Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 03, 2025

11/03 Links Pt1: Remains of Omer Neutra, Oz Daniel and Asaf Hamami returned to Israel; How the UN Tossed Out Israeli Intel To Downplay UNRWA’s Ties to Hamas; Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution

From Ian:

How the UN Tossed Out Israeli Intel To Downplay UNRWA’s Ties to Hamas

The United Nations initiated its investigation in January 2024, after the Israeli government published bombshell evidence detailing the involvement of at least 12 UNRWA staffers in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and after Western governments began pulling financial support from the U.N. body. UNRWA fired those 12 and another 9 after further probes, but 10 others Israel flagged did not meet the international organization’s standards.

"In one case," the United Nations noted in an August 2024 public summary, "no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement [in Oct. 7]. That staff member has rejoined the Agency. In nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff members’ involvement and the OIOS investigation of them is now closed."

Though U.N. investigators acknowledged the evidence often "provide[d] a factual basis to indicate that the subject UNRWA staff member may have engaged in misconduct," they stated the evidence was "not suitable for the usual human resources review and decision on disciplinary process or other measures."

Sources briefed on the confidential investigation believe these results came from the United Nations' abnormal methodology and self-imposed limitations on its investigation. By choosing to consider only what it describes as "clear and convincing evidence" of misconduct, the international organization set an "impossibly high legal standard for a simple administrative action to be taken, let alone criminal prosecution," a former senior U.S. legal official familiar with U.N. operations told the Free Beacon. "It’s exceptionally frustrating that the U.N.’s standards constrain it from firing an employee where the evidence shows that, more likely than not, he was involved in terrorist activities."

The U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG)—a statutory law enforcement agency that continues to operate independently of USAID—has launched its own investigation into UNRWA’s ties to Hamas, sources confirmed to the Free Beacon. This investigation will permit State Department officials to place Hamas-linked UNRWA staff on a publicly available exclusion list, preventing them from recirculating to other U.S.-funded aid organizations, including those seeking to operate in Gaza.

"The USAID IG’s independent investigation is welcomed and warranted," a senior U.S. official responsible for humanitarian assistance in Gaza told the Free Beacon. "The U.N. clearly is unable to investigate itself properly, and the IG’s investigation will protect American taxpayer dollars from funding the salaries of Hamas terrorists shape-shifting as aid workers going forward."

A Western diplomat briefed on the matter told the Free Beacon that shortcomings in the U.N. investigation mean Hamas-tied UNRWA staffers still with the agency could migrate to other U.N. agencies.

"Other U.N. officials have expressed privately that there is no guarantee that UNRWA staff implicated in either the October 7 attacks or members of Hamas will be flagged for hiring officials at subsequent U.N. agencies," the diplomat said. "Nobody wants to become the next UNRWA and onboard individuals linked to Hamas as aid workers, but there are not the systems to protect against such risks."

U.S. government officials are aware of the risk. The USAID inspector general alerted the Biden administration and Congress in June 2024 that U.N. agencies seeking taxpayer assistance are exempt from U.S. vetting procedures.

"It is baffling that the U.N. received a free pass in terms of vetting," a diplomatic official briefed on the USAID OIG's ongoing investigative work told the Free Beacon. "In order to receive one dime of taxpayer-funded aid, any organization, U.N. or otherwise, should be required to undergo extensive vetting of all staff operating in the region."

Khaled Abu Toameh: How Hamas Is Exploiting the Trump Plan to Maintain Control of Gaza

For Hamas, US President Donald J. Trump's peace plan, announced in early October, is evidently nothing but a temporary ceasefire, or hudna, that should be exploited to ensure that the terror group, with the help of Qatar and Turkey, expands its political and military control over the Gaza Strip.

The terror group, however, has not been facing any difficulty in hunting down Palestinians suspected of "collaboration" with Israel or those who dared to criticize Hamas during the war. Hamas, in addition, is not in a hurry because it has a serious problem with phase two of the Trump plan, which requires the terror group to lay down and decommission its weapons.

What we are witnessing is a calculated delay that aims to buy time and exhaust the US administration until Trump abandons the numerous ultimatums he has issued to the terror group. The foot-dragging aims to allow Hamas to reassert control over the Gaza Strip. According to some reports, Hamas has recruited up to 7,000 new fighters....

Hamas's actions and media interviews given by its officials since the beginning of the ceasefire show that the terror group has no intention of disarming or relinquishing security control over the Gaza Strip.

Further evidence of Hamas's total disregard for the Trump plan and ongoing effort to reassert control over the Gaza Strip was provided on November 1 by the US Central Command (CENTCOM): " On Oct. 31, the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) observed suspected Hamas operatives looting an aid truck traveling as part of a humanitarian convoy delivering needed assistance from international partners to Gazans in northern Khan Younis. The coordination center was alerted through video surveillance from a U.S. MQ-9 aerial drone flying overhead to monitor implementation of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Operatives attacked the driver and stole the aid and truck... The driver's current status is unknown."

"There is no lasting stability or peace until Hamas is removed from Gaza, a step that will require the use of force against this fascist militia." — Ahmed Alkhatib, former Gaza native and respected political analyst, X.com, November 1, 2025.

Even if we reach phase two of the Trump plan, Hamas will undoubtedly try to hoodwink everyone, including the Trump administration. Hamas, for instance, might hand over some of its assault rifles to a third party, but keep most of its tunnels and arsenal of weapons, including rockets and explosive devices. It is also possible that Hamas might try to incorporate its members into a new security force that would be deployed in the Gaza Strip, under the pretext that they are not affiliated with the terror group.

It is time for the Trump administration and the international community to realize that what we are currently witnessing is an attempt to rebrand and reproduce Hamas to ensure its continued control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas should not only be removed from power, but from the entire political, economic, social and military arena.

Australian military companies face new Israel ban as Department of Defence quietly tightens trade restrictions

The Nightly has asked the Department of Defence for details of any new restrictions coming into effect this week, but a spokesperson responded saying: “Defence cannot comment on individual permits (and conditions) due to national security and commercial in confidence reasons”.

Last month Defence told Parliament that 22 permits with Israeli end users have been issued since October 2023, five of which have “expired”, while the remaining 17 are “solely for the purpose of Australian Defence Force and Commonwealth capabilities”.

Prior to the October 7 Hamas attacks, 66 permits were issued by Defence and according to the department, a review ordered by the government of all export items has concluded, with 37 of them requiring no further action.

“Australian law stipulates that the defence minister or their delegate must grant an export permit to anything that we would regard to be a defence item,” Defence Deputy Secretary Hugh Jeffery told a Senate estimates hearing on October 9.

“We distinguish between those items that are lethal, non-lethal or dual use. These items are registered on what we called the Defence and Strategic Goods List,” he explained.

During this year’s election Prime Minister Anthony Albanese again insisted “we do not sell arms to Israel” following revelations the country’s military had completed trials of an advanced remote weapons system made by a Canberra-based defence supplier.

In 2024 Israeli company Elbit Systems was awarded a $917 million contract to provide “advanced protection, fighting capabilities and sensors” for the Army’s new Infantry Fighting Vehicles being built in Victoria by Korean-owned company Hanwha.

The @NYTimes: A bad newspaper in a good country

This is an op-ed in today's New York Times by Masha Gessen titled "How to Be a Good Citizen

of a Bad Country."

When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you? In my experience, it is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and, at least nominally, has the right to vote, if that country is the United States. It seems one can just say “Not in my name” and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers. But as this country builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions, that may change. It should change. What does one do then? How can one be a good citizen of a bad state?

On a recent trip to Israel, I talked to a number of Jewish citizens who have grappled with this question. In the last two years, as Israel has carried out a genocide against Palestinians and has all but dropped any pretense of democracy, many Israelis have come to dread telling people what country they are from. Some see this as unfair, having never personally supported their country’s far-right politicians or its prime minister, and having done what they could to change the course of Israeli politics. Others — a tiny minority — are grateful for the scorn of other nations, in hopes it can bring change to their own.

Then Gessen goes on to interview the tiny minority of Israelis who agree that the country is monstrous to ask their advice.

Notice that the only bad countries ever mentioned in Gessen's universe are Israel and the United States.

The entire piece starts from a premise that is utterly false - Ithat srael is acting monstrously, it engages in genocide, it is no longer a democracy. Then it cherry picks "evidence" that supports it.

While this is an op-ed, it violates every standard of even opinion journalism. It asserts lies as fact and doesn't even attempt to pretend that these opinions are anything but proven. and the NYT, by failing to edit the "genocide" accusation as even disputed (which happened last week with the same columnist), is engaging in spreading antisemitism.

I ran this op-ed through my TAMAR framework to identify media bias, and it created this infographic on its own describing the propaganda methodology ss "closed loop morality."

(h/t Brad)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Iran still insists Haniyeh was killed by a missile - because otherwise the IRGC looks REALLY bad

Sada News reports:

The spokesman for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said that the assassination of the former head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, was not the result of an internal sabotage operation.

The spokesman added that Haniyeh was targeted by a missile fired from a specific distance that hit the window directly and then lodged in his body.

He explained that Haniyeh was speaking on the phone at the moment of the strike and that the missile came from the same direction he was looking.

As translated by Sada News, he said: "We tried to warn him about his phones that evening, but he didn't take it seriously."

Multiple Western news agencies, relying on anonymous Iranian officials and others, have concluded that Haniyeh was killed by a bomb hidden in his room and triggered by remote control.

We don't have too many photos to verify whether the blast appears internal or external, but reports indicated an outward explosion with little damage to surrounding rooms.

One piece of evidence shows that the IRGC is lying: they arrested dozens of the IRGC workers immediately afterwards, indicating that they knew this was a bad intelligence lapse. Also, there were no alarms ahead of a missile that would be expected from their own defenses.

The missile theory is more damage control, and the IRGC is keeping it going to avoid shame.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Wassem el-Sisi, a popular figure on Egyptian talk shows who styles himself as an Egyptologist, made some bizarre antisemitic claims on TV this weekend.

Egyptologist Dr. Waseem El-Sisi revealed the ambitions of the Jews and their positions that defy history and facts, stressing that the Zionist entity has deeper goals than just religious claims...

During his interview with journalist Sherif El-Toukhy on the “Shift” podcast, Sisi emphasized the idea of “historical hatred” directed at Egypt, citing the attempt by Jews to take the statue of Ramses II to France to humiliate it. He pointed to a controversial incident when a French official cut the mummification wrappings from the foot of Ramses II, saying: “You brought us out of Egypt alive, and we brought you out of Egypt dead,” even though Ramses II has no relation to the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

This incident never happened. Ramses II's mummy was indeed flown to Paris in 1976 for conservation treatment due to fungal deterioration, but the rest of the story is completely made up.

He recounted a famous incident that proves Jewish and British influence in archaeological affairs, explaining that after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, Marcus Pasha Hanna (Minister of Public Works in Saad Zaghloul's government in 1924) ordered the tomb to be closed and prevented the excavator Howard Carter from entering, due to theft and looting. ....Carter went to the Prime Minister and the British High Commissioner, and they refused his request to open the tomb. Then he returned and threatened that he had found papyri that refute the subject of the Red Sea and the stories of the Exodus.

He pointed out that after the threat, the tomb was opened and the papyri that the British had confiscated were retrieved. Carter later retracted his statement, claiming that they were merely the king’s underwear, attributing the theft of the papyri to Lord Carnarvon, who was married to Amy, the granddaughter of the Rothschild family (the largest economic and banking family)..

This is a bizarre story. While there was a dispute over permission to visit the tomb, neither Carter nor Lord Carnarvon were Jewish. There is no record of anything being looted from the tomb. Carnavaron was married to an illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild named Almina Herbert. She helped fund the excavations but had nothing to do with them. There is no serious Jewish connection to the mostly made up incident.

El Sisi is obsessed with Jews, constantly spewing out antisemitic conspiracy theories on Egyptisan TV.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/02 Links: Omer Neutra confirmed as one of three slain Gaza hostages returned to Israel on Sunday; The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

From Ian:

When Truth Splits in Two: The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

The Great Moral Reversal
In the Middle East, proximity to Hamas’s rule has produced clarity. People who live under or near Islamist militias know the cost of their fanaticism. They have seen the beheadings, the executions, the corruption, and the cruelty. They know that Hamas, like the Houthis or Hezbollah, does not liberate, it enslaves.

In the West, by contrast, ideological distance paired with obsession of the oppressor vs oppressed narrative breeds delusion. The further one stands from Hamas’s victims, the easier it is to romanticize its violence. Western activists, many of whom would never tolerate a prayer led by a homophobic priest or a law that could affect a woman's right to control her own medical decisions, suspend all judgment when those same forces wrap themselves in Palestinian flags.

It is an irony only modern politics could produce. Arab liberals call for Hamas’s elimination, while American progressives dance beneath its banners.

Why This Matters
The implications reach beyond moral outrage. When American cities normalize pro terror rhetoric, they erode the social immune system that protects against radicalization. When politicians legitimize extremists in the name of diversity, they invite violence and antisemitism into civic life.

One world is waking up. The other is descending into moral sleep. In Riyadh, Cairo, and Manama, journalists write that Hamas’s “role has ended.” In Brooklyn, protesters shout that “resistance is glorious.”

The former seeks peace. The latter seeks purpose. The former has seen war’s reality. The latter plays at revolution from the safety of American democracy.

The lesson is painfully clear: moral clarity still exists, but you will find more of it today in the Arab world than on the streets of New York City, a city now poised to dive even deeper into fanaticism and moral inversion.

The Qatar Problem

Knowledge Production and Narrative Control
Tensions between Saudis, Iranians, and Qataris had simmered for years, and I could still feel the heat at a security forum in Europe in late August 2023. After I led a teach-in on the Middle East, the Qatari ambassador to Canada, Dr Khalid bin Rashid Al Mansouri, approached me to ask if I needed funding for my initiatives. I declined. Mid-sentence, a Gazan social-media activist cut in: “Will you keep financially supporting our people in Gaza even now that Saudi is normalising with Israel?” The ambassador turned, took his hands, and answered, “We will never ever stop supporting our Palestinian brothers.”

That was not a humanitarian promise, it was policy. Qatar has bankrolled Hamas since 2007, when the group seized Gaza after a bloody rampage that overthrew the Palestinian Authority. In 2012, Qatar’s then-Emir made a red-carpet visit to Gaza and pledged US$400 million for projects, a watershed moment that signalled Doha’s unabashed embrace of Hamas’s rule. Patronage matured into a routinised cash flow, and by 2021, about US$30 million per month was entering Gaza, framed as “humanitarian” transfers that sustained Hamas-run salaries and government operations.

At the same time, Qatar was investing heavily in Western knowledge production and narrative control. Since 2001, US colleges and universities have reported an estimated US$6.25 billion in Qatari funding, making Qatar one of the five largest foreign donors in American higher education. Think tanks and policymakers were folded in, too. Qatar gave upward of US$9.1 million to US think tanks between 2019 and 2023. The Brookings Doha Center and related initiatives received US$14.8 million in a single three-year pledge, part of a broader, longer-running relationship that raised persistent questions and prompted FBI investigations about policy manipulation and censorship across the Beltway ecosystem.

Lobbying followed the same template. In a single recent year, Qatar retained 33 FARA-registered PR and lobbying firms, spending around US$18 million to create surge capacity for bookings, op-eds, and Hill and press engagement. To give you a picture of the scale of Qatari reach in DC, I spent several months after 7 October trying to publish a piece titled, “Qatar Is a Leading Saboteur of Regional Integration.” I sent it to everyone I know in media and policy, including Ambassador Dennis Ross who promised, when I begged him at a Washington Institute event in November 2023, to get it published. I had hit multiple walls, including at a think tank of which I am a member.

A friend at one of these publications told me: “I think they [the editorial team] have an issue with the fact that they have an upcoming partnership in December with Qatar. One of the directors flagged it as problematic and might put them in a delicate situation and prefer to go with another piece they had commissioned with a lighter touch on the subject. Sorry for that.” I asked if there was somewhere I could send it where there would not be a conflict of interest. “It is hard in DC,” my friend replied. “Everyone has interests with the Qataris.”

Even public grief was asked to stand down in deference to Doha’s leverage. After 7 October, several planned protests by hostage families in front of the Qatari embassy were quietly shut down. A source close to the Hostage Families Forum in DC told me they were explicitly warned not to “endanger” diplomatic talks with the only mediators deemed capable of securing releases. I do not fault the families for yielding, especially when even Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff continue to celebrate Qatar’s role as the indispensable mediator for peace.

WAPO: Palestinian Talks on Gaza's Future Could See Hamas Help Shape Its Rule

Palestinian political factions are holding closed-door discussions that could see Hamas play a role in shaping a postwar administration in Gaza.

The eight Palestinian factions and armed groups involved - including Fatah, which leads the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank, and Hamas - are working to reach a consensus over key elements of an interim administration.

To avoid a protracted postwar insurgency, Hamas must be included in any political settlement, say Palestinian political factions and mediators from Arab countries.

A pivotal question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or President Trump would object to a Gazan government born out of talks between Hamas and Fatah.

For Israel, nearly every aspect of the inter-Palestinian talks is unpalatable.

"The fear for Israel is that Hamas will open the gates of Gaza and say to the PA, 'You're the boss here. Just bring money to Gaza and you can declare yourself the minister of agriculture or education. Just don't touch weapons, and we'll be the dominant player,'" said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence analyst.

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said, "There is a risk that the end state that emerges will be what we wanted to avoid....Hamas is battered and bruised but hanging on to power, preparing for the next round."

WSJ: Hizbullah Is Rearming, Putting Ceasefire at Risk

Hizbullah in Lebanon is rebuilding its armaments and battered ranks, defying the terms of a ceasefire agreement, and raising the prospect of renewed conflict with Israel, according to Israeli and Arab intelligence.

The intelligence shows Iranian-backed Hizbullah is restocking rockets, antitank missiles and artillery. Some weapons are coming in via seaports and still functional smuggling routes through Syria. Hizbullah is also manufacturing new weapons itself.

Under the agreement that ended a two-month Israeli campaign against the group a year ago, Lebanon is required to start disarming Hizbullah in parts of Lebanon, before continuing to the entire country as per a previous agreement.

Israel is losing patience after new intelligence findings highlighted Hizbullah's rearmament. "Should Beirut continue to hesitate, Israel may act unilaterally - and the consequences would be grave," Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a key American envoy for Lebanon and Syria, said in October.

The standoff highlights the difficulty of quashing an established militia with a base of support among the population even when it has been badly beaten. The difficulties are also evident in Gaza, where Hamas is resisting demands that it disarm and relinquish power.

Every philosophy student eventually asks: "Why should I be moral?"

It's a reasonable question. If I can get away with something—if no one will know, if I won't get caught, if the benefit outweighs the risk—why shouldn't I?

Western philosophy, built on Greek foundations, has been trying to answer this question for millennia. The responses vary: because reason demands it (Kant), because it maximizes utility (Mill), because it perfects your character (Aristotle), because God commands it (Aquinas), because that's what it means to be human (existentialists).

None of them work. Not really. Not in the moment when you're actually deciding whether to lie, to cheat, to look away from suffering. The answers feel either too abstract (categorical imperatives), too calculated (utility functions), too aspirational (virtue), or too external (divine command).

The problem isn't that these philosophers were stupid. The problem is that they started with the wrong question—which means they started with the wrong unit of reality.

Around 500 BCE, two civilizations were developing radically different approaches to understanding reality, truth, and morality.

In Athens, philosophy began with being. What is real? What is true? What is good? The Greek mind sought to isolate, categorize, and perfect. The fundamental unit of reality was the individual—the substance, the soul, the rational agent standing alone before the cosmos.

In Jerusalem, thought began with relationship. Not "What is?" but "If I am only for myself, who am I?" The fundamental unit wasn't the isolated self but the covenant—the bond between God and humanity, between person and person, between present and future self.

This wasn't a minor difference in emphasis. It was a difference in ontological architecture—in what counts as real.

The Greeks built philosophy like geometry: start with axioms, derive theorems, eliminate contradictions, arrive at perfect forms. Truth was static, eternal, complete.

Jewish thought built like engineering: start with structure under load, test assumptions, expect failure, build in correction. Truth was dynamic, relational, asymptotic—something you approach through integrity but never fully possess. Structure was not to create perfection but to make moral choices more probable.

Western philosophy chose Athens. It's been trying to solve Greek problems ever since problems that don't even arise in the Jewish philosophical mindset.

If you begin with the isolated individual as your fundamental unit, certain problems become unsolvable:

The Free Will Problem: Either your actions are caused by prior states (determinism) or they're random (chaos). There's no logical space for meaningful choice. Philosophers have been trying to thread this needle for centuries. Compatibilism tries to reconcile the two, but it feels like verbal gymnastics—because it is.

The Is/Ought Problem: You can't derive moral obligations from factual descriptions. Hume showed this, and no amount of clever reasoning has bridged the gap. Facts live in one realm, morality in another, and never the twain shall meet.

The Meaning Problem: If you're a collection of atoms following physical laws, why does anything matter? Existentialists told us to create our own meaning, but that just pushes the question back: why should I care about the meaning I create?

The Morality Problem: Why be good if you can get away with being bad? Every Greek answer either appeals to external enforcement (divine punishment, social consequences) or internal perfection (virtue makes you happy)—neither of which actually explains why you should care.

These aren't just abstract puzzles. They're the fractures running through modern civilization:

We can't agree on what rights are or where they come from
Our institutions cannot self-correct and are vulnerable to hijack
We can't make AI systems that remain moral as they scale more towards agency
We've lost the ability to talk about meaning without sounding either religious or relativist

All of this traces back to starting with the wrong ontological unit.

The Jewish intellectual tradition—formalized in Talmudic reasoning, encoded in halakhic structure, lived through covenant—never made this mistake.

It begins with a different axiom: reality is fundamentally relational. You don't exist in isolation; you exist in a web of obligations, connections, and mutual influence. You have a family, a tribe, a community, a nation. The self isn't an atom; it's a node in a network.

Once you start here, the hardest problems of Western philosophy simply dissolve:

Free will isn't about escaping causation—it's about biasing probabilities within structure. You operate in a field of constraints (biology, history, circumstance), but you have the capacity to reweight outcomes toward good. You're not breaking the laws of reality; you're participating in their unfolding. Freedom becomes meaningful because it's freedom within structure, not freedom from everything.

Values aren't separate from facts—they're properties of relationships. To say "cruelty is wrong" isn't imposing preference on neutral reality; it's recognizing that cruelty fractures the relational fabric that makes reality coherent. "Ought" isn't imported from outside; it's the direction that flows naturally from what "is."

Meaning isn't invented—it's discovered in relationship. You matter because others are affected by your choices. Your actions ripple through a network of obligation and care. Meaning emerges from how your choices affect others, not from internal conviction.

But the most important shift is this: we can now answer "what is morality?" in purely secular terms.

Morality is what increases the universe's creative capacity. Immorality is what diminishes it.

Free will comes from our choices in relationships. That means that our capacity for creativity is in our moral choices. By choosing, we can strengthen our bonds with others. Those bonds are new reality - they are created where they didn't exist before. Creativity is the full spectrum of generative human possibility: the capacity to build, connect, imagine, repair, and transform. It's what allows people to participate in the ongoing creation of meaning, relationship, and value.

Why does this work where Greek answers failed?

It's relational by definition: Creativity isn't solitary. A painting has no value if no one sees it. A song means nothing if no one hears it. Even private creativity—writing in a journal, solving a problem alone—is implicitly addressed to someone, even if that someone is your future self. Creativity is always relational, which means morality (increasing creativity) is always about how we affect others.

It solves the is/ought problem: If reality is fundamentally relational, and creativity is the generative capacity of relationships, then morality isn't imposed on reality—it's built into it. To act morally is to align with the structure that makes reality coherent. To act immorally is to fracture that structure. "Ought" becomes the direction that restores integrity to "is."

It explains why we should care: Because creativity is the only dimension where we have genuine agency. Everything else—our genetics, our history, the laws of physics—is deterministic. But in the moral dimension, we can bias probabilities. We can choose what kind of world we're creating. By consistently choosing good, we change ourselves for the better and can climb to the next level of morality. That's not a burden imposed from outside; that's the only arena where we're genuinely free.

It provides a moral floor without metaphysics: Anything that crushes human creativity—murder, tyranny, cruelty, dehumanization, silencing—is wrong not because it violates a rule, but because it destroys the generative capacity in yourself or in others that makes life worth living. You don't need God to ground this. You just need to recognize that humans are creative beings, and anything that systematically destroys that capacity is evil.

It handles constraint: Creativity doesn't mean chaos. Every creative form has structure—sonnets have 14 lines, jazz has chord progressions, engineering has physical laws. Morality isn't about unlimited freedom; it's about finding the structures that channel freedom into generative possibility. That's why even modesty in clothing or choosing not to use certain offensive words aren't opposed to creativity—they are boundaries that enhance creativity.

It's imitatio Dei—without theology: If there is a Creator, the primary divine act is creation itself. To be moral is to mirror that: to make space for others to create, to protect their capacity for agency, to build structures that enable rather than crush. If there isn't a Creator, the pattern still holds: we are creative beings, and morality is what allows that creativity to flourish across the network of relationships we inhabit.

This is what Jewish ethics always understood: saving a life isn't just preventing death—it's preserving someone's capacity to create meaning. Not standing by while harm occurs (lo ta'amod al dam rei'echa) prevents harm and protects generative possibility. Mutual responsibility (areivut) isn't altruistic sacrifice—it's recognizing that creativity is collective, that we create through and for each other.

Humility is an essential difference between Greek and Jewish philosophy. To the Greeks, human perfection is possible. To Jewish thinkers, the idea of human perfection in a world where there is a supremely perfect God is laughable. The best we can do is to keep improving, forever.

The Jewish intellectual tradition has been continuous for over two millennia. It developed sophisticated methods for handling paradox, testing assumptions, maintaining coherence under uncertainty. Talmudic dialectic is as rigorous as anything Aristotle produced—arguably more so, because it doesn't pretend contradictions are always errors.

So why did Western philosophy ignore it?

Partly language—most of it was in Hebrew and Aramaic. Partly prejudice—it was dismissed as "theology" rather than philosophy. Partly Christianity's complicated relationship with its Jewish roots. Partly the fact that Jewish thought doesn't fit neatly into academic categories; it's simultaneously legal reasoning, ethical reflection, and spiritual practice.

But the cost of this oversight compounds every generation. We've been trying to solve problems that only exist because we chose the wrong foundation.

The stakes have never been higher. We're building artificial intelligence—systems that will make decisions affecting billions of lives. And we can learn from AI.

AI, today, is neither deterministic nor does it have full agency. It is probabilistic. It will almost always come up with a reasonable answer, based on probability. And this is how people are, too: we are shaped by our upbringing, by our environment, by our experiences. We are highly unlikely to kill the next person we see walking down the street. Our free will is manifested in a much narrower range - like should we keep the elevator door open for the person down the hall. When we make moral decisions, we change ourselves - it is the ultimate in creativity.

The alignment problem (how do we ensure AI remains beneficial as it becomes more capable?) is essentially the free will problem in digital form: how do you create agency within structure? Greek philosophy can't solve it because Greek philosophy can't handle probabilistic agency within moral constraint. The Jewish model already understands how to optimize moral outcomes within reality instead of theorizing perfect morality.

We're facing institutional collapse—governments, corporations, universities losing public trust because they can't self-correct without breaking. Greek thinking builds perfect forms that shatter under stress. Jewish thinking builds resilient structures that bend, repair, and learn.

We're in a meaning crisis—secular modernity delivered material abundance but stripped away the relational fabric that makes life feel worth living. You can't solve that by telling people to "create their own meaning." You solve it by rebuilding the networks of obligation and care that make meaning real—that allow people to participate in collective creativity rather than drown in individual isolation.

This isn't about Jewish triumphalism or religious conversion. It's about recognizing that one of humanity's oldest continuous intellectual traditions developed a fundamentally different—and demonstrably better—foundation for moral reasoning, and we've been ignoring it.

Derechology is my attempt to formalize this tradition in language that's legible to secular philosophy, applicable to AI ethics, and useful for institutional design. It takes the core insights of Jewish relational ontology and translates them into systematic principles:

Reality is relational structure
Values are part of human reality
Truth is what survives audit of assumptions
Freedom is probabilistic agency within moral constraint
Morality is what increases creative capacity across relationships
Perfection is the enemy of the good
Humility is what keeps systems self-correcting

The book (when it's finally finished, but it is shaping up nicely) will lay out the full framework. But the core insight is this:

We've been doing philosophy wrong. Not because the Greeks were foolish, but because they started with the isolated self and built from there. Start with relationship instead, and the hardest problems of Western philosophy dissolve.

The question isn't "Why should I be moral?"

The question is: "Given that I exist in relationship—that my choices affect others' capacity to create, that meaning arises from generative connection, that the only freedom I have is in the moral dimension—how could I be anything else?"

Morality isn't a burden. It's the only space where we're truly alive.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Hamas still stealing aid from WFP trucks, but not as much - they have other sources of income and power now

Since the Gaza ceasefire, the percentage of World Food Programme trucks that have been hijacked has gone down from 99% to about 6%.

The UNOPS dashboard shows about 1007 tons stolen out of 17,300 tons of food via the WFP since October 11.

Even though CENTCOM released their video of suspected Hamas gunmen stealing an aid truck, Hamas has pivoted to other means of survival.

Hamas used the food as its cash cow during the war, but now that they can be out in the open it is more important for them to control Gaza as the de facto government - the NGOs bringing in aid are crediting their success at being able to coordinate with Hamas to bring the trucks in without incident.

It is in Hamas' interest to control things on the ground - and the reason is that they see that commercial imports are increasing, and will only become a bigger slice of the imports as time goes on.

And you know that Hamas does with commercial goods? It taxes them. Heavily. That was their model before the war and it is the model they are trying to rebuild.

At the same time, now that things quieted down, digital crypto donations from Iran and other Hamas allies are almost certainly resuming and increasing to make it harder for anyone to dislodge Hamas from power, which is already seeming increasingly unlikely. Every day Hamas is in de facto control - like being the interface for NGOs - it becomes more difficult for any international force to even consider doing anything to get rid of them. I would guess that the theatre of returned bodies - sending only parts of bodies or people who weren't even hostages, in dribs and drabs - are a delaying tactic to keep Hamas in power long enough that they become permanent again.

And so far, we are not seeing any serious plans from the US or the international community to get rid of Hamas.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

On the October 25, 2024, episode of the Grozny TV program "Chechen History: War and Peace," Chechnya's Mufti Salah-Hadji Mezhiev said:

Since ancient times, enemies of Allah have existed – the Jews and the currents they spawned, such as atheism. And it doesn't matter where this happens – in the Arab world or in Europe – pseudo-Orientalists are everywhere spreading lies. If you listen to the topics they raise and the questions they ask, it becomes clear: the source of their ideas is Satanism.

Russian newspapers publicized the statement, and Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar strongly condemned it.

Mezhiev then gave an unlikely explanation, saying, "My talk in the program was not only about 'enemies of Allah' but about 'enemies of all humanity, that is, the evil that united under one banner, which is the West,....Western European countries, under the pretext of freedom of expression, allow the insult of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the burning of the Holy Quran.' "

Which means he thinks the Jews control the Western world.

He then claimed that he respects all nationalities, religions, and sects.

In September 2023, the Mufti received a letter of appreciation from Russian President Vladimir Putin in recognition of his role in "strengthening the unity of Russian society and consolidating the values of interfaith tolerance."

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

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11/01 Links: The illusion of Palestinian peace; Hamas again hands over remains that don’t belong to hostages; CENTCOM posts footage of Hamas terrorists looting aid truck

From Ian:

The Balfour Declaration is a monument to humanity in this dark age of anti-Semitism

The revival of anti-Semitism has shown in a way no Zionist arguments ever could, the need for a state with a Jewish majority where Jews can live without fear.

The Balfour Declaration contained an important proviso – “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. It did not mention the national rights of Arabs, since at that time many believed that such rights were reserved for those of European origin.

All the same, “the civil and religious rights” of Arabs are better protected in Israel than in the murderous regimes and failed states which constitute much of the rest of today’s Middle East.

The early Zionists hoped for Arab acceptance. But a brief period of amity soon gave rise, inevitably no doubt, to a persistent and often violent conflict between two national claims, each backed by religion.

Balfour would not have been surprised. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s, he had been accused of being unjust to Irish nationalists. “Justice” he mused, “there is not enough to go round”. And indeed in the Middle East there isn’t.

Nevertheless, Israel has become an insurance mechanism for Jews against anti-Semitism; and sadly no one can predict when or where that mechanism will be needed.

And that is why, as the diplomatic historian, Tom Otte, has argued, the Balfour Declaration stands as “one of the few monuments to humanity in the 20th century”.

The illusion of Palestinian peace

The “ecstasy” of jihad was visible on Oct. 7, in videos of young men calling their parents to boast about killing Jews with their own hands, and in the mobs cheering as kidnapped Israeli girls were paraded through Gaza’s streets.

Even academics in the West, such as Cornell’s Russell Rickford, revealed the same moral sickness when he called the massacre “exhilarating.”

Arab–Palestinian wars have always followed this script: an initial eruption of homicidal and suicidal ecstasy, followed by crushing defeat—the War of Independence (1948), the Six Day War (1967), the Intifadas, and now the war of Oct. 7. Yet from each failure, what remains in memory is the thrill of violence, not the price of it.

This mindset—rooted in the dream of expanding Dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) by erasing Dar al-Harb (the land of war)—turns every peace proposal into betrayal, and every act of terror into redemption.

Meanwhile, international institutions like the United Nations invert morality by cloaking this death cult in the language of “human rights.” The result is what the Arab intellectual Fouad Ajami called “a palace of dreams” turned into a trap of death.

The much-discussed “deradicalization” needed for a peace process is nowhere in sight. As this survey makes clear, the obstacle is not Israel’s settlements or borders—it is the culture of hatred itself.

Until that changes, peace will remain a Western illusion.

Hamas again hands over remains that don’t belong to hostages

Hamas transferred to Israel the remains of three individuals that do not belong to any of the 11 slain hostages still held by terrorist in Gaza, Israel’s broadcaster Channel 13 reported on Saturday.

The remains, which Red Cross intermediaries handed over to Israel overnight Friday, were examined by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv’s Abu Kabir neighborhood.

The Israel Defense Forces says that at least two bodies of deceased captives can be recovered immediately by the terrorist organization, while Hamas may truly not know the whereabouts of three to five others.

“We ruled out the possibility that the remains returned last night are linked to any Israeli hostage,” an Israeli official told Ynet on Saturday.

“Specifically, this incident does not constitute a violation, since from the outset we assessed with low probability that the remains belonged to hostages. We prefer that Hamas hand over findings so we can verify them. That said, Hamas continues its fundamental violation—the failure to return the bodies of the fallen,” the official added.

According to the ceasefire terms, in cases of uncertainty, remains should be transferred to Israel for verification.

However, Jerusalem believes that Hamas is deliberately slow-walking the return of the deceased hostages to avoid its disarmament, which is set to take place in the second phase of the ceasefire deal with a deployment of an international force in the Gaza Strip.

Instead, the Islamist group is buying time to reassert its control over territory from which the IDF has withdrawn, so it will have greater bargaining power in future talks regarding Gaza’s reconstruction.

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)

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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)