Saturday, September 19, 2026
From Ian:
NYPost Editorial: The left lobs yet another ‘Big Lie’ on Israel — and the fallout keeps getting worse
NYPost Editorial: The left lobs yet another ‘Big Lie’ on Israel — and the fallout keeps getting worse
The left’s Big Lies about Israel keep growing bigger — as do the ugly consequences.Eugene Kontorovich: Britain’s Israel sanctions clash with US anti-boycott laws
The latest: Rep. Gregory Meeks’ bid to place a “hold” on a $2.8 billion sale of US bombs to the Jewish state.
“The Trump administration’s proposed sale of 40,000 2,000-pound bombs . . . raises grave, unresolved concerns about how these munitions could be used in densely populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon,” huffed Meeks; it’s empty virtue-signaling, since he can’t actually stop the sale.
How bad have the lies about Israel gotten?
These are weapons needed to destroy underground tunnels and bunkers; withholding them helps sustain Hamas and Hezbollah, though Meeks claims he backs Israel’s right to defend itself from the terrorists.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) likewise opposed the sale, claiming preposterously that “US weapons are being used to perpetrate a genocide.”
It’s all nonsense: Israel has never — never — used bombs indiscriminately or where it believed major civilian casualties were likely, let alone to “perpetrate a genocide.”
And there’s no legitimate fear it ever would.
These charges fit with a slew of whoppers in a new film, “NAZA” (an acronym for the Hebrew words for “collateral damage”), that the Israel Defense Forces used AI to identify targets in Gaza and carried out strikes knowing they’d mostly kill civilians.
Contrary to the vicious smears, the IDF never leaves targeting decisions to AI, nor would it proceed with a strike if it expected a high civilian-casualty rate.
What makes these lies especially heinous is that the precise opposite is true: Israel goes to lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
Even as Hamas tries to maximize them by using them as human shields.
Urban warfare expert John Spencer, who’s studied the war in Gaza, reports that Jerusalem has “implemented more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in history.”
All these boycott measures are, at least in part, incompatible with U.S. federal anti-boycott laws. Measures were originally adopted in the 1970s in response to the Arab League Boycott to bar Americans from “comply[ing] with, further[ing], or support[ing] any boycott fostered or imposed by any foreign country, against a country which is friendly to the United States.” Laws prohibiting investments, financing, construction, or property ownership in Israel fall squarely within that prohibition.Gil Troy: To bland Mr. Miliband living in la-la land: Your antics aren’t bold. They’re bovine
Moreover, because companies want to do business, and because boycotts create a victimless crime, boycotting countries have always had to engage in extensive enforcement efforts. The U.S. anti-boycott law prohibits participating in the enforcement process, even for companies that are not engaged in a boycott. For example, to enforce its boycott, the U.K. will have to ask anyone importing goods from Israel whether they’re from what it considers a prohibited location.
Simply “furnishing information” needed to enforce boycott measures is forbidden by U.S. anti-boycott law, even if the company is not itself engaged in a boycott. Indeed, most recent enforcement actions by the Department of Commerce are for furnishing information, rather than actual boycott activity.
America’s anti-boycott laws are not designed to protect Israel. They are designed to protect American companies from economic coercion by foreign countries in the service of restrictive and discriminatory trade policies that America does not share. These countries are not trying to convince companies to boycott Israel. They are forcing them to boycott Israel. U.S. anti-boycott laws seek to disable such coercion by making those laws unenforceable.
And it works. The measures are widely credited with helping end the Arab League boycott and ultimately setting the stage for the Abraham Accords.
It doesn’t matter that the boycotts are said to apply to “settlements,” as this literally includes Jerusalem, where the U.S. recognizes Israeli sovereignty, and the American Embassy resides.
The Trump administration must make clear that the new boycott measures will raise significant compliance problems for U.S. business, as even the Biden administration did when Turkey announced a boycott during the Gaza war. Moreover, federal law requires the Treasury Department to maintain a “list of countries which require or may require participation in or cooperation with an international boycott.” The U.K. (along with Spain and Ireland, which also recently adopted narrower boycott measures) should be put on that list, which currently only contains the bitter enders of the Arab League.
Israel has responded by saying it will close the U.K.’s unaccredited consulate in Jerusalem, a reasonable move that might have even more impact if done in response to the U.K.’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel could go further by denying visas to hostile British nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty and Oxfam. Part of the U.K.’s boycott includes a partial ban on arms sales. Israel would be within its rights to scale back export licenses for its crucial defense technologies, which are in high demand around the world.
Future right-leaning governments will hopefully abandon the boycott, as Slovenia’s has. And if a sufficient example is made of the U.K., its fellow travelers may choose to change course. But this won’t happen unless both Jerusalem and Washington go beyond mere expressions of displeasure.
Miliband pulled a Mary Poppins, adding spoonfuls of sugar so his poison could go down and fool liberals. He blue-and-whitewashed his lies, broadcasting his Jewish identity, then playing the Holocaust card. Blowing more smoke, he condemned Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the crude antisemitism threatening British Jews.
Apparently, even British Labourites can still reject these horrors.
But Miliband quickly started working his con, which has bamboozled millions. His 2,600-word speech omitted Hamas’s continued abuse of Gazans and ongoing attacks against Israel, treating October 7 as a one-time explosion. You’d think Hamas then stopped fighting.
Similarly, Miliband’s litany of Israel and “settler” sins never acknowledged Palestinian violence, provocations, or imperfections – beyond vaguely requesting “effective Palestinian governance.”
We learn: Hamas was “bad,” but “the Palestinians,” Jesus-like, suffer from the oppressive Jews. Israel is the only obstacle to peace and to Miliband’s Holy Grail, the “two-state solution.”
He ignored thousands of Palestinian terrorists who threatened Israelis before and after October 7, in Gaza and the territories – with 6,828 Palestinian terror incidents outside Gaza in 2024 alone.
He overlooked what Col. (ret.) Miri Eisin, senior fellow at the International Institute for Counterterrorism, calls “tens of thousands of weapons,” hidden in “almost every single house” in Judea and Samaria in order to kill Israelis – or seize land where Israelis farm.
He discounted the smuggling of “heavy-duty weapons” from Iran via Jordan, increasingly, by hard-to-track drones. He obscured the “pay-to-slay” policies of the saintly Palestinian Authority, forgetting that this supposedly moderate PA sabotaged the Oslo peace process years before Hamas blew any chance of peace by making Gaza “Hamasistan” – destroying many Israelis’ faith in the two-state solution.
Miliband’s cockeyed narrative echoed and legitimized anti-Zionists’ ongoing character assassination of Israel as fundamentally flawed, blaming Israel first, last, and always.
Escalating, Miliband accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Judea and Samaria. Ethnic cleansing echoes a Serbo-Croatian phrase Serbian militias used as they brutally expelled one million Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the early 1990s, killing over 100,000, 80% of them Muslim.
In 1993, UN experts defined the term as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” Ethnic cleansing in Rwanda involved Hutus murdering over 800,000 Tutsi in 100 days.
In Darfur, it described Arab Janjaweed forces expelling over 2.7 million non-Arab, African ethnic groups, leaving over 300,000 dead. UK foreign secretary accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing
By contrast, Miliband reported: “since 2023... over 4,000 Palestinians” were “evicted from their homes due to settler violence and state actions” – while 3.4 million Palestinians still live in the West Bank.
As with the “genocide” libel, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” pushes what academics delicately call “concept creep” to grotesque extremes. It’s concept free-fall, exposing the accusers as ridiculous – or malevolent. To indict Israel, the worst crimes in international law keep being drained of their meaning, with once-clear thresholds obliterated.
At what point can we fairly call out this disproportionate stampede toward injustice as unfair, hysterical, and depressingly familiar to those who recognize antisemitism, even when perfumed with human rights talk?
Diplomatic wilding against Israel risks becoming a new Olympic sport. These assaults thrill anti-Zionist haters. They bypass all the Miliband weasel words. They simply welcome Britain, Canada, Norway, and these other countries now threatening to imprison their own citizens for selling flowers or wine imported from the “bad Jews” as allies in their jihadist crusade to destroy the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
It’s curious. No Palestinians are boycotted, not even convicted terrorists cashing their latest PA check for murdering innocents.
This latest affront – coming 49 days before the Israeli elections – is counterproductive. It emboldens the marginal Israeli minority cheering violent settlers.
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