Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, May 09, 2026

05/08 Links Pt1: Saudi Arabia’s War; Princelings of Persia; IDF kills Hamas terrorist linked to Mia Schem abduction; PA policeman one of three terrorists arrested

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Saudi Arabia’s War

It’s worth noting, for posterity, that the great under-covered theme in this war has been the influence exerted by the Saudis. That story has been under-covered because Western mass media tends toward herd behavior and relies on preconceived narratives. The prevailing narrative is that if any state exerts a controversial level of influence over American warmaking, that state must be Israel. It is the only country subject to this type of coverage.

And yet, the Saudis were urging Trump to launch the war and then loudly protested when Trump signaled that he was looking for an off-ramp. Israel wants to be able to continue its own missions in Lebanon, but it can deal with a U.S.-Iran cease-fire just fine as long as its own hands aren’t tied elsewhere. That’s not true of the Gulf Arab states, which have stuck their necks out to join a U.S. war alliance that includes the IDF.

The Saudis were not quiet about pushing Trump to finish off the Iranian regime. That makes them an immediate target if the regime gets back on its feet. The United Arab Emirates has left OPEC in order to boost American voters’ flagging patience with the war, which puts them on the outs with Riyadh and Tehran simultaneously. If the administration doesn’t have the attention span to stick it out and make sure these Arab states have the security they need after going out on a limb for the U.S., American credibility will fall even faster than gas prices rise.

Israel, however, can afford to be more deferential to Trump. The Israelis have worked to protect the UAE from Iranian retaliation, so it’s not as though they want the war to end here. But it isn’t the Israelis who have publicly tied Trump’s hands and forced him to make the U.S. military defend them or else be made to look a fool over false promises.

It’s tempting to end by merely emphasizing that those who have been claiming that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy, or that American soldiers are risking their lives “for Israel,” have now managed to make themselves look more clownish than ever. But there’s another takeaway here: The public should rethink the reporting and the prognostications made by anyone who has bought or sold the prepackaged narrative about Israeli manipulation. What else about the war have you been misled to believe by mainstream narratives or podcast-bro grifting? Now’s a good time for a reality check.

Princelings of Persia

I used to dismiss what I thought was an urban myth that, to help sell Tehran on the nuke deal, President Barack Obama granted thousands of Iranian spies a backdoor path to residence and ultimately citizenship in the United States. After all, visas and green cards are not like the letters of transit in Casablanca, where you fill in your name and hop on the plane to Lisbon. U.S. consular rules would block such individuals from getting here anyway. Yet in the years after the Iran deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), this story got traction, even as Obama’s spokesmen naturally denied it.

But this year, this supposed myth was given new credibility with the arrest in Los Angeles of Shamim Mafi, an Iranian arms trafficker who came to California in 2013 and was given permanent residency under the Obama administration three years later. And it turns out Mafi is small potatoes compared to what a recent wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations has exposed: that upper Iranian terrorist nobility has been prospering all over the United States.

“They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Iranian American author and human-rights activist Elham Yaghoubian told me about the regime. “It peaked under Obama.”

For a prime example, look first to the $2 million five-bedroom, five-bath modern gray-and-white clapboard house in suburban Los Angeles that has been causing firestorms all over Iranian social media. Its most recent occupants have posted a two-and-a-half-minute video online showing off the grand front, the sprawling interior, and the adjoining elm-shaded McMansions. The camera loiters over the kitchen and dining room surfaces laden with an acre of holiday goodies, a great room of flat-screen TVs and speakers blaring performances nearly drowned out by clapping, while breakfronts full of bric-a-brac reflect, through their glass backing, glimpses of the LA woman documenting the vastness of her lavish residence.

The hostess with the iPhone camera is not Britney Spears, but one Maryam Tahmasebi, sneering at the neighbors’ American flag in contrast to the Shia Imam Hussein banner flying on her own house. And those flat-screen TVs are lit up with screeching mullahs, with a clapping mob cheering them in response. She is the daughter-in-law of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the unhinged “Screaming Mary” spokesperson of the student group that occupied the U.S. Embassy for 444 days in 1979, now an ICE detainee.

The online haters are the outraged Persians around the globe who are fuming at the latest sign of corrupt aghazadeh, or “princeling decadence,” the effrontery of the Islamic Republic’s elite Gen Zers living it up overseas while Iranians go hungry and get shot dead by the thousand at home. The aghazadeh in question is Ebtekar’s son, Eissa Hashemi. Incredibly enough, this scion of two embassy hostage takers “entered the United States in 2014 in visas issued by the Obama administration,” according to a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 11. Even more incredibly, according to the same statement, “in June 2016 – just months after the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] seized two U.S. Navy vessels and captured 10 American sailors – the Obama Administration granted all three Iranian nationals lawful permanent resident (LPR) status via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.” That would be the same time frame when Mafi, the arms trafficker in Woodland Hills, got her green card. Hashemi is in ICE detention as well, along with the couple’s son.

Americans of a certain age have to pause here to savor the thought of hostage taker Masoumeh, née Nilufar, Ebtekar (the hard-liner Water Lily renamed herself Sinless), watching her revolutionary family members being seized, cuffed, shackled, and hustled into custody for an uncertain but inevitably humiliating fate.

Though Hashemi was Iranian revolutionary aristocracy, he often pleaded to his haters—fellow Iranians—that he was not a fanatic and was not even born when his parents took the American hostages and his mother gloated over her desire to murder them. Not so with Hamideh Soleimani-Afshar, reportedly the niece of Qassem Soleimani, the deceased IRGC-Quds Force chief. Afshar had celebrated attacks on U.S. soldiers and military facilities, praised Iran’s supreme leader, called America the “Great Satan,” and voiced support for the IRGC, a designated terror organization, according to the New York Post, citing the State Department. She and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, were detained by ICE, leaving behind a black Tesla—in which the Post glimpsed Hermès cushions, a Miss Dior bag, and a Sephora bag—in front of their home on Plainview Avenue in Tujunga, on the opposite side of the San Fernando Valley from Agoura Hills.

'We should never have let them in': Labor's 'complete failure' revealed after ISIS brides charged with slavery, terrorism offences

The Albanese government’s decision to allow the return of four ISIS brides and their nine children has been branded a “complete failure” after three of the women were arrested on arrival.

Two women were arrested after touching down at Melbourne Airport on Thursday evening, with a third arrested on arrival in Sydney.

The two Melbourne women, aged 53 and 31, have both since been charged with multiple slavery-related offences, while the 32-year-old Sydney woman has been charged with lesser terrorism-related offences.

The Albanese government has maintained that no assistance was provided to the cohort, but questions have been raised about why the individuals were granted passports and not subjected to temporary exclusion orders.

Shadow home affairs minister Jonathan Duniam said the seriousness of the charges showed why “we should never have let them in”.

“The fact that we are arresting people on their arrival means we shouldn't have allowed them to come to Australia,” he told Sky News.

“We're talking about terror-related offences here and under the Passport Act there is a power for the Foreign Minister to not issue passports to people on grounds of national security.

“I would argue that terror-related offences are a good enough reason not to give someone a passport.

“We're not talking about small misdemeanours… We're talking about some of the worst crimes here.”

The shadow home affairs minister said since they have arrived, the group were now Australia’s problem, with the cost of monitoring them estimated at $2 million per year, per person.

“For the government to allow this to happen is a complete failure of this government's commitment to our national security and protection of the people here," he said.

“We should never have let them in."

We the People - Part 7 of "Reclaiming the Covenant"

The founders were not naive about government. They had read Locke and Montesquieu, studied the Roman Republic, watched the British Parliament operate at close range, and understood the mechanics of institutional design better than any generation before them. The Constitution they produced is a masterwork of that understanding — separated powers, enumerated rights, layered sovereignties, a bill of rights added almost immediately because the first draft wasn’t cautious enough. They knew how to build governmental architecture.

What they were attempting in 1787 was something the formal architecture alone could not accomplish, and they knew it. The experiment was not merely in constitutional design. It was in whether a free people could constitute themselves as a society — hold themselves together, maintain justice, extend opportunity, honor their obligations to one another — without the binding agents that every previous civilization had relied upon, like blood, the Crown, or the Church. The founders explicitly rejected them all. What remained was a covenant and a bet: that people who had accepted common terms could treat each other as members of a common enterprise, even across distances and differences that made the bond invisible to ordinary human instinct.

The Constitution announces this in its first three words. “We the People.” The obligations the Preamble describes — a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, the blessings of liberty — are assigned to the people collectively, and the government is the instrument they constructed to help honor them. The direction of authority in the American system runs from citizens outward to institutions, not downward from institutions to subjects. Every other government of the founders’ era ran the other direction. That reversal was the experiment.

Europe drew the opposite conclusion from the same Enlightenment premises. If reason could identify the conditions of human flourishing — and the philosophes were confident it could — then the rational state, staffed by educated administrators, was the appropriate mechanism for producing those conditions. The state would answer the social questions: how resources were distributed, what opportunities existed, and what obligations citizens owed one another. The citizens’ job was to participate in the state through their representatives, pay their taxes, and receive the protections and services the state provided. This was a coherent theory of how a modern society organizes itself, and it produced, over the following two centuries, the welfare states of Western Europe, whose citizens are by most measures well cared for.

America’s founders rejected that theory before it fully formed. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” was not poetry when Lincoln said it at Gettysburg — it was a job description, and it assigned the job to Americans, not to their government. The social questions were the people’s questions to answer: in their towns, their voluntary associations, their businesses, their daily choices about how to treat the people around them. Government could set the floor — the legal minimum below which no one could push another person — but the ceiling was built by citizens, and it was as high or as low as citizens chose to make it.

Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831 to understand why this arrangement seemed to be working. He was thirty-one years old, a French aristocrat in a country that had recently guillotined its aristocracy, trying to comprehend a democratic republic that had already survived longer than the French Republic had managed. What he found surprised him enough that he wrote two volumes about it.

The surprise was not the Constitution or the courts or the federal structure, all of which he analyzed carefully. The surprise was what Americans did when they had a problem. In France, Tocqueville wrote, a man encountering a difficulty would look to the government; in England, to a lord; in America, to his neighbors. Americans formed associations — voluntary, spontaneous, self-organized — for everything: building roads, founding schools, running hospitals, debating public questions, organizing charity. The habit of solving problems collectively, without waiting for authority to act, was so pervasive that Tocqueville decided it was the secret of democratic self-government at scale. A people that governed its own daily life would prove capable of governing its political life; a people that waited for the state to solve every problem would lose the capacity for self-governance entirely.

The habit he observed was the covenant in daily practice. Every barn-raising, every volunteer fire company, every mutual aid society was an enactment of “We the People” at small scale — Americans treating other Americans as people they were in community with and therefore owed something to. The government had almost nothing to do with it. That was the point.

The question was whether the habit he observed was permanent or circumstantial. He was watching a country of perhaps thirteen million people, overwhelmingly concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard, sharing a common language, a broadly Protestant Christian culture, a recent revolutionary experience, and memories of the communities they or their parents had left in Europe. Mutual obligation came naturally in that context. The farmer down the road was one of you: you knew him, or knew his family, or knew someone who did. Obligation to a visible neighbor is something human beings are wired for. Every social instinct evolution gave us operates at small scale, among people we can see.

The founders were asking Americans to extend that instinct outward far beyond anything instinct naturally supports. And in 1787, they were asking it of a country that, whatever its other divisions, was composed almost entirely of white Christians. The covenant’s terms said membership was defined by acceptance rather than identity — but the actual membership was, for most of the republic’s first century, remarkably homogeneous, which made the horizontal obligations easier to feel even when the theory said they should extend further. The hard version of the experiment — the version that asks 330 million people, the most diverse nation in human history, to feel genuine obligation to strangers across a continent who share nothing with them but citizenship — is the version only now being run at full scale.

The founders bet that the covenant could carry that weight. The evidence is not yet in.

What the evidence does show is that the inner rings of the covenant are holding. AmeriCorps data from 2023 found that 75.7 million Americans — 28.3% of the population — formally volunteered through an organization, contributing nearly five billion hours of service worth $167 billion in economic value. That number had collapsed during the pandemic and rebounded to its largest recorded expansion in the survey’s history. More striking still: 54% of Americans — 137.5 million people — informally helped their neighbors in the same period, running errands, watching children, lending tools, doing the ten thousand small things that constitute a functioning community. Tocqueville’s Americans are still out there. The voluntary habit he identified nearly two centuries ago has not died. Americans are still, in large numbers, treating the people around them as people they owe something to.

The inner rings hold. The outer ring — obligation to Americans you will never meet, in places you have never been, whose lives look nothing like yours — is where the strain shows, and that strain is the subject of the next chapter. What matters here is that the foundation Tocqueville identified is intact, and that it supplies the answer to the question the experiment was always asking: can free people maintain a society without mandatory binding agents? At the level of neighbors and communities, the answer remains yes. The question is whether Americans can extend the same habit to the scale the experiment demands.

This is where the American Dream enters.

Egypt's Vetogate pretends to report:

A new Israeli plan to establish an alternative homeland to escape the war: Jewish settlers bought a Cypriot village and prevented its residents from accessing their property. The people of Trozina cry out against the approaching Israeli occupier.

A Cypriot village is being turned into an Israeli settlement. A state of widespread anger has gripped the residents of Trozina village in southern Cyprus, after investors from the Israeli occupation bought 70% of the village's land, thus taking control of most of the land and many buildings in the area. This has led many of the village's residents to ask, "Has the Israeli occupation begun to establish an alternative homeland because of the ongoing wars adopted by Netanyahu's extremist government, and the flight of many settlers abroad?!"

The continued purchase of land in Cyprus by Israeli investors has sparked widespread controversy, especially after reports that private security forces are imposing restrictions on entry to parts of the village and preventing visitors from entering certain areas of their village. Despite statements by Cypriot authorities that the village is still under state control and that people can enter it, there are fears that Israel is taking control of the land in Cyprus and turning it into an alternative homeland for extremist settlers.

Some of this was actually on Greek social media. And as usual, there is a small grain of truth here. But the story itself is absurd.

Trozena is an abandoned village. One Jewish investor from Hungary who has some unspecified ties to Israel bought much of the land to develop it into a tourist site. Here is an interview:

The businessman behind the redevelopment of the abandoned Limassol village of Trozena has gone public for the first time, clarifying that his plan calls for 60 rooms — not 60 houses as previously reported — and that he did not purchase the village church.

Uriel Curtis, who was born and raised in Hungary and has Israeli roots, appeared on the Alpha television programme Alpha Enimerosi alongside Arsos community leader Giannakis Giannaki, addressing questions that have arisen in recent days about the project.

Curtis said he first visited Trozena five years ago and was immediately taken with it. He said he set out to understand why the village had been abandoned and to establish its ownership status.

“My vision was very simple from the start — to create a space for everyone who needs time to rest and unwind,” he said.

He was clear that the development would comprise 60 rooms, not individual houses, and that the church had not been purchased. “The church is not for sale, and I hope it never will be,” he said.

Giannaki confirmed that the church belongs to the Paphos Metropolis and is not for sale. He said improvements carried out at the church were done on the investor’s initiative and at his expense.

The community leader said Curtis had purchased 17 of the village’s approximately 30 properties from Greek Cypriot owners, along with surrounding agricultural land where vines have been planted for a winery. “Before all this, the village was a jungle,” he said.

On the historic metal bridge, Giannaki said it would be preserved as a museum exhibit, with a new bridge to be built for public use.

Most countries welcome foreign investment that would attract tourists. But when Jews are the investors, they are automatically suspected of having an agenda.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

05/07 Links Pt2: Boulder firebomber sentenced to life plus 2,128 years for murder; Israel’s Creation: The Ultimate ‘Decolonisation’ Project; From ‘Punch a Nazi’ to nominate one

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The obvious truth about anti-Semitism

It is the same with the Prime Minister and MPs who have spent the past week saying that we need to tackle ‘hate’ and ‘extremism’. But what hate? And what extremism? Might the government ban the various Iranian proxies which seem to be behind this recent spate of attacks in Britain? Or are we to tackle all hate? And after we have tackled all hate what shall we move on to next? Gluttony? Avarice?

Ask people to get specific on these questions and almost everybody in any position of power melts away. Last week a member of the audience on the BBC’s Question Time asked the Green party’s deputy leader Rachel Millward to specify where the ‘hatred’ she mentioned is coming from. Millward assumed that look people assume when they know the truth but cannot speak it. She pretended to find the question imponderable before finally saying that the two men who were attacked in Golders Green were the victims of our ‘cost-of-living crisis’, ‘rip-off Britain’ and more. Which is strange, because our ancestors went through far worse economic times and I do not remember stabbing religiously identifiable Jews being one inevitable consequence.

Perhaps Millward, like her party’s leader, Zack Polanski, is hampered by a certain voting demographic and by people in the party? After all, the Greens’ other deputy leader is Mothin Ali, who appeared to celebrate the attacks of 7 October. On the day that Israeli citizens were raped, murdered and abducted from their homes, he tweeted: ‘White supremacist European settler colonialism must end!’ He also seemed to defend the slaughter of men, women and children by Hamas as being the right of ‘indigenous people to fight back’. On winning the subsequent local elections in Leeds he dedicated his win to ‘the people of Gaza’ and finished his victory speech with the trad-itional electoral cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

It is easy enough to point to Polanski’s Green party as being a special hotbed of anti-Semitism. Two of their candidates were actually arrested by the police for alleged anti-Semitism in the week of the Golders Green attack. But the problem isn’t with the Greens. It is with Britain as a whole.

I have said for too many years now that Britain is pursuing several things that make no sense. One is the pretence that turning a pretty homogenous society into a ‘multicultural society’ has no downsides: that it is a blessing and that – all together now – ‘diversity is our strength’. Whereas the fact is that if you import a lot of people who bring a backwards worldview into your country then at some stage diversity actually becomes your greatest weakness – especially if you go on pretending that even identifying the sources of contemporary anti-Semitism constitutes a different form of ‘hate’, ‘bigotry’ or even ‘racism’. Several British Muslims have admitted in recent years that anti-Semitism in Britain’s Muslim communities is ‘rife and commonplace’. We know that only a quarter of British Muslims believe Hamas carried out any rapes or murders on 7 October.

There are some very simple answers to all this. And we don’t need another ‘conversation’ in order to arrive at them.

Seth Mandel: A Tale of Two Commencement Addresses

Whenever I see a headline claiming that so-and-so was criticized or canceled for their “pro-Palestinian advocacy,” I usually try to find out what was actually said. In media terms, “pro-Palestinian advocacy” doesn’t mean that the person said “the Palestinians should have self-determination.” Rather, “pro-Palestinian advocacy” inevitably ends up meaning the person said something psychotic about Jews.

And of course, that’s what happened this week.

Rutgers University disinvited its engineering school’s commencement speaker, Rami Elghandour, who is the producer of a revisionist passion play about the Gaza war. I can understand Rami and his fans being disappointed at the cancellation, but you’d be hard-pressed to find them accurately characterizing Rami’s own conduct. Elghandour himself, for example, whined about being canceled for his “advocacy for Palestine.”

What he actually said was: Israel is “running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.”

In other words, he’s a bit of a lunatic conspiracy theorist who wanted to take his blood libel tour to a college campus. No doubt his speech would have been highly entertaining, as he told a taxpayer-funded university all about “Jewish rape dogs” or whatever he might have said.

The accusations of Jewish sexual deviancy aren’t new, of course—the Hamasniks trying to storm synagogues in New York have taken to emphasizing their belief that Jews are pedophiles. Elghandour fits right in with the activist left and, one imagines, with many in his intended audience. That’s probably part of the reason for Rutgers’s skittishness here: How would it look when a commencement speaker told graduating college students about the importance of destroying the Jewish nation before the Jewish nation gets your kids—and having the crowd applaud in delirious ecstasy?

At the same time, what exactly did Rutgers expect when it invited him? He was on their radar because he’s famous for producing war propaganda. Aren’t they getting precisely what they asked for? You want to invite the sun with no light or heat? You invite the guy who’s famous for calling Jews child-murderers but want him to talk about engineering?

Boulder firebomber sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, 2,128 years for murder and 100 others charges for antisemitic attack

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 46, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and 2,128 years, the maximum available sentence, after pleading guilty on Thursday to first-degree murder and 100 other charges for throwing Molotov cocktails at people rallying, on behalf of Hamas-held hostages, in Boulder, Colo., on June 1, 2025.

Karen Diamond, 82, died from injuries sustained in the attack. Soliman also injured 28 people and yelled “free Palestine” during the assault and expressed intent to kill Zionists.

Michael Dougherty, Boulder County district attorney, said at a press conference on Thursday that “this was an attack on the Jewish community and an act of terror.”

“Today we’ve seen the defendant held fully accountable and fully responsible for the horrific hate crime that he committed and the act of antisemitism he committed after planning it out and taking methodical and intentional steps to harm as many people in the Jewish community as he possibly could here in Boulder,” Dougherty said.

“The defendant is now going to spend the rest of his life in state prison, or federal prison, knowing he destroyed the lives of innocent, wonderful people,” the district attorney said. “And he killed Karen Diamond.”

“As much as this act was brutal and monstrous and horrific, it was also—and hear me loud and clear—cowardly, because you want to come to Boulder County, you want to go to any community and set innocent people on fire, you are truly a coward,” he added. “And we saw that reflected in the statements he made in court today, too.”

Stephen Redfearn, chief of the Boulder Police Department, said at the press conference that he is “very thankful” for the verdict.

“That verdict sent a message, not only to the offender but also to anybody who thinks they can come and harm our community,” he said. “This targeted attack against our Jewish community was unacceptable, and this verdict here today provides some sense of justice.”

“I’ve seen a lot in my career, and this was not my first response to an incident of mass violence,” he said. “But this was one of the most heinous and cowardly crimes that I have ever seen.”

Boulder County gov working with local Jews to commemorate anniversary of fatal attack on pro-Israel rally

The government of Boulder County, in Colorado, is working with representatives of the city’s Jewish community to find ways to mark the one-year anniversary of the June 21 attack against pro-Israel participants in Boulder Run for Their Lives.

The county government is doing so “mark this upcoming anniversary and ensure this tragedy is not forgotten,” it stated.

“Almost a year ago, on June 1, 2025, there was a heinous antisemitic attack on 29 members of the Boulder community during a peaceful gathering in front of the Boulder County Courthouse,” the county government said. “The community members were gathered for the weekly Boulder Run for Their Lives walk, and tragically, Karen Diamond died from her injuries.”

It invited members of the community who want to honor survivors and remember Diamond to come to the Boulder Jewish Festival on June 7.

05/07 Links Pt1: US hits Iranian launch sites, after IRGC fires on American destroyers in Strait; Hamas operatives are being trained in Turkey to launch attacks against Israel; Four more UNRWA staff found to have kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israel's ability to defend itself must not be infringed upon, even if US, Iran reach a deal

Despite the pummeling Iran took during the March war, however, changing its stripes and agreeing to cast aside its nuclear aspirations aimed at leveling the Jewish state is a dubious prospect at best.

An Iranian official said the proposal was “more of a wish list than a reality.” On Wednesday, the semi-official Tasnim News Agency said the text contained “unacceptable clauses” and was propaganda “aimed at justifying Trump’s retreat from his recent hostile action.”

While Israel certainly wants an end to the war with an Iran that no longer poses a threat to its existence, what’s alarming about this process is that the government in Jerusalem seems to have no say in the process and is totally relying on Trump’s negotiating team, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to represent its interests.

Although Israeli officials said they were unsurprised by the developments, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely understandably concerned over the deal at hand. He worries about the likelihood that Iran will not honor the agreement, along with the implications for Israel’s ongoing efforts to remove the Hezbollah threat from its northern border.

Whether it was a coincidence or a message that Israel is not going to let its hands be tied in Lebanon, the IDF attacked Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces in Beirut on Wednesday. This was the first attack in Lebanon’s capital in weeks, following the ceasefires with Iran on April 7 and with Hezbollah on April 17.

On Thursday, the IDF confirmed the killing of Hezbollah’s Radwan commander in Beirut, Ahmed Ghaleb Balout, who had directed dozens of attacks against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon during the war, including anti-tank missile fire and explosive-device attacks.

Balout was also working to rebuild Radwan’s capabilities, including Hezbollah’s long-planned “Conquer the Galilee” invasion plan, the IDF said, adding that it would continue acting against threats to Israeli civilians and troops.

That’s the crux of the matter. An agreement between the US and Iran could theoretically weaken Tehran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. But it’s far from a foregone conclusion.

That’s why, along with the impression that the Lebanese government appears unwilling or unable to do anything about Hezbollah, Israel must maintain the freedom to act to safeguard the North – even if it results in a diplomatic conflict with Trump and the US.

WSJ Editorial: U.S. Red Lines in the Deal with the Iranian Regime

In nuclear talks, the Iranians are reviewing a U.S. framework which, if accepted, would lead to 30-day negotiations on a detailed agreement. From our discussions with senior officials, here's where U.S. red lines stand in the talks:
The U.S. says it needs Iran's attestation that it doesn't seek nuclear weapons; the dismantlement of the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan facilities; a ban on underground nuclear work; and on-demand inspections with penalties for violations. The U.S. seeks a 20-year moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment and demands the handover of all enriched nuclear material.

Iran would have to reopen Hormuz - gradually, as the U.S. relaxes its blockade, and then fully with the final deal. Most U.S. sanctions relief would be tied to Iran's performance of the deal, not merely its signing, though some assets could be unfrozen to begin.

Dismantlement is more important than any "moratorium" on enrichment, which the U.S. and Israel have already stopped by force. Iran can't enrich now, and while that should be banned permanently, with this regime it's essential to remove facilities and capabilities.

Iran would love to focus solely on its 440 kg. of 60%-enriched uranium. The regime's 20% stockpile may sound less dangerous, but reaching that level is already 90% of the way to weapons-grade. It, too, has to go. The regime has thousands of kg. of uranium enriched to 5% and lower, a solid basis to restart a nuclear program if left in Iran.

Clifford D. May: For Iran's True Believers, a Serious Peace Deal Is Out of the Question

During a Senate hearing, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth why she is so vehemently opposed to the use of military force to address the threat posed by Tehran: "We did not have any evidence that Iran intended to imminently attack this country in any way, shape, or form!"

How odd of her not to reckon with the fact that by the time we had such evidence, it might well have been too late to do anything about it. Or maybe no evidence would come to light, and the attack would emerge from a clear blue sky as happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since 1979, "Death to America!" has been the openly stated - and regularly chanted - policy of Iran's self-proclaimed "Islamic revolutionaries" and their terrorist proxies. Prior to the June 2025 air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites, Iran's rulers "could have built a nuclear weapon with near certainty in less than six months," according to David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Is that not imminent enough?

When someone says he intends to kill you, it's essential to take him seriously. Former Iranian President Rafsanjani threatened that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." Iran's rulers see themselves as jihadis fighting a holy war against the enemies of Allah. They can contemplate temporary ceasefires, periods of calm that allow them to rearm for the next battle. But a serious "peace deal" would be out of the question.

Iran Threatens To Cut Off Persian Gulf States’ Supply Of Slave Labor (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Iran Threatens To Cut Off Persian Gulf States’ Supply Of Slave Labor

Tehran, May 7 – In a dramatic escalation of its ongoing conflict with the United States, Israel, and reality, Iran announced Tuesday that it may soon deprive the Persian Gulf monarchies of their primary economic lifeline: millions of imported Asian and African workers laboring under conditions that human rights groups have politely described as "not ideal" and critics have more accurately labeled "modern slavery."

Iranian officials, speaking from bunkers thoughtfully decorated with portraits of the most recent Supreme Leader, warned that continued "Zionist aggression" could lead to a full cutoff of the kafala-sponsored workforce that keeps Dubai's skyscrapers gleaming, Qatar's stadiums staffed, and Saudi malls operational. "If the flow of expendable labor stops," said a Revolutionary Guard spokesman, "who will build their palaces while they sip date juice in air-conditioned tents?"

Gulf states import roughly 35 million migrant workers, who make up the vast majority of the population in places such as the UAE and Qatar. Under the kafala system, these laborers surrender their passports, endure squalid camps, and face legal bondage to employers—arrangements long defended as "cultural" by the same regimes that lecture the West on tolerance.

"Without these heroic proletarians risking their lives for pennies," the Iranian statement continued, "the sheikhs will have to vacuum their own Bentleys. Think of the inconvenience!"

The threat comes amid Iranian missile and drone strikes that have already killed dozens of foreign workers, stranded seafarers, and disrupted remittances — the very economic lifeline many poor families in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and beyond depend on. Gulf economies, built on the backs of men who can't change jobs without permission and women often trapped in domestic servitude, now face the prospect of actual labor shortages if the fighting intensifies.

Human rights organizations expressed deep concern. "This is a tragedy," said a representative from Amnesty International, who somehow found time between condemning Israel for existing. "Migrant workers deserve better than to be collateral damage in someone else's war — but we can talk about Qatar specifically some other time, please. You're making our fundraising department uncomfortable."

Analysts note that Iran, a regime that exports misery through proxies and crushes its own dissidents, now positions itself as the disruptor of Gulf exploitation. Meanwhile, the petro-monarchies, flush with cash from oil sales that fund everything except decent worker protections, suddenly remember they need "stability."

A senior Emirati official, speaking anonymously while his Filipino driver waited outside, dismissed the Iranian bluster. "They can threaten all they want. Our sponsorship system is built to last. These workers come voluntarily — for the opportunity."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Francesca Albanese was in Athens last weekend to promote her new book, When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. Speaking alongside former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, she offered Greeks a warning about their alliance with Israel:

You think that you have chosen Israel to guarantee peace against Türkiye. I don’t think so, Israel has picked you. Israel has chosen you, and it’s going to exploit your fears and your insecurity, because this is what Israel does to advance its regional hegemony.

This isn't policy analysis. This is antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is built on exactly one premise: a powerful Jewish collective secretly manipulates nations by exploiting their divisions, weaponizing their fears, and pursuing domination beneath a pretense of mutual interest. Albanese's formulation has every element of that framework. A secretive powerful actor has chosen Greece, is exploiting Greek psychological vulnerabilities, in service of a hidden agenda — regional hegemony — that Greece naively mistakes for common goals. Replace "Israel" with "the Elders of Zion" and there is no difference.

Some might argue that the Protocols is clearly antisemitic but impugning criminal intent to everything Israel does it not, because Israel does not represent all Jews. Yet the Elders were purportedly a small cabal of powerful Jews, not elected or supported by every Jewish person on earth. What exactly makes the Protocols antisemitic but identical language claiming Israel is secretly planning regional hegemony is not?

They are the exact same accusation.

The treatment of Israel is truly unique. Every other nation's decisions are judged using normal political analysis: Erdoğan's neo-Ottoman ideology and domestic political needs. Iran's regime survival imperatives and Shia crescent strategy. China's economic interests, doctrine, and institutional incentives. Israel alone is assumed evil at the outset and all analysis is using that prism. There is no need to dive into the factors that prompt Israel to want to partner with Greece, or the UAE, African nations or anyone else - it is all subsumed under "this is what Israel does." No explanation necessary; the hidden agenda of manipulating others for ultimate Jewish domination is assumed.

And the poor Greek government is too naive to know it is being manipulated by those brilliant Zionists. It makes decisions that it thinks are for its self-interest but are really part of the circles within circles of the vast Zionist plot. They don't stand a chance. Only even more brilliant people like Francesca Albanese can see through the deceptions and uncover the Zionist evil that animates everything in the world.

After all, Albanese alone noticed that Israel managed to manipulate the world to ignore "genocide" in Gaza. There was no media coverage, there were no daily protests tying up traffic in every major Western city, The world slept. Her book title — When the World Sleeps — proves it! The speech and the book are the same argument: there is a hidden truth about Israel that ordinary geopolitical analysis won't reveal, because Israel is uniquely defined by deception.

Those who argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism try to find edge cases that might show a difference between the two. But you can use the same methods to prove that Nazi-style racial antisemitism is not the same as medieval Christian antisemitism. In the end, the structure is the same. And Francesca Albanese, by using the term "this is what Israel does," is adopting the exact same structure as the Protocols.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Center for the Study of Political Islam International) (CSPII) tracks the growth of jihadism and political Islam worldwide. But its new research brief on Islam in Israel shows not only the huge increase of Islamic organizations in the Jewish state, but also ends up proving that calling Israel Islamophobic or practicing "apartheid" is nothing but absurd.

CSPII's detailed analysis of Islamic organizational growth in Israel is drawn from the Israeli Ministry of Justice's official registry.

They find that there are currently 386 active Islamic organizations registered in Israel, operating across 125 cities and towns. The first was registered in 1952 — four years after Israel's founding, when the state that was supposedly engaged in ethnic cleansing was already registering Muslim charities. The growth since then has been exponential, with more Islamic organizations emerging in the last five years alone than in the entire decade from 2010 to 2020.

The infrastructure numbers are harder to dismiss. There are 126 organizations dedicated specifically to building and maintaining mosques, supporting 252 mosques nationwide. The Israeli government funds more than 100 of those mosques directly (as of 15 years ago) and pays the salaries of their imams. An additional 104 organizations are dedicated to Islamic education and da'wa. Nazareth alone hosts 34 Islamic organizations; Umm al-Fahm has 33.

The "apartheid" framework depends on a picture of a dominant group systematically denying a subordinate group the right to organize, worship, and build institutions. The data from Israel's own government registry makes that picture impossible to maintain. Apartheid South Africa did not fund Black churches or pay the salaries of their clergy. It did not register and protect hundreds of civil society organizations built around Black religious identity. Israel does all of this for its Muslim citizens — and has been doing it continuously since the early 1950s.

Bigotry exists everywhere, including Israel But occasional acts of discrimination— almost all from individuals — is not apartheid, it is not genocide, it is not "Jewish supremacy." Giving it those titles is propaganda.

The facts stubbornly refuse to support the lies.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

05/06 Links Pt2: Antizionism is a totalitarian conspiracy theory rotting the West from within; Michael Oren: The End of the Diaspora?; Zack Polanski is a joke that isn’t funny anymore

From Ian:

Allister Heath: Antizionism is a totalitarian conspiracy theory rotting the West from within

Antizionism is a psychosis dressed up as a theory of justice, the ultimate pathological, nihilistic, anti-Western brew, a disgusting concoction of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism and critical theory, fused together with aspects of Nazism, Christian anti-Semitism, Islamism and Cold War Soviet nostrums.

The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the allies did to the Nazis. It trivialises the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitimate, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalises intifada terrorism as freedom-fighting.

Antizionists support a neo-Inquisition that identifies and cancels Zionists. They want to force British Jews to denounce Israel, to renounce friends and family, to pass a purity test. Modelled on the Cultural Revolution’s struggle sessions and the “taking of the knee” ritual, antizionists celebrate “good Jews”, in politics or the arts, who have turned against Israel, who have proved their loyalty, who “converted”, who humiliated themselves.

The antizionists have blood on their hands. Their lies have worked. They have radicalised white Lefties, and emboldened recently arrived extremists. The hatred is atavistic, and follows the pattern of a social contagion. Each time Israel is attacked, UK anti-Semitic violence instantly surges. Anti-Jewish pogroms trigger more Jew-hatred, especially when Israelis are raped and butchered.

Psychologists call this arousal transfer: one violent act heightens other people’s aggression level. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, violence against Jews triggers a quasi-ecstatic reaction in sick minds, and a collective bloodlust ensues. Maniacs detect weaknesses, and go in for the kill. Many suffer deindividuation: they lose their sense of self, and join in the mob.

Is that who we have become? Is the Leftist-Islamist alliance here to stay? Is anti-Semitism the New Normal? I refuse to accept it. This is not Britain. This is not us.

Exclusive: Labour’s Middle East policy let antisemites use antizionism as a cover, claims Badenoch

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has told the JC she believes Sir Keir Starmer’s Middle East policy has been picked up as a “signal” by “people who use antizionism as a cover for antisemitism”.

The leader of the opposition accused the prime minister of being “too preoccupied with his own problems” to consider the consequences of actions taken to “appease his backbenchers”, including recognising the state of Palestine.

In a wide-ranging interview, in Barnet, north London, on the final day of campaigning before tomorrow’s local elections, Badenoch also called for the Nakba Day protest scheduled for May 16 in the capital to be banned.

In critical comments the day after Starmer held a crisis summit on antisemitism at No10, Badenoch suggested his own government’s foreign policy had been at least in part responsible for the situation.

Looking back to the increasingly anti-Israel line Labour took after coming to power in 2024, she claimed that Starmer “had trouble with his backbenchers, his MPs weren’t supporting [him], and so he did things like recognising Palestine while there were still hostages held by Hamas.

“That sort of action, which he did to appease his backbenchers, sent a signal to a lot of people who have been using antizionism as a cover for antisemitism.

“I don’t think he realised the repercussions of those sorts of actions.”

The JC joined Badenoch on a campaign visit to Barnet the day before local elections, as she toured seven London boroughs in a Conservative-branded black cab.

She criticised some Labour MPs, as well as Green and pro-Gaza independent politicians, for extreme anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism.

‘Woefully inadequate’ plea deal, with just a year in jail, for man who killed elderly Jew in LA, Jewish groups say

The plea deal, under which Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, who admitted to charges related to the 2023 death of a 69-year-old Jewish man near Los Angeles, gets probation and a year in jail, is “woefully inadequate,” according to Joshua Burt, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

It also “emboldens others to act in anger against the Jewish community,” Burt told JNS.

Alnaji, 52, pleaded guilty to all charges, including felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury, on Tuesday after initially pleading not guilty. Paul Kessler died from injuries sustained in an altercation with Alnaji on Nov. 5, 2023.

The attack occurred in Thousand Oaks, near Los Angeles, amid competing pro- and anti-Israel rallies. Alnaji struck Kessler with a megaphone, and the sexagenarian fell and hit his head on the pavement.

The Ventura County Superior Court has suggested it will place Alnaji on probation, with up to a year in jail, according to the county district attorney’s office. Erik Nasarenko, the district attorney, stated that “Alnaji should be sentenced to prison for his violent behavior, and our office strongly objects to any lesser sentence.”

Under state law, Alnaji could spend four years in jail.

Tom Dunlevy, supervising senior deputy district attorney for Ventura County, told JNS that “the judge offered probation if Alnaji pled guilty, but with a custodial sanction of up to 365 days in jail as a term of probation.”

“If the court places the defendant on probation, they then set the terms of probation,” he said. “One of those terms could be an amount of jail time up to a year in jail.”