Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 31, 2025

10/31 Links Pt2: A season of bipartisan betrayal on antisemitism; When Conservative Leaders Lose Their Way; The Question JD Vance Needs to Answer

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: A season of bipartisan betrayal on antisemitism

Heritage embraces Tucker
He reached a new low this week when he welcomed neo-Nazi Holocaust denier and vicious Jew-hater Nick Fuentes onto his podcast. That raised the question as to whether Carlson was going to be able to mainstream antisemitism on the political right in much the same way that woke progressives have done to the left.

We didn’t have long to find out the answer to that question. And it came from a surprising source—the Heritage Foundation Washington think tank that has been one of the intellectual hubs of conservative thought and activism. In a video posted on X, Kevin Roberts, a historian and president of Heritage, made it clear that not only was he refusing to distance himself and his organization from Carlson, but that he was doubling down on this stand.

In a brief speech, Roberts denounced those who have criticized Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism and his vicious attacks on Israel and Christian Zionists, whom the podcaster described as heretics who had a “brain virus.” Roberts said Heritage didn’t believe in “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians” and depicted those appalled by Carlson as a “venomous coalition” who engage in “slander” that “serves someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts said Heritage supported cooperation with Israel when it served U.S. interests—something no one disputes. But the Heritage president seemed to echo some of the dark rhetoric of the far left and far right when he spoke of those who “reflexively support” the Jewish state as “loud” sinister, globalist” forces who are somehow harming America, and that must be resisted.

He made clear that he would stick with Carlson, no matter what he did, and his only interest was in attacking the left. He said that he “disagreed with and even abhorred things that Fuentes had said,” but wouldn’t cancel him either. He treated his hatred of Jews as merely an idea that should be debated.

He did some damage control on that aspect of his statement a day later by detailing on X his profound disagreement with Fuentes’s vile bigotry. Still, he stopped short of drawing the obvious conclusion that those who normalize and seek to mainstream neo-Nazi beliefs need to be held responsible for doing that.

The point being, it doesn’t matter if you are appalled by Fuentes if you treat those who promote him and treat him as legitimate as allies, and smear those who oppose such abhorrent behavior as somehow unpatriotic or guilty of dual loyalty.

This is a startling turnabout for an organization with not only an honorable record of support for Israel but whose “Esther Project” to combat antisemitism has served as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s efforts to root out left-wing ideologies that are enabling Jew-hatred on college campuses. Roberts’ seeming neutrality about his friend’s prejudiced behavior directly contradicts what his organization has been trying to do in academia.

It’s especially discouraging since the real “globalist” forces in the international community are the ones whose arguments are echoed by Carlson and Fuentes, in which they promote blood libels against Israel, and seek to isolate and destroy it. Supporters of the Jewish state are Heritage’s natural allies and are to be found among its staff and donors because they support the same vision of national conservatism—both in the United States and Israel— that Roberts has championed.

JD Vance mimics Kamala Harris
Roberts’s profession of loyalty to Carlson came in the same week as a troubling response of Vice President JD Vance to questions from an Israel-hating student at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. When given an opportunity to slap down anti-Israel conspiracy theories, he let them go unanswered. He responded with what could only be described as an equivocal statement about the U.S.-Israel relationship in which he boasted of pressuring Jerusalem during the recent ceasefire negotiations and professed his Christian faith.

While Trump and Vance have strong pro-Israel records, Vance’s answer was little different from the way Harris responded to smears of Israel from left-wing activists when campaigning last year, when she was primarily interested in signaling her sympathy for them. Like her, Vance seemed to be signaling that he, too, was more concerned with demonstrating his solidarity with extremists on his end of the spectrum than in distancing himself from them. When you consider that Vance is the likely frontrunner to succeed Trump, it calls into question whether Trump’s historic pro-Israel policies will be maintained if he wins in 2028.

Both battles must be fought
Taken together, all these events present an ugly picture of the current state of political debate in the United States.

There is no doubt that most of those who are supporting the U.S.-Israel alliance and fighting antisemitism can be found among Republicans and on the political right, while all the energy and most of the young stars in the Democratic Party are to be found among its anti-Israel and antisemitic left-wing. And unlike the crickets to be heard among most prominent Democrats about Mamdani, the pushback against Heritage and Carlson from prominent Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is a sign that the conservative base of the GOP is still firmly pro-Israel and ready to fight Jew-hatred wherever it is to be found.

But what we heard from the Heritage Foundation and Vance this week indicates that the antisemites have not only gotten a foothold within the conservative mainstream. Some of the most important players in it would prefer to embrace them rather than to drive them back to the fever swamps where they belong.

This is a sobering revelation for those who have long taken comfort from the way that the two major American political parties had more or less exchanged identities in the last half-century when it came to Israel and opposition to antisemitism. This shouldn’t diminish the effort to call the political left to account for its role in normalizing hatred for Israel. But it is a discouraging reminder that the same battle must now also be fought on the political right.

When Conservative Leaders Lose Their Way

The Stakes for Conservatism
Roberts is free to debate Israel policy, question foreign aid, or advocate for a more transactional foreign policy. These are legitimate positions worthy of serious discussion. But when he uses his platform as Heritage’s president to defend the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis, he damages not just his own reputation but the credibility of the entire conservative movement.

He gives the left ammunition to paint all conservatives as tolerant of fascism. He alienates Jewish conservatives who have been vital to building our movement. He signals to young conservatives that Holocaust denial is just another viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas.

This is particularly tragic because Heritage has so many brilliant scholars doing crucial work on everything from regulatory reform to national security. They deserve leadership that can distinguish between legitimate policy disagreements and the mainstreaming of genocidal hatred.

A Call for Moral Clarity
The Heritage Foundation is bigger than any one president. Its legacy of principled conservatism stretches back to Edwin Feulner, who built it into a powerhouse, and forward to the scholars who continue producing vital research today. The institution itself remains essential to the conservative movement.

But Kevin Roberts has failed a basic test of leadership. By defending the platforming of Nick Fuentes, he’s chosen online populism over moral principle. He’s decided that maintaining Tucker Carlson’s friendship matters more than maintaining the standards that separate conservatism from its worst fringes.

Roberts owes the conservative movement—and The Heritage Foundation itself—a clear retraction and apology. Not for his views on Israel or foreign policy, which are legitimate subjects for debate, but for defending those who mainstream Holocaust denial and white nationalism.

Until he provides that clarity, he’s damaged not just his own credibility but cast a shadow over an institution that deserves better leadership. Heritage’s board, scholars, and supporters should demand better. The conservative movement certainly does.

There are many hills worth dying on in politics. Defending the mainstreaming of Holocaust deniers isn’t one of them. Kevin Roberts should know the difference. The fact that he doesn’t is a tragedy for him and a challenge for an institution that has given so much to the conservative cause.

Seth Mandel: The Question JD Vance Needs to Answer

Last night, Vice President JD Vance made remarks at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi and then took questions from the crowd. It was inevitable that one of those questions would be a provocative statement about nefarious Jewish influence masked as an innocent question about American foreign policy.

“I’m just confused,” the stammering MAGA-hatted student repeated a couple of times. What was this poor chap confused about? “I’m a Christian man, and I’m just, uh, confused why—that there’s this notion that we, uh, might have or, uh, owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred billion dollar, um, foreign aid package to Israel…. I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

Now, there are a few possible ways to answer this type of “question.” Vance could have been combative and rejected the premise forcefully, deterring any other clowns from trying to hijack the vice president’s event. That would have been a show of strength. He also could have ignored the sniping about Judaism to appear diplomatic while trying to show that he won’t take such bait. In that case, he could’ve just answered the policy part of the question by correcting the kid’s warped description.

The third option would be the weakest: accept the premise of both parts of the question and try to convince the young man that the White House knows what it’s doing.

As you can probably guess, the vice president chose the third option:
“First of all, when the president of the United States says America First that means that he pursues the interests of Americans first. That is our entire foreign policy. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time…. In this example, the most recent Gaza peace plan that all of us have been working on very hard for the past few weeks, the president of the United States could only get that peace deal done by actually being willing to apply leverage to the State of Israel. So when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States.”

A good follow-up question might have asked Vance which specific presidents he had in mind when he suggested that other presidents have been controlled by Israel.

Vance then treated the other part of the question as equally legitimate:

“Now you ask about, you know, sort of Jews disagreeing with Christians on certain religious ideas. Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the realities is that Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah. Obviously, Christians do believe that. There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is: Let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them. But if there are shared areas of interest, we ought to be willing to do that, too.”

Vance said he was fine with, for example, working with Israel to maintain open access to Christian holy sites. Then he concluded: “What I’m not OK with is any country coming before the interests of American citizens.”

Vance was plainly unprepared for this question, even though he should have known it was coming. In the end, he came off as a guy who really wants the vote of a college-age groyper who came to troll him that night.

10/31 Links Pt1: IDF to recieve three slain hostages to return tonight; Paddystine’s new president; FBI Thwarts Jihadist Terrorist Attack in Dearborn, Michigan

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: The Numbers Game

Here is my one regret from the last two years of commentary on the 7th October War: we let ourselves get sucked into arguing the running death toll coming out of Hamas’s Health Ministry in Gaza.

In some ways, it was inevitable. Global outlets put those figures in every headline and chyron, so someone had to meet them on the field. Nevertheless, it was still a strategic mistake. We allowed Hamas’s daily ticker to become the global yardstick for morality in this conflict.

Start with a simple truth about war reporting: immediate casualty numbers after explosions are guaranteed to be wrong. These are not fog-of-war errors from Hamas; they are straight-up lies. The Al‑Ahli explosion is a case study. Within minutes, the “500 dead” claim circled the world. Subsequent assessments from Western intelligence agencies put the likely death toll in the low hundreds, yet the first number did its work; it framed the narrative for days. We have seen this ruse time and again, and we fall for it each time it happens.

I am not saying the numbers do not matter at all; every innocent death matters infinitely to the people who loved them. But the “numbers game”, the breathless, running tally, turns a legal and moral analysis into a horse race graphic. It incentivises speed over verification, from a single unverified source with a clear propaganda motive, and it collapses complex questions into a single, unreliable metric. Even organisations and reporters who regard Gaza Health Ministry figures as broadly useful acknowledge the limits of instant counts and the likelihood of later revisions when conditions improve or bodies are recovered from rubble.

Here is the broader point. If the tally is 40,000, 68,000, or 100,000, the fundamental question remains unchanged. In no other conflict do we treat a running counter as the dispositive test of conduct. Afghanistan’s war killed roughly 176,000 people through direct violence by 2021: civilians, Afghan forces, insurgents, and others, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Iraq’s direct-war deaths from 2003 to 2021 total 275,000–306,000, including 185,000–209,000 civilians. Those wars are debated on strategy, aims, and legality, not by a daily, decontextualised ticker. Nobody alleges those wars were genocides.

Look around the world right now. Amidst the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Sudan, famine has been formally identified, with the UN-backed IPC system projecting expansion absent major relief. In the worst-case scenario, up to one million people could die in Sudan through war, famine, and pestilence. There are no mass marches in Western capitals keyed to that potential number and no live tickers on cable news.

FBI Thwarts Jihadist Terrorist Attack in Dearborn, Michigan, Planned for Halloween Weekend

The FBI on Friday foiled a jihadist terrorist plot in Dearborn, Mich., arresting multiple suspects for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack over Halloween weekend.

Authorities "thwarted a Jihadist terror plot stemming from Dearborn earlier this morning—reportedly timed to coincide with children trick-or-treating later tonight," journalist Eitan Fischberger wrote in an X post. FBI director Kash Patel confirmed in a statement on X that officials "thwarted a potential terrorist attack and arrested multiple subjects in Michigan who were allegedly plotting a violent attack over Halloween weekend."

"The plot was inspired by ISIS," CNN reported, citing two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.

The suspects discussed the plot in online chatrooms where an undercover FBI agent was present, the officials told CNN. Authorities have arrested two of the participants and are questioning three others.

This is far from the only ISIS-linked terrorist plot on U.S. soil this year. In June, an Afghan national who had pledged allegiance to ISIS pleaded guilty to two terrorism-related offenses. In January, U.S. citizen Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 15 people and injured dozens more when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans. Jabbar, who died in a shootout with police, had an ISIS flag in his vehicle and pledged allegiance to the group in Facebook videos posted just hours before the attack.

Paddystine’s new president

Describing Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” she is not averse to issuing her own “Paddystinian” statements. “I come from Ireland, which has a history of colonization,” she told the BBC earlier this year. “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country.”

One of the core doctrines of Palestinianism is that “Palestine” is the only issue that matters and that other international crises—from Ukraine to Kurdistan to Sudan—are either politically suspect or simply irrelevant. As Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians, expressed it at an Oct. 30 briefing organized by the U.N.’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, “Palestine today is the stage to prove whether or not we will live in a truly decolonized world.” The message sent to the residents of the city of El-Fasher in Sudan, who last week were driven from their homes amid bestial atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as to the thousands of Ukrainian children illegally abducted by the Russian invaders, is that they don’t count.

In fact, Russian imperialism is not just exempted. In Connolly’s case, it receives a full-throated endorsement. An uncompromising backer of Irish neutrality that was famously on display during World War II, she opposes greater Irish contributions to the defense of Europe. She has additionally criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, accusing the alliance of playing “a despicable role in moving forward to the border and engaging in war-mongering,” believing that the greatest threat posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the “militarization” of Europe.

As Rachelle Moiselle, a keen observer of the Irish scene, has observed, Connolly also has a nasty habit of referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” as if the country is a geographical feature rather than an independent state allied with the West. So much, then, for not telling “a sovereign people how to run their country,” unless you believe, as Connolly clearly does, that Ukraine is a province of a Greater Russia.

Perhaps Connolly’s greatest offense was her homage to the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2018. Standing in the rubble of Aleppo, relentlessly bombed by the Russian forces supporting Assad during the civil war, she offered her solidarity to this exemplar of Arab dictators, despite Assad reducing the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus from—as one Palestinian witness memorably put it—“a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die.”

Connolly is unlikely to stick to the traditional role of the Irish president as a figurehead, opting instead for the activist profile adopted by Higgins and first pioneered during the 1990s by Mary Robinson. While the current crop of Western leaders is unlikely to heed her warnings and complaints, she is set to be a major component of the global movement to isolate and weaken the State of Israel.

She will not be alone. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, sits in her camp, as will—assuming he wins New York City’s mayoral election—the Hamas shill Zohran Mamdani, to name just two of her erstwhile comrades.

As Israel’s main ally on the world stage, the United States needs to tighten political and economic pressure on Ireland, which, in the estimation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “runs a trade surplus at our expense.” As for the American Jewish community, they should steer clear of vacations in Ireland and refrain from buying Irish products. For one thing, it’s not safe to be a Jew there. For another, with Ireland pushing a boycott of Israel, we should have no qualms about urging a boycott of Ireland in response.

Jerusalem Traffic So Bad, New Road Closures Somehow Make Things Better (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem Traffic So Bad, New Road Closures Somehow Make Things Better

Jerusalem, October 30 - The transportation situation in Israel's capital city had deteriorated to such an extent, observers noted this week, that even such a change as blocking a major downtown artery for the next several years has had a positive effect, since improvement remained the only possible direction.

Despite a dearth of main roads in the city center that still allow private motor vehicle traffic, bus lines in the area somehow have managed to follow the most inconvenient routes conceivable, with roundabout approaches to seemingly-straightforward destinations, as if the designers had set as their goal the inconveniencing of as many people as possible. Now, however, the closure of King George V Avenue to even taxis and buses, for purposes of constructing a tunnel for one of the new light rail lines, has cut off the roundabout portions of several bus routes through the center of town and forced them on more direct paths.

City officials apologized for the changes. "We know that the public expects only obtuseness and difficulty from us," acknowledged Kishinu Oref, a liaison for the Jerusalem Municipality with the Kfir Corporation, which holds the contract to operate the city's light rail system. "Implementation of the multi-year plan to hinder movement in Jerusalem with major development projects carries with it the occasional unavoidable consequence of certain movement becoming more, instead of less, convenient. We try to minimize and mitigate such occurrences, but it is unfortunately impossible to eliminate them entirely."

Bus routes that once approached the north-south King George V from the west, then made abrupt turns a block or two in advance and proceeded back west, then north, then east again, before finally reaching King George again and proceeding south, must now drive directly onto the avenue from the west, erasing an entire detour that, in rush-hour traffic, added up to fifteen minutes of travel time; the same curtailment of the winding route occurs now in the opposite direction.

"We aim, in the long term, to make living in Jerusalem a completely untenable proposition," explained Mayor Moshe Lion. "This manifests in housing affordability and availability; unresponsiveness of municipal services; spotty traffic signal maintenance; irregular repainting of lane markers and crosswalks; trash collection timed to coincide with the most traffic-intensive hours of the day; not to mention loud, disruptive cultural events that tie up entire neighborhoods and prevent people from either leaving or getting home."

"It's nowhere near a hundred percent effective," he admitted. "Some people still like it here."

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Every few months, another academic or journalist decides that the best way to honor Holocaust memory is to accuse Israel of repeating it. The latest comes from The New York Times, where Professor Marianne Hirsch, interviewed by Masha Gessen, claims we need to “rethink how we think about the Holocaust.”

It’s a long conversation—ostensibly about pedagogy and post-memory—but it eventually lands in the same familiar place: Holocaust memory, they say, has been “misused” to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, while Israel itself now stands accused of committing “genocide.” Gaza, in their telling, is the new Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s not scholarship. That’s moral inversion with tenure.

Hirsch and Gessen actively refuse to draw the simplest, most obvious analogy—the one between Hamas and the Nazis. The introduction says:

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters, “This is the savagery that we only remember from the Nazi crimes in the Holocaust. Hamas are the new Nazis.” In an interview with the Times Opinion columnist M. Gessen, the Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch argues that the trauma and memory of the Holocaust are being misused and makes a case for how it should be taught going forward.

Hamas’s founding charter calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Its fighters carried out the largest one-day mass murder of Jews since 1945. Its propaganda depicts Jews as vermin, its ideology celebrates martyrdom through extermination. If any movement today mirrors Nazi intent, it is Hamas.

And yet the Times only mentions Hamas in terms of how it is not comparable to the Nazis. Instead, it’s Israel—defending itself from a group openly dedicated to genocide—that gets branded as today's Nazis.

And this is done in the name of pedagogy.

Hirsch says:

There’s an outsize influence of the Holocaust that then obscures other histories and also obscures what is happening right now: the genocide in Gaza, which the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has fostered denial of other genocides. And I think that creates a real crisis if victims of genocide perpetrate genocide and one can deny that. I think we’re in a moment of real crisis.

It isn't Hamas who wants to wipe out a people like the Nazis - its the Jews, according to this scholar.

That Holocaust inversion is not just wrong; it’s obscene. It replaces ethical reasoning with aesthetic irony.

There’s a certain narrative seduction in imagining the victims becoming the villains. It feels poetic—almost redemptive. The oppressed become the oppressors; history closes its moral loop.

But this isn’t morality. It’s literature pretending to be ethics. It’s a way for comfortable liberal Western observers to purge inherited guilt: If Jews are now the Nazis, then we can be the righteous ones this time.

That’s why the Nazi analogy persists. It satisfies a psychological craving for symmetry, not a search for truth.

What makes Hirsch’s version especially dangerous is that it comes from within. She is Jewish, the daughter of survivors, and so the accusation carries an air of moral authenticity.

It sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of moral self-cannibalism: turning the Holocaust—the ultimate warning to protect Jewish life—into a tool for condemning Jewish self-defense.

This is not teshuvah (moral repentance). It’s performance guilt: adopting the language of self-correction without the honesty or evidence that real repentance requires.

To remember the Holocaust responsibly is to preserve moral distinctions, not erase them. The lesson is not that “anyone can become a Nazi.” The lesson is that genocidal ideologies exist—and must be confronted before they metastasize.

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany doesn’t deepen Holocaust understanding. It desecrates it. It turns Jewish trauma into a rhetorical weapon and rewards those who strip history of proportion.

There is a legitimate way to universalize the Holocaust’s lessons: by defending human dignity, by opposing mass dehumanization wherever it occurs—including when Jews are its targets. But that requires moral symmetry, not moral theater.

The most charitable interpretation I can give Hirsch is that she believes so strongly that the Holocaust must not be treated as unique but as an object lesson for us all that she uses the most obscene example of accusing Jews themselves of not learning the lessons of the Holocaust as an object lesson for all. And in effect, that is worse than the antisemites calling Jews Nazis - because this is a Holocaust lecturer making the accusation.

Singling out Jews as the main inheritors of the Nazi mantle is not “learning the lessons of the Holocaust.” It is treating the Holocaust like a course the Jews failed—implying they must repeat it until they pass.

If the Holocaust is to remain a moral compass rather than a cultural bludgeon, we have to reject these “redemptive inversions.” The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is not a bold act of conscience. When Jews do it, it is an act of performative guilt dressed up as courage.

Hamas is the group that seeks genocide. Israel seeks survival. If we can’t tell the difference, we haven’t learned a thing from history.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Kevin Roberts' Defense of Tucker Carlson: Partisanship over Principle (and an antisemitic dog-whistle to boot) @KevinRobertsTX

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made a video that demonstrates how partisanship has trumped principle, and in this video he has done more to damage the conservative movement than anyone else.

Here is the entire transcript:

I'll have more to say on this in the coming days, but today I want to be clear about one thing. Christians can critique the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic. Of course, anti-Semitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with other allies, we do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, technology. But when it doesn't, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington. The Heritage Foundation didn't become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won't start doing that now.

We don't take direction from comments on X, though we are grateful for the robust free speech debate. We also don't take direction from members or donors, though we are inherently grateful for their support, and we're adding more every day. This is the robust debate we invite with our colleagues, movement friends, our members, and the American public. We will always defend truth. We will always defend America. And we'll always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.

I disagree with, and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person's thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate. In debate, and we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left. As my friend Vice President Vance said last night, what I am not okay with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens. And it is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interests of our own country first. That's where our allegiance lies. And that's where it will stay.

WTF? Platforming Nazis is now a principled position?

Yes, neo-Nazis must be canceled. That is not even a question. To pretend that they are entitled to be platformed as legitimate is exactly the same argument that the "progressive Left" uses to justify calls to murder Jews and to praise Hamas - speech that the Heritage Foundation is very much against.

In the early days of the conservative National Review, its founder William F. Buckley Jr. banned antisemites from writing in its pages. It wasn't canceling. It wasn't censorship. It was a principled stand against hate.

It is most troubling that the head of the Heritage Foundation is against that stand.

This video is problematic on other levels too. No one argues that the US should do what is best for America. But Roberts is implying that he knows what that is - and that Israel is sometimes or often on the wrong side. That is a valid opinion, it is not fact. The pro-Israel camp is not arguing for the US to go against its best interests, but that wholehearted, public support for Israel is exactly in America's best interests.

Worse, Roberts is implying that his position is the Christian position, marginalizing tens of millions of fervent Christian Zionists.

But the most disturbing part of the video is where Roberts says "conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington." Is there any interpretation of this statement that doesn't mean "Jews" and "AIPAC"? "Globalists" are a popular euphemism for Jews in the antisemitic Right, it seems unlikely that Roberts doesn't know that.

And these same opponents, seemingly Jews, are later described as "bad actors who serve someone else's agenda" and a "venomous coalition...sowing division."

Heritage says its mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." There is no listed principle to elevate Nazis.

He says "When we disagree with a person's thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate. In debate, and we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left. " Okay, that principle is good. Now, where on the Heritage site do they challenge the ideas of Nick Fuentes? Where did Tucket Carlson challenge him? I can find no criticism on the Heritage site of today's far-Right antisemites, and its criticism of right-wing antisemitism altogether is muted at best.

If their only debate is against the toxic ideas of the Left, then they are not principled. They are enabling and platforming hate.

There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours.

I want to put that to rest right now—here are my thoughts: pic.twitter.com/F8bcxBIqKI
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) October 30, 2025

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/30 Links Pt2: Tokenism and Anti-Zionism After October 7; Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’; New York holds its breath

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Tokenism and Anti-Zionism After October 7

She certainly might be right about what lies ahead. But she is stacking the odds against it. How does one celebrate Jewish holidays without mentioning the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel? Where do you tell your kids the Israelites were going when they escaped Pharaoh’s clutches, Portland? Where were the temple sacrifices made, Katz’s Deli? Jewish history happened where it happened, and there isn’t much you can do about that.

As her mother says to her in that interview: “But how do you square that with the ancient history that I’ve been taught—that Jews were from Israel, that all those years we wandered in the desert and then finally came back to Israel. Is all of that false?”

To which her daughter responds: “That was many, many years ago!”

Yeah, that’s kind of the point. Full commitment to Diasporist anti-Zionism requires the jettisoning of everything that happened before this moment.

But the larger obstacle to the future envisioned here is that this young lady will no doubt be spending her time with peer groups hostile to Jewish tradition and practice and history. Forget the Muslim Student Union; the Times story discusses her conversations with canvassers from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive political group designed to reinforce her priors.

This is the problem that Rabbi Blumofe appears to put his finger on. It’s not that liberal Jews can’t or don’t exist. It’s that the structure of American politics is such that if one aligns with anti-Zionism, one is unlikely to encounter anything else. Indeed, the progressive gate-keeping has become so intense that anti-Zionism is now a litmus test for activists on any issue. It’s why climate prophetess of doom Greta Thunberg spends her time on boats challenging the Israeli navy.

The Diasporism advocated in these groups is a closed circle. As Vladimir Jabotinsky said when confronted with the argument that Jews ought to be a light unto the nations from within those nations but without a nation of their own: “England… has enriched the world with a valuable social idea: self-rule of free citizens, that is, the parliamentary government. However, how did the English nation teach other peoples to understand and run such a government? Certainly not by being scattered among the nations and convincing them; just the opposite.”

The same goes for being in groups whose entire reason for being is to critique the Jews. Embracing tokenism is a form of extreme self-exile and self-negation. The proliferation of political spaces that use anti-Zionism as their litmus test is one of the great challenges facing American Jewry. And the first step to overcoming that challenge is to acknowledge it.

David Harsanyi: Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’

There was no longer a need to invent blood libels tied to the Jewish faith, though doing so would never really go completely out of style. Indeed, Marr and other socialists like Eugen Dühring would blame Jews for the rise of unfettered capitalism, and national socialists and other xenophobic factions blamed them for spreading worldwide communism. But no matter how secularized or German or patriotic or apolitical a Jew might become, they still could never escape their “race.”

Later, some of the Nazis, devotees of the racialist outlook, objected to the use of “antisemitism” because they sought “Semitic” allies like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who would join them in egging on the murder of Jews in Bosnia and elsewhere. Not all “Semites” were the same.

And the “Semitic” designation is ridiculous. Coined by German historians in the late 1700s, it bunches together wildly divergent groups of ancient people by similarities in language. An “anti-Semite,” then, technically speaking, is a person who is hostile to Hebrew or Aramaic or Phoenician. Over the years, Jewish organizations have prodded people to remove the hyphen to create a more generic term for a prejudice against Jews. Now, I’m sure “Semitic” is useful for linguists or historians trying to make sense of the movements and relationships in the ancient world, but in contemporary usage, it’s about as valuable as calling Hungarian or Finn haters “anti-Uralics.”

“Antisemitism” is reminiscent of another vaguely scientific-sounding word meant to mislead, “Islamophobia.” Defining Jews as “Semites” strips them of religious, cultural, or intellectual traditions and reimagines them as a race. “Islamophobia” treats criticism of the cultural and intellectual traditions of Islam as if it were tantamount to irrational racism. Islam isn’t a race; it’s a theology with numerous strands. Jews aren’t a race, either. They are, because of their ancient origins, an ethnicity and a faith.

Orwell warned that language decays when our thoughts become foolish — and that corrupted language, in turn, makes foolish thinking easier. Words have meaning, and using them precisely matters. A person who despises others for unchangeable traits such as skin color is a racist. One who rejects Catholic beliefs with hostility is anti-Catholic. Someone who instinctively dislikes all Dutch people is a bigot. Hatred of women is sexism. An irrational fear or hatred of men is androphobia. When we distort or dilute such words, we don’t make the world kinder — we simply make our thinking less clear.

If you believe Jews control space lasers for Israel and are behind every nefarious plot you’ve conjured up in your fetid imagination, “anti-Semite” doesn’t really do you justice. You’re probably just a “Jew-hater.” There’s really no reason for anyone to soften the blow by adopting Wilhelm Marr’s preposterous verbiage.

Melanie Phillips: New York holds its breath

The fear that the wider community might turn against Jews has meant that—even now that it has indeed done so at an unprecedented level—these cowed Jews don’t blame the haters, but instead blame Israel for allegedly turning the community against them. As Levin states, even some Jews genuinely concerned with Israel’s well-being are thus sickeningly blaming Jewish victimization on other Jews.

For similar reasons, there’s a fixed belief among Jewish leaders that the principal threat to diaspora Jews comes from the extreme right, despite the fact that most of this threat emanates from the progressive radicals of race, gender and climate politics.

This helps explain why there has been no concerted opposition to Mamdani from America’s Jewish community leadership. Many of these leaders believe not that people like Mamdani have incited the current explosion of antisemitism but that Israel has tarred their own standing in society, particularly among the intelligentsia, media and other cultural icons with whom they identify.

Levin calls out a range of U.S. communal bodies and leaders, including the Anti-Defamation League, the New Israel Fund, J Street and Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the leader of Reform Judaism, for effectively siding with the mortal enemies of Israel and the Jewish people or failing to do enough to counter them.

Rather than call out the demagogic black community leader Al Sharpton, who has spewed anti-Jewish invective and has been involved in anti-Jewish violence that goes back to the Crown Heights riots in 1991 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Levin notes that Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, effectively embraced him as an ally against the right.

Along with the campus-based Hillel organization, says Levin, the ADL has also failed to take adequate action to counter the threats to Jewish students on campus, and no other legacy Jewish organization has stepped up to fill this void.

And none of them has called out the rampant antisemitism that is standard fare throughout the Muslim world. Instead, these organizations parrot the leftist denunciation of anyone critical of Muslims as a bigot.

There’s another reason that Jewish community leaders don’t call out these enemies within. The Jewish world tells itself that the greatest threat it faces is disunity, which has brought disaster upon the Jewish people in the past because it has fatally weakened its defense against its enemies.

While it is undeniable that disunity is disastrous, an even greater catastrophe is surely threatened by Jews turning against their own. This provides both lethal weaponry and a protective shield for the mortal enemies of the Jewish people.

These anti-Jewish Jews have, in effect, joined forces with those who are intent upon the extermination of the Jewish state. They sanitize and incentivize these enemies while gaslighting Jews who support Israel and whom they demonize as nationalist bigots.

The damage that’s been done by Jews who have a pathological impulse to damage their own people, and who hurl against Israel and Zionism the same malevolent lies deployed by those who want Israel and the Jews removed from the world, is unconscionable.

The willful refusal by the Jewish community leadership to address this amounts to a betrayal of a Jewish community that’s under siege. If Mamdani is elected, they will have much more to answer for.

10/30 Links Pt1: Amiram Cooper, Sahar Baruch identified as slain hostages returned to Israel; The War that Rewrote the Middle East; Italy blasts Francesca Albanese: “Entirely devoid of credibility and impartiality”

From Ian:

The War that Rewrote the Middle East

Over 24 months of sustained combat, Israel demonstrated an unexpected capacity for prolonged warfare - politically, economically, and psychologically. Moreover, the notion that Israel cannot wage war in more than two or three domains simultaneously was shown to be outdated, as it operated across seven domains: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and the West Bank, without losing strategic coherence. Israel ceased to behave like a besieged enclave and emerged as a regional power with expansive capabilities.

The war also destroyed the myth of sanctuary. From Tehran to Yemen and even Doha, Israel struck its enemies with ease and precision. The era of "safe havens" for planners and financiers of anti-Israel operations has ended.

In addition, the legend of underground invincibility collapsed. Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas poured vast resources into subterranean networks they believed impregnable. Yet the killing of Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah in a fortified bunker last year put an end to this myth. The Israeli-American strikes on Iranian facilities also underscored that even the deepest tunnels and bunkers may no longer guarantee safety.

Under U.S. CENTCOM, several Arab militaries quietly joined missile-defense efforts against Iranian strikes, an event unthinkable prior to this war. The U.S., too, shifted from a passive supporter to an operational partner, with the alliance maturing into a working, action-based partnership reminiscent of U.S. relations with NATO members.

Israel Did What the U.S. Would Have Done Had a Genocidal Enemy Launched an Attack on Us

After two years of intense conflict, Israel is substantially better off than it was on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel confounded its mortal enemies by inflicting defeat after defeat on the revolutionary, virulently antisemitic Iranian regime and its primary surrogates - Hizbullah and Hamas.

Israel persevered heroically in defiance of the Biden administration's relentless pressure to restrain its response. The IDF waged a series of brilliant campaigns - decapitating, with surgical precision, Hizbullah's leadership; degrading its thousands of missiles; and devastating Iran's air defenses, thereby facilitating U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites that significantly set back its nuclear weapons program.

Israel also secured the return of the remaining hostages without sacrificing its prerogative to crush the unreconciled remnants of Hamas should they resume violence. The shock and awe of the IDF's military victory has incentivized more moderate Arab regimes to cooperate with Israel and abandon Hamas. Israel's resounding victories against Iranian proxies contributed mightily to the weakening of Assad's bloody tyranny in Syria.

The U.S. and its democratic allies are also substantially better off now that Israel has won its existential war against its genocidal adversaries. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz expressed his gratitude for Israel's attacks on Iran: "This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us....This regime has brought death and destruction to the world."

Thus, Israel did what I hope and pray the U.S. would have done had a genocidal enemy launched a proportionally equivalent attack on us - murdering 40,000 Americans; raping, torturing, and beheading victims; casting babies into ovens - without a shred of remorse. Surely we would and should have vanquished such a perpetrator, settling for nothing less than complete and utter destruction of the regime that perpetrated the attack - just as Churchill and FDR rightly did with Nazi Germany and Japan.

It is rank hypocrisy to begrudge the right of Israel to do what we and any other morally sane nation would have done in response to a comparable attack.

The great scholar of war Geoffrey Blainey instructs us in The Causes of War that the longest and most durable periods of peace occur when the results of war are most decisive, eliminating the root cause of the conflict. We ignore these lessons at our peril.

The Age of Amnesia By Abe Greenwald

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Should JNIM capture Mali, add it to the list—along with Russia’s war on Ukraine, unprecedented aggression by Iranian proxies, and jihad throughout other West African countries—of nightmares made possible, in part, by Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to surrender in Afghanistan.

But I’m beginning to think that Biden’s withdrawal was only a symptom of something much larger. Many dispiriting circumstances here and abroad—including this latest development in Mali—are pointing to an unavoidable realization. It’s beginning to seem as if the West (with the heroic exception of Israel) has forgotten everything about 9/11 and the nature of jihadists. And we’ve forgotten everything about the necessity of fighting terrorism except for one detail—it’s hard and unpleasant work.

You see it in the pro-jihad mobs that flooded through the United States over the past two years. You see it in the dilapidated polities of Europe, where Islamist thugs tyrannize by terrorist veto. You see it in Donald Trump’s encouragement of a new Syrian regime ruled by a former al-Qaeda fighter (this, too, was an inspiration to JNIM). And you can look back and see it in Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia.

And, yes, this must be said: I can’t help seeing it right now in New York City. The city that was once devastated and traumatized by Islamist terrorists is about to elect as mayor a man with a long and loud record of support and sympathy for Islamist terrorism.

Twenty-four years after 9/11, the Taliban is in power, al-Qaeda is on the verge of state governance, terrorists are on the march, and their fans are everywhere—including, all too soon, in Gracie Mansion.

From Kul al-Arab, an Israeli Arab news site:

A Jordanian citizen made a controversial statement regarding the Western Wall in Jerusalem, saying that "the Western Wall is a holy site for Jews." These remarks come at a time of escalating religious and political tensions in the region.

How dare he say something lie that!

His family in Jordan was quick to disavow his horrendous statement and emphasize that, unlike him, they are good Jordanian citizens:

The Al-Mualla Al-Ziyoud Bani Hassan family issued a statement today, Thursday, regarding the appearance of a person standing near the Western Wall in Jerusalem, performing prayers that endorse the Israeli narrative hostile to Palestine and Jordan.

The family stated that they learned of this individual through the media and affirmed their unwavering support for the Jordanian state and its fearless Hashemite leadership.

The statement reads as follows:
Statement from the Al-Mualla Al-Ziyoud Bani Hassan Family :

We have seen through the media videos of a person standing near the Western Wall in Jerusalem, close to Al-Aqsa Mosque, performing Talmudic prayers and adopting Israeli narratives about the Holy City.

We, the members of the Al-Mualla Al-Ziyoud Bani Hassan family, stand today, as our fathers and grandfathers did, with the Jordanian people behind their state and their fearless Hashemite leadership.

We affirm that we will not be a rift or a crack in the wall of our nation, and we will remain at the heart of the state's project and its major national, Arab, and humanitarian choices.

In conclusion, we emphasize our pride in the sacrifices of Jordanians and their Jordanian Armed Forces on the soil of Palestine and in Old Jerusalem—blood and sacrifices that will forever remain a symbol of honor, dignity, and pride.

The video is shooting around social media with angry comments.

Notice that there are Jews at the Kotel in the video, and no one is upset to see a Jordanian there. No one is throwing rocks or screaming at him. He has no need for police protection to visit the site.

Unlike the situation for Jews who visit only a few meters away on the Temple Mount.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The @NYTimes simply cannot help itself, singling out Israel in article on Syria displacements

The New York Times says:

When Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war ended last year with the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad, many Syrians rejoiced at the chance to finally return to the homes and lands they had abandoned.

The war had displaced more than half the country’s population, as millions fled to other countries and many more sought safer ground within their own borders.

But now, the country’s rocky transition to new leadership has brought fresh waves of displacement, driven by acts of revenge, sectarian violence, decades-old property disputes and Israeli occupation of land in southern Syria.

Between December 2024 and July 2025, more than 430,000 people in Syria were newly displaced, according to the United Nations. No single group among the country’s diverse religious and ethnic communities has been spared the turmoil, which stretched across multiple regions.

Later in the article it circles back to those displaced by Israel's actions on the border, and spends five paragraphs on Israel, quoting Human Rights Watch.

How many were displaced by Israel? "Dozens of families."

Compare that to the 430,000 total displaced since December.

Compare that to the 1,300 people killed in Sweida Province in that timeframe.

The NYT also includes this photo:

Children heading home from school in the Syrian village of Suwaisah in southeastern Syria, where there was an Israeli incursion soon after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad

Israel doesn't occupy Suwaisah now. The article doesn't mention that village at all. Israel did perform raids against militants there but nothing is happening now, and these schoolchildren are obviously going to school. The only reason for the photo is to imply that Israel is a major reason for Syrians being displaced - and it isn't, by any rational analysis.

But the real anti-Israel bias comes from what the NYT doesn't mention: the huge Turkish occupation in northern Syria. Since December, at a minimum, 120,000 (and some estimate much more) have been displaced by Turkish-backed militias.

That is a lot of people to ignore in an article on displaced Syrians.

The article was co-written by Raja Abdulrahim, who normally writes her anti-Israel invective from Israel itself. Her bias has been clear since before the Times hired her.

This article fits her bias profile: Nothing is inaccurate, but the facts are highly curated to give an impression that is completely wrong. At the most, Israel's displacement of dozens of families is worth a sentence, compared to the hundreds of thousands displaced and thousands killed by other actors in that same timeframe. And five paragraphs highlighting Israel, which is occupying a tiny slice of land on its border, while ignoring Turkey's occupation of 4,000 square kilometers land in the north is not journalism - it is malpractice.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Libyan newspaper Alsa'ah 24 Newspaper has an interview with Raphael Luzon, the head of the Union of Libyan Jews.

I don't know the newspaper's orientation but the fact that this was published altogether is interesting.

Rafael Luzon said in a post on "Facebook": "We, the Libyan Jews, demand our legitimate rights that were seized unjustly and aggressively, from confiscated properties, souls that were taken, and forced displacement that took place in broad daylight without any right, just because we carried a different religious identity. These are horrific crimes committed against innocent Libyan citizens, for no reason other than being Jews. They lived on this land for centuries, contributed to its renaissance, culture, and economy, and were an authentic part of its social fabric," according to his claim.

He continued, "We categorically reject linking our issue to what is happening in the Middle East between the Palestinians and the Israelis, for our issue is a clear humanitarian and human rights issue with no relation to politics or regional conflicts, and no party can confiscate our natural right to justice and citizenship under the pretext of solidarity or national stance. We are talking about a purely Libyan national file that can only be resolved by acknowledging the mistake, apologizing, compensating for the damage, and returning the rights to their owners."

He went on, "The racist approach that seeks to deny these rights or incite against us is completely rejected from a legal, ethical, and international perspective, as all international agreements and charters of human rights organizations criminalize discrimination based on religion or origin and condemn any act or speech based on hatred or incitement to violence. Therefore, we affirm that the hate speech directed at us through social media or media platforms by some extremists can be subject to legal prosecution under international laws that ensure protection of individuals from bullying, incitement, and verbal violence," as he expressed it.

He concluded, "In conclusion, we say it clearly without ambiguity: We will not accept any one-upmanship from any party, nor any deliberate mixing up of the cards. We, the Jews of Libya, are sons of this authentic homeland, raised on the values of patriotism and loyalty, and we have never and will never sell or betray the land of our ancestors that we loved and lived in for centuries in peace and love. Our demands are nothing but right, justice, and fairness, and we will not be silenced by the voices that exaggerate with slogans to hide the truth of the historical injustice inflicted upon us. Libya is our homeland, and we will not stop demanding our rights, because the right does not expire with time, and justice does not die no matter how long the time may be," according to his speech.

I find it interesting that he seems to be speaking the language of Palestinians who demand rights. Perhaps he is trying to point out the hypocrisy by mirroring their rhetoric.

Because the chances for any compensation or an apology from Libya is just about zero.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/29 Links Pt2: The Cinema of October 7th; Media Complicity: Hamas Breaks the Ceasefire, Israel Gets the Blame; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder making his own ‘Palestine flavour’

From Ian:

Mini-Series "Red Alert" Chronicles the Hamas Oct. 7 Attack from the View of Four Families

Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender, 68, from a Jewish family in the Bronx, has produced a taut, gut-wrenching four-part drama series, "Red Alert," which chronicles the Hamas terror attack from the perspective of four families caught up in the horror.

"We just wanted people to see what it's like to be an ordinary, everyday person and be woken up by a terrorist in your house," says Bender.

We meet a family taking refuge in their safe room in Kibbutz Nir Oz; an Arab man driving near Gaza with his family; a husband and wife from the security forces separated in the chaos; and a mother evacuating the wounded as she searches for her son.

"They're basically all family stories," says Bender, who was nominated for an Oscar three times. "We wanted to show real heroes."

The purpose of "Red Alert," says Bender, is to expand the audience that is aware of the events of the day, rather than relay them blow for blow. "It's just too triggering. It's too much."

He felt a drama would be the most appropriate vehicle to convey a message instead of a documentary.

"I thought, the people who would not normally go see a documentary might see this. You know, it's called 'Red Alert.' In a sense, it's a thriller. But when you watch it, it actually becomes very emotional, and you realize it's the truth."

The Cinema of October 7th

It is no surprise that the first artistic response to the events of the Seventh of October, put in cinematic context and sufficiently sublimated, was a film by Nadav Lapid. Yes!, Lapid’s fifth feature film, and in some ways his most sophisticated and radical to date, is a macabre, grotesque morality tale about a young couple with a baby, trying to survive in a monstrosity of a country, a near-future or current Israel. Lapid’s alternative Israel is an oligarchy of sorts, in which the young are ruled by the elderly who consume them for sexual pleasure and entertainment. The young must sell themselves to servitude or else be doomed to bankruptcy.

It is also no surprise that Lapid was able to accommodate this colossal event, a catastrophe, in his unique brand of cinema. That’s because Lapid’s films, politically, were there long before any of this happened. His first film, Policeman (2011), starts as a group portrait of a small team in an anti-terrorist police unit. Most of the time, the officers are seen hanging out in barbecues, tackling extreme sport challenges, or at home going about their respective romantic lives. Though the premise is that of an action film, Lapid’s camera seems more intent on examining their rituals and rites, watching how they bond and how they deceive one another.

Most of the time, we see them faking it, though the feeling of the film is not that of a satire or a parody. Instead, there is a kind of overriding strained ambivalence, wherein it is hard to judge what might be the right attitude on the part of the viewer toward the subject matter and characters. The perverse is ever present in Lapid’s filmmaking, which makes it harder on the audience to tell right from wrong. The director also has a way of cutting shots together that is more reminiscent of French Nouvelle Vague than Hollywood’s version of realism, which further complicates the relation between space and time.

‘Yes!’ is an explosive, taboo-crushing novelty of a film that explores how we drag on with our lives in the wake of catastrophe.

At times, the film lends itself to some extreme oddities; the commander of the anti-terrorist crew is trying to hone his skill at vaginal massage on his pregnant wife. Maybe the best scene in the entire film takes place in one of those get-togethers, wherein the main character, the team commander, “snatches” a baby from one of the sleeping wives of his buddies, to check out in front of the mirror how to hold the baby right so as to best accentuate his muscle tone.

We are bound to ask, what could that baby-holding-in-front-of-the-mirror scene mean, strange as it is, both to the movie and to our better senses? Obviously, Israeli machismo is being ridiculed, exposed as narcissistic and false. The scene has an eerie feel to it, like something that should have been cut out of the movie and never seen. Yet it is these very insertions that make his films interesting, both as political critique and as a form of grotesque art. These moments undermine the plot, which is probably what Lapid was aiming at in the first place: to foil our self-indulgences, to wipe out our heroes.

Seth Mandel: Tarek Bazrouk and American Domestic Extremism

In 2024, he was arrested for attacking pro-Israel protesters and in fact assaulted another one as he was being arrested. This lovely ball of hate was at it again later in the year, ambushing a Jew near a Columbia protest. Then in January of this year, he got his hat trick.

All of the episodes were uncontrovertibly violent; not only was Bazrouk not protesting peacefully, but in all cases he physically assaulted peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the hate group at the center of other high-profile pro-Hamas incidents, posted that Bazrouk “has been locked up for over five months for speaking out against genocide,” and they claimed it an example of “political repression.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement unsurprisingly filed a petition for leniency, announcing it “stands in solidarity with Tarek.” Students for Justice in Palestine, probably the most extreme collection of Hamas boosters, “demands his immediate liberation.” (Note the word choice: liberation being the euphemism du jour for spilling Jewish blood.)

SJP says Bazrouk “has been targeted by the United States government for his activism.” Which in a way is true: Pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. is indeed marked by its violence and incitement.

It’s no surprise, then, to see at the courthouse 200 supporters of a man who admitted to a string of assaults. And it is important for us all to acknowledge this support. These “pro-Palestinian” groups conflate violence with speech, and have been fooling free-speech groups for years with the ruse.

Now, however, they are using Bazrouk’s case to make plain what everybody should have seen all along: They do not support free expression but rather respond to free expression with violence, just as their heroes in Gaza do. The movement has one main organizing goal: attacking Jews’ freedom of speech, expression, and association.

Additionally, they reject their naïve defenders’ claims of nonviolence. The Palestinian advocacy groups in the U.S., and the wider progressive movement in which they are now fully embedded and integrated, do not believe they are being targeted for mere speech. They simply believe that speech and violence are equally legitimate forms of expression. And, considering their welcome reception in American political culture, why wouldn’t they?

Seth Mandel: Why Some Academics Are Told Not To Acknowledge Jewish Holidays

A lot of effort goes into finding creative ways to discriminate against Jews on college campuses, but this is a new one. The Telegraph has interviewed several Jewish professors in Britain, and one of them tells the paper that her school’s diversity team sends out greetings on Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh holidays, but not Jewish ones. When she asked them to include Jewish holidays as well, she got a pretty incredible response:

“I was told that Jews could only be mentioned when marking a religious festival that makes no reference to the land of Israel—which possibly leaves one, a minor festival called Purim.”

The article chronicles several other recent incidents, most notably the ongoing harassment of Michael Ben-Gad, an economics professor at a University of London-affiliated school, including activists storming his class and threatening to behead him for the crime of being Israeli.

Ben-Gad is standing his ground quite well and keeping his sense of humor throughout this ordeal. But it is an illustration of a counterintuitive new reality: The pro-Hamas demonstrations have been much reduced (though not eliminated entirely) but the bigotry itself has accelerated.

Take for example what happened recently at Pomona College in California. Pro-Hamas protesters stormed an event commemorating the October 7 attacks featuring a survivor of those attacks, Yoni Viloga. A group calling itself Claremont Undercurrents then took credit for the attack with an open letter that, the Algemeiner reports, appears to threaten Viloga with murder.

Unsurprisingly, the letter accuses Viloga of being “a settler on stolen land” and says his “fictitious ‘state’ destroyed 92% of Gaza.”

Viloga, of course, lives in Israel. To the pro-Hamasniks in the West, it remains a crime to be a Jew living in the Holy Land.

This is no mere land dispute. It’s an argument over whether the educational institutions of the West will persist within established reality—Israel exists, the Jewish holidays mention Israel because the people of Israel are indigenous to that land—or within a bubble of genocidal science fiction.

One can’t help but notice just how much the truth of history bothers these zombies. Their concerns have nothing to do with the lives and the rights of anyone living there now; they simply can’t handle that the people of Israel are living in the Land of Israel, as they have for thousands of years.