Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

12/17 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: The Massacre at Bondi Beach Was Inevitable; NGO Monitor: Amnesty International Australia Insists on the Right to Intimidate Jews

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The Massacre at Bondi Beach Was Inevitable

There will be plenty said in the coming days about why the two perpetrators (father and son) were allowed to own guns, despite their connections with individuals jailed for plotting terror attacks. There will be many questions raised about how their shooting spree could go on for almost ten minutes and why the Australian police were so unprepared for it. There will be questions about why a Jewish event celebrating Hannukah on the beach was not better protected, given the escalating risks against Australian Jews. And there will be official expressions of mourning for the 15 victims counted so far, ranging from a ten-year-old girl to an elderly Holocaust survivor who died sheltering his wife.

But the main question is why the Australian authorities did not take the concerns of Jewish Australians seriously, and why indeed they spent the last two years pandering to the ever-growing contingent of Muslim immigrants and others who have clearly been on the path to radicalization. It will not be enough for them to say that they did not know.

Far from tamping down the problem, the Anthony Albanese government has been viciously maligning Israel since October 7, 2023. It has expressly tried to stop people from correcting those denigrations. It has allowed mass incitement every week on Australian streets and tried to bar those who oppose such incitement.

If anyone thinks that this is an edge case, they do not need to look simply at the blood spilled on Bondi Beach. They merely have to ask a question many of us have asked for the past two years: What other group would expect to be treated like this?

In 2019, there was a terrible attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a lone gunman. It was a vicious, appalling attack. Outpourings of sympathy issued from all communities.

But imagine for a moment that there had not been. Imagine that immediately after that attack there had been huge crowds of Australians outside the Sydney opera house calling for Muslims or Arabs to be “gassed.”

Does anyone think that the Australian authorities would have taken this lightly? Does anyone think that if there had been anti-Muslim or anti-Arab demonstrations on the streets every week for the two years following the 2019 attack—expressly celebrating the attack and calling for it to happen again—that the Australian authorities would have stood by, or actually placated the mob? To ask the question is to answer it.

In the meantime, Jews in Australia will be asking the same question that Jews in New York and around the world are asking. And they will be facing the same conundrum that Jews around the world now face. If they are in Israel, they are attacked. If they are outside Israel, they are attacked. And if they are in New York or other cities outside Israel, feeling increasingly unsafe and wondering whether to move to Israel, then—as happened at Park East Synagogue in New York City last month—they will be attacked as well.

The problem has been in plain sight all along. It’s shameful that so many people in positions of power decided to metaphorically shoot the messengers, while all the time clearing a path for the real-life shooters to take aim, and fire.

Gil Troy: Make terrorism backfire: Rescinding recognition of ‘Palestine’

As the world is shocked by the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre, and as experts pontificate about fighting abstractions like “hate,” too many ignore the most effective move Australia – and other countries – can make.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should say: “Palestinian terrorists and their supporters keep trying to advance the Palestinian cause by slaughtering innocents, Jews and non-Jews alike. Today, rather than impotently claiming ‘terrorism doesn’t work,’ we will prove it with one action. Terrorism doesn’t work – it backfires: Australia hereby rescinds its recognition of a Palestinian state.”

Instead, after two antisemitic anti-Zionists murdered 15 innocents and wounded dozens, Albanese guaranteed that the problem won’t end; he claimed that Australia’s recognizing of a fictitious Palestinian state didn’t encourage the Jew-slaughter.

Such head-in-the-sand thinking is like denying the link between Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Holocaust. Mein Kampf wasn’t just a bestseller, and Australia’s pro-Palestinian stance isn’t just a policy. Since the 1970s, the world has repeatedly rewarded Palestinian terrorism by advancing the Palestinian cause. Since Hamas’s unspeakable barbarism on October 7, it’s become super-trendy to enable terror and greenlight Jew-hatred.

When terrorism is rewarded
Ghazi Hamad, a Qatari-based Hamas leader whom Western useful idiots deemed “pragmatic,” called Australia and other countries recognizing a Palestinian state one of the “fruits of October 7.”

Hamas celebrated the recognition as an “important step” and a “deserved outcome of our people’s struggle.”

Terrorists aren’t stupid. Western leaders claim “terrorism never works,” yet their appeasement and cowardice spur more violence. That’s why since 2000, over 106,000 terrorist attacks worldwide have murdered 249,941 people. Since October 7, 8,670 terrorist attacks – including stone-throwing – occurred in Judea and Samaria.

There’s a fine line between exploiting a tragedy for political reasons and disincentivizing terrorism. But Bondi Beach wasn’t some natural disaster.

NGO Monitor: Amnesty International Australia Insists on the Right to Intimidate Jews

The Hanukkah massacre at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 11, 2025 – in which 15 people were murdered and scores injured – marks the worst violence targeting Jews in Australia’s history. It follows a surge in antisemitic incidents – including violent assaults – in recent years.

Despite the blatant rise in antisemitism, Amnesty International Australia, which claims to “challenge injustice wherever it happens,” has consistently vilified and actively opposed measures intended to protect Australian Jews.

In addition, between the Hamas-orchestrated October 7th attacks and the killings at Bondi Beach, Amnesty Australia appears not to have published a single standalone report, article, or statement on antisemitism in the country.1 (A feeble, watered-down January 22, 2025 statement that Amnesty Australia co-signed, referenced “escalating hate crimes on the Jewish community and on the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities in Australia.”)

Surging antisemitism in Australia
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) publishes annual assessments, documenting both the overall number of antisemitic incidents in Australia, as well as categorizing them and describing specific events. Its data demonstrate a sharp increase in both the total number, as well as the severity, of antisemitic incidents in Australia.

ECAJ Report on Anti-Jewish Incidents in Australia 2025, published December 3, 2025

Moreover, according to the New South Wales Police Force, from October 11, 2023 – March 26, 2025, it had recorded 367 antisemitic incidents, alongside 38 classified as Islamophobic. Notably, “In addition to incidents reported to, or investigated by, the NSW Police, the Community Security Group has recorded many hundreds of antisemitic events of which many are not recorded on NSW Police systems.” 2

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

After the Bondi Beach attack, there were public figures who could not bring themselves to describe the victims as Jews or to call the attack antisemitic. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was one of them.

In a statement released soon after the attack, Albanese said only that his “thoughts were with every person affected.” He did not mention Jews. He did not mention antisemitism. He did not say why the victims were targeted.

Albanese had no difficulty recognizing a Palestinian state that does not exist and never has. Yet he could not publicly acknowledge that Jews were murdered because they were Jews.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did acknowledge it. He also said he had warned Albanese months earlier about where this kind of language ends.

“On August 17, about four months ago, I sent Prime Minister Albanese of Australia a letter in which I warned that the Australian government’s policy was promoting and encouraging antisemitism in Australia.

I wrote: ‘Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire. It rewards Hamas terrorists. It emboldens those who menace Australian Jews and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets.’

Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent; it retreats when leaders act.

Instead, Prime Minister, you replaced weakness with weakness and appeasement with more appeasement. Your government did nothing. You let the disease spread. The result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”

Albanese was not the only one to obscure the Jewish identity of the Bondi Beach victims.

Oprah Winfrey wrote, “My heart breaks for the victims, their families and loved ones, and all you Aussies.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Oprah (@oprah)

There was no mention of Jews or antisemitism. Not anywhere. Oprah simply made us disappear.

Israeli American Council (IAC) CEO Elan Carr called Winfrey out, referring to the missing identification of the victims as Jews in her statement as "obfuscation."

“Oprah’s neglect to name the actual targets and victims of the attack, Jews celebrating Hanukkah, conceals both the true nature of this horrific event and the appalling surge in antisemitism that gave rise to it,” said IAC CEO Elan S. Carr, a former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. “For a public figure to express sorrow over the attack without saying that it was an antisemitic mass murder of Jews during their celebration of a holiday is precisely the sort of misguided obfuscation that allows antisemitism to flourish.”

Just as we now have ample evidence from the global reaction to the massacre of October 7 that terror begets terror, we also have evidence that omitting to call attacks "antisemitic," or the victims "Jews" begets more of the same. In 2015, for example, then President Obama famously referred to the 2015 shooting at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris that left four Jews dead as a random shooting of “a bunch of folks in a deli.”

Former White House secretary Jen Psaki, when pressed to explain her boss’ assertion that the victims were “random,” doubled down, knowing full well that calling the Hyper Cacher shooting “random” was immoral and a complete falsehood.

I created a transcript of the exchange between veteran AP journalist Matt Lee and Psaki to show all the nervous stutters that gave her away.

Matt Lee: Yesterday uh, the President in his news conference raised some eyebrows by saying that the victims, of the, uh, shooting in Paris at the kosher deli were uh “random.” Um, your colleague at the White House apparently said something similar today. Um, doe. . . is that, really, I mean, does the Administration really believe that these peop-that the, the victims of this attack were, were not, uh singled out because they were of a particular faith?
Jen Psaki: Well as you know, I believe, if I remember the victims specifically there were, they were not all victims of one background or one nationality. So, I think what they mean by that is, I don’t know that they spoke to the targeting of the grocery store or that of the specific individuals who were impacted.
Matt Lee: Well. I mean, right, but when the Secretary went and paid respects to he was with a member of the Jewish community there.
Jen Psaki: Naturally, given that it’s the, the na-th-th-th th-the grocery store is one that uh,
Matt Lee: Well don’t you think that the target, maybe, even if all the victims, e-even if the victims came from different backgrounds, from different religions, different nationalities, was the target, the store itself was the target. Was it not? I mean. . .
Jen Psaki: But that’s different than the individuals being. I don’t have any more to really. . .
Matt Lee: All right, well, does the Administration believe this was an anti-Jewish, uh, uh attack on, an attack on the Jewish community in Paris?
Jen Psaki: I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities and what they believe was, uh, the situation at, at play here.
Matt Lee: Yeah, but if a guy goes into a, a, a, a, a kosher market and starts shooting it up, you know, he’s not looking for Buddhists is he?
Jen Psaki: Well again, Matt, I think it’s relevant that obviously the individuals in there who were shopping and working at the store. . .
Matt Lee: Who does one ex . . . who does the Administration expect shops at a kosher, I mean I would like but you know, an attacker, going into a store that is clearly identified as being one of you know, as, as identified with one specific faith. I’m not sure I can, I understand how it is that you can’t say that this was a, that this is was, that this is not a targeted attack.
Jen Psaki: I don’t have anything more on this for you Matt, this is a topic for the French government to address.

Psaki was flat out lying when she told Lee, “Well as you know, I believe, if I remember the victims specifically there were, they were not all victims of one background or one nationality.”

All four of the Hyper Cacher shooting were Jews. There was no way that Psaki was unaware of this fact.

The backpedaling of the Obama administration was, of course, not long in coming. We were lied to by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest who tweeted that the administration’s views “had not changed,” that Obama had never meant to suggest that the attack was anything but antisemitic.

Our view has not changed. Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism. POTUS didn't intend to suggest otherwise.
— J Earnest (Archived) (@PressSec44) February 10, 2015

And not long after Jen Psaki refused to say the victims were Jews, she falsely claimed on Twitter that the White House administration had “always been clear that the attack . . . was an anti-semitic [sic] attack.”

We have always been clear that the attack on the kosher grocery store was an anti-semitic attack that took the lives of innocent people.
— State Department Spokesperson 2013-2025 (@statedeptspox_a) February 10, 2015

It’s a funny thing: When Jews are murdered, the people at the top of the food chain—government officials and celebrities—suddenly go nonspecific. They say “victims” or “families.” They say, “people affected.”

But they won’t say the J word: “Jews.”

Even before the Hyper Cacher attack, the Obama White House tried very hard to not talk about Jews when they were victims of terror. A year earlier, when Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel were kidnapped (and subsequently murdered), it took six days for the White House to respond, even though one of the teens, Naftali Fraenkel, was an American citizen.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of 3 Israeli teens who were kidnapped last week. May they be reunited with their sons soon.
— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) June 17, 2014

Then, during a press conference, Jen Psaki couldn’t bring herself to utter Naftali’s name, or perhaps as she claimed, she simply couldn’t remember it.

MS. PSAKI: Go ahead, Jo.

Question: Can I ask if you have a privacy waiver for the - one of the teenagers?

MS. PSAKI: We do, yes. So we can confirm that one of the kidnapped was an American citizen.

QUESTION: Which one?

MS. PSAKI: I believe his name has been reported. I don't have it in front of me right now.

Again and again, when Jews are targeted, the language changes. Specific words disappear. Everything becomes vague. By choice. Everyone knows who was attacked and they know why. But some people choose to omit the truth.

It's not that they've forgotten who was murdered. They haven't lost the words. It's that they've carefully chosen which words to use. They'll say “victims" or "families." They'll say “people affected.” But they won't say “Jews.”

Because when Jews are murdered and no one says they are Jews, the killing is stripped of its reason. The victims lose their identity. The attack becomes just another “random” act of violence.

Leave the victims unnamed and the crime can be treated like any other crime. Nothing about it is Jewish. Nothing about it is special.

You can murder Jews, and afterward it will be spoken about as if it had nothing to do with Jews at all. But when nothing is named, there is nothing to stop the next attack. And right now, at least, that seems to be what most of the world would like to see.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A tale of two Canadian delegations to the Middle East, 66 years apart

There are reports that a delegation of 30 Canadians, including six members of Parliament, was denied entry from Jordan into the territories early Tuesday.

Israel said that this was because the sponsor of the group, The Canadian Muslim Vote, allegedly has ties to an Israeli-designated terrorist entity.

The diplomatic reaction has been instant, as the Foreign Affairs Minister expressed anger and dismay: "

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand posted a statement on X this afternoon concerning the "mistreatment" of the Canadian delegation.

"Today a private delegation of Canadians — which included Members of Parliament — was denied entry to the West Bank at an Israeli border crossing," Anand wrote.

"Global Affairs is in contact with the delegation and we have expressed Canada’s objections regarding the mistreatment of these Canadians while attempting to cross."

Neither Israel's banning of the delegation nor Canada's objections are surprising.

But I cannot help to remember a little known incident from 1959, where another Canadian delegation visited the region, and a member of the then-parliament was also stopped - this time, by Jordan - from entering the Old City of Jerusalem from Israel..

The reason? Because he was Jewish.

This was barely reported even in Canada. Here's the story from Page 19 of The Expositor (Bradford), November 23, 1959

Not only did Canada not object, but even when the Speaker of the House of Commons was asked about the incident, he refused to say anything negative.

An MP was denied access to Jerusalem because he was Jewish, and Canada couldn't even muster up the self-respect to issue a statement in his defense.

Israel's actions today are defensible. Like any country, Israel has the right to restrict access by people who support terrorist organizations, even indirectly. British MP George Galloway was banned from entering Canada in 2009 for his support of Hamas, and the UK government did not say a word of protest.

But isn't it interesting that Canada did not even stand up for its own MP in 1959 in the face of blatant antisemitism, yet turns Israel's actions into an international incident?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

For many years, discussions of antisemitism have focused on attitudes and behaviors - hatred, prejudice, discrimination, or violence directed at Jews. My own definition is more precise than many others, but it still follows the same basic pattern: identifying antisemitism after the fact, once it had already manifested in words or actions.

But these definitions do not explain why antisemitism keeps reappearing in radically different ideological environments, nor why it so often emerges among people who sincerely deny any animus toward Jews.

After examining antisemitism across religious, racial, political, and ideological forms, I realized that there is a common denominator to all versions of antisemitism: antisemitism reliably appears where Jews break philosophical systems.

Antisemitism emerges most consistently in worldviews that rely on false binaries — clean, totalizing categories that claim to explain how the world works. These frameworks demand legibility: oppressor versus oppressed, religion versus nation, universal versus particular, colonizer versus indigenous, progressive versus reactionary.

Jews repeatedly break these binaries.

Jews are a people, but not defined solely by territory.
Jews are a religion, but not reducible to private belief.
Jews are a nation, but not a conventional civic nation-state.
Jews are a tribe, but one that survives dispersion.

These categories overlap but do not contradict each other. Jewish identity is layered, historically continuous, and covenantal. It resists simplification. That resistance is precisely what creates friction with ideologies that require neat classification to function.

When a philosophy encounters Jews and cannot accommodate them, it does not modify itself to reflect reality. Instead, it does one of two things: it becomes explicitly eliminationist toward Jews altogether, or it redefines what Jews are and what they are not. It never adjusts its categories to accommodate Jews as they actually exist.

From this pattern emerges a structural definition of antisemitism:

An ideology is structurally antisemitic if it requires the negation, erasure, or redefinition of Jewishness — as a people, a nation, a covenant, or a moral tradition — in order to remain internally coherent.

This definition does not depend on hatred, intent, or emotional hostility. It does not require mind-reading to establish intent. A system can be structurally antisemitic even when it claims moral concern, universal justice, or even Jewish well-being. What matters is whether Jewish existence, as it actually is, can be tolerated without collapse.

Structural antisemitism is often difficult to detect because it operates through affirmation rather than denial. Modern Arab antisemitism defines Judaism as merely a religion, and in that way it denies Jewish peoplehood. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists define Jews as a distinct race but not as a nation or religion that a non-Aryan can join.

The antisemitism lies not in what these systems say Jews are, but in what they cannot allow Jews to be.

If a system requires Jews not to be a people, not to have national expression, not to maintain covenantal obligations, or not to assert particular identity, the exclusion itself is the antisemitism.

This brings us to the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism.

The platform famously declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”

This statement predated political Zionism. It was driven by a desire for emancipation, safety, and acceptance within liberal nation-states. But structurally, it was antisemitic.

The platform accepted a universalist Enlightenment framework that could not tolerate distinct Jewish peoplehood. In order for that framework to remain coherent - and for Jews to belong - Jewish nationhood had to be denied.

Jewish peoplehood was treated as illegitimate. The intent was not antisemitic, but the effect undeniably was.

The Reform movement later reversed course. The 1937 Columbus Platform reintroduced Jewish peoplehood and attachment to the Land of Israel. Later statements in the late 20th century fully embraced Zionism and Jewish national identity. It realized what damage can occur by denying aspects of Judaism.

But the damage had already been done. Today's antisemites often refer to the early opposition to Zionism among the Reform as proof that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic. The citation itself depends on preserving a position the movement ultimately abandoned because it was untenable.

Modern anti-Zionism relies on the same structural denial. To oppose Zionism consistently is to deny that Jews are a people with a right to national self-determination. That denial is not mere political critique – it is the categorical erasure of a core dimension of Jewish identity.

This is where the claim that anti-Zionism is merely criticism of Israel collapses. The antisemitism does not lie in criticism of Israeli policy; it lies in the denial of Jewish nationhood, peoplehood, and the right to self-determination. A framework can permit unlimited criticism of Israel and still be morally coherent. It becomes antisemitic only when Jewish collective existence itself is treated as illegitimate.

This structural definition does more than clarify history. It provides a predictive tool.

Any philosophy can be tested with a simple question:

Does this system require redefining Jews in order to remain coherent?

If Jews must not be a people, not be indigenous, not be a nation, not be a protected ethnic group, or not be morally particular, the system is structurally antisemitic, whether or not it acknowledges that fact.

This is why contemporary frameworks such as DEI and certain identity-based models are antisemitic at the structural level. If Jews are denied tribal or ethnic status, they are excluded from protections granted to other groups. If Jews are redefined as uniformly “white” and “privileged,” antisemitism becomes morally permissible – or even obligatory – within the framework. Binary identity logic inevitably produces hostility toward Jews precisely because Jews do not fit any binary.

When systems accept every form of indigenous identity except Jewish, recognize every victim group except Jews, and validates every connection of a people to a land except the Jewish one, then it structurally requires Jewish non-existence in order to maintain its categories.

This definition changes the conversation.

Instead of Jews defending themselves against accusations of hypersensitivity or special pleading, the burden shifts to the ideology: Why does your system need to redefine Jews in order to function? What does that say about the system itself?

When Jews insist on the proper definition of what being Jewish means, then defending Israel, Jewish peoplehood, or identity is not bigotry or supremacism. It is insisting on Jews being treated like any other national, religious or ethnic group. Jews can say, “We are protecting a category of human difference that your system wants erased.”

And what starts with Jews never ends with Jews. Antisemitism, understood structurally, is not merely a Jewish problem. It is a warning sign of philosophical failure. Systems that cannot tolerate Jewish complexity cannot tolerate other forms of complexity - and the results are too often horrible for any group that the ideology cannot handle.

That is why antisemitism is diagnostically useful, and why confronting it at the structural level is not only a Jewish imperative, but a moral one.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Shaher Al-Nahari writes in the Saudi Makkah Newspaper his explanation of antisemitism.

It starts off reasonably, but then comes the inevitable "BUT":

In the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia, where a Jewish group was celebrating, the significance of the event lies not so much in its security or criminal details, but rather in its being a new symptom of a spreading global disease: accumulated hatred of Jews, transnational anger, and explosions of violence perpetrated in places with no direct connection to the original conflict zone.

This raises a deeper question: Why does this pattern repeat itself? Why does the political conflict in the Middle East transform into a global moral hemorrhage?

To begin with, shootings, vehicular attacks, bombings, and any act targeting innocent people because of their religious or ethnic identity can never be justified.

But this compels us to try to understand the underlying reasons that drive young people to transform their hatred into nihilistic and destructive acts.

Here it comes.

Israel, since its inception based on the concept of racial purity and superiority, has created an environment of intense conflict.

Historically, the conflict was a regional one, confined to a nascent state and neighboring peoples. However, in the last decade, it has transformed into a global moral issue, especially with the continuation of the occupation and the expansion of settlements, the repeated wars on Gaza, the policies of siege, house demolitions, ethnic cleansing, and the denial of the political and human existence of the Palestinian people.

Apparently, antisemitism didn't exist before 1948. Who knew?

What is happening today is not hatred of Jews as Jews, but hatred of a political symbol that has, through practice, become a moral burden on Jews themselves.

Aw, he cares!

Gaza, with its widespread destruction and immense human losses according to international estimates and humanitarian organizations, has become a stark symbol of the international system's inability to impose justice and peace.

This inability closes off the political horizon, crushes hope, and protects the perpetrator, leading some individuals to seek "alternative justice," even if it is illusory or criminal.

The painful irony is that this path harms Jews themselves, both inside and outside Israel. Netanyahu, while claiming to protect "Israel's security," is sowing the seeds of lasting fear in the long run and bequeathing to entire generations a legacy of timeless hatred.

...The Bondi Beach incident is a mirror of a civilized world that has failed to stop injustice at its source and now deals only with its scattered fragments

Oh, he is against terror. But you need to understand it, to contextualize it, to see the deeper meaning behind it.

And in the end, it is always the Jews' fault that people hate the Jews.

Which is exactly what antisemites have been saying since the time of the Pharaohs.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

I showed last month that the philosophical core of anti-Zionism is antisemitism, because anti-Zionists deny Jewish peoplehood and claim that Jews are only members of a religious group. Redefining the Jewish people is itself antisemitic, because it denies Jewish history, especially Jewish history in the Holy Land.

Columbia University professor Joseph Massad is no exception. He claims that Jewish peoplehood was a late 19th century myth, that Jews who lived in Europe are all converts. He clearly believes the discredited Khazar theory although he is careful not to say it explicitly - somehow, magically, hundreds of thousands of European Christians decided to convert to Judaism where they can be treated as Christ-killers without anyone noticing and without anyone writing about it.

Again - a Columbia University professor who will choose any lie, including antisemitic lies, to justify his hate for Israel. Facts are strictly optional for Massad.

Which brings us to his latest column in Arabi21. He says:

When pro-Zionists celebrate Israeli invasions and war crimes and present them as "Jewish" achievements, this position receives applause and encouragement from Israel and its allies.

When do Zionists celebrate war crimes? Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza because of Hamas policies of using them as human shields - their deaths are not war crimes by any reasonable reading of international law. Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol of 1977: says "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations."

What Jew, outside some fringe figures on social media, celebrates actual war crimes or civilian deaths? No one. Killing civilians does not help Israel or Judaism in any conceivable way. If Israel could fight a war without any civilian deaths, it would do so, and it spends a huge amount of money to develop weapons that are less likely to cause collateral damage.

But you know who does celebrate the murders of civilians? Joseph Massad!

Within days of October 7, he described the murders and kidnappings of hundred of civilians with these words: "innovative," "astonishing," "astounding," "awesome," "incredible," "remarkable," a "stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance," a "historic event" that was greeted by the Arabs with "jubilation and awe."

Massad even specifically praised Hamas' attacking purely civilian targets, saying "No less astonishing was the Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22 kms, as in the case of Ofakim."

Even he doesn't describe them as military bases - they are civilian communities in Israel itself. Yet Massad justifies their being attacked because he considers all of Israel to be illegal and all Israeli Jews to be legitimate targets.

Yes, that is real antisemitism.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/16 Links Pt2: Cash to Terror: How Humanitarian Aid Funds Extremism; 'Jew hate is brain rot': Erika Kirk vows to confront right-wing antisemitism, Holocaust denial

From Ian:

Lahav Harkov: Fight Larder Review of 'As a Jew' by Sarah Hurwitz

Sarah Hurwitz was treated like a celebrity at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington in November, and her remarks connected to her new book, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us, received enthusiastic applause. But it didn’t take long for hostiles—the same blamers, shamers, and erasers of her subtitle—to focus on one moment from her appearance and use it to vilify her. A speechwriter for President Barack Obama before taking on the same role for First Lady Michelle Obama, Hurwitz has since made a second career out of writing about how she has reconnected to her Judaism.

At the General Assembly, she made the point that young people are getting superficial, image-based information from social media about Israel and Gaza, and when she tries to present arguments based on data, they “are hear[d] through this wall of carnage” and they make her “sound obscene.” In remarks at a conference for young Zionists, she was also tagged for saying that pro-Israel arguments are being heard through “a wall of dead children.”

But it was her criticism of the way young Americans are taught about the Holocaust that really gave her critics their opening. Here was Hurwitz: “Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.’ So when on TikTok, all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”

Professional libelers of Israel, such as the radical journalist Spencer Ackerman, claimed Hurwitz was confessing in these words that “Holocaust education has worked too well,” because the lessons it teaches make it harder for her to “rationalize Israel’s genocide.”

In so doing, Ackerman and others were actually validating one of the central themes of As A Jew. In this, her second book, she continues to tell the story of her own journey, which was the subject of her first, Here All Along (2019). Hurwitz explains here that her former identity, based on “cultural/ethnic/social justice/be a good person/Holocaust remembrance,” provided her little more than a superficial and largely unexamined Jewish persona—a persona that, polling indicates, she shares with most American Jews. Hurwitz ruefully describes her younger self’s lack of curiosity about Jewish history or Jewish observance and her rejection of anything that might have made her seem less cool to the non-Jews surrounding her. In this way, she has come to believe, she was internalizing the anti-Semitism that pervades Western culture.

Andrew Fox: Cash to Terror: How Humanitarian Aid Funds Extremism

Humanitarian aid is intended to save lives. But as Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) becomes one of the most widely used forms of relief globally, evidence is mounting that in certain conflict zones it is inadvertently fuelling the very forces it seeks to alleviate.

This report examines how CVA – the practice of giving money or vouchers to crisis-affected civilians in place of in-kind aid – operates in contexts where armed groups like Hamas, the Houthis, and Boko Haram exert significant control over markets, financial networks, and supply chains. By analysing documented case studies from Gaza, Yemen, northeast Nigeria and Sudan, we identify predictable mechanisms through which cash aid slides into extremist-linked economic systems.

Our findings are clear: when a marketplace, banking or money-changing system is under the control or influence of armed groups – even ones not designated as terrorist actors by the UN – cash transfers become predictable sources of revenue for those actors. In Gaza, money-changer “fees” of 20 – 40 per cent are common; in Yemen, at least $161 million in cash aid flowed into Houthi-held territory in 2024, and UN agencies have documented widespread diversion; in Nigeria, militants impose levies on traders and transport networks that capture value from aid transactions.

In response, this report outlines a set of policy recommendations designed to improve transparency, tighten oversight, and better mitigate the risk that humanitarian cash assistance will be co-opted by violent actors, while still preserving the capacity of aid agencies to deliver life-saving support.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.(PDF)

Oxfam chief criticised government for arming Ukraine and 'tried to rewrite charity's position on Gaza' before being ousted from £130k-a-year job amid 'bullying' claims

The £130,000-a-year ousted Oxfam boss criticised the Government for arming Ukraine and risked putting charity staff in danger in Gaza, an internal investigation said.

Dr Halima Begum's role as chief executive was declared 'untenable' by Oxfam's board of trustees over the weekend following an 'irretrievable breakdown in its trust and confidence' about her ability to do the job.

It came after 70 members of staff signed a letter calling for an investigation into her conduct which centred around allegations of bullying staff and creating a climate of fear.

But an extraordinary row has broken out at Oxfam over the treatment of its outgoing boss, with allies claiming she has been unfairly kicked out.

Last night, Dr Begum's lawyers confirmed she would be taking legal action against Oxfam for 'defamatory and unfounded criticism of her' that she described as 'hatemongering and stigmatisation'.

The report flagged public comments made by Dr Begum in which she accused the UK of 'taking sides' in the Ukraine war, which allegedly led to complaints and the withdrawal of donations.

During an appearance on BBC Radio 4 show Any Questions in November last year, she criticised the West for supplying Kyiv with long-range missiles and anti-personnel landmines, describing it as a 'retrograde step'.

'It definitely feels like a reincarnation of the Cold War - us taking sides as opposed to thinking what is necessary in order to build a just international security system that all nations could rely on,' she said. 'The stakes are so high not only for Ukrainian civilians dying but also Russian soldiers dying.'

Her remarks sparked a major backlash, with a surge in complaints and donor withdrawals, The Times reports.

The report also alleged that Dr Begum attempted to rewrite Oxfam's politically neutral public messaging on the war in Gaza. Staff claimed she was not careful enough in considering the safety of staff in Gaza when she publicly called for the UK to stop arming Israel, for example.

Staff are said to have complained that her changes exposed them to potential retaliation in an environment which was already volatile amid the Israel-Hamas war.

12/16 Links Pt1: BHL: The intifada has been globalised; The West’s deflections over Bondi are obscene; Hero couple who died trying to stop Bondi terrorist

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The intifada has been globalised

I know one must arm oneself with prudence before establishing a causal link between words and crimes. And I know the danger of this slope, of this moral butterfly effect, and of the temptation to transform speech into culpability and to equate a call to murder with the act itself. But I also remember Primo Levi’s lesson in The Drowned and the Saved, reminding us that massacres never begin with weapons but with words.

I recall Victor Klemperer, the philologist who analysed the corruption of the German language by Nazism in The Language of the Third Reich, stating that “words can be like tiny doses of arsenic”.

Or quite simply Jean-Paul Sartre, whose famous phrase seems to me rarely as apt: words are “loaded pistols”.

And that is why, in sadness and anger, but without polemical spirit, I invite all those who, two years later, continue to believe that one can play with words of Jew-hatred and pogrom without consequence to an examination of conscience.

For what happened in Sydney is not an accident but a sign. Given that the same causes risk producing the same effects, it could happen tomorrow in New York, London, Rome, Madrid, or Paris. In truth, it could happen in any city in the world where one is still frivolous enough to believe that words are just words, that slogans bind only those who chant them, and that hatred – when draped in the supposed love of an oppressed people – can be absolved of its consequences.

This is not about giving in to panic nor concluding that we face an irresistible wave like those at the most tragic hours of Western history.

But if keeping one’s cool is a virtue, turning away can be a crime – and wisdom demands acknowledging that there are moments when History gives warning.

Sydney is one of them. But one must still hear, see what is being said, and act accordingly.

Brendan O'Neill: The hatred for the Jewish State is endangering the Jewish people

We’re talking about the reanimation of medieval tropes in the drag of ‘anti-Zionism’. We’re talking about the Jewish State being accused of lusting after the blood of innocents, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish nation being branded the puppet-master of world affairs, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish homeland being reimagined as the poison in the well of humanity, just as the Jews once were. Criticising Israel? Go for it. Spending your every waking hour telling the world Israel is a diabolical entity that relishes in the destruction of the sinless? Not on my watch.

As Dave Rich has argued, it shouldn’t surprise us one bit that ‘a protest movement that treats the world’s only Jewish State as a transgressor of all moral and human norms’ is helping to embolden lowlifes who just ‘do not like Jews’. How telling that the faux-progressive elites see ‘incitement’ everywhere except in their own daily hate missives against the Jewish State that have so many echoes of the ancient dread of the Jewish people. Call a ‘transwoman’ a man and they’ll have you up for hate speech. Call for the annihilation of the Jewish State and they’ll hug you.

If this high-status invective for the Jewish State and its allegedly immoral populace had exploded a few years back, it might have been manageable. It would still have required the firmest of pushbacks, but it might not have proven so existentially menacing. Today is different, though. Now the chattering classes’ mandatory abhorrence for the Jewish nation mingles with other catastrophic trends to create a moment of very clear danger for both the Jews and civilisation itself.

There are our porous borders, the flat-out refusal of those who rule over us to police our frontiers against people from profoundly anti-Semitic cultures. There is the emboldening of Islamists. We’ve seen them on those hate marches, walking alongside middle-aged Guardianistas in Vinted pashmimas, hollering for the return of the Army of Muhammad to kill all the Jews. And there is the authoritarian clampdown on open discussion of the Islamist threat. Raise concerns about the violent-minded Jew-haters in Islamist circles and you’ll be branded an ‘Islamophobe’. Our thoughts are policed better than our borders.

It is the crashing together of these two things – the modish loathing for Israel and the swelling of the Islamist menace – that has birthed this lethal moment. To defame Israel as uniquely barbarous would be bad at the best of times. To do it when we know very well there are bellicose Islamists in our midst is reckless in the extreme. Elite Israelophobia is like a red rag to murderous anti-Semitism. The Bondi pogrom is devastating proof of this – two ISIS worshippers carrying out a murderous assault on Jews following 26 months of non-stop Jewish State demonisation in Oz and across the West.

After Bondi, we have to ask – has anti-Semitism now been superseded by anti-Israel sentiment? Is the hatred for Israel not simply the witless inflamer of anti-Semitic thinking but the very form that anti-Semitism now takes? As the Australian’s Yoni Bashan reminded us this week, anti-Semitism ‘never goose-steps into the ball dressed as anti-Semitism. It doesn’t wear a sign. It arrives in the costume of the moment. As nationalism. As anti-capitalism. As social justice.’ And today as ‘criticism of Israel’. As 2025 comes to a close, one question matters above all others: are you on the side of the Jews or are you not? Their safety and our civilisation depend on how we answer.

Seth Mandel: Mass Murderers Don’t Care How Jews Feel

Mostly solid statement but there is no confusion over the “intent” of someone who uses the phrase. Bondi Beach is the intent.

Of course, the candidates who are willing to at least consider the implications of the phrase are handling this better than those who stick their fingers in their ears. Several candidates simply declined to answer the question at all.

As did Zohran Mamdani. The article notes that Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch told the incoming mayor, who pointedly refuses to condemn the call for mass murder, that “anti-Zionist rhetoric” can threaten the safety of Jews in New York. When asked by CBS to respond, Mamdani said: “Rabbi Hirsch is entitled to his opinions.”

It’s just a gentlemen’s disagreement over whether incitement to violence is good or bad, you see.

Anti-Zionism is the defining organizing principle of Mamdani’s adult life, so he knows exactly what the phrase means, perhaps better than most. There is no one in the universe less deserving of the benefit of the doubt on this than Zohran Mamdani.

The focus of the Jewish community going forward must be to stop with the rhetoric about how incitement makes us feel, because the Mamdanis of the world—and they are legion—will exploit any cracks in the consensus. And that only enables the terrorists who, I assure you, aren’t thinking about anybody’s feelings. No more handing excuses to those who openly seek our harm.

Seth Mandel: Jews Are Fed Up

The pattern is a familiar one. A terrible anti-Semitic attack will take place; political leaders will say “this is not who we are” and vow to take action; no one takes any meaningful action; another anti-Semitic attack takes place.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So in the wake of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre, it would be prudent to make it as difficult as possible for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to forget about his responsibility to act. And there’s no more powerful way to do that than to amplify the voices of the survivors. This will hopefully have the added effect of reminding Western politicians across the spectrum that they, too, are under the lights.

Here’s Victoria Teplitsky describing her father, who was wounded at Bondi Beach: “He’s 86, he’s a Holocaust survivor, he’s a survivor of anti-Semitism in the ex-Soviet Union. He grew up tough, my dad. And he came to Australia, he brought us here because he didn’t want my brother and I to go through the same experience. And we didn’t for many years. We didn’t for many years. Until October 7, 2023.”

Let’s pause here to note that Australia is home to the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel—and that another of those Holocaust survivors was killed on Bondi Beach while shielding his wife from the haze of bullets. I have to admit I get angry anew every time I hear of another Jew who survived Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but not the United States or Australia. It is an anger I believe every Jew shares.

Back to the interview. The anchors from Australia’s ABC—this is an important piece of information for later in the interview—asked Teplitsky how she’s feeling about everything. Teplitsky responded with a message for Albanese and the political establishment:

“Is this what you wanted? Is this enough now? Will you listen to us? Albanese, [Labour parliamentary leader Penny] Wong, will you listen to us? Will you actually do something? Will you actually—no, you don’t have to stand up and say anything because we don’t believe you anyway.”

She then looked the ABC anchors in the face and said: “And ABC, I’ve got to say, will you cut out the biased reporting? Will you cut it out, will you actually let us have a voice?” Teplitsky then starts to explain the role of the media in making Jews feel like outsiders but abruptly changes direction, making a moving statement that one increasingly hears among the Jews of the Diaspora. She is not a religious woman, Teplitsky says, but “since October 7, since all the hatred that’s been thrown at us, I started to wear my Magen David because I’m Jewish, and if you have something to say, you can say it to me. And ABC, please stop with the biased reporting.”

On CBS, Tony Dokoupil talked to a couple who were briefly separated from their child at Bondi Beach, Wayne and Vanessa Miller. Vanessa said she questioned whether the event was safe at the outset because of the low police presence. Referring to Albanese, Vanessa said, “He’s got blood on his hands, and he knows it.” Wayne added: “The acts of terrorism have been rewarded by the Australian weak government.”

(This Chanukah thought is heavily based on my work on extracting Jewish wisdom for today's world, which I am calling Derechology.)

The Chanukah menorah is not only a lesson in the miracle of the oil. It is a lesson about how the world should be.

Greek philosophy, from which all Western philosophy is based, treats light as the primary metaphor for good and truth: knowledge is illumination, ignorance is darkness, and once truth is fully seen, order is expected to follow naturally.

Judaism approaches light very differently.

The Chanukah lights are not one large torch, but multiple distinct flames. This mirrors Creation itself: the first thing God did after creating light was to separate it from darkness. Light alone was not enough. God imposed structure around it.

Greek “holiness” (aretē, excellence) is about perfection, maximization, and the fullest realization of an essence.

Jewish kedushah is fundamentally different. As Rashi defines it, kedushah means separation - and as Ramban explains, restraint even within what is permitted.

Greek ethics seeks the fullest expression of capacity. Jewish ethics sanctifies the withholding of capacity.

This difference becomes concrete in halacha. According to Jewish law, the lights of the menorah may not be used for any purpose other than to be seen. Each flame has its own role. Using them instrumentally invalidates the mitzvah. When they are used only for the mitzvah and nothing else, they are holy - kodesh heim.

Kedushah means that things belong in proper categories and roles - sacred and mundane, human and animal, child and adult, man and woman, obligation and permission. Moral societies depend on such distinctions not to flatten human beings, but to assign responsibility, limits, and purpose.

Chanukah makes this unavoidable. The light is there, yet we are forbidden to use it.

Greek philosophy assumes that absolute knowledge is attainable through reason alone. Jewish thinking holds that only God knows the full truth, and that human beings approach truth not through certainty, but through structure. The menorah has precise placement, strict order, defined timing, and limitations of use. It must be lit whether or not we grasp all of its history and symbolism. Actions and responsibilities are not dependent on complete understanding.

This rule is what makes morality possible. If moral action depended on full understanding, then anything could be justified once the story was told persuasively enough. We see that failure of morality everywhere today.

Structure is what prevents entropy - and creating structure is how human beings imitate God, who created a bounded universe out of nothing so that we could complete His work by building moral order within it.

That is the Jewish answer to Athens.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here is the abstract of a paper released last week in Settler Colonialist Studies:

Sacrificing Indigenous interests: solving the ‘native question’ in Australia and Palestine on the eve of the Second World War
Alison Holland
Received 19 Jun 2024, Accepted 19 Nov 2025, Published online: 05 Dec 2025
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2025.2594550

ABSTRACT
In 1937 administrators in Australia pronounced the fate of Aboriginal Australians as their eventual elimination, either through biological absorption or natural death. Historians have discussed this moment primarily through the prism of genocide. In this article I widen the interpretive lens to compare it to the contemporaneous resolution to eliminate Indigenous peoples from Palestine by British administrators. I show how the 1937 Aboriginal welfare conference and the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine were symptomatic of an imperial humanitarian turn when the ‘native question’ was raised as an international concern for the first time. Widely understood to have been a failure, this humanitarian moment simultaneously recognised ‘native’ interests and retreated from (sacrificed) them. The outcomes for Indigenous people in Australia and Palestine bear this out and demonstrate how solutions about racialized ‘others’ that were playing out across Europe were refracted in policies targeting Indigenous peoples around the colonial periphery. The comparative frame places Australian developments in global context and draws out the settler colonial imperatives at work. Despite their differences the comparison highlights the salience of the structural effects of settler colonialism. It suggests that this moment was foundational, when the twentieth century settler colonial logic of elimination was set in train in both sites.

The Australian 1937 Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities recommended - and implemented - a policy of removing light-skinned indigenous children from their families to be raised in white orphanages or by white families to eventually eliminate all aboriginal peoples from Australia.

Was the Peel Commission of 1937 "eliminationist"? No, it recommended voluntary transfer of Arabs from the tiny area of the proposed Jewish state.

The comparison is obscene. But if you accept the logic of forcing everything into a settler-colonialist frame, then what is genocidal in one must be genocidal in the other. If Patrick Wolfe declares that settler colonialism is a process meant to eliminate the native, then you cannot argue that any policy that is not eliminationist is not eliminationist.

This is dogma, not scholarship.

But as is often the case, there is context that is utterly missing from Ms. Holland's zeal to place her own twisted morals front and center.

The Peel Commission explicitly noted the 'pressure of Jewish immigration from Europe' due to persecution. Alison Holland mentions Europe exactly once - in a footnote about racial policies - and never once says the word 'Jew' in the context of refugees fleeing murder.

This was 1937. The Jews of Europe were already aware of the looming danger to them. Many desperately wanted to save their lives by fleeing to their historic, ancestral homeland. And to "scholars" like Alison Holland, saving the lives of millions of Jews doesn't enter into her already twisted moral equation where the false concept of settler colonialism is considered worse than industrialized murder.

She is so anxious to equate an actual impulse to genocide in Australia with Palestine because in today's twisted culture, Palestine has replaced Nazi Germany as the paradigm of evil. The idea that she is tacitly supporting Hitler's goals of wiping out Jews from Europe doesn't even enter her woke mind.

To be blunt - how can anyone discuss British policy in Palestine in 1937 without mentioning that this policy doomed hundreds of thousands of people?

If you consider Zionism to be unparalleled evil, then the death of millions of Jews pales in comparison with a voluntary transfer plan of Arabs.

The idea of "settler colonialism" has gone beyond scholarship into cult status, with its own foundational scriptures that cannot be questioned, and mere facts or human lives no longer matter.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)