Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

01/21 Links Pt2: Inciting Terrorism Is Not Free Speech; Nation to pause to honour Bondi victims; One in 10 young Irish adults believe Holocaust is a ‘myth’

From Ian:

Inciting Terrorism Is Not Free Speech

Our law has long recognized that words can be dangerous, even criminally so. That is why we have rules against crimes like solicitation, incitement, and conspiracy. To be sure, the line between protected speech and speech in furtherance of criminal behavior is fuzzy. But courts are perfectly willing to uphold convictions involving, for example, antitrust violations based on this distinction.

Despite these precedents, the court of appeals held that Al-Timimi’s convictions could not be squared with the First Amendment. Al-Timimi did not commit incitement, the court concluded, because his “exhortations were vague and general,” failing the “imminent lawless action” standard set out in 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio. Though he “encouraged unlawful acts generally,” he was not guilty of criminal solicitation because “the evidence did not demonstrate that he encouraged, with the requisite intent, a specific unlawful act.” This may seem like a loophole for bad actors, but the court reminds readers that “plenty of speech encouraging criminal activity is protected under the First Amendment.”

This is true, but plenty of speech is also not protected. The only standard the court employed to tell if Al-Timimi’s speech was protected was whether the criminal acts he encouraged were sufficiently specific. Since that standard can only be resolved by intuition, it’s probably best left to a jury—like the one that concluded Al-Timimi’s encouragement, advice, and instruction did meet that standard.

One wonders what is left of crimes like solicitation and conspiracy under the court’s reasoning. After all, prosecutors could have hardly hoped for better evidence in their favor. The men even testified at trial to Al-Timimi’s decisive role in helping them overcome their fears and join terrorist groups. If telling men you know are heavily armed to attack America is too vague and general to warrant prosecution, then any form of solicitation will be extremely hard to prove.

The Supreme Court will not likely review, much less overturn, this case. But it should be on the lookout for cases that allow it to re-establish the proper relationship between national-security concerns and the First Amendment.

The Court has already made clear that limitations on dangerous speech tailored to prevent terrorism are constitutional, even if applied liberally. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Court held that simply explaining the law to terrorist organizations may be prosecuted as material support for terrorism consistent with the First Amendment. “Given the sensitive interests in national security and foreign affairs at stake,” the majority wrote, courts should defer to the political branches when they “have adequately substantiated their determination that . . . it was necessary to prohibit” acts, even speech-based acts, that further terrorism.

In spite of this, lower courts have consistently balked at the notion of enforcing laws designed to disrupt terrorist networks before they begin victimizing Americans. They have set the bar for conviction so artificially high that, as in Al-Timimi’s case, no prosecutor could possibly reach them.

The First Amendment does and should protect even abhorrent expression. What got Al-Timimi prosecuted, though, was not the abhorrence of his expression. It was that his speech played an important role in getting dangerous people to take up arms against the United States. Judges’ appeals to the “vitality” of “offensive” speech in letting him off the hook ring hollow.

Seth Mandel: Josh Shapiro and the ‘No Free Shots’ Rule

Jewish leaders wasted no time in taking the Harris Committee on Un-American Activities to task for its embrace of the dual-loyalty canard. And Harris certainly deserves every ounce of criticism she and her team have received, and probably more. After all, if Shapiro can be disqualified for having as a teenager visited Israel and volunteering on a kibbutz, it could potentially have a chilling effect on young American Jews, who are already being pressured into hiding their involvement in Jewish communal activities. The attack on Shapiro is an attack on American Jewry.

Which is why Shapiro’s response is so noteworthy. We know about the obnoxious questioning not from an anonymous campaign leak or (don’t laugh) a high-status reporter digging into the undercurrent of anti-Semitism at the highest levels of progressive organizing. We know about it because Josh Shapiro wrote about it, put his name to it, and swung back at his party’s presidential nominee for good measure.

“I wondered,” he writes, “whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way.”

In any event, Shapiro concluded, the whole affair “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

As to whether Shapiro would, as Harris requested, grovel and beg the forgiveness of people chasing Jews while cheering Hamas’s Nazi atrocities, he “flatly” said no.

What is unusual about this news cycle is not that an ambitious politician with national aspirations sought to put some distance between himself and his party’s failed past leaders, or that he would paint himself as having shown toughness and nerve in his own recollections of the incidents at hand.

Instead, what is striking is that he would do so on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism. Shapiro isn’t letting them take free shots at the Jews.

The Harris team’s behavior was atrocious, but they might have expected to get away with it on the assumption that no one wants to draw attention to accusations that they are a double agent or a Manchurian candidate. Shapiro, however, refused to play that game. His response was, essentially, OK let’s talk about it. Let’s play “Ask the Jew” in front of the whole country.

Josh Shapiro wasn’t supposed to be confrontational about it. He was supposed to take the hint and know his proper place as a Jew in national politics. He was not supposed to tell them to their faces how offensive their medievalist questioning was, and then to tell the world.

There is probably not one campaign operative in a thousand who would tell Shapiro to center his Jewish pride at a moment when so many progressive activists and organizers are out for Jewish blood. It contradicts the conventional wisdom.

But conventional wisdom didn’t prevent some anti-Semitic and anti-Israel lunatic from burning Shapiro’s house while his family was inside on Passover. Should he apologize to the man who tried to murder his family, too? Surely the Harris campaign would say yes.

Shapiro didn’t ask for this fight, but he’s not running from it. Hopefully it stays that way. The next generation of American Jewish activists and politicians are watching.

Tevi Troy: Are Jews Still Welcome in the White House?

Yet this same dynamic of high visibility combined with inter-elite competition and grassroots hatred may bring about a period of unprecedented friction and danger for Jews, in which high-level Jewish political involvement proves irksome to antisemites and even to other inter-elite competitors—who, in turn, will have no shortage of Jewish rivals to scapegoat. This dynamic would likely be mirrored throughout the rest of society. Disaffected individuals or groups may also target prominent Jewish officials as a way of gaining sympathy for violent actions. We saw an element of this with the Passover firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s mansion by a disturbed anti-Israel activist.

Another, also unpalatable, possibility is that this fourth phase could couple rising elite and popular antisemitism with diminishing opportunities for Jews, as national politicians fear that prominent Jewish appointees might alienate key voting blocs, be they Muslims in Michigan, progressive Israel critics, or anti-globalists on the right. In the summer of 2024, for example, Gov. Shapiro’s Jewishness clearly seemed to count against him in the Democratic vice presidential selection process, as demonstrated by the offensive question from the Harris team of whether Shapiro was an Israeli agent. Bypassing Shapiro resulted instead in the choice of the less-talented Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ running mate.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the increasing mainstream acceptance of antisemitism in both major parties may already be causing the pipeline of future higher-level Jewish appointees to dry up. Baer, for one, suggested that the high-level Jews in the Biden administration could be a lagging indicator, reflecting high Jewish participation in the Clinton and Obama years rather than the current reality. According to Baer, some Jews faced challenges breaking into the lower levels of the Biden administration, which could affect Jewish participation in future Democratic administrations. This could stem from both discomfort with Jews from anti-Israel Democrats and reductions in qualified Jewish applicants being admitted to top schools—driven by that same discomfort. In the future, Baer feared that opportunities for Jewish staffers “might be hitting a brick wall depending on where the Democratic Party goes.”

Related to this are concerns about a broader decline of Jews in elite institutions. As Jacob Savage wrote in his widely read 2023 Tablet article “The Vanishing,” “Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing … In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.” If it continues, this scenario could be bad for Jews and bad for America, as countries that mistreat their Jews often struggle with other pathologies. Bernstein, however, is less worried, noting that the likely 2028 Democratic candidates have “plenty of Jewish senior people around.”

A third direction that the future may take is that the current surge in antisemitism will wane, and the fourth phase will be a better version of the third phase, with opportunities rising and antisemitism dwindling. This scenario is optimistic about both the Jews and America. As former Obama and Biden aide Chanan Weissman notes, “The Jewish story is the best story that America tells about itself.” He adds, “Societies that treat their [Jewish] communities well, benefit.” His scenario may not be one that many Jews see as likely at the moment, but it would be in keeping with the generally positive trajectory we have seen up until now. The problem with it is that straight-line extrapolations are often lacking in predictive power; in this case, they ignore the recent reemergence of antisemitism—which appears to be quite real.

The long history of the Jews and power in America is ultimately unique because of how little public controversy it has caused. Jews and Jewish ideas have been an essential part of this nation since its founding. While the current attacks on Jews from both the left and the right are by no means unique in the context of Jewish history, they are alien to American political culture—which is what makes this moment frightening. The attempt to mainstream antisemitism on both the left and the right should be properly understood as an attack by extremists in both parties on the existing political culture and on the principles of the American founding.

The American tradition is far more closely linked to the Jews and their many contributions to it than it is to the antisemites of the left or the right, whose hatred of the Jews reveals a rejection of that tradition—which they hope to reorder and replace with various European-born ideologies, from communism to fascism to theocracy, that have proven toxic to their political hosts. As Americans, Jews must lean in rather than retreat in the face of antisemitism, which in turn entails an embrace of this nation’s philosemitic and Enlightenment-based founding principles.

In America, Jews belong everywhere, from the White House on down. Any future White House that rejects Jews would be reflecting its own rejection of the American founding tradition.

Seth Mandel: Matt Gaetz and the Jewish Firebugs

As Jews, we’re encouraged to be a light among the nations. But sometimes I think people get the wrong idea. Every so often, we are collectively accused of setting things alight among the nations.

That’s what happened in recent weeks as fires raged in Argentina. A conspiracy theory gained some traction online that held that Israelis were setting wildfires in Patagonia in order to cheapen the value of land and then buy that land. How were they setting the fires? With Israeli grenades.

By January 12, all of this had been thoroughly debunked, and an Argentine broadcaster at the center of it apologized. Naturally, the following day, Matt Gaetz—the scandal-soaked weirdo chased from Congress by ethics investigations into another career as a wannabe Candace Owens—did a whole segment repeating the conspiracy theory about Jewish firebugs and Zionist grenades.

The fact that Gaetz chose to run a segment on it after the country where it started denounced and debunked every falsehood is one reason Gaetz is viewed as a clown even among the crowd of maniacs he associates himself with.

Nevertheless, this clown was a congressman and was even nominated to be attorney general by President Trump. Tucker Carlson, currently the dean of the anti-American propaganda fetishists, has been making appearances at the White House. So we have to grapple with the question of how much damage we think the right-wing influencer ecosystem is capable of. After all, it wouldn’t be much consolation to say Matt Gaetz has the intellectual depth of a ceramic ash tray if he were the U.S. attorney general.

One type of damage is indicated by the fact that we’re talking about the firebug conspiracy theory, and that such a canard is worth talking about at all. On that front, history has a warning.

Included in the anti-Semitic slang that has managed to persist through time is the phrase “Jewish lightning.” It’s a relic, and it’s not all that common, but it refers to the reputation that American Jews got thanks to rumors that they were uniquely liable to carry out insurance fires in the 19th century. As a result, insurance companies began to deny Jews insurance coverage. Industry manuals warned of the risk of Jewish firebugs.

01/21 Links Pt1: How António Guterres turned ‘international law’ into a weapon against Jews; Netanyahu accepts invite to join Trump’s Board of Peace; Iran’s coming reckoning: Regime collapse is likely — democracy is not

From Ian:

How António Guterres turned ‘international law’ into a weapon against Jews

Guterres has not merely presided over this corruption; he has normalized it, defended it, and amplified it. In doing so, he has used his position to advance an ideological agenda that singles out the Jewish state for delegitimization while shielding those who commit the most egregious human rights violations.

Anti-Zionist obsession at the United Nations has become indistinguishable from antisemitism in practice. When the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely targeted, denied the right of self-defense, and subjected to standards applied to no other nation, the conclusion is unavoidable.

Israel does not wage war against civilians. Hamas does.

Israel builds bomb shelters. Hamas builds tunnels under children’s bedrooms.

Israel warns civilians to evacuate. Hamas forces them to stay.

Any legal framework that erases these distinctions is not international law; it is propaganda.

International law was meant to restrain barbarism, not protect it; to defend human life, not terror infrastructure; to uphold truth, not political theater.

By weaponizing international law against Israel and tolerating terror in the name of false balance, Guterres has disgraced the office he holds and accelerated the United Nations’s descent into irrelevance.

The world deserves better.

The victims of terrorism deserve better.

And the Jewish people, who know all too well where institutionalized bias can lead, deserve better.

History will remember who stood for justice, and who turned law into a tool of moral inversion.

Alan Baker: Buzzwords and false allegations are Western human rights inversion - opinion

With tragedies abounding, the Western brainwashing machinery is working overtime against Israel.

Thousands murdered and brutally subjugated in Iran. Thousands of non-Arab ethnic groups butchered in Sudan. Massive death tolls in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Myanmar violently represses its Rohingya and other minorities. Mass atrocities by Boko Haram and other extremist groups in Nigeria. Extrajudicial killings of civilians in Tanzania. Massacres of Christians in churches and hospitals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But Western media outlets, social-media platforms, UN and human rights committees, political leaders and parliamentarians, incited university students, and ignorant show-biz celebrities spout accusations against Israel of genocide, apartheid, starvation, and disproportionate military actions.

Such paragons of humanitarian virtue claim to defend human rights and advocate for Palestinians, but glaringly ignore everyone else and deny the rights to which Israel and its citizens are entitled. They ignore genocidal violence and terror by Palestinian and Islamist fanatics, which is incited by Palestinian leadership and supported, encouraged, and financed by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey.

No less glaring is the fact that the Western world chooses to forget the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023 – the rape, torture, burning, and butchery of thousands of Israelis and foreigners; the taking of hundreds of hostages; and the use of Hamas’s own civilians as human shields.

What should be a universal moral standard of human rights has become a cynical and transparent political weapon, directed against Israel.

Whose Dome Is It? Trump Takes Credit for Israel’s Iron Dome (Judean Rose)

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

President Trump chose an odd venue as the platform for his bout of historical revisionism.
Standing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told the assembled global elite that Israel’s Iron Dome was not really Israel’s achievement at all.

“That’s our technology, that’s our stuff,” he said, recounting a conversation in which he claimed to have told Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop taking credit for it.

Trump on the Iron Dome:

“What we did for Israel was amazing…We did it for Israel. And by the way, I told Bibi, ‘Bibi, stop taking credit for the dome. That's our technology, that's our stuff.’ But they had a lot of courage, and they were good fighters, and they did a good job.” pic.twitter.com/tm9G9uHdK5
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) January 21, 2026

It was a striking claim—and it was untrue. The Iron Dome was conceived, designed, and engineered by Israeli companies—Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries, and mPrest—and first deployed at Israeli air bases in southern Israel in response to Israeli civilians being shelled by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist entities in Gaza and Lebanon. No American president invented it. No American laboratory designed it. No American general figured out how to intercept rockets fired at Jewish homes, schools, and kindergartens.

But here is the part Trump was almost certainly leaning on in making his boastful claim: while the United States did not invent Iron Dome, it did provide a great deal of the funding for it, beginning under President Obama.

That funding was critical. It expanded the number of Iron Dome batteries, ensured a steady supply of interceptors, and later tied production to American contractors. American funding was framed as an act of alliance. The expectations attached to that funding constrained Israel’s ability to respond to attacks.

I was angry at the time—more specifically, angry at President Obama. His administration would fund the Iron Dome, but it would not allow Israel to stop the missiles at their source. Israel could intercept, absorb, and endure—but no more than that.

We were given the umbrella and told to crouch beneath it, intercepting rockets while Arab terrorists were allowed to continue firing at Jews. Terrorists were permitted to keep shooting at Jewish civilians, while Israel was denied the right, as a sovereign nation, to put an end to it. But we did not create a Jewish state so Jews could cower under American protection.

Israel was founded to be a sovereign nation, capable of determining its own responses to threats. It was meant to be a safe haven for Jews in a world that has never needed much encouragement to hate them.

Iron Dome saved lives. That is beyond dispute. But it was never a clean or consequence-free solution. Interceptions send debris and shrapnel raining down, often over populated areas.

A friend’s son learned this the hard way. He was driving on a highway when the missile alert sounded. He did exactly what Israelis are instructed to do: pulled over, got out of the car, lay flat on the road with his hands over his head. An interception occurred overhead. Shrapnel came down. He was hit badly enough to require hospitalization.

This risk is well known, but people don’t much talk about it. Iron Dome has taken on an almost sacred status, making it easier to celebrate the miracle than to confront the cost—especially when that cost is borne quietly by civilians already living under fire.

Which brings us back to Trump.

Trump’s claim in Davos echoed an assumption long embedded in Washington: that Israel exists with American permission, and that its power is something to be supervised. Obama and Trump both like to assume the role of savior. They put on different performances, driven by the same vanity—the belief that Israel lives or dies because they say so, and that they deserve all the credit for Israel’s survival and success.

Israel may be protected. Israel may intercept. But Israel does not fully control the terms under which it ends threats to its citizens.

When Jewish self-defense is treated as something granted rather than owned, it becomes conditional. And once it is conditional, it can be reclaimed, rebranded, or spoken of—as Trump did in Davos—as someone else’s “stuff.”

That should trouble anyone who understands why a Jewish state exists in the first place.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The NYT coverage of Iran murdering civilians vs. Gaza shows how media bias works

It has been nearly a month since Iran has been mowing down civilians in the streets.

The Jerusalem Post sums it up:

The human cost is staggering. According to figures cited by Iranian officials themselves, at least 5,000 people have been killed since protests erupted on December 28, including around 500 members of the security forces. Authorities blame “terrorists and armed rioters.” Human rights activists and opposition groups dispute that narrative and say the death toll could be far higher, potentially exceeding 20,000.

At least 24,669 Iranians have been arrested.

A doctor inside Iran described the killings as “genocide under digital darkness” to the British newspaper The Sunday Times. One couple told the paper they were given “ten minutes to cry” when shown the body of their daughter – after being forced to pay a $5,000 “bullet fee” to recover her remains. After paying, they were driven five hours to another town, where her body had been thrown into an old grave.

Numerous families have reported being charged exorbitant sums to retrieve the bodies of loved ones killed by the regime.

Images shared from within Iran during the past week also show injured protesters admitted to hospitals – tubes and catheters still attached, admission tags visible – and then shot point-blank in the head, their bodies lying on the ground. Doctors have also reportedly refused to treat protesters, branding them enemies of the regime.

Beyond live fire, the blackout is the Islamic Republic’s central weapon against the demonstrators. With mobile data cut nationwide and only sporadic landline access available, Iranians are isolated from one another and from the outside world. Evidence cannot be shared; deaths cannot be documented.

Several Iranians contacted by the Post used the same word to describe their condition.

Hostages.

By any reasonable measure, Iran is treating its own people worse than Israel treated Gazans in the first month of its war. While "human rights activists" complained about Israel's supposed limits on reporting, there were plenty of photos and stories that were published and Hamas' press releases were treated as truth.

During October 2023, the New York Times routinely had top stories about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, above the fold, accompanied by photos of Gaza civilians that were three columns wide:

When Iran is the top story, it is more about politics than human lives. I only found one photo above the fold of Iranian civilians - very few stories about Iran make it to the front page, and of those only a tiny number center people being killed.

Here is one of the few.

Keep in mind that even according to Hamas, less than 10,000 were killed in the first month of the war. Human rights activists say 20,000 protesters were killed in Iran - all targeted killings of civilians.

To be sure, there are few photos of Iran that get smuggled out. The NYT did put one up of body bags. Notice that the deaths were placed in the subhead, not the headline.

But the Gaza war was on the front page every single day. These recent Iran articles are the exceptions, not the rule. Even though the regime is ruthlessly attacking its own people, murdering thousands.

The Times could use infographics to replace photos if they thought that the Iranian story was something to emphasize.

Clearly they felt Gaza was.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The most extreme anti-Israel accusations are rarely argued. They are asserted, repeated, and emotionally charged, because their function is not to weigh evidence but to establish a moral starting point: Israeli Jews must be understood as uniquely malevolent actors.

Once that assumption is in place, accusations of colonialism, apartheid, or genocide no longer need to be demonstrated. They feel self-evident. Evidence becomes secondary to repetition, and contradiction is dismissed as propaganda.

There is a feedback loop. In order to believe anti-Israel accusations like "settler colonialism," "apartheid" or "genocide," one must initially believe that Israeli Jews are evil. Because if you think of them as normal human beings, it is easy to find alternative explanations for the cherry picked evidence that supposedly "prove" those accusations. It happens with Amnesty, it happens with Turkey, it happens with SJP and with Candace Owens.

This is why anti-Zionist narratives work so hard to condition moral intuition. Through slogans, analogies, and fictionalized portrayals, ordinary people are trained to associate Israeli Jews with the worst crimes imaginable. The aim is not persuasion but habituation – to make bad faith feel like common sense.

This conditioning also explains a striking and otherwise baffling pattern: any portrayal of Israelis as victims is treated as inherently suspect. Haters work overtime to make sure that no one else looks at Jews as being normal people, or victims of terror, who are just trying to survive in a neighborhood where most people want to see them dead. October 7 victims cannot be victims - they must be perpetrators. Bondi Beach victims must be part of a false flag operation.

This is not because the facts are unclear. It is because Jewish victimhood breaks the narrative.

To acknowledge Israeli Jews as victims is to acknowledge them as human. And once Jews are allowed to be human – capable of fear, vulnerability, and legitimate self-defense – the entire moral structure of the anti-Zionist narrative begins to collapse. The villain cannot be a victim without destroying the story.

As a result, suffering must be denied, inverted, or blamed on the Jews themselves. Even mass violence is reframed as provocation, manipulation, or performance. The denial is not incidental; it is structural. Anything that humanizes Jews threatens the propaganda’s core objective. Even antisemitism is blamed on Jews - if it is bad, it must be the Jews' fault.

If one begins instead with the assumption that Israelis are ordinary people living under extreme and often tragic constraints, the standard accusations no longer cohere. Civilian deaths remain tragic. Policies can be criticized, sometimes harshly. But claims of genocide or apartheid require importing a prior belief in uniquely evil intent.

That belief is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is the belief system that makes the narrative possible in the first place.

Antisemitism is not merely the emotional fuel of anti-Zionism. It is the moral infrastructure that cannot tolerate Jewish humanity.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/20 Links Pt2: The Death and Legacy of Jerusalem’s Champion, Gabriel Barkay; Australia to observe national day of mourning to honour Bondi terror victims

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Death and Legacy of Jerusalem’s Champion, Gabriel Barkay

Barkay, who was born Gabriel Breslauer in Budapest in 1944, is associated with two particularly famous projects. In 1979, Barkay discovered the Ketef Hinnom scrolls in Jerusalem. Once successfully unrolled and translated, it became clear they contained a passage from the Book of Numbers dated to the Iron Age, making them the earliest known biblical text in existence.

The other is the Temple Mount sifting project. In 1999 and 2000, the Muslim authorities at the Mount illegally undertook a massive construction project and removed 9,000 tons of earth, destroying artifacts in the process and dumping the rest of the dirt in the Kidron Valley. Their goal was to replace the history-rich earth with an unauthorized mosque. Barkay led a broad group of Israelis who protested the ongoing destruction and then helped get funding for a project of volunteers to sift through the dirt discarded from the Temple site. That work continues today.

Because the truth has what you might call a “pro-Israel bias,” reality is controversial. Hence the acknowledgements in Barkay’s obituaries that his work was sometimes characterized as “right-wing.” Here is how the New York Times obituary phrases it:

“In 2005, he and others founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, a crowdsourced program to examine the estimated 400 truckloads of dirt taken from the site. Since then, volunteers have identified about a half-million artifacts.

“The project was sometimes criticized as a tool of right-wing Israeli governments eager to establish historical claim to the Temple Mount.”

You’ll notice that it is considered “right-wing” because the facts of the case are politically unhelpful to the left wing. When it comes to Jews and Israel, the truth is considered provocative. It’s worth noting that this story was about the Arab authorities attempting to destroy hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts—a crime against humanity that is described here with the same neutrality one might employ to describe the decision to take the dog for a walk. It is the Israeli archaeologists’ response to that crime—to ask that the crime not be carried out—that is deemed political. People can be very touchy when reminded of the existence of Jews.

Barkay’s dismissal of such pettiness was on the mark: “Sneezing in Jerusalem is an intensive political activity,” he told The Times of Israel in 2019. “You could turn your head to the right, or the left.”

Indeed, one lesson of Barkay’s life is that the Jewish people should not treat their own rights and existence and history as a delicate subject. People offended by the truth only deserve to hear the truth more often. And if they face resistance, Jews should raise their voices. As Huckabee advised the audience in Jerusalem last month:

“The Jewish people have the greatest story in the world. So tell it. It’s a wonderful story to be told. And you have the receipts. You have the Bible. And for heaven’s sakes, I would say use it and tell it with courage and boldness. Never speak it with apology as if, well, I don’t want to bring this up, but just so you know, we kind of have a place here. No, I think you say: Do you realize that our history traces back 3,800 years and we can follow the linear progress of that history from then until now. And there are prophecies throughout the entire Old Testament that say things that we are watching before our eyes.”

US Holocaust museum board cites years-long absences in call to oust Sanders

Members of the governing board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to remove Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council amid reports that the senator has not attended a single meeting in 18 years.

Sanders was appointed to the council in 2007. The board, which meets twice a year to oversee the D.C. museum’s mission, programming and educational work, is composed of both presidential and congressional appointees. According to attendance records reviewed by board members and provided to the New York Post, Sanders “has missed every meeting of the board since his appointment.”

In a Jan. 13 letter to Schumer signed by a dozen council members, the board wrote that Sanders “has rarely, if ever, attended council meetings or participated meaningfully in the work of the council since his appointment.”

The council also raised concerns about some of Sanders’s public statements on “contemporary genocidal conflicts, including characterizations widely viewed as inconsistent with the principles of Holocaust remembrance and genocide prevention.”

Sanders has been an outspoken critic of Israeli policy, calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and describing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza “a genocide.” The letter stated that those stances bring into question Sanders’s “alignment with the mission of the museum and its governing body.”

“In the current context, with Jew-hatred and Holocaust distortion rising globally, it is imperative that Senate-appointed representatives on the council are fully engaged and steadfastly supportive of its mission,” the letter states.

'Moderate' Abigail Spanberger Appoints Two Qatari Lobbyists To Serve on George Mason University Board

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) has appointed two Qatari lobbyists to serve on George Mason University’s board of visitors, a Washington Free Beacon review has found.

Spanberger, who was sworn into office on Saturday, tapped former Reps. James Moran (D., Va.) and Tom Davis (R., Va.) to serve on George Mason’s 16-person board of visitors, which advises the school on "policy-making and oversight." After retiring from Congress in 2015, Moran launched Moran Global Strategies, which registered as a foreign agent of the Qatari embassy in April 2023. Davis, who resigned from Congress in 2008, is a lobbyist at Holland & Knight, which subcontracts with Moran’s firm on its Qatari lobbying contract.

Qatar, an oil-rich Gulf monarchy that harbors Hamas, has paid Moran’s firm $2.3 million through August 2025 to advance "bilateral relations" with the United States, according to foreign agent disclosures. Moran Global Strategies has, in turn, paid Holland & Knight $35,000 per month for its lobbying services. Davis is listed as Moran’s "principal point of contact" in the Qatari lobbying contract, records show.

The appointments are a sharp departure from the "moderate" image Spanberger presented to the public during the campaign.

Moran, who served 24 years in the House, has lobbied his former colleagues on behalf of Qatar on educational issues, according to lobbying disclosures. In July, he met with two members of the House Education and Workforce Committee prior to a hearing on "antisemitism in higher education," disclosures show. Moran was spotted in the audience at the hearing, seated behind Georgetown University president Robert Groves, Jewish Insider reported.

Last March, Moran contacted an aide to Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D.), whose wife previously served as interim president of George Mason, regarding "outreach on Qatar's higher education funding," according to disclosures. Holland & Knight and Davis have lobbied Republican lawmakers on education issues regarding Qatar. Davis met Rep. Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.) on June 25 for a "discussion" about the Committee on Education and Workforce, according to lobbying records.

Activist probed for anti-Israel posts no longer assistant attorney general of Michigan, state tells JNS

Zena Ozeir lists her current role on LinkedIn as assistant attorney general of the state of Michigan—a role that she has held since June 2023, per her profile.

The office of Dana Nessel, Michigan attorney general and a Democrat, told JNS exclusively that Ozeir does not currently hold that position.

“Zena Ozeir is no longer employed by the Michigan Department of Attorney General,” Kimberly Bush, Nessel’s director of public information and education, told JNS.

JNS sought comment from Nessel’s office about whether Ozeir was dismissed, and if so, whether it was as a result of a probe by the state office of her social media posts.

In June 2024, Nessel’s office told the Detroit News that it was investigating social-media posts in which Ozeir appeared to direct expletives at America and Israel.

Ozeir allegedly wrote on Instagram that “every accusation made by the Zionist entity is an admission. F**k them, f**k America, f**k genocide apologists. F**k anyone who peddles Zionist propaganda or gives any legitimacy to their criminal enterprise of a ‘country.’”

She made her handle private after the Detroit News sought comment from Nessel’s office, the paper said.

On Jan. 17, Ozeir was a panelist at an in-person event, which the group Palestine Solidarity Grand Rapids hosted in the city, per one of its social media posts. The event was hosted at the Fountain Street Church Sanctuary, per a flier, which identifies Ozeir as an “attorney, activist and USPCN member.” (The latter refers to the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, which “works closely with and unequivocally supports Students for Justice in Palestine,” per its site.)

The event flyer calls for the Holy Land 5—leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, who were convicted in 2008 of funnelling millions of dollars to Hamas—to be freed.

01/20 Links Pt1: Gaza’s Executive Board and the illusion of international salvation; Trump says ‘we think we know’ location of Ran Gvili, the last hostage in Gaza

From Ian:

How Western Logic Brought Disaster upon Israel

Israel's intelligence was the most advanced in the world. But in the week before Oct. 7, 2023, it forgot to look at the Gaza bakery, which suddenly was asked to prepare hundreds of pita breads, or the barber shop in Jabalia that, on Oct. 4, was suddenly flooded with dozens of Nukhba operatives getting haircuts to look sharp before joining their 72 virgins.

"We struck them hard and they are deterred," former director of the Israel Security Agency, Nadav Argaman, declared in May 2021. "They want an economy, not a war," the political leadership told us. Then came the "Al-Aqsa Flood" on Oct. 7.

The catastrophic error that led to this disaster was Israel's excessively rational lens, rooted in Western logic - the belief that people act to maximize personal and family welfare. That is how Israel's value system works. The intelligence community and the political leadership refused to truly understand the jihadist fanaticism that had taken over Gaza.

Israel's intelligence instinctively searches for logic. But an enemy willing to sacrifice everything for a murderous ideology does not operate according to Western logic. Israel must adopt a permanent assumption: the enemy will always surprise you. He will always have a new trick - something you have not yet imagined.

True national resilience requires capability denial: Do not wait to understand how an enemy plans to use a capability - destroy it simply because it exists. Assume the possibility of blindness: The military and society must be prepared for the morning when the screens go dark.

National resilience must never rest on intelligence as its sole backbone. True resilience is the ability to absorb a blow you did not anticipate and respond with force - because you prepared for the worst-case scenario, not the "reasonable" one. National resilience is not the ability to predict the future. It is the ability to survive it even when you did not predict it.

Why Israel Is Seen Everywhere and Everything Else Is Forgotten

Israel occupies an outsized and morally charged place in the media's imagination, particularly in the West. There is a systemic, disproportionate fascination, bordering on obsession, with covering Israel as though it were the gravitational center of world affairs. With this saturation coverage, Israel becomes not just another country among many but a kind of moral index - a stage upon which the world's conscience is imagined to be tested and revealed.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies a peculiar and disproportionate place in the West's political imagination, unmatched by conflicts that are deadlier or more brutal. So it becomes over-seen, over-examined, intensely dissected, and uniquely moralized.

Israel's wars are routinely framed as the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict," as though the entire story were a localized struggle between two neighboring peoples, one strong and one weak, one powerful and one victimized. This framing is tidy, emotionally resonant, and yet profoundly misleading.

Most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians but against Egyptians and Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese, Iraqis and, increasingly, Iranians. The rockets fired at Israel during the war did not come only from Gaza. They came from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and from Iran itself. A vast and intricate regional struggle is reduced to Israelis vs. Palestinians. Israel is cast as the dominant actor, the controlling force, and ultimately the villain. The wider forces shaping the conflict vanish altogether.

This is how media distortion always works - by shrinking and enlarging the facts selectively. A small story is made to seem enormous. The result is a morality play in which a villainous country called Israel comes to embody the worst sins of the modern age. Israel ceases to be a state acting within a volatile region and becomes instead a metaphor for everything the imagination fears about power and injustice. If the coverage of Israel feels uniquely charged, moralized, and obsessive, it is because it is.

Israel Cannot Afford a Hamas ‘Victory Picture’ During Ramadan

The current conflict cannot be allowed to relapse into a wave of lone-wolf stabbings or car-rammings because the state was too timid to enforce its borders.

Hamas has already characterized these security measures as a “dangerous escalation” and an attack on religious freedom. This is a predictable script from an organization that has systematically converted religious and civilian spaces into military hubs .

The strategic imperative is clear: true peace follows the recognition of reality, and that reality requires the enemy to concede that their violent goals are impossible. If Hamas believes they can still achieve a “victory display” in Jerusalem, they will continue to resist disarmament and reconstruction efforts in Gaza. The road to a stable, post-Hamas reality begins with the total eclipse of their influence in Jerusalem.

The Israel Police and the IDF must remain steadfast. A ceasefire is not a surrender, and a pause is not a peace. The current era of regional conflict will only reach its conclusion when the citizens of Israel see that the flags of jihad have been permanently lowered.

By preventing a Hamas victory picture this Ramadan, Israel is doing more than just securing a holy month; it is asserting the permanence of the state and the finality of its security goals. First recognition of defeat, then a path to stability.

One of the most persistent errors in how antisemitism is discussed is the belief that it flows from ideology – that antisemitism is something generated by the Left, or the Right, or Islamism, depending on who is misbehaving at a given moment. History suggests something more unsettling.

Antisemitism is not only downstream of ideology. It is portable.

Across centuries, antisemitism has shown a remarkable ability to detach itself from one philosophical framework and reattach to another, reshaping its language while preserving its structure. It borrows the moral vocabulary of whatever movement it inhabits, presents itself as principled critique rather than inherited prejudice, and offers radicals a ready-made explanation for why the world is broken – and who is to blame.

Anti-Zionism has become one of antisemitism’s most effective modern vehicles precisely because it allowed ancient tropes to be rebranded as contemporary politics. What we are witnessing today, as right-wing antisemites increasingly adopt the language of left-wing and Arab anti-Zionism, is not a novelty. It is a recurrence.

And the history that produced it is far more entangled than our political categories allow.

For most of modern history, Zionism had nothing to do with left-wing antisemitism. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century leftist antisemitism was rooted in Enlightenment secularism, early socialist thought, and misdirected anti-capitalism. Jews were cast not as nationalists or colonizers, but as embodiments of abstraction, money, cosmopolitanism, and bourgeois exploitation – obstacles to the realization of a rational and egalitarian society.

Marx’s On the Jewish Question treated Judaism itself as a metaphor for capitalism. Proudhon and Bakunin were more explicit, describing Jews as parasitic, conspiratorial, and socially corrosive. This was what August Bebel famously called “the socialism of fools” – a critique of capitalism that replaced systemic analysis with scapegoating.

Zionism, when it appeared at all in left-wing discourse, was typically dismissed as a bourgeois distraction from class struggle. It was not yet the organizing metaphor it would later become.

European-style antisemitism begins circulating in the Arab East in the nineteenth century, carried by colonial penetration, missionary activity, and European education networks. One early and concrete marker is the Damascus Affair of 1840, a blood libel modeled on European Christian accusations and actively escalated by a French consul. This was not an Islamic inheritance; it was a European import.

In the Arab world, Zionism was greeted with alarm, and they needed a philosophical framework to fight it especially for Western audiences. Christian antisemitism found particular resonance in some Arab Christian milieus, where exposure to European religious polemics, nationalism, and racialized discourse was often earliest and most intense. Early Palestinian nationalist journalism in the 1910s and intellectual leadership included a significant Christian Arab component, long before the era of Islamist mass mobilization.

By the early twentieth century, a hybrid vocabulary already existed – one in which European antisemitic motifs could be localized, repurposed, and politicized.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini did not start Palestinian antisemitism but he ran with it. Initially he placed it in the context of Islamism, claiming that Jews planned to attack Muslim holy places and raising funds based on that fantasy. The Mufti's antisemitism and anti-Zionism clearly predate his formal alliance with Nazi Germany. Where they came from is not reducible to a single source: local elite rivalries, imported European tropes, religious mobilization, and the dynamics of mandatory politics all played roles.

What Nazism provided was not the creation of his antisemitism, but its acceleration, systematization, and internationalization. Fascist and Nazi ideology offered him a global explanatory framework, material resources, and a language of total struggle. His alliance with the Axis was opportunistic, ideological, and mutually reinforcing – but it built on pre-existing foundations.

This pattern – local antisemitic motifs fused with external ideological systems – repeats again and again.

The most consequential transformation came after the Holocaust.

In the West, overt antisemitism became morally radioactive. In the Soviet sphere, it was re-engineered. Stalin’s campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans,” followed by the Doctors’ Plot and the Slánský trials, performed a decisive maneuver: they translated classic antisemitic tropes – conspiracy, dual loyalty, elite domination – into the language of anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism.

Jews were no longer targeted as Jews, but as Zionists, Western agents, and subversive elites.

This framework was exported aggressively. Soviet propaganda recast Israel as a racist, colonial outpost of American empire, a narrative that spread through Eastern Europe, the Arab world, and Western leftist movements. Anti-Zionism became a way to say what could no longer be said openly.

The Western Left’s embrace of decolonial theory in the 1960s and 1970s created a powerful point of convergence.

Third-Worldism reframed global politics as a struggle between colonizer and colonized. After the Six-Day War, Israel was reclassified – often abruptly and without historical nuance – from post-genocide refuge to imperial aggressor. Arab nationalist narratives, Soviet anti-Zionism, and New Left ideology fused into a single moral grammar.

All the antisemitic and anti-Zionist tropes converged. Concepts such as settler-colonialism, indigeneity erasure, racialized power, and structural domination – developed in other contexts – were retrofitted to the Jewish case, often by erasing Jewish history altogether. Older antisemitic tropes survived the translation intact, rebranded as structural critique.

Within the Palestinian movement itself, ideological incoherence was not a weakness but a feature.

Secular Marxist groups like the PFLP and Islamist movements like Hamas routinely cooperate, coordinate attacks, and avoid mutual criticism. Yasser Arafat mastered the art of balancing Islamists and leftists under a single nationalist umbrella. Palestinian nationalism subordinated theology and ideology alike to the primacy of anti-Zionism.

This mattered far beyond the Middle East. It taught Western activists that Islamism was not an obstacle to leftist solidarity, but a legitimate partner in “resistance.” It normalized silence about illiberalism, Islamist antisemitism, and violence in the name of unity.

Today's antisemitism on the Right is different from previous, crude neo-Nazi forms. Contemporary right-wing antisemites have discovered that left-wing and Arab anti-Zionist rhetoric offers moral camouflage. Language about apartheid, genocide, settler-colonialism, and global elites allows them to recycle older claims about Jewish power while borrowing the credibility of human-rights discourse.

This is not accidental. David Duke openly praised left-wing critiques of the “Israel lobby” for giving his views respectability. Neo-Nazi outlets have long cited progressive anti-Zionist publications as evidentiary support. More recent figures have simply made the synthesis explicit. And the desire for solidarity trumps ideology - when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 in Israel proper, it characterized it as an attack on "settlements" and the Left immediately dropped any pretense of differentiating between Israel's pre-1967 borders and "occupation" to legitimize Hamas' position.

The ideological content barely matters anymore. Antisemitism adapts itself to whatever language will pass.

This is why the Left/Right binary fails so badly as an explanatory framework.

Antisemitism is not a consequence of ideological error so much as a reusable narrative technology – a way of personifying abstraction, assigning moral blame, and repurposing innate antisemitism as a moral position. It thrives wherever movements need an omnipotent villain who is both inside and outside the system.

Sometimes that villain is capitalist.
Sometimes colonial.
Sometimes globalist.
Sometimes Zionist.

The labels change. The structure does not.

The current moment feels novel because the alliances feel strange: “anti-woke” conservatives echoing decolonial slogans, white nationalists waving Palestinian flags, leftists defending the indefensible to preserve solidarity. But this is not a rupture. It is a recurrence.

Antisemitism has always been a shared underground passage between radical movements. When one entrance collapses, another opens.

The tragedy is not merely that Jews keep finding themselves at the center of other people’s moral dramas. It is that societies keep mistaking the costume for the cause – congratulating themselves for opposing the wrong version of an ancient hatred while unknowingly reproducing its logic in a new dialect.

History does not absolve either side. It indicts both – repeatedly.

And it leaves us with a sobering conclusion: antisemitism is never re-invented. It is translated.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Chris Langan supposedly took an IQ test in the 1980s where he says he scored the highest score ever, giving him an IQ of between 190-210, dwarfing Einstein. (Langan cheated - the test is meant to be taken once, and his first score did not rank him nearly as high, so he took it again under a pseudonym - but he already knew the questions!)

Last week he published this antisemitic screed:

Q: (Son of East Anglia @ThatDandy 8h) “Who are the banksters?”

A: The banksters pointed themselves out long ago. International banking has been ruled by the same crowd for at least two centuries and arguably much longer.

The current era of global usury began when Nathan Rothschild employed subterfuge and deception to gain control of the British and then the European economies in the early 1800s. The names of the Rothschilds and their allies have figured prominently in banking ever since. These people have undeniably been responsible for developing and promulgating Zionism and World Communism (they funded Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolshevik Revolution) while eroding traditional Western culture and especially Christianity, which they have now thoroughly subverted and oxymoronically transformed into "Christian Zionism" (this is an oxymoron because Christianity and Zionism have not been properly reconciled and cannot agree on a common metaphysical framework in which reconciliation is possible).

Money is power, and Zionist bankers have a global money monopoly. Obviously, this gives them a power monopoly. They founded the UN, the center of their global occupation government, in 1945, and the State of Israel in 1948, which has no historical continuity with biblical Israel but officially identifies itself with Ashkenazi Jews from Western Asia and Eastern Europe as “the Jewish state”. That’s how tiny newcomer Israel obtained its own seat in the Ashkenazi global government - the so-called “UN”, another Rothschild creation - and became a national facade for the Central Bankers. It gives them sovereign nation status, an exigent political constituency that obediently bobs up and down on command like a synchronized yoyo team, a ready supply of human shields for geopolitical exploitation, and a nuclear stockpile for destroying the world should Israel's "right to exist" ever be threatened.

The banksters control the EU and have been behind exclusively nonwhite mass Third World migration to all and only Western (White) nations for over 60 years. going all the way back to the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965. All of the UN NGOs sneaking exclusively nonwhite Third World rejects into Western nations operate under their aegis; Western Civilization is a global achievement that only a filthy-rich “global government” can destroy. This agenda was never exposed to a popular vote in any of the nations on which it was forced. It is sometimes called “White Genocide” due to its destructive effect on White health and fertility by the constant demoralization, impoverishment, and general abuse of Western majorities and the systematic transfer of their resources to reproductively incontinent demographic invaders genetically maladapted, and therefore utterly destructive, to Western Civilization.

These days, the most powerful bankers still count themselves as dedicated Zionists. This is why no global bankers ever speak out strongly against Zionism - it would amount to career suicide and worse. Today, many influential bankers are also explicitly associated with an extraordinarily dangerous organization called the World Economic Forum or WEF, the world's foremost hotbed of corporate incest and conspiracy central to the global corporatocracy that dominates virtually every secular government in the world. Through the central banks, NGOs like the WEF, and investment funds like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, they already dominate the global economy and global politics. The high-level collusion of these entities is obvious and therefore undeniable. While they are all squarely under the thumb of the banksters, anyone denying it is immediately accused of being a fool, a liar, or a “conspiracy theorist”.

This situation is exacerbated by the apparent conviction of the Ziobanksters that they have insuperable moral, logical, economic, and scientific arguments to justify White Genocide, and that every Jewish person in the world must therefore agree with them (thus, their weird notion that every Jew is a necessarily a Zionist). In fact, they have nothing of the kind, never did, and never will. They simply hate White people and want the world all to themselves, as we are constantly reminded by their more outspoken frontmen and more hateful members of the rabbinate. The mere sight of a Christian cross prompts them to scream about the separation of church and state even as they erect garishly lit menorahs on the White House lawn and do everything in their power to sacrifice Christianity and the descendants of its followers to the undying hatred that burns in their overfed bellies.

So, the self-proclaimed smartest man in the world believes debunked antisemitic stories (the Nathan Rothschild at Waterloo story is a myth, the Rothschilds didn't fund the Bolshevik Revolution, "bankers" didn't found the UN, the Khazar theory is a joke.) Besides the fact that Langan is clearly a racist and an antisemite himself, as the last sentence shows, throwing around stereotypes about fat rich non-white Jews (apparently, the banks are controlled by Chabad) hating good White Christians.

Who can solve this terrible problem of Jewish control of the world? Why, the answer is obvious:

James Fisher @JamesFi07112632
The problem has been clearly and repeatedly identified. What is the solution?

Chris Langan @RealChrisLangan
I've answered this question repeatedly and don't have the time to keep repeating myself. Simply choose the right leader. That would be me, period. Know someone better? Then trot him out and let's find out who's who.

Maybe he has some sort of specific intelligence, I have no idea. But intelligence has precious little to do with knowledge, and it is not a shield against believing and spreading stupidity, bigotry and conspiracy theories.

I can say one thing: true intelligence is always paired with humility. The people who want to run the world are never the people who you want to run the world.

This joker is not intelligent by any reasonable definition.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Car chases Jewish teens in Melbourne, driver yells "Heil Hitler!" (video)

From Australia's News.Com.AU:

In a terrifying series of events caught on CCTV on Monday night, a group of Jewish boys is followed by a white ute on the corner of Glen Eira Road and Hotham Street in St Kilda East.

The boys, all aged in their teens, were repeatedly harassed by the ute’s occupants who reportedly threatened them with violence and yelled “Heil Hitler”.

In a bid to escape the threat, the boys can be seen rushing across the road, with the car narrowly missing one of them as it performs a swift U-turn.

The vehicle reportedly circled the teens for about five minutes, harassing them as they tried to move on.

The teens are on the far corner of the CCTV footage.

This is more of that "Jewish privilege" we keep hearing about.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/19 Links Pt2: MLK was clear: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism; Sydney massacre was a warning for the world; Emily Damari on one year of freedom and those who did not return

From Ian:

Simon Sebag Montefiore warns of ‘devalued’ anti-racist language and threats to Holocaust memory

The celebrated historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has issued a striking warning about the devaluation of anti-racist language in contemporary discourse, arguing that terms such as “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are now frequently manipulated to serve agendas running counter to their original intent.

Delivering the keynote speech at the Holocaust Education Trust’s event in Parliament, Montefiore observed:“Words are important—as we learned last week, the people behind the banning of a Jewish MP from his school because of his Jewishness were a cabal of teaching unions and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) coordinators who constantly repeat the language of anti-racism.

“We exist in a struggle where words have often come to mean their very opposite. In that case, and others, diversity came to mean discrimination, equity, injustice, inclusive, exclusion.

“And as it turns out, every bigot is a proud anti-racist to their bones. Every antisemite is against antisemitism, and naturally, everybody is against the Holocaust and genocide.”

At Monday evening’s event—held to mark this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations—the author warned that Holocaust memory is “in peril” and under attack from new forms of antisemitic distortion and ideological abuse.

Also among the speakers were Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Holocaust survivor Annick Lever, and several of the charity’s young ambassadors. HET’s chief executive, Karen Pollock, pointedly addressed recent concerns about the state of Holocaust education, stating: “Despite challenges, our experience at the Holocaust Educational Trust is that we’re working with hundreds more schools since October 7th,” following earlier newspaper reports suggesting Shoah education was being snubbed by many schools since the Hamas attacks.

In his main address, Montefiore recounted witnessing repeat protests outside the part Israeli-owned Miznon restaurant in Notting Hill, near his home.

“I hate to say it reminded me of Kristallnacht in Notting Hill Gate,” he said. “I came across a restaurant almost besieged by about 60 screaming activists who were referring specifically to the Holocaust, to the genocide, and applying this to an innocent restaurant, British owned, though with an Israeli connection, that they were specifically trying to drive out of Britain and trying to drive out of the neighborhood, trying to destroy a small business by terrorizing passers by, people going to the restaurant, and the owners of the restaurant.”

Oren Kessler: The Bad History of ‘Palestine 36’ An Oscar short-listed film, funded by Qatar, Turkey, and the BBC, rewrites the past to serve a modern political fantasy

And yet the film’s gravest failing may be depriving the Jews of a voice. I don’t mean metaphorically; I mean there are precisely two words spoken by a Jew, in any language, in the entire film.

In fact, Jews appear on-screen only twice. Early in the film, a Jewish figure is briefly ushered to a microphone at the inauguration of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. Later, Jewish immigrants are seen in the distance, silently toiling behind a kibbutz wall.

And that’s it. For a film centered on an Arab revolt against Jews, it’s a glaring, flagrant omission.

It would have been easy for the screenwriters to have included two stock Jewish characters: The “bad” Jew who is arrogant, land-greedy, and patronizing toward Arabs, and the “good” one who respects their culture, learns their language, and is willing to limit Jewish immigration. I suspect that behind this choice lies the deep-rooted Palestinian and wider Arab taboo against “normalization” of Israelis—in this case, even before they were Israelis.

Nonetheless, wishing something away doesn’t make it so. Like it or not, the Jews were there, and their continued arrival was the key driver of the revolt. Portraying the rebellion as directed primarily against British imperialism (with the Jews as the silent beneficiary thereof) is historical malpractice.

The film’s last quarter is a crescendo of British brutality that bears only a patchy resemblance to the historical record. Soldiers detonate a home despite knowing an elderly couple is in their bed, embracing as they await the end. Wingate shoots a civilian in the head after gathering the townspeople to watch. In the climax, troops force civilians onto a bus and force it to drive over a landmine. Among the dead is a Christian priest whose young son then kills a British soldier in revenge. It’s essentially the film’s only moment in which blood is spilled by Arab hands.

The British have much to answer for in Palestine—a handful of well-documented atrocities, like that at al-Bassa, are amply described in my book. They indeed demolished homes during the revolt, just not with people inside. Wingate did inflict collective punishment on uncooperative villages. But there is no evidence of him ever ordering an execution, much less conducting one himself, nor of the British murdering a priest (or imam), nor of any Christian Arabs (let alone children) taking up arms against them.

Only in the final credits, and only in minuscule type, does Palestine 36 concede that the movie is a work of fiction, merely “inspired by actual events and characters.” Such a disclaimer should have appeared prominently at the outset, not buried where few viewers would notice, although that would erroneously suggest that the spirit if not the details of the Arab uprising of 1936–1939 had been captured. It has not.

As publicly funded British institutions, the BFI and BBC Film should have insisted on transparency. Their failure to do so places them uncomfortably close to the film’s other state-backed co-producers, in Turkey and Qatar, which reliably promote their governments’ harmful, extremist agendas in the region. The omission raises an obvious question: whether the lack of candor reflects more than oversight, and instead a shared comfort with reshaping the historical record to suit a contemporary agenda.

All the world’s a stage, a British dramatist once wrote, and nowhere more so than the Holy Land. But it is an affront to history that a portrait of a revolt against Jews should treat the latter as silent props or erase them altogether. However the filmmakers feel about Jewish immigration, land purchase, and nation-building in mid-’30s Palestine, these too are part of the history. These too are “actual events” performed by “actual characters” in the century-long drama still playing out between the river and the sea.

From Archetype to Libel: The Misinterpretation of Amalek in Genocide Accusations

Conclusion: From Archetype to Libel
The controversy surrounding the modern invocation of Amalek in Israeli discourse, especially after the October 7 massacre, highlights a fundamental conflict between internal Jewish cultural memory and external political misinterpretation. In Jewish legal and historical tradition, the term has long been regarded as a symbolic command rather than a literal one. Amalek is thus viewed as a metaphysical archetype of unprovoked, existential evil and baseless hatred, which appears throughout history in figures like Haman and the Nazis. When Prime Minister Netanyahu used the term, he engaged in a profound act of typological memory (Zakhor), placing the unprecedented trauma of October 7 within the ongoing struggle between cosmic good and evil. By imposing this literalist, hostile interpretation, detractors are engaging in defamation of the Jewish state.

Post-Script: The Anti-Zionist Echo Chamber
The rejection of the present article by Analyse & Kritik, which published the original article by Azzam, serves as a sobering case study in the circular nature of modern anti-Zionist scholarship. Rather than engaging with the provided evidence, the peer-review process revealed a systemic refusal to permit any narrative that challenges the “genocide” label, treating the accusation not as a hypothesis to be tested but as an absolute truth. Central to this failure was the reviewers’ total omission of the vast body of internal Jewish interpretive traditions—sources that explicitly reject or spiritualize the Amalek archetype. By failing to engage with these central points, the reviewers maintained a closed system that dismissed dissenting data as “denial,” thereby precluding genuine academic exchange.

The review process appeared driven by a palpable ideological bias that favored political positioning over substantive analysis. For instance, one reviewer asserted, without providing a shred of evidence, that for “any Israeli ear,” the mention of Amalek carries an immediate association with complete annihilation. This claim was made while simultaneously ignoring the centuries of rabbinic legal tradition cited in the article—such as the rulings of the Sages and Maimonides—that explicitly state that the literal commandment against Amalek is inapplicable today. Furthermore, the use of charged, ad hominem language—specifically labeling the arguments as those of “Netanyahu apologists”—reveals a hostile environment where scholarship is judged by its political utility rather than its factual merit.

Ultimately, this experience highlights the intellectual “incest” inherent in much of the anti-Zionist academic ecosystem. The editor’s response, which took it for granted that Israel has committed “horrible” crimes and demanded that any publication must include “commenting on the destruction of Gaza,” functions as a form of gatekeeping. By dismissing the concept of “self-defense” as a “conventional cliché” and refusing to engage with the primary and secondary sources presented, the reviewers merely confirmed that their objective is not the pursuit of truth. Instead, they serve to protect an echo chamber in which the same scholars quote each other ad nauseam, effectively weaponizing the peer-review process to perpetuate the very libel this article seeks to expose.