06/24 Links Pt1: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy: Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence; Israel's alliance with America is vital, but Jerusalem can't outsource its security

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: No, Israel isn’t ‘deliberately targeting’ children in Gaza

Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn’t there.

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip – language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are among the most serious charges in international law. So you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child, and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.

What it produces instead, according to a detailed rebuttal by the watchdog UN Watch, is a chain of assumptions dressed up as findings.

Take the report’s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli “quadcopter” while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent” – and from that single inference it concludes the baby was deliberately targeted. For this to be true, a drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, pick out a 35-centimetre infant’s head, and fire a precision shot, all based on a photo of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who even claims to have seen a drone. The same pattern recurs case after case: a family account, a doctor’s guess about which weapon caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated murder. Nothing connecting the dots.

There is one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier’s own account, via a December 2024 Haaretz investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza.

The Commission cites it as evidence of a culture targeting children. But the soldier’s actual testimony says otherwise: his unit shot the boy under a blanket order that “anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians” – opening fire before anyone could see who he was. Only afterward, retrieving his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed and “just a boy, maybe 16.”

This strategy came about because, tragically, Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters, and during this war has almost always dressed its fighters in civilian clothes, not uniform, even sending them unarmed to collect weapons hidden earlier on at their destination.

This made it extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants, so lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued. In these circumstances, some have argued that that Israel’s rules of engagement were reckless, or some of its soldiers were trigger-happy, resulting in too many innocent people being killed. But even that would not be evidence of a policy to murder children because they are children – the far graver charge the Commission is actually making.

Stephen Pollard: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy

The UN Guidance and Practice for fact-finding missions provides that evidence must be evaluated for its “reliability” and “truthfulness,” that investigations must be conducted with “integrity,” meaning “without any bias,” and that factual findings must be “adequately corroborated” by at least two other “independent and reliable” sources.” This would be a joke were it not to appalling.

The report is entirely one sided, takes its so-called evidence regarding intent, knowledge, and targeting decisions from witnesses whose outlook is prima facie loaded against Israel and whose testimony cannot be verified, and which ignores all facts which paint a different picture from the conclusion the report clearly sets out to reach.

To quote UN Watch again: “These shortcomings would be troubling in any fact-finding exercise. They are particularly concerning here because the Commission’s findings are intended to inform international legal proceedings, including before the ICC and the ICJ. Findings of this nature – particularly those purporting to establish intent and criminal responsibility – would ordinarily require rigorous testing and corroboration before being relied upon in judicial proceedings. Yet international courts have an established practice of relying on UN reports as evidence. This report therefore undermines not only the integrity of international fact-finding, but also the application of international law and confidence in the UN system as a whole.”

I urge you to look at UN Watch’s detailed legal rebuttal – destruction is a more accurate description – of the report, here.

Meanwhile, these are its key points. Most obviously, it exposes how the gravest accusation of all, that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, which is an accusation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, is made without a single verified example. The report simply concludes that because children died in the war – a tragic but unavoidable occurrence in war – this is proof of deliberate targeting.

The report does not consider in any way the role of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as if they were not even present – concluding that the IDF, under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged in the deliberate killing of children for the sake of killing children. “Across 94 pages, the Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones. The result is a fictionalised account of the conflict in which there is no armed opposition, no complex urban battlefield, and no armed actors in Gaza other than the IDF. Combined with the erasure of militant activity in the West Bank, this distortion enables the COI to advance the fabricated narrative that Israeli forces were trained, directed, and deployed to deliberately target children as a matter of policy.”

As UN Watch puts it, the report’s extreme length is intended to create the impression of rigorous evidentiary and forensic review, yet it still cannot mask the fundamental absence of reliable proof for its central allegations.

None of this will be reported because it does not fit the now near-universal narrative – that Israel is a uniquely evil rogue state which commits genocide to satisfy its blood lust. But who now cares about the truth?

Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence

Supporters of Israel and the Jewish community (and, above all, the Jewish community itself) must be utterly exhausted. Since 7th October, we have seen an unprecedented global onslaught of disinformation. Wave after wave, day after day, blood libel after blood libel, centuries-old and vicious. If we ever wanted to know how the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust was created, we do now. We have all been constantly on the defensive for over two and a half years. Yesterday’s tiresome, evidence-free tissue of nonsense from the UN Human Rights Council is a masterpiece of the antisemitic genre. Every trope under the sun is there. It has been rebutted brilliantly elsewhere. This article is instead concerned with what to do about the gleeful antisemitic machine that has seized on this nonsense and will run with it for months to come.

Supporters of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide have spent too much energy responding to accusations after they have already passed through the institutions that lend them force. A hostile claim enters an NGO paper, moves into a UN report, becomes a headline, appears in a parliamentary speech, and then finds its way into campus motions, sanctions campaigns, divestment drives and street politics. By the time the correction arrives, the allegation has already acquired the authority of repetition. More to the point, nobody outside the pro-Israel ecosystem reads or believes any rebuttal. The lies are too powerful, and the machine pushing them wins the numbers game every time.

The campaign against them requires a different posture. It is time for accountability. We know by now that rebuttal alone cannot match the speed, emotion and reach of libel dressed in institutional language. Accuracy must be paired with consequences. False allegations should be treated as liability events, not merely as arguments to be answered. The task is to make the production, laundering and circulation of defamatory claims costly, documented and procedurally risky.

The most important shift is to examine the entire chain of allegations. A UN report, a media story, or a parliamentary intervention is usually the final expression of a longer process. Someone generated the claim, someone supplied it to investigators, someone gave it legal vocabulary, someone briefed journalists, someone amplified it, and someone used it to demand policy action. Each point in that chain offers a potential route to accountability. The relevant questions are practical: who made the claim, what evidence supported it, who checked it, who ignored corrections, who repeated it after notice, and what concrete harm followed?

We must begin with a litigation-grade dossier. Every contested allegation should be extracted, sourced, classified and tested. False facts, misleading omissions, circular citations, anonymous sourcing, legal exaggeration, and defamatory insinuations must be carefully distinguished. Courts, regulators, donors and professional bodies respond to precision. A strong dossier should identify the claim, the source, the contradiction, the affected person or entity, the republication history, the available jurisdiction and the remedy sought. That is legal intelligence.

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Amnesty is antisemitic — by its own definition

On 14 December 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration attended by roughly a thousand people at Bondi Beach, two gunmen opened fire and threw homemade bombs into the crowd. Fifteen people were killed and forty injured. The attack was the worst mass shooting in modern Australian history, and it was, by the near-unanimous judgment of Australian authorities and the world's press, antisemitic — Jews murdered at a Jewish religious gathering for being Jews. Within weeks the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, with former High Court Justice Virginia Bell as Commissioner, charged with investigating the nature, prevalence, and drivers of antisemitism in Australia, examining the circumstances of the Bondi attack, and assessing antisemitism's impact on the daily life of Jewish Australians. The Commission invited submissions, and especially encouraged Jews who had experienced antisemitism to make them.

Amnesty Australia's submission to the Commission is not meant to highlight the problem of antisemitism. It is meant to minimize it.

Amnesty starts with a definition of antisemitism that is surprisingly reasonable. It tells the Commission (1.2) that 

At its core, antisemitism is racism; discrimination, stereotypical discourse and hostility directed at Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage. 

The rest of the twenty-five-page report works as hard as possible to chip away at Amnesty's own definition. 

Zionism is a belief. The idea that Jews form a nation, and that this nation was formed in and is centered on the land of the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel, is a belief Jews hold; the daily liturgy is built around return to Zion and Jerusalem, and has been for two millennia. A modern political expression of that belief does not make it less a belief that Jews hold. Hostility directed at Jews for this belief is, by their own definition, antisemitism. 

The existence of anti-Zionist Jews does not make an anti-Zionist attack on Jews any less antisemitic, any more than the existence of atheist Jews makes the firebombing of a synagogue any less antisemitic. A bigotry is defined by the hatred that drives it and the group it strikes, not by whether some member of the group declines to hold the targeted belief. The arsonist who burns a synagogue does not first poll the congregation for believers, and the relevant question was never whether a dissenting Jew can be found. It is whether the hostility attaches to Jews as such for a belief most of them hold — and the "beliefs" clause Amnesty wrote answers that before anyone can raise it.

The rest of the submission is the sustained labor of keeping that consequence out.

It begins by calling the Bondi attack "horrific" (1.3), and from that point forward antisemitism is never permitted to stand alone. It arrives chaperoned. The rise in antisemitism, the submission explains in the very next paragraph (1.4), "has occurred alongside increasing racism, vilification and hostility against Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities, as well as other racialised and marginalised groups." Responses "should strengthen protections against all forms of racism and discrimination, rather than prioritising one community's rights at the expense of another's." A submission to a commission on antisemitism has, by its fourth paragraph, reframed attention to antisemitism as a threat to be managed — a possible act of prioritizing one community "at the expense of another." This is am implicit attack on the Commission itself, which is meant to understand antisemitism specifically — according to Amnesty an investigation into what causes the Bondi attack should not center on antisemitism at all. It must cover all forms of hate, and it must always, always mention the other forms together with antisemitism. 

The dilution is Amnesty's major theme. Antisemitism is "part of the wider work governments must undertake against discrimination and different forms of racism" (5.9). It rises "along with" Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism (5.9). 

Antisemitism is not interchangeable with the hatreds Amnesty keeps setting beside it. Most racism casts its target as inferior — lesser, backward, subhuman. Antisemitism characteristically casts the Jew as superior in malign power: the manipulator, the lobby, the hidden hand, the disproportionately guilty. A framework that can only recognize hatred as contempt for the inferior is structurally blind to a hatred that operates as resentment of the powerful. That blindness is convenient, because the genocide accusation, the fixation on the "Jewish lobby," and the singular obsession with one small state among the world's hundred conflicts are the contemporary grammar of the powerful-Jew trope. Police brutality in the US? Blame Israeli training. Amnesty's insistence that antisemitism is simply one more racism erases how antisemitism works - and how Amnesty promotes it.

While Amnesty pretends that antisemitism is the same as other forms of hate, it itself does not treat them the same. To Amnesty, only the fight against antisemitism endangers human rights. The IHRA definition, according to Amnesty,  risks the right to free speech, even though its language says the exact opposite. But there is no section cautioning that combating Islamophobia might chill free expression, no warning that anti-racism measures for any other group risk infringing the rights of others. The entire apparatus of "human rights respecting," "proportionate," "do not unduly restrict" is deployed against a single form of hatred (9.1–9.11, 10.1–10.20). Of all the hate Amnesty names, only the fight against antisemitism is presented as a standing danger to everyone else's freedom.

When Jews are murdered, Amnesty names the killing antisemitic only when it cannot possibly find another justification. In Bondi, the target was a Hanukkah celebration and nothing else, a thousand Jews and no one else, with no second location and no broader civilian toll to fold the Jewish dead into. The antisemitism had no cover to dissolve into, so it had to be named.

Compare this to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, where terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House at Nariman House as a Jewish target, murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, and — by the testimony of one convicted attacker — chose it on the belief that it was "used as a front for the Mossad." Amnesty condemned the Mumbai attacks as terrorism and noted the Jewish center factually, but I cannot find a single instance where Amnesty characterized the targeting of Nariman House as antisemitic. There were other targets, so the specific targeting of Jews can be watered down as a simple terror attack against civilians.  

The same dissolution serves for the Har Nof synagogue massacre of 2014, where Palestinian attackers butchered four rabbis at prayer with axes.  Amnesty has never called this, or to my knowledge any Palestinian attack, antisemitic. I cannot find anywhere Amnesty calls the Hamas charter, with its citations of the Protocols and its invocation of the hadith calling on Muslims to kill Jews hiding behind rocks and trees.

Amnesty's only consistency with antisemitism is to make its surface as small as possible. If the Bondi murderers had written a manifesto saying that Israel is engaged in genocide and the Chabad that sponsored the Chanukah festival was complicit because it does not oppose Israeli policies, Amnesty would have had a problem with calling that antisemitic — because that is Amnesty's own logic in opposing anyone, any organization or any company from maintaining normal relations with Israel.  It wrote in a September 2025 briefing, "Amnesty is calling on states and public institutions to... immediately, whether independently or collectively, suspend all activities that contribute or are directly linked to Israel’s unlawful occupation, its system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls or the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Otherwise, they risk complicity in the crime against humanity of apartheid, genocide, and other crimes under international law." Their definition absurdly includes companies like Expedia and Airbnb and can be infinitely expanded.

This minimization of antisemitism is consistent. Amnesty regards the Jewish community of Australia incompetent to define the risks they face. In footnote 43, Amnesty takes the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's annual antisemitism monitoring — the principal communal body's record of incidents against its own community — and informs the Commission that the Jews counting them have it wrong. The monitoring included "weekly demonstrations," Amnesty notes, and "the inference being that these protests are 'antisemitic.'" The implication is that the community has misclassified the hostility directed at it. The Jews, by characterizing demonstrations against their beliefs as threats, are the real threat to human rights. 

Amnesty Australia joined with other groups to condemn arson against Jewish targets in their country. It gave three examples: 

The antisemitic attacks include the January 21 arson attack and spray-painting of antisemitic graffiti of a childcare centre in Maroubra which is located near a Jewish school and synagogue; attacks on the former home in Sydney of a prominent Jewish individual which involved the destruction of cars with fire and antisemitic graffiti; and the vandalism of two Sydney synagogues in one week which were both graffitied with swastikas.  

 Every one of those attacks either included swastikas or language like "Fuck Jews." But at the same time there were other vandalism attacks against Australian synagogues that also said "Free Palestine."  

It it a strange coincidence that Amnesty and the other groups cannot bring themselves to define attacks on synagogues  as antisemitic if they can avoid it. This is what minimizing antisemitism looks like. 

Each of these is a way of exempting Jews from the definition in paragraph 1.2. The last movement of the submission does something worse: it violates its own definition.

The submission refers to Israel's "genocide against Palestinians in Gaza" (9.5) and to "Israel's genocidal acts" as settled fact, asserted without the qualifier that any contested legal claim demands. It rests this on Amnesty International's own December 2024 report. That report contains, on page 101, the sentence that collapses the entire framing. Amnesty there describes the prevailing legal standard for genocidal intent — the standard the International Court of Justice has applied, under which intent must be the only reasonable inference from a state's conduct — as "an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict."

The bar for the gravest accusation in international law is set high precisely to prevent the term's use as a political weapon. Amnesty looked at that standard, acknowledged in writing that applying it honestly "would effectively preclude" the conclusion it wanted, and then set the standard aside in favor of a looser one of its own construction. 

Amnesty's flat characterization of Israel's actions as "genocide," using a definition it fabricated for Israel alone, is itself discrimination against the Jewish people — a standard built for Jews and applied to no one else. No wonder the submission objects that IHRA's "double standard" example is too "vague" to count as antisemitism. The problem was never vagueness. It is that the example describes Amnesty perfectly.

Amnesty says antisemitism is hostility directed at "Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage." Amnesty never wrote "all Jews." It wrote the community and its institutions, targeted for identity, belief, or heritage — and that is a perfect description of Amnesty's own campaign against Israel. The identity is Israeli Jews. The community and its institutions are the Jewish state and the companies and citizens who sustain it, whom Amnesty has declared complicit in genocide. The belief is Zionism. The heritage is the claim that Jews have a right to the land of their origin. Amnesty has assigned collective guilt to a people for the belief that constitutes them, judged that people by a standard it built for no one else, and directed the verdict at the largest Jewish communal institution on earth. By the definition Amnesty handed the Commission, Amnesty qualifies.

This is why the definition given by Amnesty itself had to be minimized. A standard applied honestly would have caught its author. Bondi and swastikas stayed in the definition because Amnesty couldn't find a reason not to include them. Amnesty did not bring the Commission a definition of antisemitism. It brought a procedure for shrinking antisemitism until it all but disappears.

To Amnesty, "complicity with genocide" can include almost everything; antisemitism can include almost nothing. Hostility to Israel is infinitely flexible, hostility to Jews infinitely diminished.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/23 Links Pt2: Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it; Australian Teachers union seeks guidance on Holocaust lessons, claims it is ‘difficult’ to teach

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: Starmer tackled antisemitism in opposition – but then helped fuel it in power

Whatever else may lie behind Labour’s attitude to Israel, that political demography explains why Starmer started to deal with the Jewish state not as one of our nation’s most trusted and closest allies, which has been engaged in a battle to defeat Iranian proxies since the October 7, 2023 massacre, but as a de facto enemy state.

Within weeks of taking office the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy had dropped Britain’s opposition to the ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant and had imposed an entirely symbolic ban on the export of certain defence equipment to Israel – symbolic because Israel had no need of them, and because our armed forces rely far more heavily on Israeli technology than the other way round. Last year the Royal College of Defence Studies was instructed no longer to admit Israelis.

Then last September Starmer did the bidding of antizionists and antisemites across the world by recognising a Palestinian state without demanding anything in return – especially and notably not requiring the release of the remaining hostages as a quid pro quo. His action was criticised as, at worst, rewarding Hamas for October 7 or, at best, giving Hamas a PR coup over more moderate Palestinians in showing that their terrorism had forced recognition.

Starmer’s government has relentlessly portrayed Israel as some kind of rogue state, which has added fuel to the antisemitic fire which has taken hold since October 7, 2023. And until very recently, when the explosion in antisemitic incidents turned violent, Starmer had uttered not a word of criticism of the hate marches and demos across Britain which have been a festival of Jew hate since the Hamas massacre.

It is all very well for Starmer to seek to portray himself as some sort of healer, expunging Jew hate from Labour. But he cannot have his cake and eat it. Since becoming PM, Starmer has hugely damaged relations with Israel (even if Israeli intelligence continues to provide vital information to our security services). The last two years will go down as the worst in living memory for relations with Israel – in large measure as a result of Starmer’s deliberate policy to appease the Muslim sectarian vote.

The only question that remains now is how much worse this will get under Burnham.

The Kurds are the real victims of the Middle East, not the Palestinians

At the end of the day, perhaps the likeliest explanation for this indifference to the plight and promise of the Kurds is quite simple.

Could it be that the Palestinian cause can be made to fit into the contemporary, and all too simplistic, binary narrative of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel – the world’s only Jewish-majority state – cast as villain, a framing that echoes age-old tropes and carries a powerful emotional charge for some audiences?

The Kurdish story might seem more complicated from the outside. The antagonists include Arabs, Iranians, and Turks, but not Jews and Israelis, making it harder, and perhaps less comfortable, to fit into prevailing ideological frameworks and orthodoxies.

The result is a striking asymmetry. One national movement attracts enormous global attention, endless demonstrations, celebrity endorsements, campus encampments, and international campaigns. The other, despite representing a population many times larger and, in the case of Iraq, endured genocide, does not begin to command comparable concern.

The real question, then, is why a people of more than 40 million, denied a state for more than a century and subjected to repeated waves of repression, has attracted so little of the moral passion mobilised elsewhere.

Until that question is honestly confronted, claims of universal principles, support for self-determination and national liberation movements, and concern for human rights will continue to ring hollow.

Divided over vilification laws

Victoria’s strengthened anti-vilification laws have produced no convictions since taking effect, raising questions about whether the changes will deliver meaningful outcomes for the Jewish community.

Amendments earlier this year removed the requirement for the Director of Public Prosecutions to approve prosecutions before charges could be laid.

Jewish Community Council of Victoria CEO Naomi Levin said the change was a step forward, but cautioned it was too early to judge.

“Removing the barrier, which was DPP approval, is a real step in the right direction, but we need to give these laws time to be implemented, for police to become familiar with them, and for charges to be laid before we can really judge whether it’s satisfactory.”

Levin acknowledged a broader erosion of confidence.

“There’s been a breakdown of trust between the Jewish community and police and government, because we’ve seen so many really challenging incidents of vilification go unprosecuted.”

Some question whether further reforms really addresses the underlying problem.

Jewish activist Menachem Vorchheimer argued the new laws were unlikely to make a meaningful difference, because the key legislative gaps had already been addressed under existing provisions.

“There is no evidence that there is any difference since recent changes to the laws came into place. Victoria has had a legal framework to deal with racism against Jews for 25 years,” he said.

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06/23 Links Pt1: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster; UN report a ‘predetermined indictment dressed up as an investigation’; Former hostage condemns UN Special Rapporteur's silence on Hamas' October 7 sexual violence

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster

Israel is no vassal state. The United States gets enormous benefits from its alliance with this democratic Middle East partner in terms of weapon development and intelligence. As Vance himself stated in 2024, it’s the ideal MAGA ally since, unlike Europe, Israel fights alongside America.

Still, Vance’s willingness to characterize Iran’s possession of weapons to threaten other nations as morally equivalent to Israel’s military was troubling. “You can’t tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, they’re not allowed to have any self-defense,” he said.

And yet, Vance revealed his own bias against Israel when, perhaps channeling the blood libels spread by leftist antisemites like his podcaster friend Tucker Carlson, he warned the Israelis that those who decried an American decision to surrender were simply being bloodthirsty.

“I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” said Vance.

That accusation was as reckless as it was unfair. Israel isn’t trying to kill its way out of anything. It was viciously attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, by Iranian minions who carried out the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. It was the target of direct missile barrages launched on April 14 and Oct. 1, 2024. And it was attacked by missiles, rockets and drones throughout the war that started on Feb. 28, leading to casualties, damage and sending much of the country into bomb shelters day after day.

Had America been similarly attacked, we know very well that Trump and Vance would have exacted a far greater revenge on the assailants than the targeted strikes that Israel executed on Iranian targets.

Being able to vent his contempt and lack of sympathy for an ally that fought side by side with American forces and who were essential to the success America achieved may have given Vance some satisfaction. But it won’t get him out of the fix in which he now finds himself.

A weak negotiator
Simply put, the Iranians know that Vance’s position in the talks is weak. That’s why they are treating him with the same contempt that they once treated Obama’s envoys, as they continually take back any concessions he says he’s wrung out of them, making it clear that if he wants an agreement, then it will have to be on their terms.

We don’t know yet how the negotiations will end. Perhaps Trump’s natural aversion to bad deals and his unwillingness to be a party to a pact that will rightly be characterized as an abject surrender that will not achieve any of America’s war goals will cause him to recall Vance and return to war. He ought to know that as unpopular as the war may be, ending it in defeat will be even more unpopular. Having invested so much political capital in the conflict already, he won’t win it back by mimicking Obama’s appeasement.

Or perhaps he is so sick of the conflict and too panicked by gas prices, plummeting polls and the prospect of a Democratic sweep of the midterms to reverse course again.

Either way, he has set up Vance to fail. Trash-talking Israel may earn him cheers from the antisemitic groyper wing of the GOP, but neither they nor his fellow Israel-bashers at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times will win him the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. And if the vice president is the architect of an end to the war that will be the moral equivalent of President Joe Biden’s retreat from Afghanistan, then it may earn him a place in history, but not one that will be a stepping stone to the Oval Office.

Surrender Is a Verb, Not a Vibe By Abe Greenwald

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Because the U.S. had become so unaccustomed to the notion of victory, Israel’s post–October 7 determination to defeat one enemy after another struck many Americans (and others) as something monstrous. Even setting aside the unique standards to which the Jewish state is held, people seemed to think that a country is supposed to end a war once it’s taught the enemy a lesson. Israel, of course, reminded the world that wars are fought to be won, not ended.

So I took Trump’s invoking “unconditional surrender” as a kind of logical next step in reclaiming the purpose of war fighting. When one side surrenders, the other achieves victory. And surrender is also regime change by other means. Once imperial Japan surrendered in 1945, it was no longer imperial Japan. An Islamic Revolutionary Republic that surrenders to the United States would cease to be an Islamic Revolutionary Republic.

Anyway, that was what I had in mind to write about today. But then I saw that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just said this about Trump: “When he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender.”

That’s not unconditional surrender. It’s laying out a potential off-ramp for Trump to get out of his demand.

In war, surrender isn’t a “place.” It’s not in the eye of the beholder. And it’s not “essentially” determined. Surrender is an action that someone takes. In Leavitt’s definition, there is no place for the active agent; there is no surrenderer.

Of course, Trump could contradict her before the end of the day. And perhaps Leavitt was just winging it. But as things stand, we’ve taken a step back once again. Back to the murky talk of timelines, exit strategies, and undefined goals.

So perhaps this war, like other recent American wars, will be ended instead of won. And the biggest problem with wars that merely end—no matter how devastated one side may be—is that they don’t end at all.

Bethany Mandel: What Jews hear when JD Vance talks about Israel

The same dynamic appeared recently during a press conference in Switzerland focused on negotiations with Iran. When a reporter referred to what he described as a “genocide in Lebanon,” Vance did not challenge the characterization, nor did he mention Hezbollah’s role in the conflict, and did not note that the organization responsible for years of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians is itself an Iranian proxy. Instead, he moved quickly into a discussion of diplomacy and peace.

Then came perhaps the clearest example. During a White House briefing last week, Vance delivered a remarkably sharp rebuke of Israel, far more aggressive than his statements about Iran, declaring that Trump was effectively the only world leader sympathetic to Israel and suggesting that Israeli officials would be wise not to antagonize the one powerful ally they had left, aggressively asserting that the U.S. has bankrolled Israeli security.

At a moment when Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, funds and directs proxy groups across the Middle East, openly calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and has American blood on its hands, Vance seems more animated by Israeli behavior than by Iranian aggression. His frustration is directed primarily toward Jerusalem, while the regime in Tehran receives far more rhetorical restraint.

That imbalance is why many Jews heard something different in his comments to Stuckey. Had those remarks come from someone whose public rhetoric displayed at least equal skepticism toward Iran, they might have sounded like a reasonable plea for moderation. Coming from someone who has spent recent weeks and months repeatedly criticizing Israel and members of its government, they instead were part of a larger pattern.

We have watched a rapid deterioration take place over the last decade on the Left, where anti-Israel activism has served as a gateway into broader conspiratorial thinking about Jews, power, and influence.

It would be a tragedy to watch the Right make the same mistake after spending years recognizing that pattern on the other side. Conservatives concerned about Jew-hatred metastasizing on the Right may be increasingly hysterical in their rhetoric, but their paranoia is far from unjustified.

The conservative movement has spent years warning about ideological contagions that distorted the Left’s judgment and detached it from reality. It would be an extraordinary act of self-destruction if, having correctly identified the disease, we embrace our own version of it.

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It is very hard to see the frames we are stuck in: a visit to the 1955 World Book Encyclopedia

In my Substack, I've been writing a series called "How to Think" on critical thinking. It isn't specifically about hostility towards Israel or Jews,, but if people would use these methods, it would reduce both of those. I believe that this goes beyond what every other critical thinking book says.

Most of the chapters are partially behind a paywall, but I'm making this short chapter available to all. The analogy between the racism described here and antisemitism should be obvious - many of the previous forms of antisemitism seemed to be logical and even progressive at the time, and only later can they be seen for what they were. And so it is with today's "anti-Zionism."

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06/22 Links Pt2: A Jew Among Jews; Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood: BDS is like “taking books off shelves”; Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Hélio Varela scores at FIFA World Cup

From Ian:

A Jew Among Jews By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
During Passover, the Free Press published a beautiful piece by Olivia Reingold titled “I Am an October 8 Jew.” In it, she describes how, after October 7, she began to reclaim the Jewish heritage she had all but abandoned as a child. Eventually, Reingold would find herself moved to tears during a recent Shabbat service, “a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.”

I can’t say that I’m an October 8 Jew, as I was devoted to the cause well before then. But something about my Judaism has also changed since October 7.

I’ve long been a passionate Zionist, and I’ve felt that I owe everything to God. While I am a devoted believer, however, I’m a very negligent observer. Having come fully to embrace my Judaism only in adulthood, I’ve done slightly more than the bare minimum to maintain a personal sense of Jewish tradition.

Beginning a few decades ago, I went about kosher eating in my own way (and I’ve got my biblical justifications for it). I wrap tefillin in phases, the way others might go to the gym, slack off, and then resume. I pore over the Hebrew Bible regularly but in no regimented fashion. I tread lightly and humbly into the Talmud.

All of which is to say, I have cobbled together my own version of observance and continue to fine-tune it. Many Jews do the same.

Judaism, as I came to it, was about my relationship with my God, my place in history, and my inheritance. A lot of “my” was involved in this, but somehow “my people” barely came up.

October 7 changed me in this important respect. Before that day, I had never felt much of an ongoing obligation to my fellow Jews around the world. Of course, whenever I heard news of threatened or assaulted Jews, the bonds of history and faith would take hold. But they would once again recede. I didn’t think a great deal about how my actions or words affected the Jews of Australia, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

It hadn’t occurred to me that we were all, as Jews, in the same position. Because, at the time, we really weren’t. I was born well into the age of Jewish emancipation, and up until October 7, 2023, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews were counted foremost as individual citizens of their countries of residence. Their circumstances varied.

‘Fauda’ producers issue content warning regarding Oct. 7-based episodes

he producers of the action TV series “Fauda” warned viewers on Sunday that they may want to skip the upcoming episodes based on events during the Hamas-led massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Episodes 7 and 8 [of Season 5], which will air tomorrow [now today] ... include content, sights, and sounds that may be difficult to watch. It’s important for us to say: These episodes return to that terrible day and stand on their own. If watching is too difficult, it’s OK to give up and connect with the season’s plot, which will continue in the episode that will air next week,” Israeli satellite television network Yes said in a statement on social media. The renowned show, which debuted in Israel in 2015, has aired in 190 countries.

The newest season of the series was filmed primarily in Israel and Budapest, Hungary, after plans to shoot its European segments in Marseilles, France, were changed due to security concerns.

It was rewritten to address the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. The 11-episode Season 5 runs weekly on Yes in Israel and is distributed internationally on Netflix as well.

Israeli actor Idan Amedi, who played undercover agent Sagi Tzur in earlier seasons of the series, does not appear in the latest season due to the serious injury he sustained while fighting against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood compares boycott-led show cancellations to “taking books off shelves”

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has likened his gigs with an Israeli artist being cancelled due to boycotts to “taking books off shelves”.

In May 2024 and again in March 2025, Greenwood played in Tel Aviv with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, incurring criticism from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A pair of UK performances by the duo, scheduled for June 2025 in Bristol and London, were later cancelled following pressure from pro-Palestinian campaigners.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said those cancellations followed “peaceful BDS pressure”, citing what it called the artists’ “clear and irrefutable links to whitewashing Israel’s genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians”. Its post also said: “Dudu Tassa has repeatedly entertained genocidal Israeli forces in between these massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, willingly acting as a cultural ambassador for apartheid Israel.”

Greenwood has now given an interview to El País, in which he was asked to compare his stance on playing in Israel to the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

“I’m a fan of lots of Israeli films and writers and musicians, and the music I make with Dudu is resurrecting songs that are older than most of the countries that are currently fighting each other,” Greenwood responded.

“That’s always going to be more important to me,” he added. “There are bookshops in Madrid that are openly selling Amos Oz’s novels and he’s Israeli. To me, cancelling music is the same as taking books off shelves.”

Greenwood responded in a statement at the time of the cancellations, saying: “The venues and their blameless staff have received enough credible threats to conclude that it’s not safe to proceed.”

“Forcing musicians not to perform and denying people who want to hear them an opportunity to do so is self-evidently a method of censorship and silencing,” he continued. “Intimidating venues into pulling our shows won’t help achieve the peace and justice everyone in the Middle East deserves. This cancellation will be hailed as a victory by the campaigners behind it, but we see nothing to celebrate and don’t find that anything positive has been achieved.”

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06/22 Links Pt1: Jewish man and Cop killed in Montreal shooting; UN Watch chief seeks indictment of UNRWA head; Gazan terror groups admit some slain journalists were fighters

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Escalation must cost: Current Switzerland talks leave Iran stronger, Israel exposed

The United States and Iran concluded talks in Switzerland on Monday. Mediators Qatar and Pakistan described “encouraging progress” and announced a 60-day road map toward a final agreement.

The talks had created a “good foundation,” US Vice President JD Vance said, adding that Iran agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back into the country. Washington also issued a temporary 60-day license that allows Iranian oil and petrochemical sales through August 21.

The talks included discussion of a Lebanon “deconfliction cell” aimed at preventing renewed escalation between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel was absent. Iran was present.

That fact should trouble every Israeli. Diplomacy with Iran can be useful when it weakens the regime, freezes a threat, or buys time under conditions that favor the West. The Switzerland talks risk giving Tehran time, money, legitimacy, and a role in managing the fires it helped set.

Over the past 24 hours, criticism has focused on one concern: Tehran appears to have gained a road map without publicly accepting the hard conditions that would make it meaningful. It appears to have secured breathing room on sanctions while its proxies remain armed. It appears to have turned the Strait of Hormuz into a bargaining chip and Lebanon into part of a broader US-Iran understanding.

Iran should not be rewarded for threatening global shipping. It should not receive economic relief after using regional chaos to force the world back to the table. It should not gain influence over arrangements involving Lebanon while Hezbollah remains its most important Arab proxy and the direct threat facing Israel’s border communities.

A Lebanon deconfliction mechanism may sound technical. In reality, it could become a diplomatic trap. Israel cannot allow its freedom of action against Hezbollah to be filtered through a process shaped by Iran. The residents of Metula, Kiryat Shmona, Moshav Margaliot, Kibbutz Manara, and other northern communities do not need another committee. They need Hezbollah pushed back, disarmed, and deterred.

Mark Dubowitz: Why Squander The Greatest Leverage Ever Built Against Iran?

Most importantly, how much damage will be done to the sanctions architecture that took years to build?

Tehran could also gain access to tens of billions of dollars in additional oil revenue and portions of the roughly $100 billion in Iranian funds frozen abroad. That would be a massive windfall.

If the MOU includes broad waivers covering banking and transportation transactions, that would represent far more than a narrow licensing arrangement. It would fracture the core architecture of American oil and financial sanctions.

Once the United States normalizes Iranian oil exports to major buyers such as China, India, and the United Arab Emirates, alongside the repatriation of oil revenues back to Tehran, the damage becomes difficult to reverse.

If companies, traders, insurers, shipping firms, banks, and governments become accustomed to doing business with Iran again, restoring today’s pressure campaign would take years, not weeks — precisely why sanctions relief should come at the end of successful negotiations, not at the beginning.

And prematurely weakening this leverage will make it even more difficult to secure the final nuclear agreement with Iran that the MOU is supposedly designed to deliver.

The regime has played this game successfully against multiple American presidents. Indeed, the only arena in which the Islamic Republic has consistently defeated the United States is at the negotiating table.

President Trump argued he still retains the military option. But leverage erodes. Deployments end, Washington’s attention shifts, and Tehran may simply pocket economic concessions while waiting for pressure to dissipate or for a next president not willing to stop Iran.

If negotiations fail — as they likely will — the administration should be prepared immediately to restore maximum economic pressure, return to military operations including in Hormuz, and suffocate the regime’s remaining sources of power.

There is one final instrument that every administration has neglected.

The Iranian people.

Economic pressure and military power can weaken the regime. Only the Iranian people can ultimately end it.

Nothing can match the power of tens of millions of Iranians who despise the regime that rules them. No one has sacrificed more to challenge the Islamic Republic.

Despite enduring killings, incarceration, torture, corruption, and economic ruin, they continue to resist.

The truly decisive question is not how long the United States can pressure this regime.

It is whether America is finally prepared to help Iranians finish the job themselves.

President Trump should immediately instruct his intelligence services to build a plan. Call it Operation People’s Fury. And have it ready for when Iranians courageously return to the streets, as they have done repeatedly for decades.

Hamas held 'top secret' meeting with French officials, discussed return to '1967 borders'

Senior leaders of Hamas' political bureau held a highly confidential meeting with a French delegation, according to a Monday report from Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

It reported that the meeting took place "recently" in an unspecified country in the Middle East.

Two Palestinian sources spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat, one from Palestinian civil society elements who maintain working relations with France and other European countries, and the other from a Palestinian organization close to Hamas. They described the meeting as "top secret," adding that some Palestinian factions were only informed shortly before or after it was held.

This marks the first reported meeting of Hamas leaders with European officials since the October 7 massacre.

According to the report, the French delegation included current and former diplomats, as well as members of parliament from the ruling coalition and opposition parties.

Focus on Palestinian Internal affairs
A source from Palestinian civil society said the talks were largely focused on Palestinian internal affairs, improving national reconciliation, and advancing a political process aimed at ending the conflict with Israel.

The source also told Asharq Al-Awsat that discussions also touched on supporting establishing a Palestinian state within "the 1967 borders," meaning the pre-Six-Day War armistice lines.

Since October 7, France has been a leading advocate for a two-state solution that would allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.

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Hezbollah leader: Israel is censoring Quranic verses about Jews

Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem gave an Ashura speech on Sunday where he came up with a new Jewish conspiracy theory.

He stated, “Israel, through its presence and influence, has imposed in some countries that verses that speak about the Jews should not be taught so that future generations do not learn the history of the Jews and remain ignorant of historical facts.” 

Essentially he is saying that some Muslim countries, under Israel influence, are not teaching the verses of the Quran that are negative towards Jews. 

Which means that the head of Hezbollah just admitted that the Quran is antisemitic.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/21 Links: A Judge's Verdict on Israel; JNS Summit: Melanie Phillips Gives Chilling Warning on Islam!; IDF killed PIJ terrorist who kidnaped 12 y.o. hostage Yagil Yaakov

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: A Judge's Verdict on Israel

REVIEW: 'Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law' by Roy K. Altman

Countries exist, and whether they're the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus or China, no one doubts their basic right to continue their existence—unless it is Israel. Roy Altman, a young federal judge in Miami, has been lecturing about Israel widely on campuses since October 7. Israel on Trial distills his rebuttals of the six claims he has most often encountered that aim to undermine and delegitimize the presently constituted Jewish state.

I'm pleased to say Judge Altman is a friend, and kindly praises my work in his book—but I will risk my other friendships by recommending this book as absolutely indispensable equipment for any college student in America today.

The first three claims challenge Israel's creation or existence, claiming it is a "settler colonial project," illegitimately founded, and displacing what should be a Palestinian state. The other three focus on Israel's supposed conduct. Israel cruelly occupied Gaza before Oct. 7, 2023, one claim goes. This lets Hamas sympathizers, especially on campus, present that attack as more like a plucky prison break than an attempt to destroy Israel. Then there are the invocations of seldom-used international criminal law concepts of genocide and the even more obscure crime of apartheid.

Altman's answers to these critiques draw broadly from law and history. He provides excellent distillations of the abundant archaeological evidence for Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel. He also shows how this has not impeded their willingness to make repeated territorial concessions in the name of peace. Altman details six occasions on which the Jews agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state, only to have the Arabs reject it. His longest and most thorough chapter shows that "if anyone has colonized the Land of Israel, it has been [a] succession of Muslim armies." This is particularly important to recount now, as arguments challenging the authenticity of Jewish historical claims have started to sprout up on the political right, transmogrified into crank theories about how today's Jews are not the real Jews (a pet theme of Tucker Carlson's).

Many have heard of Israeli "settlers" living in the supposedly Arab city of Hebron, but do not know about the Arab ban on Jewish entrance into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—800 years ago. They have heard of "Palestinian rights," but not Napoleon's proclamation recognizing Jews as the "rightful heirs of Palestine." Altman's quick tour through history is crucial for a generation that, at best, knows about the past from podcasts and social media.

One place Altman falters is in describing Gaza and the West Bank as having been occupied before Israeli troops left in 2005. He makes the remark in passing, as his discussion focuses on rebutting the unprecedent proposition that Israel has since then occupied Gaza without physically occupying it, a unique doctrine invented for Israel. But Israel's presence before 2005 was not an occupation either, because these areas were both part of the League of Nations’'Mandate for Palestine, also known as the British Mandate, formed after the collapse of the previous sovereign, the Ottoman Empire. As the successor state to the Mandate, Israel inherited its borders under the international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for "as you possess under law")—the same rule that accounts for Jordan's odd borders, the Kurds' statelessness, and Syria's boiling melting pot.

Altman analyzes the accusations with a legal methodology, closely examining the evidence presented for each—and marshaling the facts to the contrary. But unlike in a courtroom, Israel's "acquittal" is not enough. The accusations are so sensational and passionately made that many neutral observers would conclude that even if they are off the mark, Israel must be guilty of some lesser included offense. Proof is not necessarily the point of these criticisms as much as creating a taint. Dreyfus's acquittal surely did not convince his accusers that he was entirely honorable.

Altman points out that the Palestinians' claims all mirror those of the Jews. The Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel has served as a paradigm for a people connected to a particular land. The Palestinians present themselves as the genuine natives. The word "ghetto" was invented to describe the tiny, crowded areas in European cities where Jews were permitted to live—and, therefore, Gaza becomes the world's largest open-air prison.

Why the genocide libel is central to the propaganda war against Israel and Jews

The Gaza war may have ended, but the genocide libel marches on. That libel, the false accusation that Israel and Diaspora Jews perpetrate genocide against others, allows anti-Zionists to invert the Holocaust, erasing Jews’ Holocaust victimhood and bestowing it upon Palestinians. And given this libel’s ubiquity, it’s worth understanding the libel’s origins, why it was amplified and went viral after Oct. 7, 2023, and why some Gazans dubbed themselves “Holocaust survivors” on social media as combat ceased.

The genocide libel is a central plank in “the propaganda war against Israel, which has become one of the most organized and sophisticated narrative campaigns in modern geopolitics,” said Faran Jeffery, director general of operations at the U.K.-based Midstone Centre for International Affairs. It focuses on “framing Israel … as a moral aberration.”

This propaganda war builds upon decades-old Soviet anti-Zionism. While the postwar West marginalized Nazi-style antisemitism, anti-Zionism evaded that strong taboo with thinly disguised libels about Israel and “Zionists.” Leveraging that loophole, the contemporary Western Left has recycled the extensive Soviet playbook, and its emphasis is clearly on efficacy over accuracy.

Professor Gunther Jikeli, associate director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, wrote, “If we apply the accepted legal definition of genocide, the accusation is simply untrue — and constitutes a form of defamation and demonization of a country. Second, it has a direct impact on Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere: Jews face constant suspicion of supporting an ‘evil’ state.”

Lest this prompt cognitive dissonance, anti-Zionism offers a preemptive remedy. “Anyone who senses that hostility toward Jews might be racist risks feeling a kind of moral contamination — becoming, in that sense, ‘like a Nazi,’” said Adam Louis-Klein, founder of the Movement Against Antizionism. With Nazism still widely considered objectionable, “that guilt must be instantly inverted and projected onto the object of hatred itself. Thus, a core feature of anti-Zionist ideology is to depict ‘Zionists’ as ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis,’ while Palestinians are recoded as the ‘Jews’ or ‘Holocaust survivors.’”

Pierre Rehov: Trump's Iran 'Deal'

The 14-point text is unambiguous on the point the White House is most eager to fog. It commits the United States, "with regional partners," to develop a "plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- $3 billion of which has, according to the unsurpassed journalist, Lee Smith, already been sent to Iran through by way of the United Arab Emirates. The president has called reports of that figure "fake news" and insisted nobody is putting up "ten cents." The clause nevertheless sits prominently in the document he signed.

Only one question really matters: what does the agreement, if honored by Iran, deliver? It leaves enriched uranium inside Iran, concedes a right to enrichment that was recently a red line, permits the Iranian ballistic-missile program Trump now defends supposedly because other countries have missiles too, and pours reconstruction money into an economy whose ruling institution is the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

An interim framework can easily be a device for extracting one concrete concession -- opening the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz -- while the other clauses quietly expire.

Trump has repeated that if the deal collapses he will return to force – but who will do that after he is no longer president?

Each Israeli reprisal can trigger an Iranian walkout, and each walkout hands Washington a legal pretext to resume the war it paused. If Trump, however, is reluctant to use force against Iran again now, why should anyone think that he would be more inclined to use it later?

Without a united opposition to inherit power and without an army to seize Tehran, talk of liberation is a consolation, not a strategy. The war degraded the regime; it did not remove it -- and nothing in this agreement will. In fact, the MOU promises to enrich the IRGC again so that it can tighten its hold on the Iranian people even more viciously.

So the memorandum sits there, looking like the clumsiest concession an American administration has made to a sworn enemy in a generation...

The regime in Tehran, which has waited out many American presidents and means to wait out another, is betting they are bluffing about everything except the check.

Iran: Did Trump Cave In?

[Iran] continues to execute opponents, confiscate the assets of critics, organize mass arrests across the nation, and funnel funds to proxies in the region.

The only change that has happened is that in the past few days it has raised a claim to the exclusive ownership of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Majlis of which Ghalibaf is speaker has passed at least three laws forbidding any negotiations with the American "Great Satan".

The Majlis also put a $50 million price on the US president's head.

What we have so far is a 60-day extension of a shaky ceasefire with a list of desiderata to haggle over.

Will the projected 60-days of talks produce anything resembling peace and stability in the region as many pray for? The outright answer I could give is a firm no.

Gorbachev and Deng could achieve a change of course because the USSR and the People's Republic of China had a deeply-rooted party structure plus highly centralized armed forces.

Neither of those two conditions exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a hodgepodge of political, economic and military baronies pulling in different directions while regarding the maintenance of the status quo as essential for their survival. Imagine a kaleidoscope that if turned this way or that produces different visuals and colors but remains fundamentally the same.

The tactic Tehran will use is clear: drag out the talks until we see the back of Trump and Netanyahu, as we did with six other US presidents and as many Israeli premiers.

If it actually happens, the 60-day stint may establish a roadmap pointing to several desired goals. The next phase would be labeled "confidence building easers" followed by a third named "modalities of implementation" -- in other words, a roadmap to lead Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner up the garden path.

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How Everyone Becomes a Target: When philosophy becomes a license to kill

This was a guest post I wrote on Kile B. Jones' Substack, The Inverted World. He in turn wrote a guest post on my Substack on the same topic from a psychiological perspective.

A federal indictment, a tenuous network of victims, and the philosophy that turns a portfolio dispute into a license to kill.

On June 10, a federal grand jury in Detroit unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight people with an eighteen-month campaign of violence: jars of butyric acid hurled through the windows of family homes, nails scattered in a driveway, houses marked with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to designate targets for death, a vow by one defendant to become a woman's physician and poison her slowly, and a plan to follow another target home and "burn it down."

Kile B. Jones has assembled the full documentary record; the defendants are presumed innocent of every count.

The perpetrators were University of Michigan students and recent students at that, several of them honors students, one a medical student, operating within the TAHRIR Coalition — the umbrella of dozens of campus organizations led by Michigan's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The indictment alleges that the coalition's own social-media accounts broadcast the threats, that its lead student group was asked for "money for autonomous actions," and that the cell's targets matched the coalition's published demands. And whom did they attack? They seem to have little in common. The university president and chief investment officer, who declined to divest the endowment. The personal injury law firm that employs a regent. The provost. A campus police officer who had policed the protests. A fellow student suspected of talking to the FBI. And the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — a communal charity with no role in university governance, no control over the endowment, no connection to the decision the campaign was ostensibly about — defaced on the first anniversary of October 7.

The targets share no obvious thread. A car-accident lawyer, a refugee cop, a charity, a classmate: what list contains all of these, and why? The conventional answer is that hatred overwhelmed them, that the violence was a breakdown of reason. The evidence points the other way. In the very exchange where he discussed poisoning a patient, one defendant explained that he wanted to act because it was "the only way to clear my conscience." Not to silence his conscience — to clear it.

The violence was the discharge of his moral sense, not its suppression.

These students experienced themselves, throughout, as the few with the seriousness to do what was required. Their philosophy didn’t just allow violence against families of regents who still invested in Israel as a small percentage of the entire endowment. It demanded it.

Step one: a theory of who is guilty. The first move is to replace acts with positions. Ordinary moral and legal reasoning assigns guilt for what a person did: you are culpable for your conduct, and innocent where you did not act.

The framework these students absorbed assigns guilt for where a person sits. In the structure of oppression, culpability flows from your location — your identity, your institution, your associations — rather than from anything you chose to do. A regent who votes against divestment is guilty; but so, in principle, is anyone the structure places on the wrong side, whether or not they lifted a finger. This is originally derived from Marx, down through Maoist and Soviet class theory, filtered down to today.

People aren’t guilty for what they do, they are guilty for what positions they occupy in the class system. In recent years this idea has extended to anyone who is perceived as being “privileged.” (Which always seems to exclude the ones who are deciding who is privileged.) When you extract humans from the decision of who is guilty, you have erased any concept of personal responsibility — not only on the victim side but on every side. This is a coherent and fundamentally immoral philosophical position, and it is very popular. But the TAHRIR folks made it even worse.

Step two: "directly or indirectly" The second move is the one that removes every limit, and it appears in the indictment in the conspirators' own operating language. The targets, the document states, were those believed to support Israel "directly or indirectly."

The enemy isn’t Zionists; it is anyone perceived as not being anti-Zionist enough. That can include literally everyone. For example, when Hamas and Fatah argue with each other, they each accuse the other one of being Zionist.

The endowment holds shares in firms that do business in Israel: that is a real, traceable relationship, however attenuated by the time it reaches a regent's vote. But "indirectly" has no boundary at all, because indirect connection is transitive and the chain never terminates. If the regent is complicit through the endowment, then the firm that employs the regent is complicit through the regent, and the charity that shares his community is complicit through that, and the officer who guards the people who manage the building is complicit through the institution, and onward without any principle that says stop here.

Once indirect association counts, the boundary of the guilty category is no longer fixed by anything. It is set by whoever is drawing the connections, and it can be drawn to include anyone. This is not a slippery-slope worry about where the logic might go. It is a description of where the documented attacks already went. The best way to see it is to map the actual targets that were attacked (not just threatened,) and count the steps from the center of their universe, Israel. The gray chain is the institutional one, and even it stretches thin. Israel, then firms with Israeli business, then the endowment that holds those firms, then the board of regents that governs the endowment, then one individual regent who sits on that board, then the personal-injury law firm that employs him: by the time the campaign reaches the firm it actually attacked, it is five links from the source, and not one of those links is about anything the law firm did.

The university branch is no tighter — endowment, university, and then a fellow student or a campus police officer, each reached by membership or employment rather than by any decision about Israel. (The officer is the one partial exception worth conceding: campus police broke up the encampment, so the cell may have had a grievance against him as police, independent of Israel entirely — which, if anything, means the "supporting Israel" rationale was a pretext even by their own logic.) The amber chain is stranger and more telling. The Jewish Federation has no organizational link to Israel whatsoever — no shares, no governance, no employment.

Its path to the center runs Israel, then Zionists, then Jews, then the Federation: three steps, each one a substitution of categories rather than a real relationship. A state becomes an ideology, an ideology becomes an ethnicity, an ethnicity becomes a particular charity that happens to be Jewish. The Federation sits the same distance from the center as the board of regents — three rings out — but the board got there through three organizational facts and the Federation got there through three acts of redefinition. That is the Protocols logic rendered as a network diagram: by the final step, "connected to Israel" has come to mean "is Jewish," and the map shows the exact rung where the meaning was swapped. We’ve seen this logic before.

Bristol professor David Miller maps these elaborate diagrams of his fevered imagination of complicity that invariably land on Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine came under fire in 2022 for mapping out institutions in Massachusetts under the same guilt-by-position logic that ended up reaching every Hillel in New England, the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston and the Jewish Arts Collaborative. What the picture demonstrates is that "directly or indirectly" has already done its work. The people these students actually attacked were, by the campaign's own theory of connection, three to five links removed from the thing they were angry about. The arbitrariness is not a future risk. It is the documented present.

Step three: the license to kill the nodes A map of the guilty is not yet a reason to hurt anyone. Positional guilt plus "indirectly" tells you who is on the wrong side, and draws the side as wide as you like, but on its own it justifies a boycott, a denunciation, a divestment demand — not acid through a window. The final element is what converts a node on a diagram into a body. That element is Frantz Fanon's doctrine of redemptive violence. The Wretched of the Earth argued that violence by the colonized against the colonizer is a cleansing, recreating act rather than a regrettable necessity — the means by which the oppressed remake themselves into free agents. This is the doctrine that lets a medical student describe planned poisoning as the way to "clear my conscience."

Within the Fanonist frame, the violence is not the abandonment of his morality; it is its fulfillment. Restraint would be the failure. Fanon was describing an armed colonial settler and the colonized subject shooting back. His colonizer was a person with a gun and a farm on expropriated land, an active agent of a violent occupation. Nothing on the Michigan map is close to that. But when Fanonism is combined with the never ending mapping of who is bad, we arrive at a situation where literally anyone who is perceived as being on the wrong side of history — defined by what position they are in, not what they do — they are subject to being murdered in the name of justice.

That’s how you get to young people saying that their conscience cannot stand it if they don’t attack the families of the people they perceive as being four or five degrees separated from Israel.

That is the combination, and it is the whole of it. Positional guilt supplies the brush. "Indirectly" makes the brush infinitely wide. The map shows the brush has already painted a car-accident lawyer and a Jewish charity. And their flavor of Fanonism hands anyone holding the brush a license to kill whatever it has painted, for the killer's own moral redemption. Each element is survivable alone. A theory of structural complicity, by itself, produces seminar papers.

Fanon, by himself, applied to actual colonial war, produces a contestable but bounded argument. It is the multiplication that has no edge: an unlimited target set crossed with a therapeutic license to destroy its members. Everyone is a node The logic never ends. If the law firm is a legitimate target for employing a regent, then so is any company the endowment invests in, and so is anyone who works for that company, and so is any student who accepts a scholarship funded by it or a job offer from it. Each is connected to Israel by exactly the kind of indirect link the framework has already ruled sufficient, and each is therefore paintable, and therefore — under Fanon — killable for the satisfaction of the one who decides it.

The same logic that placed a refugee cop on the list places the sophomore who took the internship. There is no node the framework excludes, because the only thing required to become a node is a connection, and the framework has defined connection so that everyone has one. This is where the philosophy, not the temperament, is the danger. It has no brakes. Nothing in this philosophy says that the person who bought a lamp from a garage sale by the cousin of a manager who once hired an Israeli security guard is not equally guilty. A moral framework with no internal brakes will, given enough sincere adherents, eventually produce followers who sincerely think that braking is immoral and everyone they do not like must be hounded, harassed and attacked. It would be comforting to treat the inductees as an aberration.

The harder truth is that they are a faithful execution. They took published philosophies literally, strung them together, followed where they lead, and were stopped not by anything in the philosophy but by the FBI. There were other components here — the vanguardism that produced the cell structure by imitating militant movements of the 1960s, the genocide-emergency framing that set the tempo, the long-falsified Third-Worldist romance that the academy keeps teaching with its body count edited out. Each deserves its own accounting. But they are accelerants on top of the core mechanism. The mechanism is simple enough to state in a sentence, and damning enough to end on: give people a theory that makes everyone guilty by association and then makes killing the guilty an act of self-purification, and the only question left is who among them will be sincere enough to act on it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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