Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

03/03 Links Pt2: Antizionism fuels the hatred of Jews; The Politics of the 'Good Jew'; This Purim, think of the 10,000 Jews who cannot celebrate

Persia is now Iran, and they have been plotting to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth for decades. They built an empire of proxies across the Middle East, from Iraq and Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — planning to circle the Jewish Nation in a ring of fire that would be our ultimate destruction.

And then came October 7. For one day, the Gazan invasion brought the Holocaust to Israel. With deep understanding of history, the invasion was methodically planned to recreate the deepest Jewish horror in modern history — using fire, torture, and terror to rip families apart and not only slaughter but break the spirit of the Nation of Israel.

But we did not break.

The Nation of Israel fought back. And the nations of the world expressed horror at the death toll of the enemy who had tried to destroy us. And even some Jews joined the cries of pity for those who wished to slaughter Jewish men, women, and children.

We retrieved all of our hostages, dealt debilitating blows to all the proxies, and even struck the head of the snake — Iran.

But we were stopped before the job was completed.

And today we know that the ayatollahs of Iran are trying to reignite their ring of fire — their nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and their proxies.

And they slaughtered thousands of their own people who rebelled against the evil regime.

President Trump, like the king of ancient Persia, made decrees. He promised the demonstrators of Iran, “Help is on the way.” He told the world that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles that threaten other nations. And he built up unprecedented military might, ready to be unleashed on Iran.

But the ideologues of Iran will not — cannot — change their murderous ideology, because to do so would mean rejecting their identity. Like Haman, their one true desire is to destroy all of the Jews.

And they will never stop unless they are made to stop.

And now the world is waiting. What will President Trump decide? And what is he waiting for?

Iran is an existential threat to the Nation of Israel, a danger to the people of Iran, and the cause of enormous suffering around the world.

And now, as I write, the first siren goes off — not because there are incoming missiles, but because the attack has begun on Iran and we are to be ready for whatever might come next.

It is almost as if President Trump was waiting for Purim. Perhaps the man who writes his name in gold on towers he built knows that the stories of the Jews last longer than any building.

Happy Purim. There will be no celebrations now, but hopefully, when this is over, there will be. It is time for the horror Iran has inflicted on the world to be turned upside down and become a time of rejoicing and freedom — an opportunity for a better future for Israel, the Middle East, and the world.

Antizionism fuels the hatred of Jews

Denying Jews the rights afforded to all other peoples is not criticism, it is bigotry. Allowing Israel to be defined by libels rather than to be appraised along the same lines as all other states is not a political opinion, it is discrimination. And this discrimination is causing clear and present harm.

Indeed, the ideology responsible for this harm continues to not only be treated as legitimate political expression but applauded as brave dissent against a conspiratorial conception of Jewish power. This is how antizionism functions as a mask: by wrapping anti-Jewish hostility in the moral language of the day, it transforms prejudice into principle. As it has been throughout history, the targeting of Jews is repackaged as moral necessity.

For the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism is not a political position but an expression of peoplehood and self-determination – an indispensable and inextricable part of our Jewish identity. Targeting “Zionists” is a socially permissible way to target Jews, while offering plausible deniability.

Most institutions still refuse to make this connection.

Naming antizionism would require institutions to confront a belief system they have treated as morally legitimate, despite its discriminatory outcomes. Until they do, universities will continue to enforce anti-racism codes while tolerating antizionist “activism” that systematically marginalises Jewish students. Legal institutions will affirm equality before the law while permitting rhetoric that casts Jewish collective identity as inherently criminal. Politicians will condemn antisemitism in principle while remaining silent about Its contemporary permutation.

The upcoming Royal Commission has an opportunity to change this, and that must start with naming antizionism as the key driver of the anti-Jewish hostility now gripping Australia.

This “elephant in the room” will not disappear through silence. It must be named. And once named, it must be confronted. Otherwise, Jewish Australians will continue to hear solemn assurances that antisemitism is unacceptable — while watching the extremist and bigoted ideology that fuels it remain comfortably within the bounds of respectable debate.

The Politics of the 'Good Jew'

Historically, rulers could say: “I am not anti-Jewish; I employ one.” Today, movements can say: “We are not antisemitic; Jews support us.” The structure may be different, but the function looks strikingly similar. Just as in the past, this arrangement does not necessarily protect the broader Jewish community.

After the October 7th pogrom, when antisemitic incidents surged globally, it did not matter whether a Jew was Zionist, anti-Zionist, Left-wing, Right-wing, religious, or secular. Synagogues required security. Jewish schools increased guards. Students hid their Stars of David. The mob does not distinguish between court factions.

The medieval Court Jew believed that his access to power insulated him from the prejudices of the street. That turned out to be dead wrong — and deadly. The modern Jewish figure who aligns with dominant anti-Israel narratives may believe that proximity to cultural legitimacy offers similar insulation. They will learn, soon enough, that antisemitism is never that discriminating. Movements that chant “From the river to the sea” do not append footnotes clarifying which Jews are exempt. Conspiracy theories about “Zionist influence” do not pause to verify individual ideological credentials.

When Jewish identity itself is framed as structurally powerful, morally suspect, or politically malignant, internal Jewish disagreements offer little shield. There is a difficult tension here: Jewish tradition values debate, the Talmud is built on dissent, Zionism itself emerged from fierce ideological argument.

The problem is not that Jews disagree. It is that non-Jewish institutions selectively reward Jewish dissent that undermines Jewish collective security, while dismissing Jewish concerns about antisemitism as self-serving. That dynamic replicates something deeply old: Jews are most welcome when they reassure power, least welcome when they assert communal vulnerability.

One of Zionism’s central promises was the end of court politics. It would see Jewish policemen put Jewish criminals in Jewish jails. No more pleading before princes or dependence on elite favor. Sovereignty meant self-definition. Security meant self-defense. In the Diaspora, of course, Jews remain minorities. Engagement with broader society is inevitable and necessary. But the temptation to seek validation through disavowal is not new.

History shows that the court is never permanent. Legitimacy borrowed from power is conditional, and acceptance predicated on denunciation is fragile. The court will recalculate when the winds shift. The question for our moment is not whether Jews may criticize Israel, but whether Jewish identity itself is becoming contingent on ideological compliance — rewarded when it serves dominant narratives, suspect when it resists them.

We have seen this movie before, and many remakes. None have been good.

03/03 Links Pt1: Iran’s Irrational Self-Destruction; Spencer: Ending A Campaign Of Violence Is Not Starting A War; Britain Walks a Mile in Israel’s Shoes

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Iran’s Irrational Self-Destruction

Vladimir Jabotinsky once said of the role of anti-Semitism in World War II: “The Jewish tragedy is, of course, not the microbe which has caused this war. It is only the culture-medium in which the microbe has grown to maturity.”

The same might be said of Iran’s quest to destroy the Jews at the expense of its own sustainability.

Jabotinsky wouldn’t live to see how right he was—in this, as was usually the case, the Zionist intellectual was a prophet. As the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer noted about the Nazis: “The killing was totally anti-pragmatic, anti-modern, anti-capitalistic, anti-cost-effective. They murdered the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto although they were producing essential goods for the German Army; they did the same in Bialystok and elsewhere.” In 1942, the Germans “took some 40,000 or so Jews from the ghettoes near [a] planned road and established slave labor camps for them to build it. And as they were building the road, these Jews were killed.”

Yaron Pasher tried to quantify it: “had the Germans taken the 3,000 trains that were used during the war for the Final Solution plus 2,000 trains of booty to move troops to the front (whether the Eastern Front or the Western Atlantic Wall), the Wehrmacht could have in general transferred approximately seventy-one divisions — namely, about five armies totaling just about half a million troops with full gear, including the horses and other pack animals on which German logistics were based.”

I know people are tired of Nazi analogies, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ayatollahs in Iran were similarly beset with, and blinded by, a self-defeating obsession with the Jews.

To Iran, nuclear capability would give the regime two different ways to threaten a new Holocaust: a bomb itself, obviously, but also a nuclear umbrella that would give it immunity from outside attack and enable it to encircle the Jewish state in a “ring of fire” in perpetuity, making life in Israel increasingly difficult, squeezing Israel’s economy, and eroding its territory by making its existing borders indefensible.

The rallying of Western allies committed to nonproliferation used several means to derail Iran’s pursuit of a bomb. One of those means was economic: the policy of “maximum pressure.” President Trump made such pressure a priority, bleeding the Iranian economy with sanctions. The administration itself estimated that by mid-2019, the pressure campaign had cost Iran $10 billion in lost oil exports alone.

The President Fixes a Historical Mistake

President Trump is making a long-overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been, both in ideology and in action, an enemy of the U.S. Washington tolerated its provocations, fearing regional instability or a military quagmire; or they convinced themselves that the Iranians, despite their fanatical rhetoric, were rational actors who could be bargained with.

Especially after the failure of U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inadvertently strengthened Tehran's hand in the region, Iran came to be seen as a problem the U.S. would have to live with, for good and for ill.

The basic logic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was that Washington should recognize Iran's aspirations as legitimate, so that the mullahs would come to feel they had a stake in maintaining the regional order. American allies, in turn, would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran. This meant restraining U.S. allies from taking their own steps to check Iran's growing regional power.

The fatal flaw in the scheme was in misunderstanding Iran's motivations. The mullah's terror regime wanted what it had always wanted and said it wanted over and over, which was to destroy the U.S.-led order in the region, wipe Israel off the map, and overthrow the Gulf Arab states in a global Islamic revolution to be headquartered in Tehran. The U.S.'s accommodating policy allowed Iran to build a fearsome regional empire. This made the Oct. 7 attacks possible. President Trump is making a long-overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been, both in ideology and in action, an enemy of the U.S. Washington tolerated its provocations, fearing regional instability or a military quagmire; or they convinced themselves that the Iranians, despite their fanatical rhetoric, were rational actors who could be bargained with.

Especially after the failure of U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inadvertently strengthened Tehran's hand in the region, Iran came to be seen as a problem the U.S. would have to live with, for good and for ill.

The basic logic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was that Washington should recognize Iran's aspirations as legitimate, so that the mullahs would come to feel they had a stake in maintaining the regional order. American allies, in turn, would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran. This meant restraining U.S. allies from taking their own steps to check Iran's growing regional power.

The fatal flaw in the scheme was in misunderstanding Iran's motivations. The mullah's terror regime wanted what it had always wanted and said it wanted over and over, which was to destroy the U.S.-led order in the region, wipe Israel off the map, and overthrow the Gulf Arab states in a global Islamic revolution to be headquartered in Tehran. The U.S.'s accommodating policy allowed Iran to build a fearsome regional empire. This made the Oct. 7 attacks possible.

The Iran Endgame

On Sunday, Trump disclosed that he had agreed to talk with the regime and that they may now be more amenable to a deal—whatever that means at this point. Aside from optics, it is unclear what benefits such a “deal” would have for the United States or its allies. Furthermore, we have no idea who the president has agreed to talk to, since, as he put it, “most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone.” Trump did not mention whether his “three very good candidates” for leadership in Iran are among the living. In fact, he later indicated that they were all dead: “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

A few hours before his Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump offered yet another set of options. He told a media outlet that he had several “off ramps”: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding.’”

Neither of those options is particularly promising, either, as they both could result in the same undesirable outcome: the survival of the IRGC. On the other hand, what Trump means by “take over the whole thing” is unclear. But, given that the president is not interested in an Iraq-style takeover, it seems likely that such a scenario would morph into some version of the “Venezuela option.”

A third, hybrid option would offer the worst of both worlds: a quick end to the campaign followed by a Venezuela scenario. Yet any scenario that involves rehabilitating figures such as Larijani, assuming he’s still alive, or other IRGC veterans, such as Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (who is also being promoted as a “Delcy” candidate), and lending renewed legitimacy to IRGC structures is clearly a terrible idea, for all the aforementioned reasons: It will lead to renewed IRGC control of the country, this time backed by the United States. A future Democratic administration would likely build on any such arrangement, including the removal of sanctions, to further strengthen an IRGC-led government, leading to a resurgence of the current regime under an American protective umbrella.

Given these options, and their negative likely outcomes, the preferable course of action is to continue to, first of all, destroy all critical nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure in Iran while continuing to decimate the IRGC’s command structure as far down as possible—not just on the military side, but also the “political” (including Larijani and Ghalibaf and others). This could be done over a reasonable amount of time. Then, as the president said in his speech, let the Iranians seize their moment and figure it out. No “taking it over” and no “Venezuela.” Kill our enemies, obliterate their command structures, annihilate their offensive capabilities, and go home.

Whether the president will decide on this course of action or choose one of the many available off-ramps or “deals” will become clear soon enough. To date, the U.S.-Israeli joint campaign has been a model of operational integration and division of labor. But given the existing uncertainty, it behooves Israel—which, as of Sunday, has claimed to have eliminated some 40 senior figures on the clerical, military, and IRGC sides—to intensify the pace of targeting the command structure even beyond the first tier and to include “political” figures like Larijani (who reportedly has been targeted), Ghalibaf, and the rest of the country’s leadership cohort. The fewer such figures the Iranian opposition, however fractured, has to contend with, and the fewer experienced cadres it has to draw on for support, the more successful attempts to build something new in Iran are likely to be. If the opposition fails, a weakened IRGC is better than a stronger IRGC, especially one backed by the United States.

That the Iran regime, whose hands are soaked in American blood, has lived this long is a long-standing affront to the United States. Since 1981, the survival of the regime has emboldened American foes throughout the world while threatening the security interests of the United States and its regional allies. It allowed the regime to kill hundreds of Americans as well as hundreds of thousands of people throughout the region, and to murder its opponents on the soil of free countries around the world. Instead of putting an end to these malign activities, successive American administrations have kept Iran’s terrorist regime on life support, with Barack Obama even briefly elevating it to allied status. Its destruction would be a sizable contribution to world peace—while serving the American national interest. That alone should be enough.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed reporters on March 2, 2026, he laid out a strategic case that deserves more attention than the absurd "This proves Israel dragged America into war!" noise surrounding it. The core argument isn't complicated, but its implications are stark: the United States (and Israel, and moderate Arab states) faced a narrowing window, and every month of inaction made the eventual reckoning worse.

Modern missile defense rests on an uncomfortable economic reality. Shooting down a ballistic missile costs far more than building one. Iran's short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles run somewhere between $100,000 and $2 million per unit to produce. The interceptors needed to stop them — Patriot PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, SM-3 — run $4 million to $36 million apiece. And you typically need more than one interceptor per incoming missile to achieve reliable kills.

This means it costs between 5 to 70 times more to shoot down a missile than it cost to build one.

If it was merely economics, perhaps this is not a strong enough argument. But this is only part of the story.

Rubio put it plainly:

"They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 [missiles] a month... compared to the six or seven interceptors that can be built [per month by the US]."

One hundred offensive missiles monthly against six or seven interceptors. That's not a defense gap: it's a math problem with only one feasible solution.

Rubio introduced a concept that should be central to every discussion of this operation: the "line of immunity." This is the point at which Iran's arsenal becomes so large, so distributed, and so capable of inflicting retaliatory damage that no government — American, Israeli, or otherwise — can absorb the political cost of striking Iran's nuclear program.

"This operation needed to happen... because Iran, in a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity—meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage."

And then the key line:

"Look at the damage they're doing now. Imagine a year from now. This had to happen no matter what."

This is the central argument, and it holds regardless of how one feels about the timing or the administration making the decision. A regime producing 100 missiles monthly, under sanctions, while already striking airports, embassies, and civilian infrastructure, would in 12–18 months have amassed an arsenal capable of making any military response politically and strategically untenable. And defense would be, literally, impossible.

Israel's Iron Beam, being deployed against Hezbollah and Hamas rockets and drones. dramatically reduces the cost per shot - but it cannot be used against Iran's ballistic missile arsenal.

The strategic calculus would be serious enough if we were dealing with a government that restricted its targeting to military assets. We are not.

"The United States will not deliberately target civilians. The Iranians, on the other hand — I'm sure you've seen it — [are] hitting embassies, airports, and all [civilian] infrastructure... They are deliberately targeting millions. You know why? They are a terroristic regime. They sponsor terrorism."

This matters enormously. Iran's willingness to strike civilian infrastructure tells you exactly how they intend to use a larger arsenal. A regime constrained by proportionality norms or international law is one thing. An Islamist government that makes decisions, as Rubio noted, "on the basis of theology, apocalyptic" reasoning is another.

An Iran holding 2,000–5,000 ballistic missiles — the stockpile projections for 2027 if production continued unchecked — with a demonstrated willingness to hit civilian targets and a theology that treats martyrdom as a feature rather than a bug is not a deterrable actor in any conventional sense.

All of the above exists without even considering Iran's nuclear program. Rubio continued:

"Why does Iran want those capabilities? What they've been trying to do for a long time is build a conventional weapons capability as a shield they can hide behind — meaning there would come a time where they have so many drones and so much damage that no one can do anything about the nuclear program. They are trying to put themselves in a place of immunity where the damage they can inflict will be so high that no one can do anything about their nuclear program or ambition."

This is the strategic architecture in full. The conventional missile buildup is not an end in itself — it's cover for the nuclear program. Once the conventional umbrella becomes impenetrable, Iran completes its nuclear development behind it, and deterrence collapses entirely. At that point, the region isn't just held hostage by ballistic missiles. It's held hostage by ballistic missiles pointed at it by a nuclear-armed apocalyptic regime.

Biding time is not an option. Every month without attacking Iran's ballistic missile program is a month with 100 new missiles aimed at US troops, moderate Arab nations and Israeli civilians - missiles that will be harder and harder to defend against to the point of impossibility in the near future.

Here is a case where "imminent threat" logic fails in international law. The threat is cumulative and, without military intervention, there is a foreseeable and irreversible tipping point.

Waiting is not prudence - it is suicide.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Academic book turning the Book of Esther into a story of Jewish genocide of "gentiles"

Sarojini Nadar’s Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther was released last year by Routledge. It takes a biblical story that begins with a legally sealed plan to exterminate every Jew in the Persian Empire and reframes it as a story about Jews wantonly killing Persians.

The interpretive lens is declared from the outset: Gaza. The book assumes Israel is committing genocide. That assumption then becomes the key for rereading Esther. The ancient text is retrofitted to match the contemporary accusation.

The first paragraphs of the book make it obvious that Nadar is shoehorning Esther into her hate for Israel:

As we've noted many times, Netanyahu's invocation of Amalek was in terms of remembering what they did, not annihilating them - two separate commandments.

The very premise of the book is false, based on a connection made by the author that has no basis in reality.

The Book of Esther is centered around a royal decree to “destroy, kill, and annihilate” the Jews — men, women, and children — on a single appointed day. The decree is sealed. Persian law does not allow it to be revoked.

That is the existential core of the story.

But in this reading, the moral focus is relocated to the end — to the 75,000 enemies killed when the Jews defend themselves from the would-be genocidaires That episode is elevated as the defining meaning of Esther. The extermination order against the Jews is a minor point barely mentioned.

In this book, Haman’s defining feature is not his genocidal antisemitism. It is his genealogy. He is an “Agagite,” linked to Amalek — a people once marked for destruction in earlier biblical texts. The Book of Esther definitely makes the link, but not in terms of destroying Amalek but in terms of the irrational hatred of the Jewish people that Amalek represents, both in the Torah and in Esther.

Any Jewish schoolchild immediately associates Amalek with unmitigated evil. That is Esther's use of "Agagite." His genocidal desire is based on one fact - that one Jew refuse to bow down to him, just as the Torah emphasizes that Amalek attacked the Israelites for no reason except hate, ambushing the Israelites from the rear where the weakest and slowest were trailing behind, when there was no threat. This is the paradigm of antisemitism.

Instead of noting that obvious analogy between Haman and Amalek, Nadar creates a completely different analogy -one based on the idea that Jews are always the guilty ones.

She even dismisses Haman's decree to murder every Jewish man, woman and child as a "literary exaggeration."

But not Jews trying to survive. That is not exaggeration - that is "genocide." The violence against Haman and his allies is read not primarily as self-defense against extermination, but as Jews enacting a divine mandate to annihilate an ancient enemy. Haman the exterminator becomes Haman the theologically marked victim in her retelling.

The Book of Esther says repeatedly that the Jews struck “those who sought their harm.” It specifies that in Susa, 500 men were killed. It emphasizes three separate times that the Jews did not take plunder — despite being legally allowed to do so.

The narrative does not describe Jews slaughtering Persian civilians indiscriminately. It does not narrate women and children being killed by Jewish forces. It does not present expansion, conquest, or domination. In other words, by no definition can the Jews' self-defensive actions be called genocidal - unless that is how you look at Jews in general. Yet Nadar repeatedly says that the Jews killed 75,000 “gentiles,” positioning self defense as a baseless hatred of anyone who is not Jewish.

Nadar denies any antisemitism. Yet her warped worldview prompts her to she even twist the Biblical account of Amalek itself to try to justify its actions as either self defense or pre-emptive defense of Canaan:

She's just "asking questions." Just like Holocaust deniers, just like Candace Owens. Instead of asking why people have hated Jews irrationally for the past 2,500 years, she asks what the Jews must have done to be hated.

In Esther, Jews are no longer a threatened minority fighting to live. They are the eternal aggressors. In the Torah, the Israelites are not newly freed slaves who are being led to liberation but an aggressive threat to the presumably peaceful Amalekites. In Gaza, Israel is not a state responding to violence or existential threat. It is the inheritor of a biblical annihilation script.

In all cases, Jewish self-defense becomes morally illegitimate by definition. Any exercise of force, even in response to extermination, is reframed as genocidal intent. And antisemitism, uniquely among all types of hate, is transformed into something that must be justified, somehow, because otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Nadar does something similar in her thesis that the Book of Esther connects the sexual subjugation of the king's harem with the Hebrew word herem, which can mean destruction. The words indeed are etymologically related, both denoting separation, but neither is used in Esther, yet Nadar uses this to connect the misogynistic behavior of a Persian king and the supposedly bloodthirsty Jews- she might as well connect Esther to the Arabic/Muslim word haram, forbidden, which also shares the same root word.

This book is moral inversion masquerading as scholarship. And it judges the Jews of Persia and even the Israelites through the same bigoted lens as it judges the Israeli Jews of today.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/02 Links: America’s Invaluable Ally; The death of a tyrant; Tehran’s traffic cameras allowed Israel to track Khamenei; Two more US servicemembers killed raising total to 6

From Ian:

Israeli President: "If Someone Rises to Kill You, Rise to Kill Him First"

Speaking at the site of an Iranian missile attack in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog thanked U.S. President Donald Trump "for his courage" and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "for the correct decision" in launching the strikes on Iran.

"We are united at this moment to defeat the enemy and bring about change," he said.

Israel is at war, "and in war, you must first take care of the home front and protect it, and second, attack and act with full force to defeat the enemy."

"If someone rises to kill you, rise to kill him first," he said, quoting the Talmud.

"It is our duty to be strong, resilient, and steadfast. We will get through this and move forward, and our children and grandchildren will one day be grateful for these moments."

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said, "I've never been prouder to be an Israeli and we will never apologize for what we are doing. I give my full backing to the government and its leader." "There is no left and no right. The entire people of Israel stand behind the [air force] pilots."

John Spencer: Iran's War on the United States Did Not Start Yesterday

Iran started a war against the U.S. in 1979. It has never stopped. The Islamic Republic defined itself in opposition to the U.S. and built its foreign policy around confrontation with America and its allies. During the Iraq War, Iranian-backed militias killed 603 U.S. service members. I know this personally. My soldiers and I faced their weapons. This was part of a deliberate strategy by Tehran to attack American forces. The campaign never ended.

In January 2020, Iran fired ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq. More than 100 American service members were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. Between October 2023 and early 2024, Iranian-backed militias conducted more than 170 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

At the same time, Iran has enriched uranium to levels far beyond civilian energy requirements. It has developed longer-range missile systems with capabilities that are not defensive in nature.

Diplomacy has been attempted repeatedly over decades. While talks proceeded, Iran continued to fund Hizbullah, Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Houthis. It continued to refine missiles. It continued enrichment. It continued attacks on Americans. At some point, a pattern must be acknowledged for what it is.

The question today is not whether Iran's war on the U.S. exists. It is whether the U.S. ends it. History suggests that when America fails to respond decisively to sustained aggression, the aggression grows. Americans have been targeted for 47 years. Enough.

The death of a tyrant

What he lacked in religious scholarship and charisma he made up for in ruthless political maneuvering. Alongside other hardline members of the clergy, he developed a tight-knit partnership with the IRGC. And so from the 1990s onwards, Khamenei’s reign was marked by an ever-tightening grip on civil society.

After reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami beat Khamenei’s choice in the 1997 elections, he launched a crackdown on even mild challenges to the status quo. He closed down newspapers, jailed key politicians and had his henchmen silence reformers. This pattern of responding to any internal challenge through brutal and increasingly lethal repression increased in intensity throughout his reign. He violently put down student protests in 1999; beat and shot demonstrators during unrest following the disputed 2009 election; and crushed large-scale, increasingly working-class protests with lethal force in 2019, killing hundreds.

The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, at the hands of the so-called morality police, prompted what were then the most widespread anti-regime protests of his rule. Khamenei responded by killing nearly 600 protesters and arresting more than 20,000. It turned out that was just a foretaste of what he was to visit on anti-regime protesters earlier this year. Officially, the Islamic Republic claims that just over 3,000 people were killed. External observers suggest the real death toll could be over 30,000.

The growth of popular Iranian opposition to the Islamic Republic is not a surprise. Iranians’ living standards have plummeted, and their freedoms crushed, under the reign of the two ayatollahs. The economy is shattered, state-level corruption rife and the most basic of civil liberties non-existent.

At the same time as the Iranian populace has been living in dire straits, Khamenei and his IRGC cronies have been relentlessly and expensively pursuing their Islamist mission abroad. They ploughed billions into supporting a network of Islamist militias – the so-called Axis of Resistance – across the Middle East. They invested an enormous amount of resources into the military and perhaps even more in pursuit of a nuclear-weapons capability. And all the while ordinary Iranians struggle to access water and electricity.

Right from the start, Khamenei was only too happy to neglect the lives of Iranians in the interests of violently promoting the Islamist mission abroad. With Iranian backing, Hezbollah detonated a truck bomb outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, killing four Israelis and 25 Argentinians, including children. It struck again in Buenos Aires in 1994, bombing a Jewish community centre, killing 85 people. That was just the start. Since the early 1990s, Iran has backed its proxies to the hilt in their transnational war against the supposedly Satanic forces of America and Israel. Countless lives have been lost and a region torn apart, as Khamenei’s Islamic regime expanded its reach into Iraq during the 2000s, and Syria and Yemen in the 2010s.

It’s possible to argue that the Islamic Republic’s war with the Great and Little Satans has now come home to roost. The current US-Israeli intervention is the latest, most dangerous phase of a conflict started by an Iranian proxy slaughtering hundreds of Israeli Jews over two years ago – Hamas’s pogrom on October 7. And it has now claimed the life of Khamenei himself. He has become the most significant fatality in a war he has done so much to stoke.

The February blizzard had been generous with the neighborhood and merciless with the shul roof. Three feet of snow, then ice, then — on Friday afternoon, two hours before Shabbos — a structural engineer named Phil Rosen stood in the parking lot of Congregation Limudei Avot, looked up at the social hall roof, and delivered his verdict with the grim efficiency of a doctor who has bad news and a waiting room full of patients.

"It's not safe," he said. "Not for an event. Not this week."

Rabbi David Horowitz stared at him. "The Purim party is Monday night."

Phil shrugged with the particular sympathy of a man who has delivered this kind of news before and knows there is nothing useful to add.

"How many people?" he asked.

"Two hundred and thirty. Plus walk-ins."

Phil looked at the roof again. "Yeah," he said. "No."

The theme had been set months ago: Mexico, in honor of President Claudia Sheinbaum, the first Jewish head of state Mexico had ever produced. The invitations were out. The sombreros had been ordered — forty-seven sombreros, non-refundable. A full klezmer-cumbia fusion band had been booked. The caterer had been instructed to go all in on Mexican food, including, at someone's specific insistence, salsa ordered by the gallon. The Sisterhood had been working on the decorations since January.

And now: no hall.

Rabbi Horowitz stood in the parking lot for a long moment after Phil left. Then he went inside, picked up the phone, and called his wife.

Rebbetzin Devorah Horowitz was the chair of the Limudei Avot Youth Team — terrible slogan "Don't be late - join LAYT today!" created in the 1990s but never losing its original "youthful" members. Devorah was the person you called when the caterer cancelled the night before the annual dinner, when the Torah was found to have a letter cracked on Thursday and needed emergency repair before Shabbos, when two b'nei mitzvah families had been double-booked for the same Saturday and nobody had noticed until that week.

She answered on the first ring.

Rabbi Horowitz explained. There was a silence on the other end that he recognized: not panic, but the particular stillness of a woman mentally sorting through a problem before she begins speaking.

"Shabbos starts in two hours," she said finally.

"I know."

"There's nothing we can do until Saturday night."

"I know."

Another pause. "Dovid," she said, "those sombreros were non-refundable."

"I know that too."

"All right," said Devorah. "Saturday night. Tell the Team to be at our house at nine."

Shabbos that week had an unusual quality. Those who knew about the roof — and by Friday night candle-lighting, that was most of the shul — moved through the day with the particular restlessness of people who have a problem they cannot yet address. The davening was fine. The cholent was fine. The Shabbos afternoon naps were, if anything, longer than usual, because sleeping was the one productive thing available.

Devorah made lists in her head of what needed to be done after Havdalah. By the time Shabbos ended she had assembled, in her mind, a complete action plan. What she did not yet have was a venue.

The Youth Team convened at the Horowitz kitchen table at nine o'clock Saturday night: Devorah with her legal pad, Morty Feldstein the gabbai with his ancient address book, and Barry Sternberg, the shul's resident real-estate maven, who arrived still in his Shabbos suit and immediately began working his phone.

"Two hundred and thirty people," said Devorah. "Mexican theme. Monday night. The sombreros are already in Rena Bloom's minivan."

"What about the JCC?" said Morty.

"I called. They have a Sweet Sixteen."

"The Marriott ballroom?"

"Bar mitzvah."

"The firehouse on—"

"They need two weeks' notice minimum for liability reasons."

Barry looked up from his phone. He had the expression of a man who has just remembered something. "There's a new nightclub downtown," he said. "By the waterfront. Called Aura. Just got its certificate of occupancy last week. LED lighting system, the whole thing — apparently the place glows. Owner's holding his grand opening in two weeks but technically the space is ready."

Devorah's pen was already moving. "Capacity?"

"Four hundred."

"Sound system?"

"State of the art, from what I hear."

"It's perfect," said Devorah. "What's the catch?"

Barry set his phone down on the table. "The owner is Kevin O'Donnell."

Kevin O'Donnell was not an antisemite in any classical sense. He had simply once remarked, at a family gathering after one whiskey too many, that he found Jews exhausting — too much talking, too much negotiating. (He wasn't entirely wrong.) He had said it once. It had been repeated, as things get repeated in close communities — imperfectly, with elaboration — until it reached the Jewish community as: Kevin O'Donnell hates Jews and said so at his mother's funeral.

This was inaccurate. But it was what LAYT was working with.

"We can't just call him," said Devorah.

"No," agreed Barry and Morty simultaneously.

They sat for a moment.

"What about Reverend Callahan?" said Morty.

Reverend Kenneth Callahan — Vicar of St. Brendan's Church on Maple Avenue, three blocks from the shul — had grown up with Kevin O'Donnell, been an altar boy with Kevin O'Donnell, attended the same schools, played on the same streets. He had once, in 1974, taken the blame for a broken rectory window that Kevin O'Donnell had definitely broken. Kevin would do almost anything Ken asked, partly out of affection and partly out of a debt he had never quite acknowledged but never entirely forgotten.

Devorah looked at her watch. Nine-thirty on a Saturday night.

"Call him," she said.

Morty called. The Reverend answered on the third ring, sounding not at all put out.

"Of course I know the shul," said Reverend Callahan warmly, when Morty explained. "Rabbi Horowitz is a good man. What can I do?"

Morty explained the situation. There was a thoughtful pause.

"Kevin can be stubborn," said Reverend Callahan. "But I'll try. I can't promise anything."

"We understand completely," said Morty.

"And," said Reverend Callahan, with what Morty would later describe as a gentle but utterly unmistakable firmness, "if I'm going to all this trouble, I would like to attend. I have always wanted to see a Purim celebration."

Morty covered the phone and looked at Devorah. She spread her hands: obviously.

"Reverend Callahan," said Morty, "you are not only invited, you are our guest of honor."

Kevin O'Donnell called back forty minutes later. He had spoken to Callahan. He was willing — reluctantly, with conditions, in the voice of a man doing a favor he had not entirely agreed to do.

Condition one: the venue had to be left exactly as found.

Condition two: the shul was responsible for any damage.

Condition three — and here his voice took on the careful tone of a businessman protecting an investment — before any outside event could use the space, he needed a formal audit of the premises. His insurance carrier required it. His accountant was unavailable until Monday morning.

"Monday morning?" said Devorah.

"Ten o'clock," said O'Donnell. "Not a minute before. That's the earliest my carrier will accept."

Devorah looked at the ceiling. The party was Monday night. The audit would clear — if it cleared — with perhaps ten hours to spare.

"Fine," she said. "We'll have our own accountant there."

She hung up and looked at Morty.

"Who do we have?" she said.

Morty opened his address book.

"Marvin Gross," he said.

Marvin Gross was a precise, quietly anxious man who had been doing taxes for half the shul for twenty-three years and who approached every financial document with the focused intensity of someone defusing something. He was reached at home mid-Saturday-night, in the middle of what he described as "a very important Sudoku."

"I need you to audit a nightclub on Monday morning at ten o'clock," said Devorah.

A pause. "What kind of nightclub?"

"The kind with a certificate of occupancy and an insurance carrier."

"Is this for the—"

"Purim party. Yes."

Another pause. "I'll need to prepare."

"You have all day Sunday."

"I'll need the preliminary financials by—"

"Barry Sternberg will get them to you tonight."

A very long pause. "All right," said Marvin. "You know, Devorah, what I call a last second audit? An oy-dit!"

Devorah groaned.

There is something very ironic with the far-right claiming that isolationism is "America First." It isn't. Whether we like it or not, we live in an intertwined world, and we need to act that way to maximize American power and security.

A free, pro-Western Iran wouldn't just benefit Iranians. It would be one of the most consequential geopolitical wins in a generation — and it maps almost perfectly onto what "America First" actually demands: less entanglement, stronger allies, cheaper energy, and adversaries put on the back foot. The collapse of this regime would solve or reduce multiple problems at once.

It Deals a Structural Blow to China

China buys 80–90% of Iran's oil exports - at steep sanctions discounts that effectively subsidize its industrial machine. That cheap fuel, combined with Iran's role as a BRI corridor and BRICS partner, makes Tehran one of Beijing's more useful strategic relationships. It is not irreplaceable, but genuinely valuable.

A democratic Iran changes the math entirely. Iranian oil returns to the open market, sold at market prices to whoever pays most. China loses its discount supplier, its BRICS partner, and a key node in its anti-Western coalition simultaneously. It would also have to reckon with a pro-Western government sitting astride regional trade routes it had counted on controlling.

This a structural setback for Beijing, the kind that forces a strategic recalculation.

It Kneecaps Russia

Since the Ukraine war began, Iran has been one of Russia's most consequential military suppliers. Shahed drones, produced cheaply and in volume, have reshaped the battlefield in ways NATO planners are still adjusting to. That supply chain runs through the Islamic Republic.

Regime change ends it. Russia fights on but with one fewer arsenal to draw from and one fewer sanctions-hardened partner willing to absorb Western economic pressure alongside it. Every Shahed that doesn't get built is a Ukrainian city that doesn't get hit.

It Stabilizes the Gulf — and Reverses the Saudi Drift

Saudi Arabia has been hedging toward China, and the reasons aren't hard to understand. Riyadh looks at American foreign policy and sees an unreliable partner, one that oscillates between maximum pressure and nuclear appeasement, that withdrew from Afghanistan in chaos, that has never quite resolved what it wants the Middle East to look like. Meanwhile, Iranian aggression through proxies - the Houthis threatening Red Sea shipping, Hezbollah destabilizing Lebanon, Hamas making normalization politically toxic - makes any bold Saudi diplomacy look reckless.

A pro-Western Iran changes both calculations simultaneously. The Sunni-Shia cold war that has organized Gulf politics for four decades loses its engine. The existential Iranian threat that has kept Gulf states in permanent defensive crouch fades. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other moderate Arab states suddenly have far more room to maneuver - toward the United States, toward Israel, toward a regional order that doesn't require Chinese patronage as insurance against Iranian aggression.

American strength creates the conditions for Gulf stability. Gulf stability ends the drift toward Beijing. The logic is straightforward.

The Abraham Accords Get Their Momentum Back

The Abraham Accords were genuinely historic, and they stalled not because Arab states secretly oppose normalization with Israel, but because Iran made the cost of visible friendship with Israel much higher. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis function as instruments of Iranian policy as much as anything else. Their purpose is to ensure that any Arab leader who moves toward Israel faces a domestic and regional firestorm funded and armed from Tehran.

Remove Iranian sponsorship of the rejectionist axis and the landscape shifts dramatically. Moderate Arab governments that have wanted normalization for years - and have been quietly pursuing it in back channels - suddenly have political space to move openly. Saudi-Israeli normalization, which seemed tantalizingly close before October 7, becomes achievable again. The rejectionist veto over Arab politics, held in place by Iranian money and Iranian weapons, dissolves.

Energy Prices Come Down

Iran holds some of the world's largest proven oil and gas reserves, currently constrained by sanctions, mismanagement, and deliberate underinvestment. A democratic Iran rejoining the global energy market as a legitimate producer means a meaningful increase in supply — which means lower prices.

This is good for American consumers. It's good for European allies still painfully weaning themselves off Russian energy. And it's bad for every petrostate whose fiscal models depend on prices staying elevated. Lower energy prices are themselves a form of strategic pressure on America's adversaries, achieved not through policy but through market reality.

Ninety Million Iranians Get Their Country Back

The Islamic Republic is not Iran. It is a revolutionary theocracy that has held one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated civilizations hostage for forty-five years. The Iranian people - educated, cosmopolitan, with deep historical ties to the West and a cultural inheritance stretching back millennia - have been trying to communicate this for decades.

A free Iran is not a client state or a nation-building project. It is a natural ally - one with a population already oriented toward democratic values, enormous human capital, and energy wealth that would benefit the entire world. For once, the idealists and the realists want exactly the same thing.

The foreign policy class has long treated "stability" in the Middle East as meaning the preservation of existing arrangements, however dysfunctional. But the Islamic Republic isn't stable — it is a source of instability, exported deliberately and systematically across the region for forty-five years. Its fall wouldn't destabilize the Middle East. It would remove the single greatest source of destabilization the region has.

Yes, it is good for Israel. But it is even better for America.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

When the going gets tough, political actors use antisemitism to help. Latest example: Iran.

Antisemitism functions as a reusable political instrument. It pre-exists any particular regime and can be activated when convenient. There is always a reliable population that is either already antisemitic or willing to be swayed which can be mobilized by political actors to help shore up their bases.

The Arab world used antisemitism for decades whenever regimes were in trouble or threatened by populist uprisings to try to redirect anger outside. The Nazis didn't create a new strain of antisemitism - they took advantage of the existing antisemitic feeling in Germany that was already there. The new Right antisemitism of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens is tapping into and extending the neo-Nazi fringe that never left the American Right. Progressive "anti-Zionists" can reliably position Jews as the rich/white/powerful uber-oppressors.

In each case the pre-cancerous cells of antisemitism are there beforehand, waiting to be metastasized by whomever needs it for their own political purposes.

Which brings us to Iran.

At this time, Iran doesn't need to mobilize antisemites from within Iran but from outside. Normally we see their Arabic language media playing on Arab antisemitism to shame Arab nations who dare have peace deals with Israel.

In English, though, their targets are American antisemites. This article in Abna24 shows how it works today:

Trump sacrifices American soldiers for power-hungry Israel: Iran's security chief
Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Ali Larijani has once again denounced the US president for destabilizing the West Asia region, emphasizing that Donald Trump, with his ill-founded aspirations, has been sacrificing American troops for the power-seeking Israeli regime.

Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Ali Larijani has once again denounced the US president for destabilizing the West Asia region, emphasizing that Donald Trump, with his ill-founded aspirations, has been sacrificing American troops for the power-seeking Israeli regime.

In a statement on Monday, Larijani reprimanded Trump, saying his delusional behavior, has turned the self-made slogan 'America First' into 'Israel First,' ignoring the consequences for the United States.

We see Larijani is hoping to get more support from the American antisemitic far-Right as a promising avenue to pressure the Trump administration to stop the war. He positions America as a slave to Israel's interests. Which is a neat inversion from the "Big Satan/Little Satan" rhetoric that Iran has usually been using since 1979.

And of course, for the purposes of this argument, Larijani is positioning himself not as a lifelong opponent of everything the US stands for but as a principled supporter of America First ideology - a friend, if you will.

Antisemitism is endlessly elastic, which is why it is employed by actors who cannot agree on anything else. Iran is saying that it has a lot in common with the antisemites on America's Right, whom they normally despise, and therefore they should partner up against their common enemy.

Once Iran reframes itself as the true defender of American interests against “Israel First” politicians, it is no longer merely attacking US policy. It is attempting to recruit Americans into a narrative where their own government is the captive of Jews.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Harvard’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy is hosting an event this week titled From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine. The book it features proposes to “end apartheid and occupation rule” and establish a transitional framework leading to democratic decision-making about the territory’s future governance.

Universities should host controversial ideas. Human rights centers, especially, should not be timid. But intellectual seriousness requires clarity about what is being proposed — and what assumptions are being adopted.

The book's premise is that Israel is an apartheid state and that the area from the river to the sea is essentially a one state reality today. The problem isn't the book making these false claims; it is that the Carr Center is treating them as uncontested fact.

The Carr Center’s event description does not say “what the authors describe as apartheid.” It states, flatly, that the goal is to end apartheid and occupation rule. That framing is not neutral. Whether Israel constitutes an apartheid regime is one of the most fiercely debated legal and political claims in international discourse. I have demonstrated many times that the groups making those arguments twist international law for their own political purposes. Treating it as settled fact is itself a substantive position.

More importantly, the proposal being discussed is completely different than how human rights are discussed in the context of any other state.

Normally, human rights groups either claim that a state is violating international law and demand it complies, or they seek to use existing legal frameworks to change the state's policies from the inside. Human rights advocacy typically demands compliance with international law within existing sovereign frameworks. It rarely proposes immediate regime replacement as the primary remedy.

Yet this is what is being suggested here. Only for Israel, a state that (whether the authors believe it or not) takes human rights and international law very seriously.

According to the event description, the authors seek to design a transition government, reform laws and institutions, and lay the groundwork for democratic decision-making about the future governance of Israel-Palestine. In practice, that necessarily entails redefining sovereignty, citizenship, and political authority across the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Extending equal political rights across the entire territory prior to any final status decision would, as a matter of demographics and constitutional design, transform Israel’s identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. That is not a marginal reform; it is a foundational restructuring of sovereignty. It would fundamentally alter Israel’s current national identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. It is not honest to describe it as merely a technical peace plan. It is a proposal to replace the existing political order with a new one, without the approval of the current citizens of Israel, who would have no say on replacing their own government.

That is not democracy.

A human rights center has a special obligation here. Human rights law protects individual equality — but it also recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination. The tension between universal civic equality and national self-determination is one of the most difficult problems in modern political theory. Presenting a blueprint that effectively collapses one side of that tension without acknowledging it is not neutral scholarship.

The event description also frames the problem as Israel “waiting for a perfect partner for peace,” implying unilateral obstruction. It does not acknowledge Palestinian political fragmentation, the history of rejected proposals, Hamas’s continued control of Gaza, or the security collapse that followed Israel’s 2005 disengagement. One may dispute the weight of those factors, but omitting them entirely creates a moral asymmetry that undermines credibility.

The fact that the Palestinians have rejected their own state, numerous times, since 1947, is ignored, and all those rejections are framed as Israel's fault alone. Yet Palestinian rejectionism was because they never wanted to build their own state where they can have rights, but to destroy another state. This plan fits in very well with that strategy,. It does not allow Jews to have rights, no matter what hand waving the authors claim. It is a warmed over version of Moammar Gaddafi's "Isratine" proposal.

There is another question the event framing does not confront: what prevents a transitional authority from descending into civil conflict? Regime replacement in deeply divided societies is historically volatile. South Africa is often invoked as a comparative case, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differs in demography, regional environment, armed non-state actors, and mutual existential fears. A glance at newspapers between 1945 and 1948 shows that Arabs were routinely attacking Jews and some Jewish groups responded in kind. People were murdered daily. That is the real "one state reality" that proponents of plans like this ignore.

If the event were structured as a debate, with explicit acknowledgment of competing interpretations of occupation, apartheid, and the asymmetry of demanding the overhauls of the only Jewish state where Jews can practice self determination while not demanding the same for any other nation may exemplify academic rigor.

As currently described, it reads like the Carr Center is accepting the false premises and the only debate is exactly how the Jewish state must be weakened or dismantled.

Beyond that, the book that is being discussed was written by and promoted by members of "Democracy for the Arab World Now." DAWN has treated Hamas primarily as a political actor rather than foregrounding its terrorism. A human rights organization that cannot bring itself to criticize Hamas is a peculiar one to be promoted by Harvard University. Beyonf that , DAWN has troubling ties to Islamist groups and its anti-Israel advocacy has no resemblance to fairness or accuracy. One example is its "doxxing" of members of AIPAC by putting their pictures on playing cards, reminiscent of armies who use playing cards so soldiers know who to target. DAWN knows the symbolism and chose to treat American Zionists as if they are war criminals deserving of being targeted for death. Why would the Carr Center even consider promoting a group that does such a thing?

A blueprint for peace is welcome. But clarity about what is being dismantled, what is being built, and whose rights are being recalibrated is not optional. It is the minimum standard for serious human rights scholarship.

As it stands, by accepting the premises of this book in its description, the Carr Center is abandoning the very human rights and democratic frameworks that they claim to uphold.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/01 Links: The hypocrisy of the West’s weepers for the Islamic Republic; 9 killed as Iranian missile destroys synagogue in Beit Shemesh; 3 American soldiers killed

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: First Thoughts on the New Iran War

He did not say the war was for regime change. He said that ,after we had achieved our military aims, the Iranian people should take the golden opportunity to free themselves from the tyranny that has had its boot on their faces for 47 years.

There is a distinction.

A regime-change war would effectively require us to go in on the ground in Tehran, take out the mullahs, and announce that a regency of some sort that would then lead to a new republic. Instead, this war is designed to take out the command, control, communications, and military abilities of the regime and leave Khamenei and his demonic underlings denuded, undefended, alone, and astoundingly weak—to leave their regime a carcass to be picked over rather than continue to exist as a punch-drunk boxer who can rise from the canvas and try to keep swinging. Once we’re done, it would be quick work for Iranians themselves to kick the mullahs to the curb.

But, regime change war or not, I think my questions now have pretty clear answers. The six weeks of diplomatic dithering following the Iranian slaughter were, in fact, simply temporizing. We got our ducks in a row—and, presumably, gave Israel time to help us locate the necessary targets inside Iran to strike the bad guys while leaving the general population largely unmolested.

Today, February 28, 2026, may be the most important day of the 21st Century so far. May God bless our fighting forces as they place themselves in harm’s way to protect, defend, and save the West—and may we triumph over this remorseless, conscienceless, and evil enemy that has been at war with the “Great Satan” for nearly half a century.

Brendan O'Neill: The hypocrisy of the West’s weepers for the Islamic Republic

How do we explain a moral universe where there can be more fury over strikes against a government than there was over that government’s mass murder of its own citizens? This, sadly, is what has become of ‘anti-imperialism’. That old noble cause was once about defending the independence of nation states that found themselves in the crosshairs of the Great Powers. In recent years, however, it has curdled into a cynical, blind loathing for America. It’s just anti-Westernism now. It is fuelled less by a love of sovereign rights than by a kind of cultish self-flagellation, where the fashionable suspicion of all things Western gets falsely dolled up as ‘anti-war activism’.

This idea that the West is always wicked, and thus its enemies deserve empathy, is less the heir to the great peace movements of old than an outgrowth of the anti-civilisational trends that run riot in the academy and across the cultural establishment. We end up in the sick-making situation where the moral guardians of the new left are silent when a people’s revolt is savagely put down but agitated when the men responsible for it get a missile through their bedroom window. Because according to the juvenile commandments of anti-Westernism, America is the source of every earthly problem. Thus when America causes a death in Iran, it’s World War III, it’s a crime against humanity. Yet when the regime causes infinitely more deaths in Iran, meh.

There’s a curious reverse racism to this insistence on blaming the West for everything bad. It infantilises the regimes of the world, treating their crimes almost as instances of diminished responsibility rather than true offences against the human spirit. To see imperialism in action, look no further than the Islamic Republic. It deploys cruel proxies to enforce its theocratic writ everywhere from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It green-lit the Islamofascist invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, as a warning to both the Jewish State and the Saudis who were repairing their relationship with it. It calls home its brutish proxies every now and then to deploy them against the Iranian people themselves – classic coloniser behaviour. If you’re an anti-imperialist, the Islamic Republic should offend your every moral fibre.

I know, it has long been a tactic of the interventionist lobby to call the critics of their wars ‘pro-regime’. Those of us who opposed the lie-fuelled invasion of Iraq and the reckless US-UK intervention in Libya were slandered as Saddam sycophants and Gaddafi apologists. But in this instance, isn’t it justified? ‘Anti-war’ leftists made apologies for Hamas. They shed more tears over the exploding bollocks of Hezbollah militants than they did over the Druze kids killed by those militants. They chanted for the anti-Semitic brutes of Iran’s personal army in Yemen – the Houthis. There is a serious discussion to be had about the wisdom of what is happening right now. Many of us remain wary of external intervention, believing it is more likely to deepen regional and global tensions rather than liberate the oppressed populace. But we are well within our rights to wonder if those saying ‘Hands off Iran’ really mean ‘Hands off this regime that slaughters innocent men and women because at least it is anti-American like us’.

I fled Iran’s terror — Trump’s courage is an answer to my prayers

Every US president since Jimmy Carter has sat across the table from Iran and bought what they were selling.

Trump is the first one who didn’t.

When Barack Obama blinked on Syria in 2013, after Assad crossed Obama’s red line on chemical weapons, the world learned American threats were negotiable.

When Obama handed Iran the nuclear deal formally known as JCPOA, with its sanctions relief, billions in unfrozen assets and a sunset clause, the regime learned America would reward it for promises it never planned to keep.

Saturday, the regime learned that era is over.

Trump sees the Iranian regime for what it is, a destabilizing force that has plotted assassinations of American officials, including Trump himself — and he acted.

That takes courage. It takes historic vision.

For the first time, an American president has come to the rescue of the Iranian people, rather than focusing only on the nuclear file.

When the strikes began early Saturday, I heard from friends and relatives, some of them in Iran.

They were celebrating — particularly the reports that the Supreme Leader himself had been killed — and cautiously hopeful.

But every one of them said the same thing: Their deepest fear is that these strikes will stop short.

That they will wound the regime just enough to bring it back to the table, but leave it intact, still capable of crushing dissent, still able to imprison, torture, and execute the young Iranians who dare to dream of something better.

The Iranian people do not want a weakened theocracy.

They want a free Iran, one whose government answers to the nation’s interests, not to a revolutionary ideology exported on the backs of suffering civilians across the region.

If these strikes are designed to achieve that end, history will remember them as a turning point.

If they are designed merely to extract concessions, if the regime survives and regroups, the Iranian people will pay the price.

The courage it took to begin this must be matched by the vision to see it through.