07/14 Links Pt1: Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East; The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"; Royal Commission, Royal Omission

From Ian:

Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East

The Jewish people, returning to their ancestral homeland after centuries of exile and persecution, represent the reclamation of indigenous rights in the face of repeated conquests. Jews maintained an unbroken presence in the land, however small, and their national revival drew on deep historical, religious, and archaeological ties – connections that predate Arab arrival by millennia.

Nowhere is this distortion more evident than in the construction of a distinct “Palestinian” identity. I’m not the first to posit that the notion of a separate Palestinian nationality serves primarily tactical purposes. It functions as a strategic tool to sustain opposition to the Jewish state and advance broader Arab cohesion, rather than reflecting an ancient, organic peoplehood distinct from the surrounding Arab world.

This ideology emerged in modern times as a mechanism to delegitimize the sole sovereign Jewish entity in the region, framing Jewish self-determination as an alien intrusion.

Consider the visual reality of any regional map. Vast Arab-majority countries surround tiny Israel, home to the Jewish people. The contrast is stark: a constellation of Muslim-majority states, products of historical expansion, arrayed against the Jewish homeland.

This is not a case of a powerful empire oppressing a minority indigenous group, but rather the opposite: the world’s smallest, most unique native civilization defending itself against the lingering impulses of one of history’s greatest imperial forces.

The greatest feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand has been convincing much of the globe that this expansive legacy represents a vulnerable underdog fighting for liberation, rather than a continuation of efforts to extinguish Jewish sovereignty.

This imperial Arab history provides essential context for today’s debates over indigeneity and justice. The Jewish return to Israel, far from colonialism, is decolonization, the restoration of a people to their biblical and historical cradle after successive foreign dominations, including Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman, and British periods.

Israel’s success as a vibrant democracy, technological innovator, and refuge stands in sharp contrast to the challenges faced by many neighboring societies still grappling with the aftereffects of authoritarian legacies and rejectionism.

The Palestinian cause, in this light, appears less as a pure liberation movement and more as an extension of historical patterns of denial toward Jewish rights. By insisting on a narrative that erases Jewish indigeneity while promoting a fabricated national story for tactical gain, it perpetuates conflict rather than seeking genuine coexistence.

True peace would require acknowledging the Jewish people’s ancient ties, the realities of regional history, and the right of Israel to exist as the fulfillment of self-determination for an indigenous nation.

The real colonial dynamic in the Middle East stems from those expansive conquests that reshaped identities and suppressed diversity across North Africa and beyond. Israel, by contrast, embodies resilience and revival, the Jewish people’s determination to reclaim and rebuild in their eternal homeland, contributing to the region while defending against ongoing threats.

They are the colonizers. Recognizing this truth does not diminish legitimate aspirations for peace or prosperity among all peoples, but it demands intellectual honesty. Only by confronting historical realities can we hope for a future where the Jewish state is accepted not as an anomaly, but as the rightful, indigenous presence it has always been.

Eitan Fischberger: The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"

“American Doctor,” opening in theaters August 14, presents Feroze Sidhwa as a neutral American physician with no personal stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framing doesn’t survive contact with his own record:
Sidhwa has told MSNBC he has no connection to the conflict whatsoever, yet his own writing going back to 2007 describes decades of activism rooted in what he himself has called a Zoroastrian religious duty to oppose Israel, alongside years spent editing books and essays for Hamas-sympathizing academic Norman Finkelstein.

He has repeatedly and specifically denied ever seeing Hamas inside Gaza’s hospitals, telling the BBC that in his account no one who has ever set foot in Gaza has witnessed it. The record at every hospital where he has volunteered says otherwise.

At European Hospital, where Sidhwa insists he saw no trace of Hamas, the IDF says it found a Hamas tunnel running directly beneath the building, the same tunnel where senior Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar was killed in a May 2025 strike, along with the bodies of other terrorists and a cache of weapons and intelligence material.

At Nasser Hospital, Sidhwa himself confirmed on Democracy Now that one of two people killed in a March 2025 strike on a recovery room was Ismail Barhoum, the man the IDF identifies as Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, and argued the strike was illegal anyway. Freed Israeli hostages say they were held inside that same hospital, and Hamas’s own Interior Ministry ran policing operations out of it.

The personal website that now anchors Sidhwa’s media career, complete with a press kit, went live on the exact day his New York Times op-ed was published in October 2024, suggesting the “reluctant-witness” persona was a planned rollout rather than an accident of timing.

Israeli think tank urges tougher measures against Turkish consulate, limiting diplomatic presence

A new policy paper published by the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy called on the Israeli government to take a series of steps to reduce the Turkish consulate’s activity in Jerusalem and limit the status of its representatives.

Among the recommendations are revoking diplomatic benefits, canceling work visas, restricting freedom of movement in Israel, removing immunity from diplomatic vehicles, and reexamining the activity of Turkish institutions operating in the city.

The paper, written by retired ambassador Ran Yishai, who heads the center’s research division, includes 10 policy recommendations. According to the author, their purpose is to reduce what he defines as hostile Turkish influence in Jerusalem and strengthen the implementation of Israeli sovereignty in the city.

At the center of the document is the claim that the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem does not function as an authorized representative office to the State of Israel, but rather as a body operating mainly with the Palestinian Authority. For that reason, the paper argues, there is no justification for Israel to continue granting its representatives the full range of benefits normally extended in diplomatic relations between states.

Yishai says that for years Israel allowed the Turkish consulate to operate in Jerusalem in a manner that went beyond its official status. In his view, the consulate serves as a central hub in Ankara’s policy in the city and acts in a way that denies Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

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Lindsay Graham was irreplaceable

I have walked the halls of Congress with NORPAC four times, in 2008, in 2009, in 2015, and again this year. Eleven years separated the 2015 trip from this one, and Congress does not have the same vibe it did in the past.

Lindsay Graham died Saturday night at his Capitol Hill home, felled by what the D.C. medical examiner's office has preliminarily called an aortic dissection. He had just returned from Ukraine and was expected on Sunday's "Meet the Press" when paramedics were called to his house for cardiac arrest instead. He was smart, he was unapologetically pro-Israel, and this year my delegation actually got to meet him in person, which is why his loss lands harder for me than it might have otherwise.

But Graham's death is not the full story. The story is what his absence reveals about a coalition that was already thinning before he died.

On my earlier trips, meeting with Democrats required no special strategy. Support for Israel was the default position, so consistently that the handful of members who opposed it would not even take the meeting. NORPAC could walk into any Democratic office in 2008, in 2009, or in 2015 and talk about Israel on its own terms. This year the briefings were different: NORPAC had us orient many of our conversations with Democrats around a bill against antisemitism rather than around Israel itself, because that was the framing likeliest to get a sympathetic hearing. The shift in strategy is itself the data point. When an advocacy organization has to downplay Israel to reach half the aisle, the automatic bipartisan consensus that defined this mission for two decades has already broken.

Republicans have not made that shift, at least not yet. Every Republican I met this year was still overwhelmingly pro-Israel, Graham foremost among them. But the enthusiasm behind that support felt generational in a way it hadn't before, concentrated among members old enough to remember 1967, 1973, Entebbe, and the Osirak strike as lived history rather than as book history. Graham belonged to that cohort, a lawmaker whose support for Israel was built on decades of direct experience with the region rather than on inherited talking points. Losing him means losing not just a vote but a repository of institutional memory, and the members coming up behind him did not grow up with the same reference points.

None of this is uniform, of course. Richie Torres and John Fetterman remain as forceful on Israel as any Democrat in Washington, and lawmakers like them are critical because they show the default can still be resisted. But a default is still a default, and shifting a party's baseline takes years, not a single election cycle or a single strong voice pushing against the current.

What made Graham valuable was not simply that he voted the right way. It was that he could argue the case with the fluency of someone who had spent decades studying it, and that he did so with a passion that is increasingly rare on either side of the aisle. Replacing a vote is a matter of arithmetic. Replacing that combination of knowledge, credibility, and appetite for the fight is a lot more difficult.

We need to rethink how to support and defend Israel. Pro-Israel advocacy built its strategy for forty years on the assumption that new Grahams would keep arriving to replace the old ones. This year's trip was the clearest sign yet that the pipeline has slowed, and mourning the man without reckoning with what's drying up behind him would waste the one clarifying thing his death has handed us.

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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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07/13 Links Pt2: Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’; The people who know nothing know everything; "He's a Lying Liar." Haviv SLAMS Ro Khanna's Political Stunt in Israel

From Ian:

Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’

Human rights groups are tolerating terrorism against Israel, the UK’s independent reviewer of terror legislation has said.

Jonathan Hall KC said Left-wing activists regarded violence towards supporters of Israel as a “kind of exemption” because their brains had been “scrambled by Gaza”.

He said that many civil liberty NGOs had abandoned their “traditional” focus on “domestic issues” and instead become “sucked in” to an obsession with the Palestinian struggle.

Speaking at an event at Parliament, he said that some human rights groups had “lost this really precious neutrality and ability to be consistent” on the subject of Israel.

Mr Hall said: “I’ll be able to tell you from my own experience, I barely have any engagement with these sorts of groups. You’d think that Amnesty UK would be right in the forefront of saying: ‘There is an amendment to this legislation, what should we do?’ No, they’re involved in really defending one particular sort of protest.

“And I think that it’s an example of something that we’ve seen with the Palestine Action group response, where people on the whole get their brains scrambled by Gaza.

“So they tolerate behaviour, very violent behaviour, which they would say, if it was being done by the extreme Right or an Islamist group, ‘yes, of course that would amount to terrorism’. But they seem to regard it as a kind of exemption.”

Earlier this year, six Palestine Action activists were cleared of committing aggravated burglary after a break-in at the UK headquarters of an Israeli-owned arms company.

The six activists were found not guilty over allegations that they had used or threatened unlawful violence.

They had used an old prison van to ram-raid an Elbit Systems factory in Bristol in the early hours of Aug 6, 2024, and attacked police officers with sledgehammers, according to Avon and Somerset Police.

They “genuinely believed” their demonstration at the factory would help the Palestinian cause in Gaza, the court heard.

Mr Hall urged humanitarian groups to “pull themselves back from the brink and remember what they really are there to do”.

He said he had spoken to senior executives at British NGOs who are “worried about the direction of travel” but are being “pushed” in that direction by younger members of staff.

Lee Smith: The Culture of Loserdom

The United States saved Egypt from a humiliating defeat in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered French, British, and Israeli forces to evacuate the Suez Canal, which they’d easily taken from Egyptian forces. But not even Nasser’s Soviet patrons could save him in 1967, when Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, seized Sinai, and remade the Middle East in six days. His successor Anwar Sadat lost the 1973 war when Ariel Sharon nearly encircled Cairo and only Henry Kissinger’s intervention stopped him.

And then Sadat turned it around, briefly. He won a Nobel prize for making peace with Israel, got back the Sinai—and then terrorists killed him for it. The country’s only other Nobel prize winner, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the throat on a Cairo street for writing a book that Egyptian terrorists didn’t like. In other words, Egypt cannot abide winning. And thus, naturally, Egypt renewed the contracts of Hossam Hassan and his twin Ibrahim, thereby rewarding the coach responsible for one of the most spectacular chokes in sports history and consequently one of the most repulsive displays of sporting conduct.

People, nations, aren’t supposed to lose like Egypt does, by embracing loserdom as a collective gestalt deployed to blame others for the failures that are only their own. Perhaps the most crucial job of any parent, and coach, is to teach their children how to lose gracefully and what to learn from it so that they may reap victory in the future. Sports is part of that tuition—even the best teams lose sometimes. You can do everything right, execute every play perfectly, but the other side, the other athlete, is simply better. Or you were better, but the calls went against you, or the weather was bad, and that’s just the way it goes.

But if you wanted to breed psychopaths, if you wanted to build a mummy army fed on a strict diet of resentment, you’d tell them nothing is their fault because every outcome is controlled by a mysterious force: colonialism, or Zionism, or voodoo, etc. And then, when things went against them—and things always go against those whose minds and souls are cut to fit the jagged-edged pattern of paranoia—they’d erupt in fits of predictably maniacal rage.

It’s the instrumentalization of those pathological furies that drives the politics of the Middle East. For instance, because of Egypt’s will to lose, Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything, from Mossad dolphins to soccer defeats, to their death in another war with Israel. It’s the same throughout the Muslim Middle East, which is why from Iran to Gaza, the Palestinian cause—the global standard of loserdom—is celebrated like victory.

And now the third-world migrants who have overrun Europe’s shores have brought the same culture to the continent. After Morocco’s loss to France, for instance, North African immigrants surrounded an Amsterdam hotel believed to be hosting Israelis and shouted threats, holding them responsible for the loss. And here, in the United States? It’s not a good sign that the man elected to run America’s greatest city can’t tell winning from losing and gives evidence he thinks like the third-world mobs drenched in resentment, that Egypt was robbed.

The people who know nothing know everything

I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.”

Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

The dinner was being held in an immaculate apartment overlooking the city. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lighting was flattering, and the books had been arranged not alphabetically but morally. Edward Said sat beside Frantz Fanon. Judith Butler leaned against a large volume on decolonising architecture. There were several books about Israel, none by Israelis, historians, military analysts, Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, or anyone who had recently burdened themselves with the region’s chronology.

The apartment belonged to Oliver and Beatrice, who had invited 12 people for what they called “an evening of food, friendship and necessary conversation.”

I had been included, I later realised, as the necessary conversation; the one in need of “education.”

Beatrice greeted me at the door with the expression of a person welcoming a recently rehabilitated extremist.

“We’re so glad you came,” she said, touching my arm. “We were worried you might feel uncomfortable.”

“I’ve been to family weddings,” I replied. “I’ll survive.”

The other guests had already assembled around a huge island bench. They held champagne flutes and spoke in low, solemn tones about suffering in places they would never visit.

There was Julian, an international lawyer who specialised in commercial leases but had recently developed strong views on the laws of armed conflict. Nadia worked in branding and referred to herself as a storyteller. Marcus was a documentary producer whose documentaries had never been produced. Eleanor taught postcolonial literature and had perfected the academic art of converting adjectives into accusations. Simon was in finance and considered himself politically courageous because he had once criticised capitalism at Davos.

There was also Theo, a surgeon, who knew nothing about Israel but knew it with clinical confidence.

I was introduced around the room.

“This is our pro-Israel friend,” Beatrice announced.

When celebrity ignorance gets a stage

You can criticize Israeli settlement policy in Judea and Samaria. Plenty of Israelis do, loudly, in a free press, which is more than can be said for any of its neighbors. That is a real debate, and I welcome it.

But a nation that has voluntarily relinquished more territory than it currently holds is a strange poster child for expansionism. Name another country in history that won defensive wars and then handed the land back just for a signature on a peace treaty.

I’ll wait.

That’s the thing about Casablanca’s Oxford speech: It is the statement of a man who has never had to know anything, explaining to a room full of university students who the Jews really are. He got the biography of his subject wrong because he never learned it. He got the map wrong because he never looked at it. Although he does note that some of his closest friends are Jewish.

The danger isn’t that a rock singer holds uninformed opinions and mumbles through them to an audience who knows even less. Everyone is entitled to those. The danger is the machinery around him: the host who says “100% agree” without a beat, the comment sections calling it brave, the prestigious institutions handing Casablancas a lectern, the total absence of anyone in the room asking a single factual question.

When ignorance gets a stage, applause and an Oxford invitation, while the people it targets get stabbed on a London street, we are not having a policy debate. We are watching a line move.

So, I’ll say it again: Say something. You don’t need a position on settlements to notice that the facts here are wrong and that the target, once again, is the Jews.

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07/13 Links Pt1: Trump admin launches campaign to dismantle ICC; Lindsey Graham: A voice of moral clarity falls silent; Trump: ‘We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,’

From Ian:

Twenty-six years after Camp David, Israel needs a new security doctrine

At Camp David, we negotiated with the man who was then regarded as the supposed partner, the only figure who was allegedly willing to sit down and negotiate with Israel (while the rest of the Palestinian leadership rejected the very idea outright). Yet we still reached a dead end. The result of those concessions was not peace, but the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a planned wave of terrorism that claimed the lives of more than one thousand Israelis.

By demonstrating a willingness to make those concessions, we created an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, one in which the international community came to regard Israeli territorial concessions as the natural starting point for every future negotiation.

That precedent must be erased. It must be erased from the pages of our diplomatic and security history, and it must be made clear that those proposals are null and void and cannot serve as the opening position for any future discussion.

The lesson of the Camp David Summit (2000) is even deeper and more relevant today. The summit definitively shattered the assumption that territorial concessions, in and of themselves, would bring reconciliation. It proved that the root of the conflict is not the scope of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, but the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Even at the point of Israel’s maximum willingness to compromise, it became clear that a historic compromise was not the objective of the other side.

From this understanding emerges the diplomatic doctrine that Israel must adopt for the decades ahead: lasting arrangements are not achieved through territorial gestures, but are built upon strength, deterrence, and security.

The only practical foundation for any future arrangement will emerge only when a profound change in Palestinian consciousness takes place, one that includes full recognition that Israel is a permanent and indisputable reality, with no intention of withdrawing or relinquishing its right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Only when the other side becomes convinced that it cannot defeat Israel or alter reality through terrorism, international pressure, or rejectionism, and that the continued illusion that the Jewish presence in the region is temporary bears no fruit, will the foundation for a stable and realistic arrangement truly be laid.

The key to peace lies not in the breadth of Israeli concessions, but in the strength of Israeli deterrence and the depth of Palestinian recognition of our legitimate existence here.

Turkey, Israel, and the New Ottoman Empire

What Is Behind Erdogan’s Antagonism Toward Israel?
So, why has President Erdogan shifted Turkey away from being a regional partner of Israel to one of its chief antagonists in the Middle East and on the world stage?

There seem to be two leading causes of Erdogan’s anti-Israel posture: His personal animus toward the Jewish people and his regional ambitions.

As an Islamist politician, Erdogan has been influenced by the ideological circle that surrounds him, which is contemptuous of Jews and views the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and establishment of the secular Turkish state as part of a secret Jewish plot.

The existence of Israel as a Jewish state in what is viewed as a traditionally Muslim region only amplifies this dislike and suspicion of Jews.

Aside from Erdogan’s personal ideology, Turkish society has become more open to public expressions of antisemitism in recent years, which has allowed the Turkish strongman to use his public opposition to the Jewish state as a means of garnering more votes among the Turkish public.

Perhaps even more consequential than antisemitism in the worsening of relations between Israel and Turkey are Erdogan’s long-term regional ambitions, which place him in direct confrontation with the Jewish state.

As opposed to other leaders who ruled Turkey before him, Erdogan subscribes to the idea of “neo-Ottomanism,” which aims to position Turkey as a leading force in the Sunni Islamic world.

As the Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Middle East for hundreds of years, Erdogan seeks to return Turkey to this position of power by spreading its influence (and sometimes even its military forces) into neighboring states.

This expansion of Turkey’s role in the Middle East can be seen over the past 10 years, with Turkey sending forces into Iraq to fight ISIS (against the wishes of the Iraqi government), establishing itself militarily in Qatar, extending its influence in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israeli Arab communities, placing a foothold on the Red Sea, and becoming the patron of the new Syrian government since the fall of the Assad regime in 2024.

With the recent diminishment of Iran’s position in the Middle East, Erdogan is even more determined to increase Turkey’s influence in the region and become the new hegemonic power.

So, how do Turkey’s regional ambitions affect its relationship with Israel?

First, Israel’s own security needs can come into direct conflict with Turkey’s desires. This is most clearly seen in Syria, where Israel has established a buffer zone along its border due to its suspicion of the new regime, while Turkey has openly embraced it.

Second, in Erdogan’s view, by becoming increasingly and publicly hostile to the Jewish state, he is leveraging the anti-Israel sentiment of the Arab street to catapult Turkey into being the leading voice of the Muslim world, at the expense of more moderate regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Thus, it appears likely that as Erdogan’s Turkey becomes a growing force in the Middle East and seeks to dominate the region, it will increasingly become more antagonistic toward Israel.

However, as opposed to this remaining a problem for the Jewish state, Turkey’s regional ambitions will likely become a problem for all Middle Eastern states that do not wish to become subservient to one hegemonic power in the region.

Half Won, Half Lost By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Trump now seems to understand that the whole negotiation saga was an Iranian ruse. So we’ve gone back in time. The U.S. is once again pounding Iran from the air, and Trump just announced that we’d be reimposing a blockade on Iranian vessels.

But given this administration’s penchant for stopping short of victory, it’s hard to see where this goes, even in the next few days. And why is it that Iran won’t play along with the U.S., abide by the MOU, and collect the billions it has been promised?

The man who’s had the clearest understanding of this war from the start is Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. While Bolton is a committed Iran hawk, he’s been sounding the alarm about Trump’s lack of strategy since the run-up to the operation. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Bolton argues that the U.S. and Israel have weakened Iran’s government to the point that there is no cohesive Iranian leadership to make a deal. “This disarray explains why some in Iran are again reportedly plotting to murder Mr. Trump,” he writes, “while others are still negotiating with his representatives.”

I’m sure Bolton is correct about the difficulties posed by our semi-victory. But there’s another piece of the puzzle: our semi-failure. American planning blunders have done their part to make a tidy exit impossible. The U.S. was unprepared for and ultimately checked by the Iranian threat on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has argued that energy markets will organically overcome this challenge. That could be, but he’s not so confident that he’s ready to leave the strait in the regime’s hands.

So the U.S. has fought itself into a perverse Goldilocks zone where we won just enough and lost just enough to prevent our leaving. The administration has taken a long, winding path merely to reach this point of clarity. I’ll take it, with the hope that the president finally commits to total victory. But I expect that getting from here to there will involve at least as many foolish diversions.

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Ted Cruz is trying to rid the Republican Party of antisemitism

In December 1991, William F. Buckley Jr. devoted nearly 40,000 words of National Review to a single question: was Pat Buchanan an antisemite? Buckley reviewed Buchanan's Gulf War commentary, his "amen corner" description of Congress and Israel, and a set of statements that tracked classic tropes about Jewish influence and dual loyalty. His conclusion: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism." Buckley did not find that disqualifying: the National Review endorsed Buchanan in the 1992 New Hampshire primary a few weeks after the piece ran. Buckley had ruled the language out of bounds. He had not ruled out the man. Yet his essay reverberated in the conservative movement for years.

Ted Cruz wants to do something perhaps even more dramatic. Speaking at a March 2026 antisemitism symposium hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review, Cruz called for conservatives to purge antisemitic figures from the movement "just as" Buckley did sixty years earlier, then turned to Tucker Carlson: "I believe Tucker Carlson is the single most dangerous demagogue in this country." He has described antisemitism as "the gateway drug to anticapitalism and anti-Americanism," and backs The Front Line, a 501(c)(4) built to make it disqualifying in Republican primaries, mapping races and running messaging campaigns against candidates who traffic in it. 

Buckley published a finding, in his own magazine, that cost him a working relationship with a writer who had called National Review his "spiritual guide." Cruz and The Front Line are trying to go further - to make antisemitism disqualifying for any Republican lawmaker.

Both men treat antisemitism as diagnostic rather than incidental. A movement does not produce Jew-hatred as a random defect. It produces it when something upstream has already gone wrong, and the antisemitism is the symptom that surfaces first because it is the easiest one to spot. Buckley traced Buchanan's rhetoric to a paleoconservative strain trading the movement's postwar commitments, anti-totalitarianism, ordered liberty, alliance with the traditional partners of the West, for an isolationism that found Jews a convenient explanation for America's foreign entanglements. Cruz is diagnosing the same disease in his own generation's terms. He is not primarily worried about the students cheering anti-Israel lines at Turning Point USA events. He is worried about the isolationist "America First" reflex behind the cheering, one that treats Israel, capitalism, and the postwar order as three names for the same betrayal. The antisemitism is the test result. The disease is the abandonment of the commitments that used to define conservatism.

Both men are also paying, or paid, a real cost for saying so in public. Buckley's essay widened a rupture with the paleocon wing that never closed, even after the National Review endorsement tried to paper over it; critics on both sides accused him of either damning an ally or failing to finish the job. Cruz, weighing a 2028 run, is picking a fight with a commentator who reaches a bigger youth audience than he does. At the same March symposium, Republican Jewish Coalition chairman Norm Coleman told the room the party is winning the fight against right-wing antisemitism. Cruz, on the same stage, said flatly that he wasn't sure that was accurate. This is principle over optics and standards over the illusion of unity.

While occasionally the Left makes a show of being strongly against antisemitism, they invariably come up against the anti-Zionists in their camp who hide their antisemitism behind politics, and they are unwilling to take a stand against the "anti-Israel" dog whistles. So Chuck Schumer may have made a speech about antisemitism on the Left in 2023, and Keir Starmer may have purged blatant antisemites from the Labour party, but the source of the rot is still there. Antisemitism on the left travels increasingly under cover of anti-Zionism, and a movement that treats demonization of the Jewish state as presumptively legitimate cannot succeed in drawing a line that doesn't really exist. 

What Buckley and Cruz share is a working premise: when you tolerate the antisemite because he brings votes, ratings, or energy, the toleration licenses everything that follows from it, the isolationism, the conspiracism, the substitution of resentment for argument. Confronting it costs real support and buys nothing in return except the claim that the movement's stated principles are still operative. Buckley made that trade in 1991; Cruz is invoking Buckley's example to justify finishing the job. It is an uphill battle and perhaps a quixotic one. But there may be a way to succeed, and it is not to separate Israel from the antisemitism discussion but to center it. 

That is an essay for another time. 

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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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07/12 Links: Lindsey Graham, a stalwart supporter of Israel in the Senate, dies at 71; Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike; The PA's War Against Jewish History

From Ian:

In memo before October 7, Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike

Yahya Sinwar, the late Hamas leader who masterminded the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre, assessed ahead of the onslaught that Israel might respond with a nuclear strike on the Gaza Strip, but chose to carry out the invasion anyway, according to a newly revealed document written in the terror chief’s own hand.

The memo, written in August 2022, was obtained by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, and excerpts from it were published by Channel 12 on Sunday. A similar document was revealed last fall, though several details were not present in previous reporting.

According to Channel 12, Sinwar laid out specific operational plans, including numbers of fighters to be deployed to particular junctions, envisioning 25 simultaneous breaches of the Israel-Gaza border fence, to take control of 25 different junctions. He envisioned “well-trained squads” carrying out each of these infiltrations, with each squad numbering 100 fighters.

Sinwar also planned for a further 2,210 fighters to attack 221 small communities in the south, and a further 1,600 for eight larger ones. He wrote that 1,200 fighters would be deployed to attack Israeli cities, and 2,000 to attack army bases. The total fighting force he imagined would have numbered some 10,000 terrorists, none of whom would have been privy to the entire scope of the plan.

The figures are significantly higher than the number of Palestinians who actually invaded from Gaza on October 7, which the Israel Defense Forces estimates at around 5,600, of whom about 3,500 were Hamas fighters, along with some 580 fighters from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and about 1,400 other Gazans.

“The goal is to expel the settlers with their vehicles,” the terror chief wrote in the memo, referring to the residents of Israel’s south. He wrote that “priority” should be given to children and women, while ordering that “the men aged 17-50 are to be taken hostage” and that “all phones must be taken, along with any additional documents they are carrying on their person.”

The Channel 12 report emphasized Sinwar’s awareness of the likely costs of the attack, noting that he did not profess certainty that Iran, which backs Hamas, or the Islamic Republic’s other regional proxies such as Hezbollah, would join in the onslaught, as the terror group is widely believed to have hoped they would.

Moreover, the terror chief estimated that Israel would “not hesitate to use all means and weapons at its disposal” in response to the mass murder, adding: “They may even use an atomic bomb, no less.”

“But first, it will be surprised by the attack and enter into chaos,” he wrote, describing the assault as “a campaign of life or death,” and calling for “a popular operation of returning to the villages and recapturing them symbolically.”

WSJ: Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate over Hormuz

For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon and is seeking to cement its new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway - and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it.

"This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz," warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security commission. "The Strait of Hormuz will only open with 'Iranian arrangements,' not American threats," added the parliament's speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

This attitude heralds a rocky future, with continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies. "The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion - by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and driving up the price of oil," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence - a sphere denied to it by America ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tehran's drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East.

Iran's perception of itself as a new regional hegemon is delusional given how much its military has been degraded, how much its network of proxy forces in the Middle East has been weakened, and how much its economy has been suffocated in recent months, said Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical analyst. "All it has left is bullying, piracy, noise and the ability to act as a spoiler. These are not the qualities of a hegemon, but of a thug."

For now, the Iranians have limited themselves to largely ineffective attacks on American military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

"Fundamentally, the Iranians don't believe that Trump wants to go back to war, so they are going to just push and push. They are really thinking that he is not going to wallop them at all," said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official.

Masih Alinejad: The Iran the Funeral Cameras Don't Show

In the months since supreme leader Ali Khamenei's death, I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran.

They are messages of disbelief, relief and, when people feel safe enough, joy. But they are still afraid. They are always afraid.

The carefully choreographed seas of mourners at the funeral are an illusion. I know from experience how they are assembled through force.

The total expense of the week-long funeral - including security deployments of roughly 150,000 police, temporary infrastructure, transportation, accommodation for thousands of out-of-town participants, free 24-hour metro and bus services, catering, and a week of public holidays - could approach $800 million.

Why does the system that denounced extravagance pour hundreds of millions into a funeral?

For a supreme leader who was considered a titan of a global movement, the absence of every major world leader is an embarrassment.

This was not mourning. This was a regime staging a display of strength for an audience that is no longer watching.

Many of those attending the funeral genuinely want revenge. During the funeral, crowds of mourners hung an effigy of President Donald Trump. From the funeral stage, regime loyalists repeatedly vowed revenge.

Placards carried by mourners displayed prominent Americans, with red crosshairs or target marks over their foreheads. The captions read, "Sooner or later, your heads will roll."

When the Islamic Republic threatens to kill you, believe them. As a former journalist in Iran, I was forced into exile for criticizing the regime, only for Iranian intelligence operatives to plot my assassination in New York - a plan foiled by the FBI at the last minute.

But before that, the regime threatened me publicly with posters, cartoons, and effigies. For the Islamic Republic, propaganda is the prelude to action.

This is Iran's reality: a population who have learned to perform grief when required, and who express their true feelings only in whispers, anonymously, or not at all.

I have been the keeper of those messages for years. They fill my phone. They fill my social media. They are the Iran the funeral cameras do not show.

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In 1939 a priest described how today's "anti-Zionist" antisemites work

In 1939, Catholic priest Charles Owen Rice told a Pittsburgh audience how antisemites were beating the rap:

"These enemies of the Jew will define anti-Semitism as persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew. They will hold that because, to their anti-Jewish attacks, they affix a rider saying that they exempt good Jews, therefore, they are automatically absolved of anti-Semitism."

When you define antisemitism as "persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew" you are saying that it is only antisemitism when it has no logical excuse. But when Jews are accused of controlling the government, running Wall Street or dominating the media, that is not hatred of Jews as Jews - that could be a valid reason for antisemitism!

Where have we heard the definition of  antisemitism as hating "Jews as Jews" before? Oh yes, just last month. And it was argued by the exact "good Jews" in their roles Rice was referring to.

Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion invited submissions, and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network answered with 259 pages built toward a single demand: reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, because anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic no matter what they say about the Jewish state. To make that case, APAN enlisted three Jewish anti-Zionist scholars, and all three converged on the same highly restricted definition of antisemitism Charles Owen Rice identified that excludes nearly all antisemites.

Shaul Magid called antisemitism "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew." Ilan Pappe called it "hatred of Jews because of who they are." Neve Gordon called it hatred "understood as hatred of Jews per se." All of these are restatements of "antisemitism is persecution of the  Jew because he is a Jew" - in other words, for no valid reason. Apply that definition honestly and even the people accusing Jews of poisoning wells are exonerated, because they didn't hate Jews qua Jews - they only hated the poisoners! A reason is a warrant, and under Magid's, Pappe's, and Gordon's own test, a warrant is an alibi.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, written specifically to counter the IHRA definition, runs the identical maneuver.  Its core definition turns on hostility to Jews "as Jews," the same restriction Rice's antisemites used and the same one Magid, Pappe, and Gordon rediscovered ninety years later. That framing lets the JDA wave off the ugliest charges against Israel: the genocide accusation, the apartheid libel, and the blood-soaked conspiracy theories about Zionist power, because none of it counts as hatred of the Jew as such. It's hatred of the Jew as an Israeli, an occupier, a colonizer, always with a warrant attached, which by the JDA's own logic means it's never really antisemitism at all.  

JDA does contradict itself by giving examples of hating Jews for various reasons, but their examples are arbitrary: why should saying that Jews secretly spread COVID antisemitic but saying that Jews try to hide their genocide against Palestinians is not?  Adding specific exceptions to "Jews as Jews" does not make the definition much better.  

"Jews as Jews" describes one narrow slice of Jew-hatred, not the whole of it. Rice knew that in 1939, back when the warrants were finance and Bolshevism and a blood libel over Christian children. The same shrinking maneuver keeps resurfacing every time someone needs to excuse a particular hatred while condemning the rest, decade after decade, because it works: define real antisemitism as reasonless, and any hatred with a stated reason, however manufactured, gets to walk out the door labeled something else.

Here's the entire JTA article.

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07/11 Links: Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7; Trump: 1,000 missiles are locked and loaded and aimed at Iran; One detail changes the whole Ro Khanna story

From Ian:

Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7, author says

Shortly after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Warren Kinsella began noticing what he considered the fingerprints of a professional propaganda campaign.

A Canadian political strategist who has worked for decades in war rooms advising prime ministers and political campaigns in Canada, the United States and Israel, Kinsella makes that case in his new book, “The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda.”

According to Kinsella, Hamas and its networks, along with their Western followers, had thousands of social media accounts primed, protest banners ready, and talking points translated into multiple languages long before the IDF’s response to the carnage had even begun.

Kinsella believes that what may appear to be spontaneous outrage on Western streets and social feeds is, in fact, a coordinated political operation that could only be executed by state actors and professional agitators.

His new book claims Jew-hatred is being mainstreamed by outlaw states and extremist groups who use tools of modern campaigning such as message discipline, cash payouts and logistics training. These actors push slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” so quickly and uniformly that they cannot be dismissed as organic, Kinsella said.

And, he says, Western democracies have barely begun to respond.

“Almost immediately after October 7, I looked around and quickly formed the opinion that what I was seeing was an organized, professional-style political campaign, pushing out this vile, hateful propaganda against Jews, the Jewish state and Western democracy,” Kinsella, a resident of Prince Edward County, Ontario, told The Times of Israel. “I spoke to other political people I know, and they all had the same reaction.”

In October 2023, “there were thousands of protests around the planet using the same slogans,” said Kinsella, who is also a columnist for the Toronto Sun and founder of the Daisy Consulting Group.

That, to Kinsella, was either “one hell of a coincidence” or evidence of central planning.

Kinsella sees that conclusion as central to the book’s thesis and points to comments by US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who has accused Iran of seeking to fund and encourage anti-Israel protests.

“The bad guys,” he said, “have unlimited resources and armies of propaganda,” with which they have successfully convinced Westerners that Israel is an “apartheid state” and a “white supremacist colonial state bent on destroying a powerless non-white minority.”

Kinsella’s documentary film “The Campaign” — which complements the book — was first screened in Toronto on March 30. Last month, it was shown in Tel Aviv at Israel’s largest documentary film festival, Docaviv, and at Canada’s Parliament Hill for legislators.

Nova Festival survivors face torrent of abuse

Survivors of the Nova festival massacre on October 7 are facing a torrent of online abuse from bots believed to be manned by Iran.

Thousands of coordinated fake accounts linked to hostile state actors have targeted those who attended the festival, at which 364 people were murdered by Hamas and dozens more injured or taken hostage in 2023.

Social media platforms are failing to remove abusive posts, comments and videos about the survivors, according to a new report monitoring the abuse and shared exclusively with The Telegraph.

The report, set to be published by Fighting Online Anti-Semitism in the coming days, documents a “sustained and multi-layered digital campaign” against survivors of the attack.

The researchers said the “coordinated” campaign was intended to erase, distort and justify the events of Oct 7, not only by challenging the facts of the massacre but also the survivors themselves.

They pointed to social media posts calling for the death of survivors, denying their experiences and labelling them with racist, sexist and other highly offensive slurs.

Conspiracy theories have abounded ever since the massacre, suggesting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired on its own citizens to justify a ground assault on Gaza.

“The phenomenon ranges from complete denial – claiming the attack was a staged event involving ‘crisis actors’ and fake blood – to posts and comments that shift blame onto the IDF,” the report states.

The organisation believes Tehran is behind the campaign of abuse.

Holocaust author said book was ‘canceled’ because he wouldn’t bash Israel, US

A book about the Holocaust was “canceled” after the author said he refused his editor’s insistence that the introduction include criticisms of Israel for committing “war crimes” in Gaza and the Trump-led US for creating “concentration-style prisons” for migrants.

Rafael Medoff, the author of the book “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said he refused to publish what he believed were falsehoods editor Craig Yoe wanted to put in the book contracted to be published by Dark Horse.

Prior to the current controversy, Dark Horse published two of Dr. Medoff’s other books, “Whistleblowers” and “Cartoonists Against Racism” without incident.

It was only after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel that Yoe began demanding that Dr. Medoff denounce Israel as the price to be paid for publishing his new tome “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said Medoff and the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs.

“The book was canceled. I was canceled,” Medoff, who has written op-eds for The Post, said.

Yoe sent a Sept. 1, 2025 email to Medoff saying he “thought long and hard” about adding a separate “note” in the book to unload on Israel and the US before its planned publication.

Yoe said Trump is “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons, is sending American residents to gulag type prisons in other countries without constitution guaranteed trials,” Yoe said.

“At the same time,” he added, ” a country populated by an ethnic religious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a prime minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Medoff sent a detailed response to Yoe objecting to slamming Israel and the US, saying the claims Yoe wanted to print were “factually inaccurate” and would politicize the book.

Head of PEN America, a free expression group, quits because it’s against Israel boycott

Dinaw Mengestu, the head of the free expression group PEN America, resigns after the group said it was against cultural boycotts in an article about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination.

Mengestu tells The New York Times it is “unethical” for his free speech group to oppose cultural boycotts because it’s discriminatory to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

He accused PEN America of “defending some rights while not defending others.”

PEN America’s Thursday article focused on Israeli and Jewish writers “facing rising isolation and exclusion.”

The article said the group believes boycotts threaten free expression, but recognizes the right to boycott.

PEN America says its mission is to “protect free expression” and the “freedom to write.”

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07/10 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: “Had we been living in Berlin, what would we have done?; The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West; Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after Oct. 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-Oct. 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

New Ted Cruz-aligned organization takes aim at right-wing antisemitism

Allies of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are launching a new political organization aimed at countering antisemitism within the Republican Party, Jewish Insider has learned, led by Arielle F. Klepach, a former assistant U.S. attorney and senior counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

The Front Line (TFL) will operate as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, meaning the group will not have to disclose its donors and can spend unlimited sums toward political activity, provided campaign finance is not its primary purpose and it does not contribute directly to campaigns.

A source familiar with the matter told JI that those behind the organization, which Cruz is not directly involved with, raised several million dollars to fund the operation. Klepach will run the operation as executive director.

In a statement on her hiring, Klepach said she was enthusiastic to join an effort focused on preventing Republicans from mimicking what she described as Democrats’ embrace of anti-Israel sentiment.

“There has been a surge of antisemitism across America, which first engulfed the left and is now threatening the moral integrity and political unity of the conservative movement and the Republican Party,” Klepach said. “I am excited to lead The Front Line’s efforts to defeat right-wing antisemitism before it takes conservatives down the same path of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and pro-Sharia advocacy that has taken the left.”

TFL’s mission statement describes the group as “an issue advocacy organization aligned with the positions of Ted Cruz dedicated to countering right-wing antisemitism, by making antisemitism disqualifying in the Republican Party and conservative movement, through activities across political, policy, and digital spaces.”

Sanders compares Israel with Sudan and Russia

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has long accused Israel of “genocide,” compared the Jewish state with Sudan and Russia in a statement on Thursday.

“One might have hoped that, after thousands of years of war, humanity could have come up with a better way to resolve conflicts than killing and mass destruction,” the Jewish senator said. “Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is now more war and bloodshed raging across the world than at almost any point in decades.”

In a statement ostensibly about “civil war and genocide in Sudan,” Sanders noted Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “without provocation” and what he said is “genocide” in Gaza.

“In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 innocent people and taking 251 hostages,” he said. “In response, Netanyahu and the Israeli military did not simply wage war against Hamas. They waged war against the entire population of Gaza.”

He accused the Jewish state of destroying “virtually the entire physical infrastructure of Gaza.”

Hamas is known to embed deliberately among the civilian population and to use it as human shields.

Five paragraphs into the statement about genocide in Sudan, Sanders finally mentioned Sudan, before pivoting to U.S. President Donald Trump.

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07/10 Links Pt1: US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling; Pro-Israel UK MP Ann Widdecombe, murdered; CPJ Staff Packed With Anti-Israel Agitators

From Ian:

Brian Cox: Hamas announced it is stepping down in Gaza. It’s time for Canada to step up

The Board of Peace that is tasked with managing the transition of authority in Gaza welcomed Monday’s announcement that Hamas has dissolved its government, yet the Board nonetheless insisted that its assessment will be “guided by actions, not promises, to meet the critical needs of the people of Gaza.”

If Hamas does not voluntarily disarm and refrain from a governing role in Gaza, these non-negotiable objectives may yet require overwhelming military force to achieve. This means the prospect of intense—even deadly—combat operations remains.

Despite the dangers on the horizon, the potential for this plan to finally achieve durable peace in Palestinian territories is worth the risk.

But doing so will require commitment, resolve, and skilled military capabilities. This is why the Canadian Armed Forces are especially well suited to the task.

One potential roadblock is the current strain in relations between Canada and the United States. Despite current tensions, the government still maintains that “Canada has had no closer friend and ally than the United States” for over 150 years.

And although the peace plan is an American-led initiative for which Trump is appointed chair of the fledgling Board of Peace, the United Nations Security Council has welcomed the board and authorized establishment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF).

This provides international legitimacy to the peace plan, which is a point the government can emphasize to the domestic constituency in light of current diplomatic tensions with America.

Last fall, the Carney government along with Australia, France, and the UK recognized the State of Palestine even though it doesn’t currently qualify for traditional criteria of statehood. Committing robust military capabilities to the ISF in Gaza represents an opportunity to pursue a credible two-state solution.

The Carney government insists that “Canada is a strong supporter of the Middle East Peace Process” and that its approach to the conflict “is guided by its historic and unwavering commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace and security.”

If Canada is genuinely committed to long-term peace while also supporting “free and fair elections in Palestine in which Hamas must play no role,” political rhetoric, humanitarian aid, and capacity building simply will not be enough.

The consequences of failure are predictable: perpetual conflict, resurgence of Hamas and other Iran-backed regional proxy militias, and eventually a repeat of the October 7 atrocities followed by catastrophic large-scale hostilities.

A coalition of the willing must seize this moment by demonstrating the resolve needed to convert wishes to results.

The time is now for Canada to step up, join in, and take on a decisive role to foster genuine peace in Gaza and beyond.

US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling

Two influential US congressional panels have launched a major inquiry into the New Israel Fund (NIF), JNS reported on Friday.

According to the report, the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees are examining allegations that the American-based leftist organization potentially violated federal tax laws by funneling non-profit capital into partisan political operations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an official warning obtained by JNS, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) detailed how NIF may have breached its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status “by providing millions of dollars in funding to groups that engaged in political campaign activities in the 2019 Israeli elections."

US internal revenue laws strictly forbid public charities from intervening in foreign or domestic political races either directly or indirectly.

According to congressional investigators, the NIF covertly backed radical anti-Netanyahu networks.

“NIF provided approximately $356,000 to Zazim, an Israeli organization that ‘operated a transportation system that brought thousands of Bedouin voters’ to the polls that were part of the opposition party to Prime Minister Netanyahu," the lawmakers noted. They also revealed that the organization “also provided approximately $95,000 to Adalah, a group that ‘provided legal representation to the Joint Arab List,’ an alliance of Arab parties that centered their campaign around ousting Prime Minister Netanyahu in favor of his opponent, Benny Gantz."

Further compliance failures were flagged regarding a 2019 court filing indicating that the NIF actively interfered in the sovereign electoral map by securing signatures for a legal petition to block a right-wing legislative candidate. “When the Israeli Supreme Court banned the candidate, ‘NIF called it a victory for democracy,’" the chairmen noted.

The leftist organization has historically presented itself as an entity dedicated to bolstering civil equity, asserting that it has disbursed over $300 million to various left-wing frameworks since 1979. However, the prominent visual on their web portal showcases Arab MK Ayman Odeh, leader of the radical anti-Zionist Hadash-Ta'al faction.

Odeh, despite being an elected member of the Knesset, has made countless anti-Israel statements, including comparisons between Israeli hostages and Hamas terrorists.

Rep. Jim Jordan indicated to JNS that the evidence points to blatant meddling. “The law is the law. You’re not supposed to be using this for electioneering activity," he stressed. “It looks like they were.

Downstream of the Lie By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
I’m not talking about the dupes who believe anti-Israel propaganda. I mean, rather, those Israel supporters who blame the shift in public opinion on Israel’s failed communications strategy over the past three years.

They act as if anyone else is doing a better job of getting populations to distinguish between lies and truth. Falsehoods and loony theories have come to proliferate everywhere at all times. Look at recent history: Most of the country believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Most bought into the story that Covid came from a wet market. The 2020 election showed that Americans generally thought Joe Biden was cognitively fit for office. As recently as 2024, Gallup found that a majority of Americans were opposed to banning “gender-affirming” care for minors. And most still think the government is lying to us about aliens.

In such cases of broadly shared misinformation, we tend to blame those peddling the lies, not those who just didn’t scream the truth loud enough. In fact, truthful protestations are repurposed by the liars as further proof of a cover-up.

Look, I don’t really think Israel lost the information war to begin with. As I’ve argued before, the information Israel needed to get across was that it’s not going anywhere and will do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.

But what’s more important is that the psyop against Israel isn’t ultimately about Israel. It’s a disinformation nuke aimed at the heart of America. Just look at what it’s already done to our social cohesion. Same goes for the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theory, which is itself an anti-Semitic spinoff of the op against Israel. History shows that the promulgation of anti-Semitism can be a death sentence for free societies.

To save our country, I suggest we start looking abroad at who would stand to gain from this kind of crack-up. Never mind the incentive structure of clicks and views. That’s all downstream of the problem’s source. It’s the U.S. that’s losing the information war. And the way to win it is to take the fight straight to our enemies.

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The Abu Safiya Propaganda Campaign - all based on uncorroborated and unlikely descriptions of a man near death

This week produced a textbook coordinated campaign : Amnesty International, CAIR, CodePink, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel all escalated calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, echoed by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and carried by the Guardian, the BBC, and NBC News. 

Where did this come from? 

The spark was a single visit. On July 2, Abu Safiya's lawyer, Nasser Odeh, met with him and came away describing a man near death — unable to speak lucidly, beaten by more than five guards with hands, batons, and hammers, nearly losing consciousness several times during the meeting itself, telling Odeh he did not expect to survive.

Every outlet that ran the story ran Odeh's account, and only Odeh's account. No doctor examined Abu Safiya independently. No photograph or video from the visit exists. The Israel Prison Service denies mistreatment, calling the allegations false. The entire campaign — the Amnesty statement calling the reports "truly horrifying," the UN experts' demand for immediate release, the wire coverage — rests on one lawyer's description of one meeting, a lawyer who has every incentive to shade the truth, and nearly all of it describes Abu Safiya as a civilian pediatrician with no connection to the war beyond treating its casualties.

That framing has a hole in it. A 2016 photograph uncovered by NGO Monitor shows Abu Safiya in military uniform at a Kamal Adwan ceremony alongside senior figures of Hamas's Military Medical Services and National Security Forces, and multiple Arabic-language sources refer to him as a colonel. Abu Safiya's link to Hamas's governing apparatus is a matter of public record, not an Israeli fabrication invented to justify his detention after the fact — a detail the campaign coverage this week omits entirely.

When Israeli forces took Kamal Adwan Hospital that Abu Safiya led on December 27, 2024, they detained more than 240 people they identified as Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, including 15 tied to the October 7 attack, and later released interrogation footage of a detainee describing the hospital as a shelter used to stage patrols and move weapons. It strains credulity that the hospital he ran could host so many militants without his knowledge or approval. 

the publicity campaign also ignores the legality of Israel's detention of Abu Safiya. Israel is holding him under the Unlawful Combatants Law, and PHRI and the UN bodies describe that as arbitrary detention requiring either charges or release. But as retired military lawyer Brian Cox has argued, Hamas is not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions, so its fighters fall outside the POW protections of the Third Convention; the governing provision is Common Article 3, which covers non-international armed conflict and permits holding a detainee for the duration of hostilities without the judicial process that a criminal charge would require. The hostilities have not ended.

We cannot know how accurate Odeh's description of Safiya is. But it echoes testimony that surfaced months earlier from detainees released in February and March, and that testimony was, if anything, more graphic. Those detainees said Abu Safiya could not speak without repeating each word four times, that dogs had been set on him, that his weight had fallen to around forty kilograms. Read together, the two accounts describe a man who has spent the better part of a year under constant torture, beatings, and starvation, sliding steadily toward death.

There is one problem with that picture: the video from June 10.

Abu Safiya appeared before Israel's Supreme Court by video link that day, between the March testimony and Odeh's July account. He was gaunt, but not the emaciated, forty-kilogram figure described months earlier. In the five seconds of footage that circulated, he shows no visible difficulty breathing — sitting still, shackled, unremarkable.

Is it possible that Abu Safiya was near death in March, recovered enough by June to sit calmly through a hearing, and collapsed into near-death again by July? Possible, yes. Likely is a different question, especially once you notice that the lurid details are exactly what got Odeh onto the BBC, that nobody in this chain offers a claim about Abu Safiya's condition that doesn't ultimately trace back to somebody speaking on his behalf, and that the same coverage leaves out a documented military affiliation and a live legal dispute over whether his detention needs a charge at all.

Odeh has every incentive to make his client's case as urgently as he can to whichever outlet will run it, and there is nothing improper in that; it is what advocates do. The failure sits with the news organizations and human rights bodies that took a single uncorroborated account, matched it against no evidence but its own resemblance to an earlier uncorroborated account, and never asked what the one piece of footage actually showed, or what they were leaving out about who Abu Safiya is. A little more skepticism was available to all of them. They chose not to use 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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