practically invites the next round of pressure. PEN America was also diplomatic, right up until it replaced its leadership and retracted statements defending free expression. Diplomatic accommodation is not a defense against institutional capture. It is the first step toward it.

These hypocrites shouldn't be coddled. They should — they must — be called out for what they are. The JBC has a rare opportunity to make a strong statement about real freedom of speech and to expose how these anti-Zionist authors are trying to subvert it. This is the time to stand up for real principles and not to knuckle under to pressure from those who want to silence their political opponents by any means necessary.

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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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France falsely calls Israeli attacks on Lebanon "disproportionate"

Brussels Signal reports:

France’s foreign ministry has said the European Union’s association agreement with Israel could be reopened for discussion in light of what it calls “disproportionate” Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Speaking today, Pascal Confavreux, spokesperson for the ministry, stated that given the gravity of yesterday’s events in Lebanon and the situation in the West Bank: “One cannot exclude that the discussion on the suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement will reopen, in addition to national sanctions.”

He added that while Israel has the right to defend itself, its actions are “not only unacceptable but also disproportionate and lead de facto to an impasse”. 

The word "disproportionate" has a specific legal meaning. 

The IHL formulation of the rule of proportionality requires a balancing of the foreseeable civilian harm and the expected military advantage based on the knowledge available to the military commander at the time prior to the initiation of an attack. 

To determine if an attack is disproportionate, one must know what the military value of the attack is and balance it against civilian harm. 

France has no idea what Israel's targets were. So it cannot possibly know whether the attacks were disproportionate. Using that language in this context is wrong.

Now, a few days after the attack, what do we know?

Lebanese officials claim tat over 300 people were killed. Israel claims that it killed 180 Hezbollah fighters and also aimed at other Hezbollah military assets.

A 3:2 ratio of militants to civilians, in an urban area, would never be considered disproportionate when done by any other army. In history. 

Israel is not saying that there were any mistakes. It confirms the airstrikes - most done in a single ten minute period over wide parts of Lebanon. The IDF has lots of lawyers who look at the legality of every individual strike before it happens. In other words, the IDF knew what its targets were, what the likely civilian casualties would be, and decided that the military advantage outweighed the expected civilian losses under international law, knowing all those facts.

France knows none of this.

The irony is that France has a history of airstrikes killing civilians for no apparent military reason. In 2021’s Operation Barkhane in Mali, France claimed to target a jihadist gathering but ended up killing 19 civilians in a wedding party. In 2011, French led airstrikes with NATO in Libya killed civilians on several occasions with no known military reason for the strikes, yet France maintains to this day that they were all valid miliary targets - and therefore proportionate despite the dozens of civilians killed.

It is not willing to give the same benefit of the doubt to Israel that it insists the world give to France, even though Israel’s intelligence on targets is from all evidence orders of magnitude better than France’s has been in its recent conflicts. 

Words matter. Assuming Israel's tally of terrorists killed in accurate, France's use of the term "disproportionate" is objectively wrong. And even without that tally, France is irresponsible for using that term without knowing the intended targets and their military value.

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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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04/11 Links: What Would It Have Cost For Israel To Maintain Its Popularity?; How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy; BBC calls terrorists resistance fighters in Iran coverage

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Would It Have Cost For Israel To Maintain Its Popularity?

So: What could Israel have done at this moment to prevent its continuing fall in U.S. public opinion? We have our answer: not hit back.

Well, sure, some people say, Israel could have carried out airstrikes without a ground invasion. But first of all, that wouldn’t have worked either, since the accusations of “genocide” began while Israel was still trying to capture or expel the remnants of the invading Palestinian forces. Israel carries out airstrikes in Lebanon and gets accused of genocide there, too. The accusation is held at the ready and fired at Israel the second it does something in response.

Second, the idea that Israel shouldn’t go in after the hostages is genuinely insane, not to mention the fact that Israel absolutely had to strike back hard and that Western leaders agreed from the outset that taking out Hamas was a legitimate goal.

But let’s go back to the hostages. Americans were among those taken by Hamas, and the American public was punishing Israel for going in to find them?

Now, it’s true that along the way, various media figures falsely reported claims of a famine in Gaza, of intentional starvation, of genocide, and whatever else they could think of. There’s no question this hurt Israel’s standing, but since Israel didn’t do those things, it is necessarily limited in what it could have done to prevent people lying about it.

Either way, the underlying point seems to be clear here: Israel could have stopped or slowed its popularity slide in the U.S. had it been willing to let Iran and its proxies get away with Nazi levels of violence against Jews.

Are there things Israel can do at the margins to improve its public image? Absolutely, and those will be enumerated and debated as this discussion continues. But I can’t shake the feeling that marginal effects have been the only ones on the table outside of Israel doing something suicidal.

How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy

That video of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, grilling college presidents about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university policies—and the college presidents responding that it depended on the context—has been viewed more than a billion times, making it what the jacket copy of her new book calls "the most-watched congressional hearing in history."

The performance propelled Stefanik to new prominence but not yet into a different job. She was reportedly considered—how seriously is unclear—to be President Donald Trump's 2024 running mate. Trump eventually did nominate her to be the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, a cabinet position, but then in March 2025 Trump pulled the nomination. Stefanik entered the 2026 race for governor of New York—and then announced she was suspending that campaign and also not running for reelection to Congress.

Making a success as a nonfiction writer may be even longer odds than winning election as governor of New York as a Trump Republican. Yet on the basis of her debut performance, Stefanik just might have a promising future ahead of her as an author. Poisoned Ivies is the best book yet on how the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel reverberated on American campuses.

The right-wing jeremiad against decadent universities is a genre with a long history. The conventional list starts with William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1951 God and Man at Yale and continues through Allan Bloom's 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, and Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. You could take it back even further, to Irving Babbitt's 1908 Literature and the American College: "The function of the college … should be to insist on the idea of quality."

Unlike Buckley and D'Souza, who came at it as students, or Bloom and Babbitt, who were professors, Stefanik brings the perspective of a politician. With that hearing questioning Harvard's Claudine Gay and Penn's Liz Magill, who both subsequently resigned, she "reset the course of American higher education" and changed the perception of Ivy League institutions. "Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant institutional life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred," she writes.

Antisemitism is returning – and the world is silent, again

At the center of this danger stands Iran, a regime built on extreme religious ideology and ambitions of regional hegemony. Like Germany in the 1930s, this represents a combination of a totalitarian worldview and a drive to obtain destructive power. Iran operates through regional proxies and promotes a long-term strategy to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The threat is not only external. It advances gradually and at times almost imperceptibly.

The connection between radical ideologies within Europe and actors such as Iran is not always direct, but it exists at the level of influence and consciousness. When extreme ideas spread, they create an environment in which it becomes easier to undermine stability, weaken trust in institutions, and empower hostile forces.

Just as many in Europe in the 1940s did not believe that the destruction of Jews on such a massive scale was possible, there are those today who struggle to believe that open threats against Israel and the West could be realized. Yet history has already proven that when declared evil is not stopped in time, it becomes reality.

The conclusion is clear. The West must wake up and distinguish between pluralism and indifference, between tolerance and surrender to ideologies that seek to exploit freedom in order to undermine it. The world once again faces a test. Will it choose to learn from the past, or repeat the mistake and hope for a different outcome?

Chamberlain believed he was buying time. In reality, he was buying an illusion.

That illusion came at a heavy cost to the world.

This time, everything is visible, everything is documented, and everything is being said openly. Iran declares its intention to destroy Israel, while leaders in France, the United Kingdom, and Spain roll their eyes and claim it is not their war.

Those who choose to close their eyes today will not be able to claim tomorrow that they did not know. The choice is not between war and peace, but between clarity and illusion, between responsibility and indifference.

The question is no longer what will happen, but who will bear responsibility when it does.

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04/10 Links Pt2: Simon Schama: With parts of London ‘no-go zones,’ Jews have lost basic civil rights; So You Want To Be a Bundist; The rise and fall of Tariq Ramadan; What Do You Mean by “Jewish State”?; Eliot Engel dies at 79

From Ian:

Historian Simon Schama: With parts of London ‘no-go zones,’ Jews have lost basic civil rights

As a “little Jewish boy” growing up in postwar Britain, Simon Schama says he never felt physically unsafe walking the streets wearing a kippa. Nor, he says, were guards routinely posted at the door of the local synagogue.

But, notes the acclaimed historian, that’s not the experience of Jewish children in Britain today. Instead, he says, it is the most difficult time for young Jews to be growing up since the end of World War II.

“It’s really painful that little kids, for example, Hasmonean or Jewish Free School kids, have to hide their uniforms,” Schama tells The Times of Israel. “The sense of a fearful loss not just of self-esteem, but basic civil rights. Nobody goes around tearing hijabs off Muslim women, and I’m very glad they don’t. But this is a dreadful time just [in terms of] feeling you have equal rights to the rest of the multicultural population.”

Parts of central London’s West End, says Schama, have become “no-go” areas, with Jews wearing a kippa or a Star of David facing the risk of “being screamed at.”

Schama’s comments came during a week when Britain’s Jewish community — already experiencing near-record levels of antisemitic incidents — was further shaken by an arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish-run volunteer organization in the heavily Jewish north London neighborhood of Golders Green.

A renowned art historian, as well as a scholar of British, French, and Jewish history, Schama is clearly put off by an anti-Israel exhibition in Margate, on the south coast of England, that made headlines that same week.

“Disgusting, horrible, mad, kind of bad Julius Streicher cartoons of Jews eating babies,” says Schama. “The really worrying thing is, of course, how these extreme, murderous, grotesque things have become absolutely… part of Generation Z’s repartee.”

All of this is far removed from the world in which Schama grew up.

“My father thought, after the Holocaust, there was nothing to fear in Britain,” he recalls. “Both my parents, and their generation, and indeed mine growing up, thought somehow of British life and Jewish life being a kind of almost perfect cultural fit.”

Despite being a Labour supporter, like many British Jews at the time, Schama’s father “worshiped Churchill both as a Zionist and for the war,” he says. Schama recalls the pride with which his father later told him about the speech by William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered in the House of Lords in March 1943, denouncing Allied procrastination and inaction in the face of the Nazis’ mass slaughter of European Jewry. “We stand at the bar of history, humanity, and God,” the archbishop declared.

“My father was moved by that,” says Schama. “The sense that the head of the Church of England would be the one person to say, ‘Don’t look away, don’t do nothing,’ struck him as a symptom of the benevolence and the fit between British history and Jewish history.”

Schama, who is currently working on the third volume of his trilogy “The Story of the Jews,” rejects the idea that Jews do not have a long-term future in Britain, as well as comparisons with the 1930s. There is no “horrible, intimidating, crazed popular antisemitism” backed and encouraged by the state, as was the case in Nazi Germany. Britain’s King Charles III meets members of the community during a visit to Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Crumpsall, north Manchester, on October 20, 2025. (Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP)

And, he says, there continue to be “moments of fantastic hope” for the community. By coincidence, on the day of the Golders Green arson attack, it was announced that King Charles is to become a patron of the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism and protects Jewish synagogues, schools, and other institutions.

“It was an incredible thing that the king accepted the patronage [of the CST]; that’s exactly what was needed,” Schama says.

Seth Mandel: So You Want To Be a Bundist

Equal collective rights for all nations within the state. That the advocates of this system didn’t call it “nationalism” is mostly irrelevant. Jewish autonomy as envisioned by Medem and others on the Jewish left would essentially mean the following, in practice: Jewish governing bodies running what they called cultural affairs and institutions. This included education.

In a world built around the ideas of Medem-like autonomists, either Yiddish schools would be publicly funded or Jewish governing bodies would be given the power to tax all the Jews, and only the Jews, to pay for these and other institutions.

Bundist theorists weren’t assimilationist—Medem himself seems to have conceived of assimilation as a nefarious capitalist plot of some sort. Jewish autonomy was a mainstream idea among Jewish leftists just as much as it was among those who eventually became known as “rightist.” Socialist Jewish writers and thinkers envisioned a sort of Zionism-lite—with the key difference being that it would apply in the Diaspora.

Let me simplify this. If I were to live under Jabotinsky’s idea of Jewish autonomy, I would be governed by Jews in the Land of Israel—if I chose to move there. But under Medem’s idea, I would be governed by Jews in America (though also by a secular national government). Rather than pay synagogue dues to the shul of my choice, I’d most likely be paying an annual Jew tax.

The triumph of Zionism over Bundism maximized Jewish freedom. But it also had the same effect on Jewish security. We’ll never know if the Holocaust would have happened as it happened had there been a State of Israel at the time. Instead, the Holocaust happened during the time of the Bundists. That isn’t to blame them, obviously, for what happened. It is merely to say that Bundism wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival.

Nor was it universalist and assimilationist, two terms that ironically describe the Bund’s biggest modern-day fans. If it was “anti-nationalist,” it was a very funny sort of anti-nationalist. I’ll close with Medem’s own words, translated by Lucy Dawidowicz and published in COMMENTARY in 1950:

“When did I clearly and definitely feel myself to be a Jew? I cannot say, but at the beginning of 1901, when I was arrested for clandestine political activity, the police gave me a form to fill in. In the column ‘Nationality,’ I wrote ‘Jew’.”

Douglas Murray: The rise and fall of Tariq Ramadan

This was how I first encountered him in the 2000s. I had helped arrange an English publication of Caroline Fourest’s Frère Tariq, in which the French journalist devastatingly showed how Ramadan spoke out of both sides of his mouth. To Islamic audiences he preached one message, to western audiences he told another.

On the rare occasions he was put on the spot, Ramadan was evasive. In a French TV debate in 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy – not then president – tried to get him to condemn the Islamic teaching that a woman should be stoned to death for adultery. The most he could say was he thought there should be a ‘moratorium’ on stoning for such a crime.

Ordinarily such talk would go down badly. But at around this time the situation in Europe was getting worse. After the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, Ramadan was one of the Muslims appointed to the UK government’s counter-extremism taskforce. A number of us were sharply critical of this, but nothing seemed able to stop Ramadan´s remorseless rise. In television studios and debating chambers across many countries he and I debated and argued against each other for years. I once called him ‘my closest enemy’. He always came across to me as both fraudulent and cunning.

In 2005 he was made a professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and held a teaching position at the university right up until the first sexual assault allegations were made against him more than a decade later.

Why he should ever have been given such a position at Oxford was itself a mystery. One of the people who put him forward for the role once admitted to me that he had no knowledge of Ramadan’s academic history, nor his Islamist track record. So why was he appointed to St Antony’s? The college had always been known as the ‘spook college’. Was it a sign that parts of the Establishment had found a way to embed and elevate Ramadan? As the years went on, and no allegation or misstep seemed to touch him, that certainly became my own suspicion.

As the relationship between Europe and its Muslims came under an ever-greater spotlight it was in the interests of officials, like those in the Blair government, to promote ‘moderate’ Muslim voices – whether they were actually moderate or not. Ramadan fitted a bill. One explanation as to why (until recently) no criticism or exposé of him ever landed is that he was simply too important to certain people.

When the Obama administration came into office in the US, Ramadan had an almost equally gilded ride. Past travel bans relating to his alleged funding of terrorist-linked groups and connections to extremists were forgotten.

From Athens to Oxford, whenever I encountered him I could never understand the entitled, arrogant attitude he projected as he mouthed evasive platitudes. It was as though he knew he was always going to be fine. Life was good to Tariq.

All of this has come to an end due to something I suppose not many people could foresee. But, as I say, the more striking thing about Ramadan is not his fall, but his rise.

He will doubtless appeal the French verdict. But I would be surprised if we hear much from him again. The accounts of his victims tell us too much about him. But the supply and demand problem that created him says an awful lot about us, too.

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