Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 12, 2026

01/12 Links Pt1: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made; The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame; Trump: 25% tariff on all countries doing business with Iran

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: What the late great Bernard Lewis knew about Khomeini

The late Bernard Lewis—renowned multilingual Orientalist—didn’t agree that Carter or anybody else had an excuse for ignoring Khomeini’s true identity and agenda. In a 2010 interview that I conducted with Lewis while researching my book, To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University described his rebuffed attempt to set the record straight.

“In 1978, there was this figure being discussed, Khomeini, whom I knew nothing about,” he recounted. “So, I did what one normally does in my profession: I went to the university library and looked him up. I discovered that he was the author of Islamic Government [a collection of speeches he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970]. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. It could give me some idea of what the man is about.’”

Lewis took the volume home and read it in one sitting. What it revealed was a philosophy of Islamic statehood, using the harshest possible rhetoric to denounce non-Muslims and calling for the spread of Sharia law across the world.

Deciding that something had to be done to expose the ayatollah and his intentions, Lewis contacted then-New York Times op-ed editor Charlotte Curtis and offered to pen a piece on what subsequently came to be known as “The Little Green Book.”

“No thanks,” she answered. “I don’t think our readers would be interested in the work of some Persian writer.”

Whether her response was due to ignorance of the significance of Khomeini’s waiting in the wings to take over Iran from the Shah, or to a lack of desire on the part of the Times to acknowledge that however authoritarian a ruler the shah might be, he was the epitome of benevolence compared to his proposed successor, wasn’t clear.

Nor did Curtis’s attitude surprise Lewis, whose view of the press was already—justifiably—dim. But it did cause him to recall an exchange he’d had in Pahlavi’s office not long before the revolution.

“Why do they keep attacking me?” the shah burst out, as soon as Lewis entered the room.

“Whom do you mean, Your Majesty?” Lewis asked.

“The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and Le Monde—the four weird sisters dancing around the doom of the West,” Pahlavi said. “Don’t they understand that I am the best friend you have in this part of the world?”

“Your Majesty,” Lewis replied, “you must understand that the editorial policies of these papers are based on Marxist principles.”

“What do you mean?” Pahlavi shot back incredulously, since Communism wasn’t on his list of the West’s faults.

“I’m not referring to Karl, but to Groucho,” Lewis quipped.

When the Shah looked puzzled, Lewis asked him whether he was familiar with Groucho Marx.

“Yes, of course,” he responded, almost insulted by the suggestion that he, a buff of American movies, might not be up on Hollywood.

Lewis explained, “Remember when Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to become a member of a club that would have him? Well, our media’s posture—like our foreign policy—is to shun any government that wants our friendship, and to placate and pursue our enemies.”

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.

The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.

The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.

The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.

After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself

Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.

Melanie Phillips: Iranian protesters are showing courage in the face of tyranny — but Israel-obsessed liberals don’t seem to care

The reason is that the uprising is not just against the regime but against the repressive tyranny of Islam itself. This is intolerable to Western liberals, because it gets in the way of their fixed narrative that, when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it’s justified resistance against Western-backed imperialism.

Such liberals simply cannot acknowledge the reality of Islamic terrorism and repression.

Their belief that the Israelis and Western imperialism are always the villains, and Muslims are always their victims, is essential to their self-image as morally virtuous people.

It may sound incredible, but Islam has become synonymous with conscience itself among Western progressives.

This is because the Palestinian cause has become their signature motif.

The Palestinians are viewed as the ultimate oppressed people, dispossessed of their rightful inheritance and victims of Israeli “genocide,” “apartheid” and war crimes in Gaza.

Every part of that is a lie. But among liberals, it’s an article of faith.

So they’ve failed to grasp how this cause has been leveraged by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood bent upon the conquest of the West. This is particularly true of Qatar, which has patiently spread its influence throughout Western universities and even bought up various Western media personalities.

The Palestinian cause has embedded into the Western mind the inversion of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and tyranny, which is a hallmark of the Islamic world and has found such fertile ground in the post-truth, post-moral Western intelligentsia.

So the keffiyeh-clad classes have been cementing Islamic control over Western streets and public space.

In Britain this is far advanced, with the Labour government under Keir Starmer refusing to outlaw genetically damaging Muslim cousin marriage and dragging its heels over dealing with the mainly Muslim rape and grooming gangs.

Western governments have increasingly moved to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, often classifying it as a terrorist or extremist organization. It is already banned in the UK, Germany, most Arab countries, Russia, China and others. Right now Australia is considering a ban on the group after a recent Sydney conference was publicized where the leaders said the West "sucks blood from humanity," advocated for a "Muslim army" under Sharia, and framed Islam as the only solution for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The justification for these bans usually begins with the group’s stated aims. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects liberal democracy and advocates replacing it with a global Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law. It presents Islam not merely as a religion but as a political system destined to supersede Western civilization. Its rhetoric is frequently antisemitic, dismissive of pluralism, and grounded in a vision of Muslim supremacy.

It is no stretch to say that the group's ideas are hostile to Jews, to women, to dissenters, and to the moral assumptions that underlie liberal societies. If Hizb ut-Tahrir ever held power, its worldview would translate into repression.

There is a problem, though. Hizb ut-Tahrir is explicitly non-violent. It does not carry out attacks. It does not issue operational instructions for terrorism in Western countries. Its leaders insist, consistently and publicly, that their method is ideological persuasion rather than armed struggle. Their ideas are corrosive, but they remain ideas.

It appears to have used socialist concepts to build itself this way specifically to take advantage of Western freedoms and inoculate it from being banned legally in the West.

This brings up the question of where free speech ends and where limiting speech is better.

That distinction matters more than many people are comfortable admitting. Once a society begins banning organizations solely for what they believe rather than what they do, it enters terrain that has rarely been stable and has often proved dangerous for minorities. Jews in particular do not have the luxury of treating this as an abstract concern. Measures justified as exceptional responses to one threatening ideology have tendency to be reused later against Jews, once the legal tools exist and the political mood changes. A framework that allows the state to suppress Hizb ut-Tahrir for advocating a religious supremacist worldview could, under different conditions, be turned against Zionism, against halachic norms, or against Jewish communal self-defense. This is not a slippery-slope fallacy: it is a recurring pattern.

At the same time, pretending that Hizb ut-Tahrir is merely another set of opinions that should be ignored is willfully naive. Its ideology does not sit in a vacuum. It is a sustained narrative that delegitimizes Western society, portrays Jews and non-Muslims as exploiters, and presents the destruction of the existing order as morally necessary. It may not tell followers to commit violence, but it devotes considerable energy to explaining why violence committed by others is understandable, justified, or admirable. Over time, that difference becomes less sharp than Western legal categories would like it to be.

The problem, as I see it, is that the West's concept of free speech is unnecessarily expansive and out definition of incitement is needlessly and extraordinarily narrow. We tend to locate responsibility almost entirely at the moment of explicit instruction, as though speech and action are cleanly separable until a specific verbal threshold is crossed. That approach forces societies to wait until violence is imminent before acting, while treating years of ideological conditioning as irrelevant. It assumes that moral preparation is harmless so long as it avoids certain words.

Hizb ut-Tahrir operates comfortably within that space. It questions the legitimacy of liberal democracy, depicts Western societies as morally bankrupt, frames Jews as agents of global injustice, and presents political Islam as the only path to dignity and justice. Violence elsewhere is praised without being ordered. Martyrdom is romanticized without being demanded. None of this satisfies the Western legal definition of incitement, yet it steadily lowers the moral barriers that make violence against civilians unthinkable. On the contrary, for many, the logical conclusion from being influenced by such ideologies is violence.

Jewish ethical reasoning has never been so constrained. The concept of lifnei iver recognizes responsibility at the point where one predictably enables wrongdoing, not only at the moment of execution. Moral culpability attaches when a person removes obstacles to harm, even indirectly, even without intent. Speech that repeatedly renders violence excusable or noble is not treated as morally neutral simply because it avoids direct commands.

Seen through that lens, the problem posed by Hizb ut-Tahrir is not that it holds extreme beliefs, but that it functions as a preparatory environment. It habituates listeners to a worldview in which violence by others becomes morally intelligible. That places it in a different category from ordinary dissent or even radical critique, and it justifies a different kind of response.

This does not require banning ideas. It requires acknowledging that speech operates within systems. A society can restrict organizational activity, funding, coordination, and amplification when those structures predictably serve as pathways toward violence, without criminalizing theology or private belief. That approach is narrower, more defensible, and far less likely to metastasize than ideological prohibition.

Free speech in the West has gradually ceased to be treated as an instrument and has come to resemble an article of faith. It is defended as absolute, detached from consequences, and insulated from moral evaluation. That was never its original purpose. Free speech was meant to facilitate truth-seeking, protect dissent, and prevent tyranny. It was not meant to obligate societies to host movements whose explicit goal is to dismantle the conditions that make free speech possible - or to dismantle the host societies themselves.

Free speech cannot function as a suicide pact, but neither should it be reduced to a reflex that substitutes for thinking. The harder task is to take ideas seriously enough to evaluate how they function over time, at scale, and in emotionally charged environments.

The question, then, is not whether Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. It is whether Western societies are capable of developing a more mature understanding of incitement, one that accounts for moral enablement and foreseeable harm without granting the state a license to police belief. The system should be able to distinguish between reasonable ideas and "Globalize the Intifada!"

If that effort fails, the tools created to address groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir will not remain confined to them. History suggests they rarely do. And Jews are always going to be the first targets.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Since the 1970s, Neo-Nazis and far right extremists in Argentina have been claiming that Jews have been planning to buy up land in southern Argentina and Chile to create a Jewish state there. The conspiracy theory is called the Andinia Plan.

People still believe it. And every year, when there are forest fires, Israelis or Jews are blamed.

It is true that many Israelis go hiking in Patagonia and other regions, and some have accidentally started forest fires - one major one in 2011 that was started negligently by an Israeli backpacker. But now every fire is blamed on Jews, including new ones this year.

خلال التغطية الإعلامية لحرائق الأرجنتين، وفي لقاء صحفي مع امرأة أرجنتينية من المنطقة المتأثرة بالحرائق، حذرت المرأة وناشدت العالم للانتباه إلى حرائق الغابات المدمّرة والضخمة في الأرجنتين، مؤكدة أنها لم تكن طبيعية على الإطلاق .

تقول إن الحرائق دمّرت ما تصفه بجنتهم وتم إحراقه… pic.twitter.com/OPlVkQJD6V
— Tamer | تامر (@tamerqdh) January 11, 2026

The specific incident this year is that one man, Martín Morales, filmed tourists whom he identified as “Israehellis” making fires in Los Glaciares National Park, an area where fires are strictly prohibited. The video gives no indication or proof that the backpackers were actually Israeli. Even according to Morales, when he yelled at them they put out the fire. Yet that by itself was enough to restart incessant rumors yet again that the Jews want to burn down Patagonia to buy it cheaply from the government and make a new Jewish state.

El Diario 24 reports:

On Radio 10, journalist Marcela Feudale claimed that the fires in Patagonia had been started by two Israelis . These statements sparked outrage from figures such as Eduardo Feinmann, the president of the DAIA (Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations), Mauro Berenstein, and even President Javier Milei, who warned that this type of message, broadcast on major media outlets, promotes an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic stance.

One of the first to criticize Marcela Feudale's comments was journalist Eduardo Feinmann, who called his colleague "irresponsible." "Yesterday I heard the irresponsible Marcela Feudale on Radio 10 saying she had good sources indicating that the fires in Chubut were started by two Israelis. That is completely false. It was a deceitful and anti-Israeli comment ," the journalist wrote on his official X account.

Along the same lines, Mauro Berenstein, head of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations (DAIA), emphasized that pointing to two Israelis as the cause of the fires without evidence is completely irresponsible and dangerous. "It creates stigmas and reinforces an anti-Jewish and hateful narrative . The media bears an enormous responsibility: lies are not opinions, and DAIA will not allow it," he stated.

The words of the DAIA president were echoed by Javier Milei, who described this scenario as "the dark side of Argentina ." The head of state also shared the statement of Congresswoman Sabrina Ajmechet, who warned that Feudale's remarks, in a context of increasing antisemitism, are irresponsible and put the Jewish community in an uncomfortable position.

According to the Buenos Aires City legislator, the Radio 10 journalist's message was not innocent, but rather had a purpose. "I don't think it was a coincidence. They use Israel and Jews to attack the government, and it's completely gotten out of hand. Today in Argentina, many live in fear for practicing their religion. We must consider the consequences of the messages we use as communicators," Ajmechet stated.

Once the conspiracy theory gets spread, people are quick to use it to fit their biases. So this pattern repeat every year.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/11 Links: The courage of the Iranian people and the silence of the world; Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

From Ian:

Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism published in Fox News, Asra Q. Nomani documented how a network of self-described Marxist and communist organizations mobilized pro-Nicolás Maduro protests across more than 100 American cities within 12 hours of his capture on Jan. 3 by U.S. forces. The minute-by-minute reconstruction reveals the operational capability that I described in my congressional testimony in December 2024: a sophisticated, foreign-funded rapid-response infrastructure operating on American soil.

Nomani’s reporting raises a critical question: What is this network actually built to do? The answer matters profoundly for understanding both the campus antisemitism many Jewish students experienced after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the broader threat to American foreign-policy coherence.

This infrastructure exists to mobilize immediate domestic opposition to U.S. actions that threaten authoritarian regimes aligned with Chinese and Russian interests. Not all anti-Israel protests fall into this category. But specific campaigns, particularly the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) movement that blocked airports, bridges, tunnels and critical infrastructure, were organized by groups with documented ties to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech billionaire who sold his company for $785 million.

What The New York Times investigation revealed in August 2023 was a global operation. Singham has been co-opting left-wing movements worldwide—from political parties in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, systematically steering them toward pro-China Communist Party narratives. The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to groups that “mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.”

In South Africa, Singham’s network funded the Nkrumah School, which hosts boot camps attended by activists and politicians from across Africa. According to U.S. tax records, one of Singham’s nonprofits donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. But activists who attended these sessions began noticing something troubling. What was marketed as liberation politics increasingly took a pro-China tilt. New Frame, a South African news outlet funded by Singham, shut down in July 2022 after staff questioned why there was no coverage of Uyghur oppression or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This pattern of co-optation was repeated globally. In India, Singham funded NewsClick, which “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” In Brazil, funding went to Brasil de Fato, which interspersed articles about land rights with praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The operational model was consistent: Find genuine progressive movements, provide substantial funding and gradually shift their focus toward CCP strategic priorities.

Who The Left Stands With By Abe Greenwald

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The Western left’s silence and inaction in response to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Iran confirms what some of us have long known. Progressive activists are not pro-human-rights, pro-minority-rights, pro–women’s rights, pro-freedom, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-peace or anti-war, and they are definitely not pro-democracy.

What they are is anti-American and anti-Semitic. That’s it. Which means the only things they are for are America’s enemies and the world’s Jew-haters.

Some have asked: Where are the American demonstrations showing support for the courageous Iranians trying to bring down the theocratic regime that’s oppressed them for generations? The answer: They don’t exist, or at least not in numbers significant enough to have come to anyone’s attention.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t protests happening in the U.S. right now. For example, last night, while Iranians were standing up to the mullahs, a crowd of keffiyeh-clad thugs swarmed a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” Set aside—if you can—that they were there to intimidate Jews. They were also declaring themselves on the side of the Iranian regime. Hamas, as we all know, is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization. That’s where their sympathies lie.

And that’s been the case for more than two years. Anti-Israel protesters in the U.S. and Europe have regularly waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which was, up until recently, almost an Iranian statelet in Lebanon. And sometimes they’ve brandished the Iranian flag itself. So long as you hate Jews and the U.S., you’ve got friends on the Western left.

Courage of Iranian women stands in stark contrast to Britain's face-masked cosplay revolutionaries

He styles himself a revolutionary, fighting for progress.

Week in, week out, he and his comrades gather in cities across the UK, chanting their support for Palestine and demanding the destruction of Israel.

On occasion, he’ll turn his attention elsewhere and stand outside a feminist conference, screaming abuse at attendees who refuse to buy into the fantasy that trans women are actually women.

Whether devoting himself to making Jews feel unsafe or spending miserable afternoons threatening women who reject the presence of men in changing rooms and rape crisis centres, the contemporary British radical goes equipped with two essentials.

The first is a terrifying certainty. The second is a face-mask.

I’ve never had much time for these cosplayers, these weekend insurgents with their incoherent views and their violent rhetoric but, over recent days, my contempt for them has only deepened.

Since December 28, people across Iran have been on their streets, demanding the end of the Islamic regime that has terrorised them for decades. With international media denied access to the country, citizens have, through shaky live streams on their smartphones, showed the world what real revolutionary courage looks like.

How small the masked undergraduate waving a Hamas flag on a British street looks when compared with those Iranian women who – under threat of the most horrific punishment – have thrown off the hijabs they are compelled to wear.

While British ideologues align themselves, from the safety of the West, with the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah, people across Iran are saying “no more” to the theocrats who, for years, have supported those terror groups.

And they are doing it with humbling bravery.

Watching shaky footage of a group of young women – their heads uncovered, their voices loud and clear – marching in protest while the sound of gunfire echoed around them, I found myself profoundly moved by their courage. Would I, I wondered, step up as they were now doing?

The most honest answer I could give myself was that I hoped so.

It has been depressing, if unsurprising, that those on the British left who scream so loudly about Palestine have had little to say about what’s happening in Iran. There have been no rallies of Keffiyah-clad protestors demanding support for the oppressed people of Iran.

But, then, how could they credibly have done so when Iran, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, has been funding Islamist terror groups that share their unwavering hatred for Jews?

The only coherence in the incoherence is antisemitism

Here is video of a clash between anti-Ayatollah and anti-Israel protesters yesterday in Bellevue, WA:

NEW: Pro-Hamas radicals and Islamists are clashing with Iranian Americans calling for regime change in Tehran.
This is all happening now in the middle of downtown Bellevue, WA. https://t.co/FdPNYDDYl6 pic.twitter.com/BuqPT9vvmS
— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) January 10, 2026

Many are noting online the utter insanity of white women who pretend to care about the oppressed fighting against protesters of the quite oppressive Iranian regime which is especially misogynist.

It is similar to the LGBTQ activists who have taken up pro-Hamas, anti-Israel positions when they are the ones who would be attacked if they lived under Palestinian rule.

Finding hypocrisy is easy, but these people have a coherent philosophy in the midst of their obvious incoherence. People and movements are not inconsistent - in their own mindset, they are supremely consistent. The only question is to find what that mindset is.

In the case of these white women in Washington, it isn't "supporting the oppressed." The Iranian people are the oppressed.

It isn't Marxism. They don't look like they've read Das Kapital. They aren't interested in fighting capitalism..

It isn't anti-Trump. Trump may have expressed support for the Iranian people but it is not exactly a centerpiece of his policy at this point.

It isn't anti-America. There are plenty of people who hate America but they are generally not motivated to go out in the streets unless there is a specific event. Anti-ICE protests are one of the sparks that do prompt demonstrations, but what thread is there between anti-ICE and pro-mullahs?

If this were simply about opposing American power or capitalism, we would see comparable mass mobilization around Yemen, Syria, Iran, or Venezuela. We do not. Only anti-Israel protests reliably produce crowds. That fact alone tells us where the emotional and ideological center of gravity lies.

The only coherence in the incoherence is hating Jews under the guise of "anti-Zionism."

Think about it. These women are the most obvious beneficiaries of white privilege on the planet. Many of the Western progressive activists involved here are well-off suburbanites. Israel functions as a moral proxy that allows Western activists to discharge guilt without implicating themselves or their societies. Israel becomes the universal symbol for "white oppressors" and Palestinians the symbol for "oppressed people of color" and in that way they can externalize their own white guilt by blaming the Jews as being everything they hate about themselves. (There is similar logic behind land acknowledgements - empty performance to feel righteous, but no one handing their houses to native Americans.)

This is not simple hypocrisy, because hypocrisy presumes a failure to live up to stated values. Here, the values themselves are not operative. What is operative is a symbolic map in which Israel stands in for ‘everything evil about power,’ regardless of facts.

So if Israel is against the Iranian regime, then the regime must be good. If Israel fights Hamas, Hamas must be good. If Hezbollah or Houthis shoot missiles into Israel, they must be good.

I'm not saying that these activists consciously hate Jews. But their moral framework reliably collapses political evil onto Jews and the Jewish state. Structurally, it is the same thing. And as we've seen more recently, this collapse often becomes classic antisemitism, as protests migrate to synagogues and targeting Jews particularly.

Similarly, most of these activists are not consciously pro-Khamenei. They are structurally indifferent to Iranian agency. Once Israel occupies the ‘oppressor’ slot, anyone opposing Israel is provisionally good – including theocrats, terrorists, or regimes that murder women.

Antisemitism, whether explicit or not, is the only consistent throughline to their otherwise inconsistent positions.

For those who want some pretense of support for their ridiculous and contradictory positions, there are plenty of left-wing writers who can string two sentences together and therefore become all the evidence needed. At this moment, the only article in The Intercept about the Iranian protests, from a week ago (!), blames - Israel.

An entire progressive news site looks at Iranians being shot in the streets and the only thing it can write about is how this is somehow connected to the Zionists.

Once Israel is fixed as the embodiment of oppression, reality becomes optional. Iranian dissidents can be ignored. Islamist brutality can be excused. Women’s rights can be suspended. The only constant is that whatever harms Israel must be good.

That isn't moral reasoning. It is ideological coherence maintained by positioning Jews as the permanent moral antagonist - not coincidentally, the same position Jews have held for centuries.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Xueqin Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian educator. He went to Yale and is part of Harvard's Global Education Innovation Initiative. He was profiled in the New York Review of Books and written for CNN.

He's also is a rabid antisemite.

Jiang created a field called "Predictive History" where he pretends to use the concepts from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series to reproduce "psychohistory" to predict the future. His YouTube channel has 180,000 subscribers, and he has over 40,000 followers on his Substack.

A brief look at his recent YouTube lectures shows his predictions for 2026:

China, yeah, I mean, Japan and China and India, they're all going to have conflicts with each other. But also, what we should expect is that America starts to embargo China, meaning America uses its sea power to block China from accessing resources, more seas. And China imports most of its oil and a lot of its food. So if there's a blockade of China, you can expect the Chinese economy to really suffer.

But and then what we can expect to happen is America at some point will go to war with Iran and this will destroy both countries. Okay? Iran will not lose this war, but it won't win this war either because America is just going to bomb the crap out of Iran. It's going to send Iran back decades. But America will lose this war. But this is important because America loses war, it's forced out of the Middle East. And once it's forced out of the Middle East, all its military assets goes to Israel, which creates the Pax Judaica. Does that make sense, guys? That's the plan. Okay.

Now you have Pax Judaica. And what Pax Judaica will do is start to control the world because through chaos and conflict Pax Judaica can make a lot of money, right? Because Pax Judaica, what's going to happen is that you have these technology companies like Google, they're going to move over to Pax Judaica and build a global surveillance state. You have civil wars, you need AI to control people. If you're going to war with Russia, you need weapons, okay? But you also need financing as well. So, you can expect a lot of banks to move to Israel and it's possible Israel becomes now the global reserve currency because everyone is trading with Israel. If you're Russia, you need to trade your resources, right? Oil, energy, and grain. Okay? So, Russia controls a third of the world's carbohydrates. Guess what, guys? Israel controls Africa. So, what will happen is that Russia and other countries will sign a trade agreement with Israel and Israel becomes a center of global trade. Okay, does that make sense? So this is how Pax Judaica will profit and remember that Israel has the world's best intelligence agency the Mossad and what they can do is go around the world and create as much chaos as possible. Okay.

So while the world is burning, Israel Pax Judaica is profiting and that's what the future looks like for the next 10, 20 years. And this will of course lead to the rise of the antichrist who will take control of Pax Judaica and force the world to eventually attack Israel in something called the war of Gog and this will of course lead to second coming of Jesus. So, that's a grand plan. Okay. Right.

Starts around 30:00.

He is also an enthusiastic proponent of the Khazar theory and claims that 17th and 18th-century "apostate" messiahs Shabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank created a "Sabbatean-Frankist" cult that infiltrated global banking and intelligence, and that this group is the driving force behind a "satanic" globalist agenda.

Gemini AI estimates that he makes between $10-$30K a month on his Substack alone. Thousands more come from ads on his YouTube platform.

Chinese antisemitism is now a thing. It is unlike Western antisemitism but it is being used politically by the Chinese government to advance its own political agenda. It sees, accurately, that its own geopolitical position is enhanced by antisemitism. And influencers like Xueqin Jiang, broadcasting from the Chinese mainland, are not going to say anything their government does not want them to say.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Guardian reports:

Circumcision is to be classed as a potential form of child abuse under new guidance for prosecutors, amid concerns from judges and coroners about deaths and serious harms caused by the procedure.

A draft document by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on “honour-based abuse, forced marriages, and harmful practices”, classes circumcision as a potential crime alongside breast flattening, virginity testing, hymenoplasty and exorcisms.

Wow, that's some company.

And what evidence do they bring to say that circumcisions are horrible?

According to the Office for National Statistics, since 2001 there have been seven deaths of boys under 18 where circumcision was a factor.

Seven deaths in 25 years is seven deaths too many. But without knowing the denominator, or comparing it to other procedures, how can we know how dangerous the practice really is?

We cannot, which is why The Guardian doesn't bother to ask basic question.

Like how many total circumcisions have been done in the UK in the same 25 years?

How does the death rate compare with that of other largely optional procedures that are regarded as generally safe?

Luckily, we have the answers to both.

In the UK, there are about 30,000 non-therapeutic circumcisions, which means over the 25 years, there was a rough fatality rate of about 1 in 100,000+ procedures.

Let's compare to tonsillectomies. In England, in hospitals, the mortality rate for tonsillectomies for children between 2008-2019 was 1 in 27,000, or roughly four times the death rate of circumcisions.

Not only that, but 7 out of 8 pediatric tonsillectomies were not medically necessary.

Did anyone call tonsillectomies "child abuse"? Of course not. They did what one would expect - the doctors studied the information and are now a lot more careful about the circumstances for when to recommend the procedure, and they learn how to do it safer.

Certainly circumcisions should be done by professionals, in an antiseptic environment, and ideally with easy access to medical personnel if there is a problem. That is what a responsible report would say. But a blanket labeling of the procedure as potential child abuse is not a sober description of facts, but a bigoted reaction - whether antisemitic, anti-Islamic or both. if some groups routinely do the procedure in unsafe circumstances, call that out, not the entire procedure.

The same people who claim to care so much about child abuse and bodily autonomy don't say a word about the number of children and babies who get infections from ear piercing (and it is not a small number, although rarely fatal.)

Bigotry is no less ugly when it masquerades behind caring about children. Arguably, it is worse.

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

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The historic link between the West Midlands Police and the classic blood libel

In October 2025, West Midlands Police and the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG) in Birmingham announced a ban on supporters of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv attending a UEFA Europa League match at Aston Villa’s Villa Park on November 6, citing public safety and risk of disorder as the basis for the exclusion. The police initially justified the ban by pointing to intelligence of potential violence and “significant hooliganism” involving Maccabi fans, as well as concerns that segments of the local community might attack visiting supporters. It was based on false evidence that was manufactured after the fact.

I wondered about historic patterns where Jews were banned from public spaces ostensibly for public safety reasons. One striking example appears in Las Siete Partidas, the Castilian legal code compiled in the mid-13th century, which later became foundational law across Spanish territories, including colonial jurisdictions such as Spanish Florida and Louisiana.

Las Siete Partidas demands that Jews stay out of public spaces on Good Friday, because the Jews are suspected of attacking Christian children on that day:

Because we have heard it said that in some places Jews celebrated, and still celebrate Good Friday, which commemorates the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by way of contempt: stealing children and fastening them to crosses, and making images of wax and crucifying them, when they cannot obtain children; we order that, hereafter, if in any part of our dominions anything like this is done, and can be proved, all persons who were present when the act was committed shall be seized, arrested and brought before the king; and after the king ascertains that they are guilty, he shall cause them to be put to death in a disgraceful manner, no matter how many there may be.

If the Jews are attacked, it is their own fault and they are not entitled to legal protection:

We also forbid any Jew to dare to leave his house or his quarter on Good Friday, but they must all remain shut up until Saturday morning; and if they violate this regulation, we decree that they shall not be entitled to reparation for any injury or dishonor inflicted upon them by Christians.

Violence against Jews is thus pre-emptively excused, on the grounds that Jewish visibility itself constitutes provocation and Jews are the aggressors.

The parallel to the West Midlands case is difficult to ignore. British police justified the exclusion of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in part by invoking false accounts of events in Amsterdam in November 2024, that antisemites reported as Jewish-initiated attacks. In reality, subsequent investigations showed that Jewish and Israeli fans were targeted in premeditated, coordinated attacks organized via messaging platforms, explicitly calling for assaults on Jews.

In both cases, false antisemitic narratives were not merely tolerated but operationalized. Authorities accepted fabricated accusations at face value, treated Jewish presence as inherently dangerous, and justified exclusion as a neutral act of public safety. Violence driven by antisemitism was transformed into proof of Jewish culpability.

Also in both cases, authorities acknowledged that Jews would likely be attacked - but rather than treating the attackers as the problem, they treated Jewish presence as the threat. In medieval Spain, one reason Jews were banned from public view was because Christians might assault them. In modern Britain, Jews were barred from a football match because locals might attack them. In both instances, antisemitism was normalized as an immutable background condition, and Jews were burdened with the consequences.

This is the continuity that matters. The reasoning behind Las Siete Partidas and the decision by West Midlands Police is not simply similar; it is structurally identical. In both cases, antisemitic rumor becomes state evidence, anticipated antisemitic violence becomes a reason to restrict Jews rather than restrain attackers, and Jewish exclusion is presented as administrative necessity rather than moral failure. The logic is medieval, even when the language is modern.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/10 Links: Is Iran Finally on the Brink of Revolution?; Trump says he is ready to assist Iranian protesters; 40-year-old man arrested throwing rock that fractured skull of 8-year-old NJ Jewish girl

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: The Middle East is once again in flux

Something else, however, is forming in its place. A new ideological alignment is emerging around Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, grounded in political Islam and nationalist Islamist governance. It partially draws in Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Syria and finds resonance in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with indirect reach into Pakistan. This alignment privileges ideological affinity over transactional cooperation. Syria sits uneasily between worlds, open to Turkish influence yet also exploring pragmatic arrangements, including economic coordination and even talks with Israel, under American auspices.

Pragmatism, meanwhile, has contracted. Saudi Arabia no longer treats entry into the Abraham Accords as urgent. Public opinion, religious legitimacy and political identity impose costs on overt normalisation. As Iran weakens, Saudi dependence on Israel for security diminishes, reducing strategic pressure to formalise ties. Saudi policy blends interest with ideology and ambition. It does not mirror the Emirati model.

The result leaves the pragmatic alignment largely concentrated between Israel and the UAE, with others peripheral or inactive. Israel now faces two ideological fronts: the older Iranian-centred network, weakened but alive, and the newer Turkish-centred alignment gaining confidence and space. Washington positions itself between pragmatists and ideologues, cooperating selectively with Turkey and Saudi Arabia while hesitating to force the collapse of Iran’s system.

In this environment, Israel must operate with increasing autonomy. Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken openly of ending American military aid within a decade, arguing that Israel has ‘come of age’ and developed independent capacity. The statement reflects strategic reality. American leadership is less reliable. Withdrawal, not arbitration, defines its trajectory.

If Iran’s regime falls, the Turkish ideological bloc will expand. Pressure on Israel will intensify. Yet great opportunity will also appear. A post-regime Iran will require reconstruction, technology, water management, and institutional expertise. Israel could become a partner of consequence. Parallel to this, Israel is deepening ties with the UAE and even Somaliland, adding a non-Arab pragmatic partner and exploring new economic corridors.

The Middle East now contains both logics at once. No alliance yet dominates. Stability remains elusive. Power relationships shift without moral resolution. Conflict persists, mutating rather than vanishing. For Israel, adaptation replaces expectation. Threat and opportunity arrive together. There is no final settlement on the horizon, only a system in motion, shaped by interests where possible and ideology where restraint fails.

Secret dossier reveals police ‘covered up’ threat to Maccabi players

In response to these findings, Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP and Telegraph columnist, said: “The police fitted the intelligence to justify a predetermined decision to ban Israeli fans from Villa Park – all at the behest of Islamist thugs and agitators. And then they lied about it.

“While they pretended the threat was from Israelis to local Muslims, we know from released papers it was the other way round – with armed Islamists threatening visiting Israelis.

“These police logs are further damning evidence of the dishonesty of West Midlands Police.”

Lord Walney, the Government’s former adviser on political violence, said: “This fiasco started out looking like timidity from West Midlands Police in the face of vocal local Muslims, but this latest revelation suggests it has become a systematic cover-up.

“The more chief constable Guildford has tried to double down and deny the force’s initial cowardice, the worse the scandal has become. Like Nixon at Watergate and countless other wrongdoing, it is the cover-up that will tarnish his reputation until he does the decent thing and resigns.”

Lord Austin added: “This is a shocking revelation.” The former West Midlands MP said: “It shows beyond doubt that when West Midlands Police were telling the public and Parliament that Israeli fans had to be banned because they presented a threat to public safety, they knew that it was in fact local Islamist extremists who were threatening violence against the Israelis.

“But instead of arresting the people threatening racist violence, they capitulated to them and have staged an appalling cover-up and lied repeatedly ever since. Why is the Chief Constable still in his job? He must resign or be sacked.”

West Midlands Police declined to comment.

Mosque that advised on Israeli fan ban also sat on panel that chose police chief

A mosque consulted by police before Israeli football fans were banned from a match in Britain was also represented on the panel that appointed the force’s chief constable, newly released documents show.

The Sunday Times reports that Kamran Hussain, then chief executive of Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, sat on the interview panel that selected Craig Guildford as chief constable of West Midlands Police in December 2022.

The force later consulted the same mosque before barring supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a Europa League fixture against Aston Villa last autumn. The consultation was disclosed by Guildford in a letter to MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee.

The decision to exclude Israeli fans and transparently flawed intelligence used to justify it has left Guildford’s position in doubt. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has said he should be dismissed.

Guildford’s future may be decided within days, when a report by Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, is expected to be submitted to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and laid before Parliament.

Freedom of information disclosures show that Guildford was appointed after appearing before a panel convened by Simon Foster, the Labour police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands, which included Hussain. The identities of other panel members have been withheld.

Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk and an Aston Villa supporter, told the Sunday Times: “West Midlands Police relied on false intelligence to justify banning Israeli fans from Villa Park and discussed the decision with Green Lane mosque. The question now is who is really in charge. It clearly was not the police.”

The force has been accused of retrospectively creating intelligence to support the ban, and of failing to disclose warnings that Islamist protesters planned to target Israeli supporters if they were allowed into Birmingham.

01/09 Links Pt2: Archives Confirm the Nazi Origins of Palestinian Terror Finance; The Birmingham Maccabi scandal proves multiculturalism has failed

From Ian:

Explosive Archives Confirm the Nazi Origins of Palestinian Terror Finance

Archival material newly unsealed in Belgrade casts a harsh spotlight on collaboration between Nazi Germany and Islamist leadership during the Second World War. Hidden for decades in Yugoslavia’s national archives, a slim investigative file on Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, confirms both the scale of his operational role in Nazi Europe and the political suppression that later ensured the case would never be pursued.

The file is not thin because evidence was lacking. It is thin because the investigation was stopped.

The documents reinforce a historical continuum stretching from the Mufti’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany to the postwar survival of Nazi capital networks that later financed the emergence of Palestinian terror organizations. This is precisely the through-line Patricia Posner and I documented in our 2024 joint investigation published by the Jewish Chronicle, Revealed: Nazi Financial Fixer Who Funded Palestinian Terror. In that exposé we traced how François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi financier, preserved Hitler’s political and financial legacy and redirected looted Nazi assets into Middle Eastern militant causes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Belgrade materials focus heavily on al-Husseini’s activities in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina. Far from acting merely as a political intermediary or propagandist, the Mufti pushed aggressively for operational control. He helped facilitate the creation of multiple Waffen-SS divisions composed of local Muslims, units that went on to commit mass atrocities against Jews and Serbs, including village burnings, executions, rape, and systematic terror.

What emerges from the archive is not only violence, but design.

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Documents assembled by Yugoslav investigators before their work was halted reveal how deliberately the alliance between the Nazi leadership and the Mufti was constructed. A wartime memorandum authored by a senior German official responsible for Muslim minority affairs in occupied territories records extensive coordination between Nazi authorities and al-Husseini aimed at mobilizing Muslim populations for the Nazi war effort.

The Mufti was not simply endorsing Third Reich objectives. He was shaping policy. He advocated embedding religious authorities directly within German military units, arguing that imams should be used to indoctrinate and motivate Muslim soldiers serving in both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. He pushed for the creation of formal training institutions designed to fuse political Islam with National Socialist ideology, producing cadres capable of spreading both doctrines in tandem.

This was not theoretical. A similar religious training model had already been implemented under his direction in Bosnia. Graduates of that system were deployed across the Balkans, reinforcing Nazi control and participating directly in atrocities against civilian populations. The Belgrade files confirm that the fusion of Islamism and Nazism was neither accidental nor rhetorical. It was institutionalized.

The archives also expose another dimension of the alliance that resonates powerfully with what followed in the postwar period: money.

UK must stop giving millions to the corrupted fiefdom of Unrwa

The West is divided into nations that recognise the dangerous reality that has crept up on them, and nations that cling onto the hope that appeasement underpinned by the mirage of international law will prolong the illusion of peace.

While Israel has been forced to confront threats on seven fronts, the West has mostly had the luxury of appeasement.

A newly assertive United States has been awakened from the “All eyes on Rafah” delusion under President Biden, which obstructed Israel’s fight against antisemitic Hamas terrorists, to siding with Israel when President Trump neutered Iran’s threats of a second Holocaust by bombing their underground nuclear facilities.

Then there is the United Kingdom, which, along with others, continues to feebly call for “restraint” every time Israel strikes a blow against common enemies who hate Jews and the West, while keenly lapping up one piece of propaganda after another.

As Israeli hostages were starving in the dungeons of Gaza, Sir Keir Starmer demanded an end to the “man-made humanitarian crisis” there while recognising a State of Palestine without even conditioning it on the return of the hostages. He handed hardened terrorists the diplomatic jackpot free of charge. So much for moral clarity.

CAA’s polling now reveals that 91 per cent of British Jews opposed the move, with barely 5 per cent in favour. This was a climax of Britain’s immoral and self-defeating foreign policy, after decades under the spell of anti-Israel propaganda. Unsurprisingly, Israel pays little heed. British calls for “an immediate ceasefire” no longer land when Israeli children have been kidnapped in the wake of Palestinian terrorists committing the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.

Nothing demonstrates willing Western gullibility more than the United Nations. For decades, the UN has been a parody of itself. Its Human Rights Council bulges with the worst perpetrators of human wrongs. As Israel witnessed in southern Lebanon, UN peacekeepers are simply a shield behind which terrorists prepare for mass murder.

Perhaps the worst UN agency is Unrwa. Whereas all the world’s refugees fall under the remit of UNHCR, Unrwa focuses only on those designated as refugees under their own special definition in Gaza and other territories neighbouring Israel. Founded in 1949, Unrwa spends over $3 billion a year on six million people, while UNHCR spends $11 billion on 21 times that number.

Unrwa is a corrupted fiefdom within the already distorted world of the UN. Its practices have been exposed endlessly. Its educational curricula have referred to the Jewish state as the “enemy”, taught mathematics by counting “martyred” terrorists, used phrases such as “jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in grammar lessons, and more. Its facilities have been used to store munitions and as rocket launch pads in practically every conflict with Israel.

Perhaps the worst open secret has been that Unrwa teachers and officials repeatedly moonlit as terrorists. Israeli intelligence alleged that 12 of Unrwa’s staff participated in October 7, including taking hostages. UN Watch investigators claimed that 490 Unrwa staff had links to terrorist organisations. Yahya Sinwar was found carrying an allegedly fake Unrwa identification card but there was no such excuse when the leader of Hamas in Lebanon was found to have served as head of the Unrwa teachers’ union.

Hostages who made it out of Gaza alive described being held by Unrwa personnel or in Unrwa facilities, including British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari.

The importance of Unrwa to Palestinian terrorists perhaps became most blatant amid the storm that followed the establishment by the US of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which essentially briefly replaced Unrwa. Its Gazan workers were murdered by Hamas, and disinformation campaigns convinced many a credulous Western leader and journalist that Israel was massacring Gazans collecting food amid a supposed famine depicted using the emaciated figures of children suffering from congenital diseases.

In a pre-October 7, totalitarian, Hamas-run Gaza, one might argue that there was no way Unrwa could operate without becoming enmeshed with terrorist organisations using it for cover. I would agree.

It is therefore no wonder that our polling found that 89 per cent of British Jews do not want taxpayers to fund Unrwa. When the previous government suspended funding to Unrwa, it had good reason.

01/09 Links Pt1: Israel tapering off US military aid within the decade; What normalizing antisemitism looks like; Widespread Iran protests reach 13th day; rights group says at least 51 killed

From Ian:

Is This Time Different in Iran?

So after two weeks of the largest nationwide demonstrations in Iran since the Islamic Revolution, what has changed and why? It had nothing to do with negotiating tables and a lot to do with battlespace.

First, let’s note that this month’s huge anti-regime demonstrations in more than 100 Iranian cities were not ignited by a single big domestic event like a blatantly stolen election or the murder of an innocent young woman. The Iranian rial has been crashing past a million to the dollar for weeks, and inflation reached the point where the Tehran bazaar was losing money on every transaction, so it closed. Something else drove the following events such as the South Pars energy strike and reported military defections.

The battlespace started shaping up six years ago this month under Trump, with the U.S. killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, by U.S. drones at Baghdad Airport. He had just arrived from Damascus, where he was briefing former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a plan to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, as had been done in Tehran in 1979. Iran’s Iraqi cat’s-paw Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and 10 senior Iranian briefers and bodyguards were also killed in the strike. After 20 years of Bush, Obama, and Biden kid gloves, Tehran was legitimately frightened.

And then after the Tehran-directed atrocity against Israel in October 2023, Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, Muhammed Deif, Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Aqil, Hashem Safieddine, and Ismail Haniyeh in an IRGC safe house in Tehran, and almost a hundred more in Lebanon and Gaza. Deprived of its decapitated Hezbollah Praetorian Guard—the Syrian Ba’ath Party didn’t trust its own people any more than the Bolivarian Maduro trusted Venezuelans more than Cubans—the criminal Assad family fled to Moscow. Then, last summer, the Israeli and U.S. air forces wiped out much of the Iranian military’s general staff and key nuclear sites. The pro-Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing dominoes continued to fall with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the massacre of his Cuban protection detail, the seizure of Russia’s ghost ships, and the spread of Starlink terminals in Iran.

Iranians have seen the regime and its backers exposed and humiliated by an American administration, and they were quick to exploit this roll of the dice. Unlike pro-Hamas nihilists from Berkeley to Dublin, they have hit their streets in millions without a single keffiyeh or “Allahu Akbar,” motivated by American successes against their regime and its feckless backers.

As of the time of writing, the regime has turned off the internet and all landlines, and Khamenei has emerged from a two-day silence to express defiance. This is no surprise to anyone who knows that Khamenei’s greatest fear is moderation that causes the regime to bend and then break. As expressed in Alex Vatanka’s The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran, Khamenei became obsessed with the prospect of an “Iranian Gorbachev” who would impose reforms and usher in a USSR-style collapse; the more so because this was addressed by Tom Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, in a 1996 column titled “Waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev” after he visited Iran. That pressed all of the leader’s buttons. Expect his defiance to continue as long as he is alive or in power.

Which may not be long, because he faces two threats. The one in front of him is the unpredictable Donald Trump, who has already shed Iranian blood and has promised to “rescue” the Iranian people. The one behind him is the IRGC, which holds all the firepower in Iran and which knows—as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knew—that the mullahs are despised by nearly the entire population. They are unlikely to lay down their guns or give up the 40% of the Iranian economy they control. They are led by Ahmad Vahidi, an internationally sanctioned terrorist.

“Terrorists are assholes” was a wise saying of one of my counterterrorist colleagues at the CIA. She didn’t just mean that terror plots ruined our weekends and sleep schedules. She meant that terrorists are psychopathic, disloyal, and venal creatures who could and did mistreat each other and turn against each other. The top ranks of the IRGC are full of them.

What might lead the IRGC to sideline or overthrow Khamenei and his weak president, Masoud Pezeshkian? Two kinds of strikes: an anti-regime blow from the United States, or the labor variety that would shut down Iran’s energy sector. If both occur, my money is on a coup, and goodbye mullahs.

JPost Editorial: As ceasefires unravel, Israel faces critical decisions on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria fronts

Doubts about Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa remain strong in Israel’s political and military echelons.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have accepted US President Donald Trump’s request to give Sharaa a chance. Israel should take the opening seriously and test it with hard requirements.

For Israel, a successful security understanding with Syria would preserve its ability to secure itself through control on the ground while laying the foundations for wider communication and cooperation.

The rare joint statement released on Tuesday signals Israel’s willingness to try a different approach on the Syrian front while tying any diplomatic steps to the protection of Druze minorities in the area.

That condition offers a real indicator of whether Damascus can govern responsibly and keep hostile actors away from the border.

As ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza remain in limbo, Israel now has a rare opportunity to pacify the Syrian border and strengthen the security of its northern communities.

Jerusalem should define redlines, demand verification, and keep freedom of action intact. It must also remain wary of a weak agreement that collapses at the first test.

The potential benefits feel closer than they did a week ago, including an image that once sounded absurd: Israelis and Syrians sharing Mount Hermon in peace – even if that vision starts with a jointly operated ski resort.

Jonathan Tobin: What normalizing antisemitism looks like

In the last year, incidents of bloody antisemitic terrorism in Boulder, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Manchester, England; and last month, on Bondi Beach in Australia have demonstrated what happens when governments are indifferent to advocacy for these smears.

Jews internalizing hatred
But the willingness of some Jews to dismiss antisemitism, even after all the horror of the last two years, is also about something else. It’s clear that a minority—albeit a sizable one in places like New York, where so much of the Jewish community leans hard to the left—of the Jews have internalized the animus directed at them and now blame the victims, whether Israelis or Americans, of antisemitism for the behavior of the antisemites.

It is not atypical behavior for victims of discrimination to look inward to find the causes of violence rather than at the perpetrators and ideas that animate them. But it is more likely to happen when mainstream discourse becomes dominated by the Jew-haters. Under those circumstances, it is far easier for those who promote this noxious ideology to get away with pretending to be an advocate for human rights, as Mamdani does, and for the Jewish targets of victimization to be told to pipe down and stop complaining.

That was, after all, just how African-Americans who protested against those who promoted segregation and discrimination during the century of Jim Crow racism in the United States. In an era where such vile bigotry was made commonplace, they were also dismissed and told they were overreacting. Now, the very people on the left who falsely analogize that dark period of American history to the Palestinian war on Jewish existence, supported by Marxists and Islamists, are telling Jews to back down in much the same manner.

The only answer to Mamdani and those promoting the idea that those who notice the antisemitism of the left and American Muslims are just partisan hysterics must be the same one given by advocates of civil rights to the racists of America’s past. Those in the media and the political establishment must be told that members of the Jewish community aren’t going to be marginalized by being told to calm down and not believe evidence seen almost daily. Decent Americans of every faith and ethnic background must make it clear that Jews will not be silent or acquiesce to a mayor out for retribution. His actions must be resisted with the same loud and determined protests and political action that Americans have eventually meted out to other types of hate-mongers.

A new survey was released on Jews working in secular non-profits.

The results are sickening, and entirely expected.

39% have seen instances of antisemitic statements or behavior in their workplaces in the past year.

35% have considered leaving their current job based on their experience as a Jew in their workplaces, mostly because of antisemitic incidents.

35% say they are uncomfortable expressing their Jewish identity in their workplaces.

Again, these are secular non-profits - run by the most progressive, liberal people there are. And Jews are not comfortable working in those places because of antisemitism.

These woke places are not very welcoming for their Jewish employees.

Is anyone shocked by this? Adamant denials of antisemitism rarely translate into actual fighting against antisemitism.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)