09/30 Links Pt1: Heroic Israelis avert a tragedy in the sky; A Nation Like a Lion’—Israeli Airline Passenger Heroics Avert Jihadist Terrorist Attack

From Ian:

‘A Nation Like a Lion’—Israeli Airline Passenger Heroics Avert Jihadist Terrorist Attack

In early 2024 the band Hatikva 6 released a song that captured the spirit of Israel as it responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack. "Everyone looks so ordinary but … We're a nation of superheroes. In each and every one hides a soldier ready to save the world," it says.

The Hebrew version on YouTube has 15 million views; a version with English subtitles, which I recommend you take a break and watch now, has fewer views.

Just in time for the third anniversary of the October 7 attack—and just past the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America—came an episode whose details reminded me of the song.

As Israeli government officials and flight passengers recounted it, a Boeing 737 FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv with about 174 people aboard started rapidly losing altitude, and lights suddenly went out inside the cabin. Flight data indicate the plane plunged about 14,000 feet in about 30 seconds.

"It became drastic," one passenger on the flight, Adam Polo, told Fox News. "After a couple of seconds, people started to shout, people that were sitting in the first couple of rows and in the business class that were close to the pilots' room … that there was a stabbing, and that there was blood everywhere, and then they asked that everyone who can help, please join and come immediately. And then we were really really really lucky that I think like 10 guys just jumped to help. Three or four of them actually entered into the pilots' room and succeeded, after a couple of minutes, succeeded to control the situation."

"I ran toward the cockpit," a passenger on the plane, Yaniv Hayun, told The Free Press. "We physically fought with the co-pilot; he was going wild. I put him in a choke hold, took control of him, and dragged him out of the cockpit. … Then I called for other Israelis to help restrain him." They did so using headphone cords and zip ties, according to the Free Press account.

One passenger, Itzhak Liber, was pictured on video saying in Hebrew, "there was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots. We simply jumped and removed him from the cockpit."

The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an election on October 27, 2026, that polls indicate is close, met with Hayun at Ben Gurion International Airport, where the passengers eventually arrived after a stop in Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu released video clips and images of his meeting with Hayun, whose shirt and socks were soaked with blood. Hayun, as his wife and two daughters looked on, explained to Netanyahu how he subdued the terrorist copilot. Hayun then recounted how he had pulled back on the yoke of the aircraft based on what he'd seen watching a television show, Air Crash Investigation, also known as Mayday.

Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, was quoted by the Times of Israel that the event "was a jihadist terrorist attack attempt, which was thwarted only thanks to the bravery of several Israeli passengers who broke into the cockpit, overpowered the terrorist and, with their own hands, restored control of the plane to another flight crew who was present there."

Netanyahu also credited "Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery. Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster."

The mid-air heroics by passengers are reminiscent of those aboard the planes that were hijacked as part of the September 11 terrorist attack. Daniel Lewin, a passenger aboard a plane from Boston that was eventually flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, appears to have battled the terrorists, according to his family members and accounts by others aboard the plane who got word out before it crashed. And Todd Beamer was heard saying "let's roll" as he led the effort that apparently caused United Flight 93 to crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, rather than the terrorist target in Washington.

President Trump called it "the most amazing story" and said the key Israeli passenger was a professional plumber. "A plumber. Never flew a plane. Strong guy," the president said.

Dr Brian L Cox: World Central Kitchen convoy attack is a tragedy, not a crime

There is no doubt that the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza last April was a tragedy. The question that has been circulating in the court of public opinion since then is whether it was also a crime.

According to a recent statement published by Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps, the answer is no. The decision not to initiate criminal prosecution was later denounced in a joint statement from the governments of Australia, Canada, and the UK as “shameful.”

The World Central Kitchen attack,” laments the statement, “is one of countless incidents in Gaza where there has been no accountability.”

In reality, it is the double standard expected of Israel created by narratives such as that reflected in this joint statement that is “shameful.”

Rhetoric demanding accountability based on the perceived outcome of attacks during the conduct of armed hostilities has become standard practice for human rights NGOs and other advocates with no responsibility for implementing in practice international law as it exists in doctrine. After all, many NGOs and similar special interests “typically exist for purely humanitarian purposes,” which means their perspective on the application of international law “is far from neutral.”

The popular effects-based approach to applying the law of armed conflict often adopted by humanitarian activists is misguided because it doesn’t align with how foundational rules such as distinction and proportionality function in practice. For governments to espouse this approach in public messaging is absolutely inexcusable.

Yet, this is precisely what the joint statement from Australia, Canada, and the UK does.

The message claims, “Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law,” yet it fails to explain how these governments believe Israel failed to do so. Although the joint statement correctly notes that an inquiry by Israel characterised the “incident as a serious mistake and failure,” the “serious failure” occurred “due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the Standard Operating Procedures.”

Failures involving compliance with relevant use of force policy do not necessarily involve violations of international law, nor are they inherently criminal.

Indeed, the Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism carried out by the Israel Defense Force considered the “totality of the operational circumstances” and determined that “notwithstanding serious failures in the process that led to the assessment that Hamas operatives were travelling in the vehicles, the decisions of the commanders did not raise reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct.”

This conclusion was reached by evaluating the process that led to the attack, rather than the perceived outcome based on information that came to light after the incident.

That is how the law of armed conflict is actually applied in practice.

The joint statement, by contrast, declares that the “victims of this incident and their families deserve justice and accountability.” This represents a demand to hold personnel accountable —by initiating criminal prosecution for an incident that does not constitute a crime — based on the effects of the attack.

By this logic, it was shameful for the United States not to prosecute anyone responsible for the 2015 attack on the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma centre in Kunduz, Afghanistan, even though the official inquiry determined, correctly, that the incident was not criminal in nature despite the “human error” that contributed to the incident. The same can be said for the decision by the German government not to pursue criminal prosecution following a separate 2009 civilian casualty incident in Kunduz, or by the Netherlands following the tragic 2015 airstrike in Hawija, Iraq.

According to the precedent set by the Australia/Canada/UK joint statement, it is now shameful for any government not to prosecute troops responsible for civilian casualty incidents when human error is involved, including the governments responsible for this statement, even if an official inquiry determines relevant personnel did not violate applicable law.

Foreign minister Penny Wong went a step further by declaring “Australia is outraged by the Israeli Government’s decision to not pursue any criminal proceedings against those responsible for” the attack.

Yet despite all the indignant geopolitical rhetoric, none of the governments behind the joint statement have explained what provision of the law, whether international or domestic, they believe was violated.

This effects-based construct completely contradicts how international law actually functions in practice.

Israelis rescued from northern Ethiopia after days trapped by rebel advance

Some 20 Israeli citizens who were stuck in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region amid a rebel advance in the area have been rescued after three days of “intensive efforts,” the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

The ministry said it worked in coordination with the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa and other relevant authorities to extract the stranded Israelis from the area.

“The group of Israelis who had become stranded in Lalibela in northern Ethiopia amid the security escalation in the area were evacuated yesterday and today by helicopter,” the ministry said in a statement.

“Helicopters transported the group to a safe area, from which they will continue on to Addis Ababa,” the ministry continued.

It said representatives would continue to accompany and assist the group until they arrive safely in Addis Ababa.

The Israelis became trapped in the Tigray region as a result of heavy clashes that erupted last week between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the federal government.

The fighting has raised fears of a return to the full-blown civil war of 2020-2022, in which an estimated 600,000 people died. People walk in Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, as fighting escalates with the central government, September 24, 2026. (AP Photo)

The Israelis were stuck in the city of Lalibela, where airports are reportedly closed and road travel is dangerous.

The stranded Israelis wrote to the Foreign Ministry to request help, the Ynet news site reported earlier this week.

The letter reportedly informed the ministry that “flights have been canceled indefinitely, and this is no longer just a delay of a few days” and that “the city’s fuel, food and cash stocks are extremely limited.”

Dozens of civilians, including children, have been killed in the renewed fighting as Ethiopian government forces bombard towns in Tigray and push north towards the rebel-held capital, health workers and locals told AFP on Tuesday.

Fighting is ongoing along several fronts, but government forces appear to be pushing north into Tigray, towards the regional capital of Mekelle.

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Maine Senate candidate demonstrates the current epistemic antisemitic environment perfectly

I have been writing about how the current epistemic environment has been twisting facts into anti-Zionism. The Democratic candidate for the senate in Maine just illustrated it as perfectly as possible, and extended it to classic antisemitism as well.

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson , while discussing Jewish Mainers who reject the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, said said it was “unfortunate” that there are people in Maine who do not like to use that term “only because they’re Jewish and what that means to them, with the Holocaust.” He then reaffirmed his own conclusion: what Israel is doing “fits that description” and “is a genocide.”

Notice the evidence he brings for "genocide."  He doesn't. He takes a word that has been misused and extended beyond its own legal definition and treats it as undeniable. 

Therefore, the Jews who disagree (again, because he doesn't know what genocide is) cannot possibly legitimate reasons for their position. No, it must be because they are unfortunately Jewish. 

Their Jewish identity is the problem, not their logic.

He doesn't consider that perhaps they disagree on the definition of the term. They cannot possibly believe the evidence does not establish specific genocidal intent, think competing explanations fit the evidence better, or simply remain uncertain. A normal epistemic process leaves those possibilities open and engages the arguments themselves.

Jackson instead attributes their disagreement to their identity. 

They reject his conclusion “only because they’re Jewish” and because of what the Holocaust means to them. Their objection therefore ceases to function as possible counterevidence and becomes evidence of their supposed bias. The conclusion remains fixed; the only question becomes why Jews cannot see what Jackson regards as obvious.

That is exactly how a self-protecting epistemic environment works. Once “Israel is committing genocide” has become background knowledge rather than a proposition still requiring demonstration, dissent no longer has to be answered on its merits. The dissenter can instead be psychologically or socially explained: Jewish, Zionist, emotionally invested, unable to see clearly because of historical trauma. Evidence turns into armchair psychology. 

This is antisemitism. Jackson doesn't consider Jews who disagree with the genocide conclusion as having a valid point that must be answered. Their Jewishness is itself the only evidence he needs to discount their opinions.

 Jewish testimony about an accusation against the Jewish state receives a credibility discount because the speakers are Jewish. 

There is also a striking asymmetry in Jackson’s explanation. He assumes that Jewish identity explains why Jews might reject the genocide label, but does not ask whether political identity might help explain why he accepts it to begin with. It sure isn't evidence-based.

Jackson presumably meant to explain Jewish sensitivity to the word “genocide.” What he ended up illustrating is something more revealing: once the conclusion is treated as settled, identity can be used to explain away the people who refuse to accept it. 

And while he was at it he also demonstrated that for many on the progressive Left, there is no line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. 

What a perfect candidate to replace the guy with the Nazi tattoo.

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09/29 Links Pt2: How jihad learned to speak the West’s language; Mamdani announces campaign against antisemitism, doesn’t mention connection to anti-Zionism; Florida designates CAIR as domestic terror group

From Ian:

How jihad learned to speak the West’s language

In 1991, an internal memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, later entered as evidence in a US federal trial, described the movement’s work on the continent as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Not a bomb. Not a rifle. Jihad, waged from within, through the institutions of the very society it targets.

Almost nobody in the West has heard that sentence. What the West hears are other words: freedom, justice, liberation, resistance, human rights. Words it knows, loves, and has built its moral identity around. The question it rarely asks is who supplied those words, and to what end.

A mind does not check where a word came from. It checks whether the word fits.

Consider a young man marching on an American campus, or through London, Paris, or Berlin, calling for the liberation of Palestine. He does not believe that he is calling for jihad. He is thinking about oppression, colonialism, and his duty to stand with the weak. He is running his own value system.

Scrutiny is triggered by foreign content, not by familiar content. A phrase that matches what a person already believes is absorbed without inspection. The most efficient way to transmit foreign content is therefore to wrap it in the familiar.

No need to say jihad. Resistance will do. No need to speak of victory. Liberation will do. No need to explain the day after. Decolonization will do.

An effective slogan does not transmit a message. It produces commitment without requiring comprehension.

Ask him which river and which sea, and very often he cannot answer – not because he is concealing anything, but because he genuinely does not know. He fills the gap with the concepts he does believe in: freedom, equality, an end to oppression.

That moment exposes the mechanism. A man who chants a sentence whose content he does not truly understand has not adopted a position. He has acquired belonging. Once he fills it with his own meaning, the sentence becomes his, and he will defend it as though he had written it.

Anyone confronting him with facts is no longer arguing with whoever drafted the line. He is colliding with the values of the man shouting it.

Florida designates CAIR as domestic terror group

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and the Florida Cabinet voted to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and more than 90 other organizations as terror groups on Tuesday.

In a more-than-400-page agenda document for the vote, the state alleged that “there is substantial evidence that CAIR is engaging in terrorist activity” and accused the group of having connections to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holyland Foundation terrorism financing trial.

In the same vote, Florida applied foreign terrorist designations to groups already listed by the State Department as terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, the Houthis and the Continuity Irish Republican Army.

CAIR bills itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization” and notes on its website that it has never been charged with a crime.DeSantis signed an executive order in December designating CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization, which a federal judge blocked in March.

In July, DeSantis signed a bill granting him and the state Cabinet new powers to designate groups as terrorist organizations and recommended that CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and the other groups designated on Tuesday be the first to be so sanctioned.

The bill, which DeSantis has described as an “anti-Sharia law” measure, allows the state to legally dissolve groups designated as terrorists and creates criminal penalties for those that fail to do so. It also allows for the expulsion of any students in the Florida university system who promote the groups and bars the groups from certain other state funding, including contracts.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented CAIR in its lawsuit against DeSantis’s executive order, is also suing the state to stop the implementation of the terrorism designation law.

“Gov. DeSantis’s use of Florida’s dangerous new ‘terrorism’ designation regime against CAIR and its Florida chapter is baseless and unconstitutional,” Hina Shamsi, director of ACLU’s national security project, stated on Tuesday.

“There are simply no legitimate grounds to brand our clients with a reviled label, impose crippling criminal penalties and force them to shut their doors in Florida,” Shamsi said.

Why ‘Washington Post’ columnist Shadi Hamid excuses Hamas, demonizes Israel, Jews

When Gaza-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib penned a devastating op-ed in The New York Times on September 4 decrying Hamas’s destructive role in the Gaza Strip, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid was incensed (“For Gaza to Recover, Hamas Must Be Expelled”).

Hamid invented on X/Twitter that “pro-Israel hardliners” support Alkhatib because he “justifies the killing of Palestinians as unfortunate fact or a necessary evil.” Hamid’s assault against Alkhatib is a gross distortion of Alkhatib’s vision for a bright future for the people of Gaza.

“A Palestinian miracle on the Mediterranean is within reach if Gaza rejects Islamism, Jihadism, Hamas, and stale nationalist notions, all of which have left it devastated,” Alkhatib wrote, laying out the path forward for the fruitful development of the coastal territory.

But a thriving future in which the Gaza residents can pursue peaceful lives free from the ruinous rule of Hamas is apparently not Hamid’s shared vision. Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre, Hamid’s columns and social media posts have rationalized Hamas, demonized Israel, and marginalized Jews politically.

On October 31, 2023, Hamid published a column in The Washington Post explaining that Hamas isn’t evil. The essay – written three weeks after Hamas launched a cross-border raid and murdered 1,200 people and abducted 250 others – exonerated murder, abduction, and rape carried out in the name of Palestinian “resistance.”

Noting that Palestinians had become convinced “that nonviolence doesn’t work,” Hamid argued that Hamas’s violence was a legitimate expression of Palestinian frustration.

But in what world does frustration justify mass murder?

Moreover, in his essay, Hamid ignored the inconvenient history of Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas rejecting peace deals. He left out Hamas’s ideology, codified in the organization’s charter, which advocates killing Jews.

He was silent on the inculcation of hate in Palestinian schools. And he also ignored Hamas’s hijacking of international aid to raise an army, dig tunnels, and build a rocket arsenal.

By ignoring the threat that Hamas posed to Israel, Hamid was free to accuse Israel of using excessive violence and committing war crimes in its war against Hamas. Over the course of a year and a half, Hamid argued his case, often using discredited information that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

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09/29 Links Pt1: What Bibi knew; A Two-State Solution Was a Casualty of October 7 for This Generation; Oslo Was Never Owned by the Palestinian Public

From Ian:

A Two-State Solution Was a Casualty of October 7 for This Generation

The possibility of a two-state solution for this generation was a casualty of Oct. 7. It is hard for me to understand how anyone can honestly say that they would not protect themselves if their neighbor had already killed one of their children and threatened to do it again as soon as they had the opportunity. It is sad that self-preservation has become something Israel, and increasingly Jews, seem to have to argue for.

When Oct. 7 came, the people of Israel rose up and came to the aid of their county. They searched for hostages, killed terrorist before they were able to rape, kill and maim even more people, and collected the blood and remains of so many dead so they could be buried and their families could have graves to visit and mourn.

Once you've seen the videos taken on GoPros by the terrorists on Oct. 7 or hear the glee in the recorded conversations where they tell family about what they are doing. Once you've seen the horrific scenes and participated in the cleanup of massacres like the Nova festival, can you support allowing a border state to Israel that would be governed by the group that planned and committed this atrocity?

Even hearing about the work that was done from people whose eyes are haunted and dead is enough for most people to know that so many were killed on Oct. 7 and the two-state solution was also a casualty. This generation will never support such an approach.

For so many years, Israelis in bordering towns both north and south lived with rockets raining down on them constantly. They raised their children with an uncertainty borne of constantly needing to run to a bomb shelter. But this seemed to be the price to pay - the necessary reality of having neighbors who wanted us killed and world opinion who wanted Israel to exercise never-ending restraint. This, too, broke after Oct. 7. Many woke up to see that accepting such a life was impossible going forward. That protecting its citizens was the most important consideration. It feels like Israel and this generation is done hoping and conceding.

Oslo Was Never Owned by the Palestinian Public

On Sept. 13, 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords' Declaration of Principles at the White House. Days before the ceremony, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of mutual recognition. The PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism. The killing was supposed to stop. It did not.

On that day, Jordanian television aired a prerecorded Arabic address by PLO chief Yasser Arafat. He reminded his listeners that the Palestine National Council had resolved in 1974 to establish a national authority over any part of the land that Israel vacated in a phased plan to eventually take over the rest. Oslo, in his telling, was a stage in the struggle, not a substitute for it.

Palestinians are scheduled to vote in November under rules requiring candidates to accept the PLO's commitments in Oslo. In a poll published Aug. 12 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 2/3 of Palestinians opposed requiring election candidates to accept the PLO's commitments, including its agreements with Israel.

The frameworks now being assembled for Gaza rest on similar architecture. Yet agreements built on the Western model, in which a document creates obligations that outlast political changes, require something the Middle East has rarely supplied: A party able to carry out a commitment after the leader who made it is gone.

The practical conclusion for Jerusalem and Washington is that the next agreement should be judged by what the public demonstrably accepts, and its security terms should be enforceable by Israel without depending on anyone's goodwill.

Pools, marble and mansions: Inside 100 Palestinian luxury homes in West Bank A photography book published by Regavim showcases 100 privately owned Palestinian villas and estates across the West Bank, seeking to challenge what the organization describes as a selective international portrayal of Palestinian life.

Titled Real Estate Under Occupation, the book features swimming pools, fountains, marble staircases and landscaped grounds. Regavim, an Israeli NGO that campaigns on land use and construction enforcement, said its field coordinators photographed all the featured properties in a single day.

In Shuqba, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah, the team documented an estate that Regavim described as covering 4,800 square meters, with a central swimming pool, landscaped lawns, shaded entertaining areas and a large courtyard.

In Nahalin, southwest of Bethlehem, the book features a neoclassical property listed at 1,120 square meters, with seven balconies, a turret, a fountain and an ornamental pool.

In Khirbet Zif, in the Hebron Hills, the organization documented gated compounds with swimming pools, gardens, guest accommodations, saunas, security cameras and private access roads. Other properties featured stone columns, electric gates, orchards and private parking.

The measurements are those supplied by Regavim; they should not all be read as interior living-space figures.

The introduction uses sarcasm to place terms such as “oppression,” “severe deprivation” and “daily hardship” alongside photographs of luxury homes. Regavim said it aimed to show how selective imagery could influence public opinion and foreign policy, while acknowledging that poverty existed.

The photographs document individual examples of wealth. They do not establish how common such wealth is across the Palestinian population. In its May 2026 economic update, the World Bank reported that economic activity in the West Bank remained substantially below its pre-October 2023 level, despite modest growth in 2025.
Report PDF

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A Word So Casual It Is Used Without Thought

The New York Times publishes yet another truly slanderous op-ed, this one by M. Gessen:

Do you even need to ask what that word is? Gesen describes the thoroughly discredited NAZA movie as if it is real journalism:

More than halfway through the film, Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.

The word doesn’t appear in the movie again.

This is all the evidence Gessen needs. After comparing this film to a new  dark comedy (again, not a documentary) about a mistaken Mossad hit, he concludes:

The difference between the practice depicted in “Checkout,” the comedy, and the unrelenting, unbearable horror described in “NAZA” is scale. Now, it’s industrial. That’s what makes it a genocide. It really is that unequivocal, and perhaps this is why the makers of “NAZA” didn’t need to use the word more than once.

"Genocide," to NYT columnists, is defined by vibes. And that's all you need. It isn't a serious word; it is something that is more like pornography; you know it when you see it. It is a term that can be casually tossed around without evidence, without even a clear definition. It is whatever you decide it is.

But that isn't what genocide is. And using it as casually by the headline of an op-ed is the opposite of seriousness.

A new academic paper from Indiana University actually does take the word seriously, along with other terms used casually about Israel, apartheid and settler colonialism.

The genocide accusation is governed by a treaty definition requiring enumerated acts and the specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in substantial part, as such. The record establishes killing within the meaning of Article II(a) and serious bodily and mental harm within the meaning of Article II(b) together with the civilian and combatant death and deprivation described above. It does not establish that conditions of life were imposed for the purpose of physical destruction under Article II(c), that measures were imposed with the intent required by Article II(d), or that Israel intended to destroy Palestinians as such rather than defeat Hamas, the armed organization governing Gaza and embedded within the civilian population. Military and genocidal aims can coexist as a matter of law, but genocidal intent must still be established from the totality of the evidence. Genocidal intent cannot be inferred from the consequences of a military campaign alone; where plausible competing explanations remain, it is not the only reasonable inference. The genocide accusation is therefore not established under the Convention.

This isn't as catchy as viewing a popular film and deciding that it must be accurate. But it does take the term "genocide" with the seriousness it deserves. The word isn't powerful because it is tossed around as a side comment: it is powerful because it has a specific definition meant exactly to stop it from being used casually, the way it is used by New York Times columnists.

This NYT piece will be read by hundreds of thousands of people,  if not millions. The serious academic paper that methodically takes apart the actual accusation of genocide will only be read by dozens. 

The word can be used as propaganda or it can be used with seriousness. The average person only hears the former version. And that is the only version the Newspaper of Record decides is worth employing.

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09/28 Links Pt2: The Quiet Islamic Colonization of America; Bondi survivor takes his warning to the UN’s doorstep; Germany’s academic centre for the denial of antisemitism

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: The Quiet Islamic Colonization of America

For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions.

The Muslim Brotherhood grasped the possibilities long before Washington did.

Millions of Muslims have no interest in seeing political Islam govern anyone, and many may have even crossed an ocean to escape it. The organizations that claim to speak in their name are another matter, and their central achievement has been to make the two indistinguishable, so that a political network registers as a whole population.

The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power.

While countries in the West are always nonchalantly accused of imperialism and colonization, how come no one ever mentions the Islamic imperialism and colonization of Christian Byzantium – now Turkey – let alone the entire Ottoman Empire? How come no one ever mentions the Islamic colonization of the Coptic Christian country of Egypt, or of northern Cyprus in 1974? Or the formerly Buddhist countries of southeast Asia, such as the Maldives, Malaysia or Indonesia?

The Islamic colonization now underway in Europe and the United States carries no racial or demographic content.... The territory being taken is ideological: it changes hands whenever a political movement discovers that open institutions can be used more profitably than if they were attacked, or whenever foreign money purchases standing inside institutions that form the next generation of American elites, or whenever two movements with incompatible values find they can trade access for votes.

Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule.

The process is arithmetic: small concessions, each too minor to be worth a fight, accumulating across institutions, phrases and political territory until reversing the situation would demand a confrontation no one wishes to have. Europe crossed this threshold without even noticing it. America has not.

The interval, however, in which recognizing the problem still costs less than reversing it is not indefinite.

I’m from Gaza – peace will only come if we rid our mosques and schools of radicalism

Dismantling the infrastructure of radicalism and countering ideological mobilisation in mosques and schools is no less vital than disarmament. In fact, it is the fundamental prerequisite for ensuring that violence does not reignite the moment the rubble is cleared. Rebuilding mosques without altering the rhetoric that prevailed prior to October 7 means recycling the very same concepts, giving rise to a new generation that reproduces the crisis – an outcome directly opposed to the interests of Gaza, its residents, and regional stability. The Strip requires a permanent end to conflict and the attainment of its rights through diplomatic and legitimate avenues.

Achieving this demands an end to the monopoly over the pulpit and the classroom. For decades, the educational and religious systems were exploited to steer collective consciousness exclusively toward armed conflict, with pulpits utilised for factional mobilisation and attacks on dissenters. Thus, an urgent need has emerged to restore the mosque's original role as a place of worship and a hub for enlightened thought, promoting values of tolerance and coexistence – drawing inspiration from successful, developing regional models such as the United Arab Emirates.

Stripping ideological control from the pulpits requires institutional oversight and independent bodies to ensure they are not converted into tools for factional mobilisation that tear the social fabric apart. Similarly, the educational environment must be reformed and protected. This goes beyond purging curricula of incitement to prohibiting paramilitary activities within schools and insulating educational facilities from partisan exploitation, thereby safeguarding children from early radicalisation.

Nevertheless, banning extreme ideas alone is insufficient, as human consciousness cannot remain a vacuum. The success of these endeavours hinges on presenting a civil, intellectual, and cultural alternative grounded in citizenship and the rule of law. Replacing narrow ideological affiliations with full citizenship guarantees equal rights and duties under judicial and institutional frameworks, reinforcing the view of a young person as an independent individual possessed of dignity, ambition, and the capacity to contribute to society.

Disarming Hamas without ridding educational and religious institutions of their radical ideas will keep the door to conflict wide open. Gaza's future will be determined inside classrooms and atop pulpits, where a consciousness is forged that will either repeat past mistakes or lay the foundation for a generation committed to peace, development, and investment in the future.

David Collier: Simon & Schuster Run From Social Responsibility

The issue is not whether Simon & Schuster agrees with Susan Abulhawa. The issue is why the company apparently believes its social responsibility extends far enough to cancel some authors over their conduct, but feels justified in helping to bring Abulhawa to a wider audience.

These aren’t forgotten books sitting passively on a backlist.

These are new editions. A fresh commercial decision has been made. Covers are produced, publicity generated, books marketed and the reputation and resources of one of the world’s largest publishers placed behind them.

And Abulhawa herself is making the political purpose of the republications explicit.

In August, she urged supporters to pre-order the Simon & Schuster editions, announcing that her pre-order royalties would go to the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).

That deserves scrutiny. PYM has a documented history of organising and campaigning alongside Samidoun, which the U.S. government designated in 2024 as a “sham charity” serving as an international fundraiser for the PFLP, a U.S. and EU designated terrorist organisation.

This makes the publisher’s attempt to distance itself increasingly difficult to swallow. Simon & Schuster is actively republishing and promoting the books; Abulhawa is explicitly directing the resulting royalties towards politically extremist causes. If any of that money crosses over into support for terrorist networks, it opens up an entirely different discussion.

Abulhawa has openly supported terrorism. Why on earth would Simon & Schuster want to be anywhere near this?

Someone at Simon & Schuster approved that decision.

Was that person aware of what Abulhawa posted on October 7?

Did they know about her explicit embrace of armed violence?

Did they know about the “parasites,” “demons,” “cockroaches” and “ghouls?”

If they didn’t, Simon & Schuster has a serious due-diligence problem.

If they did, there is a far more uncomfortable question to answer.

Where exactly is its line?

Would Simon & Schuster commission new editions from an author who repeatedly described Muslims as parasites, demons and cockroaches, celebrated someone who massacred Muslim civilians and openly expressed support for those carrying out terrorist violence against Muslims?

If not, what principle distinguishes that hypothetical case from this one?

This isn’t about banning Susan Abulhawa. She is free to write. Publishers are free to publish her. Readers are free to buy her books.

But Simon & Schuster is equally accountable for the choices it makes.

Corporations cannot plaster their websites with promises about diversity, inclusion, safe environments and social responsibility, invoke those principles when deciding one author is beyond the pale, and then retreat behind “her views are her own” when confronted with another.

The question is no longer what Susan Abulhawa believes; she has made that abundantly clear.

The question is what Simon & Schuster believes, and whether its loudly proclaimed principles mean anything when the people targeted by dehumanizing rhetoric happen to be Jews.

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09/28 Links Pt1: Holocaust inversion is obscene; Eleven Ways NAZA Misleads Viewers; US Identifies Three More UNRWA ‘Teachers’ Who Participated in Oct 7 Terror Spree

From Ian:

David Harris: Holocaust inversion is obscene

In the decades after the Holocaust, outright denial remained largely beyond respectable Western discourse. Its proponents faced public condemnation and, in countries such as France, legal consequences. But distortion took other forms: trivialisation, rationalisation, mockery, and supposedly historical explanations that excused or diminished the crime.

At Babyn Yar itself, Soviet authorities hid the victims’ Jewish identity. The monument erected there did not identify Jews as the targets of the September 1941 massacre, but spoke generically of the “victims of fascism”. The Kremlin denied Jews recognition of their tragedy. The struggle over memory was already under way. Although Soviet forces had liberated Auschwitz, Moscow was part of the emerging problem. Anti-Semitism as a political tool trumped historical truth.

Still, living witnesses were able to confront falsehood with personal testimony. Survivors, rescuers, and liberators could describe what they had endured or seen. The overwhelming documentary record reinforced their accounts. Alas, time has steadily deprived us of those voices. The evidence remains, but fewer people can stand before an audience and say: I was there.

That growing distance creates opportunities for those determined to deny the factual foundations of the Holocaust. And directing old – and new – anti-Semitic tropes against Israel offers another route: the hatred can be presented as political argument, even when its substance remains all too familiar.

To those who invoke their Jewish identity to lend credibility to anti-Semitic arguments, whether in London, Ottawa, or Washington, take note. Jewish ancestry does not make an antisemitic argument less anti-Semitic.

The danger extends beyond forgetting what happened. It includes the deliberate distortion of that history through the ghoulish phenomenon of Holocaust inversion: casting the one Jewish-majority state as a modern-day Nazi Germany, the embodiment of the evil that nearly destroyed the Jewish people.

The truth be damned. Never mind that Israel is a liberal democracy fighting for its survival against jihadist forces openly committed to its destruction. In a post-truth world, history can be hijacked, turned on its head, and repackaged beyond recognition. Consider Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, whose doctoral thesis in Moscow advanced Holocaust denial and distortion.

In 2022, in Berlin no less, Abbas accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Amazing! Fifty Holocausts, yet he continues to travel around the world while he lives comfortably in Ramallah, his sons prosper in business, and, miracle of miracles, the Palestinian population has grown substantially over the very decades in which these supposed fifty Holocausts occurred.

The obscenity of such Nazi imagery, circulated increasingly today by reckless politicians and unaccountable influencers, should be self-evident. It appropriates the systematic extermination of six million Jews, nearly two-thirds of European Jewry, to portray Israel as the successor to Nazi Germany. Such rhetoric turns the memory of murdered Jewish people into a weapon against the country, portraying it as having no moral legitimacy, no right to exist.

If words are to have any meaning and if history is to be a guide, then Holocaust inversion must be called out for what it is – premeditated dishonesty in the service of anti-Semitism.

The 33,771 Jewish people killed at Babyn Yar, and the millions of their murdered brethren, are not here to defend the truth of their lives and deaths. That responsibility falls to us.

Daniel Rubenstein: When Talking About Gaza, Start With This One Fact

“What do I say when…?”

This is the most common question that I get as a prominent advocate for Israel.

“What do I say when someone accuses Israel of genocide?”

“What do I say when someone accuses Israel of being an apartheid state?”

“What do I say when Israel is accused of colonialism?”

When people ask me these kinds of questions, what I really hear them saying is:

How do I play defense?

How do I remain in the frame that my opponents have set?

How do I use the vocabulary that my opponents want me to use?

This is a strategy for losers.

Sure, it’s important to understand the g-word, the a-word, and the c-word on an academic level so that you are able to have productive conversations with people who approach you in good faith. But I am not going to allow people who operate in bad faith to decide the terms of the debate.

I refuse to play defense.

If I’m on television and I’m asked a hostile question about the war in Gaza, I will reframe the debate by starting my answer with the following sentence: Hamas is the government of Gaza. Once this is established, I can begin to paint an accurate picture of the situation.

Most people don’t know, or they deny, or they like to avoid saying that Hamas is the government of Gaza (after three years of war!) and has been the government of Gaza since 2007. Israeli officials often respond to accusations about Israeli tactics in Gaza by saying something like “Hamas is responsible” – which of course is the conclusion that we’d like people to reach, but it’s an opinion, not a fact. If more people understood that Hamas was the government of Gaza on October 7, 2023, then there would be a greater understanding about who was responsible for what followed – and why Gaza looks as it does.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas had been the government of Gaza for 16 years. What does it mean that Hamas was the government of Gaza? Hamas controlled Gaza’s border crossings. Hamas determined who could enter Gaza and who could leave Gaza – whether through the Egyptian border at Rafah or through the Israeli crossings at Kerem Shalom and Erez. Hamas collected taxes. If goods entered Gaza, which they did – hundreds of trucks per day – Hamas got a cut. Hamas taxed fuel, electricity, and building supplies. Hamas taxed goods that Hamas smuggled into Gaza via its vast network of tunnels. Businesses in Gaza could operate only with Hamas’s permission and protection. Hamas controlled Gaza’s television networks, radio stations, and newspapers. Hamas controlled the mosques. Hamas appointed the imams. Hamas approved the sermons.

The Hamas government of Gaza controlled the education system in Gaza. Hamas managed its own network of schools and determined the curriculum that would be taught in those schools. At United Nations schools in Gaza, Hamas made sure that its own members (or friends and family members) were principals and teachers.

The Hamas government of Gaza ran a network of hospitals and appointed the directors of the hospitals. There is a children’s hospital in Gaza City named Al-Rantisi Hospital. It is named after Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a Palestinian pediatrician and a co-founder of Hamas. v The Hamas government of Gaza ran summer camps where children engaged in social activities alongside military-style training and indoctrination.

The Hamas government of Gaza had a police force that violently cracked down on dissent.

EXCLUSIVE: US Identifies and Blacklists Three More UNRWA ‘Teachers’ Who Participated in Oct 7 Terror Spree, Kidnapped and Held Israeli Hostages

The State Department formally added three more United Nations Relief and Works Agency school teachers to a first-of-its-kind blacklist after an ongoing U.S. investigation concluded that the teachers participated in Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree and held Israelis captive, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal. It's the latest embarrassment for the United Nations, which has delegated most of its Gaza relief work to UNRWA even though the agency is fully infiltrated by Hamas.

The Trump administration's September 24 order bars the three UNRWA staffers from working on all U.S. taxpayer-funded aid projects for the next decade, blocking them from circulating into other U.N. humanitarian groups.

The three UNRWA teachers—revealed as Rami Mohammad Sabbah, Mamdouh Husain Al Qaq, and Yusuf Zedan El Hawajri—doubled as Hamas footsoldiers who entered Israel on Oct. 7 to kill and capture Israeli citizens, according to a nonpublic investigative summary prepared by the United States Agency for International Development's independent inspector general and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.

The State Department has now added a total of four UNRWA staffers to a still-growing federal blacklist that will prevent them from joining any U.N. agencies involved in the Gaza reconstruction project. The USAID inspector general's office, a law enforcement entity separate from the largely defunct USAID, has referred more than 100 current and former UNRWA staffers for similar action, and U.S. officials familiar with the matter told the Free Beacon that further additions to the blacklist are likely forthcoming.

While UNRWA has fired a total of 70 Gaza-based employees, largely in response to the USAID inspector general's probe, its administrative action does not prevent them from moving to other U.N.-backed humanitarian groups that are working on American aid projects in Gaza. The State Department's blacklist—built as a result of the USAID inspector general's landmark findings—ensures that Hamas-linked UNRWA staff will not be eligible to work inside Gaza, benefit from American funding, and infiltrate the massive reconstruction project the United States is now standing up.

"The USAID inspector general's continued investigation, finding definitive links between UNRWA and Hamas, has opened the eyes of the international community as to why Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio deemed UNRWA a 'subsidiary of Hamas,'" a senior U.S. official briefed on the ongoing investigation told the Free Beacon. "This was quite evident last week at the U.N. General Assembly. The winds are finally shifting."

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Let's Talk About Privilege (Substack reprint)

This was originally posted on July 14 on my Substack as an article for paid subscribers only.

Julian Casablancas, the frontman of The Strokes, told a large YouTube audience recently that American Zionists “get the benefits of white privileged people, but talk like they are black people during slavery.” He then went to the Oxford Union and “clarified” that he only meant that Jews who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state “If the only thing you can bring yourself to say is ‘Netanyahu is the problem’ or, ‘Well, I believe Israel has the right to exist,’ you “are perhaps accidentally signaling to some that you…are supporting Jewish supremacy and white supremacy.”

Again, his audience is Oxford students. His father was the founder of Elite Model Management and his mother a former Miss Denmark; he was educated at the Lycée Français de New York and then at Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school known as “the school of kings,” before finishing at one of the most expensive private schools in Manhattan. And he looks at Jews who support Jewish self determination, who support a nation that was literally built from nothing, as Jewish supremacists with the ultimate privilege.

Let’s talk about privilege.

The problem isn’t that Casablancas has it. Nobody chooses the family or the school they’re born into, and there’s no sin in inheriting advantage. The complaint is what he did with the word once he had it: he took a term that used to imply responsibility and used it as a slur against people with less power than he does.

Privilege is morally neutral. So is strength, so is intelligence, so is a beautiful voice — the raw material a person is handed carries no moral weight on its own. How you use these advantages - and everyone has some advantages - is what is important. A strong man who protects the weak and a strong man who bullies them have identical strength; only the use separates them, and only the use is anyone’s business to judge. The same holds for privilege, which is why the word used to travel with an obligation attached — noblesse oblige, to whom much is given much is expected, the boy who inherits the family firm and is expected to run it honestly. Privilege named a debt.

Warren Buffett still uses the word the old way. He calls it “the ovarian lottery”: born male, white and American in 1930, to parents who talked about interesting things at dinner and could afford to send him to decent schools, wired by pure genetic accident with a mind that happens to be extraordinarily good at valuing businesses in a market economy that rewards exactly that skill. None of it, he’s been clear for decades, had anything to do with merit. “I was born at the right time and place,” he told his biographer. He pledged to give away more than ninety-nine percent of his fortune, on the theory that winning the lottery obligates you to the people who didn’t. Casablancas took the word that makes a man like Buffett give away tens of billions of dollars and repurposed it as ammunition against people he’s never met.

Notice, too, what Casablancas had to do to make the accusation work: he never evaluated an individual Zionist’s conduct. He evaluated a category, and assigned the whole category his own family’s privilege. A Jew who fled persecution with nothing, whose family was murdered, who was expelled from the Arab country his family lived in for centuries, whose life has been building rather than inheriting, gets stamped with the privilege of “Zionists” as a class. That is the same move — judging a person by the group rather than by what he actually did — that identity politics is guilty of. This is no coincidence.

Everyone with privilege has a choice about what to do with it: use it as a weapon against other people who may or may not have as much of it, or show appreciation for having been given it at all. Casablancas chose the weapon. Buffett chose the gratitude, and then he chose to act on it. They each had the choice and we can determine what kind of man each is by what they did with their privilege.

Politicians have mostly chosen privilege as a weapon too, which is stranger, since nearly all of them are beneficiaries of exactly the advantages they campaign against. Imagine one who told the truth instead: “I am extraordinarily grateful for what my life gave me, and I want to use it to help others. That’s why I’m here. I want to raise everyone up, not knock anyone down.” Almost none of them say this. Instead they climb onto the anti-privilege bandwagon and rewrite their biographies as a struggle comparable to growing up in extreme poverty, because admitting to advantage now reads as disqualifying rather than as an obligation to be honored. Nearly none of them has the life story they’re selling their audience, and that gap is what leaves them open to the charge of hypocrisy — Graham Platner positioning himself as a blue-collar oysterman while his father quietly paid for his house, his mother was his only paying customer, and his boyhood included a prep school that cost more than most Mainers make in a year.

Privilege comes with two obligations, not one. Using the position to help others is the first. Showing gratitude for having the position at all is the second, and it’s the one politicians skip, because gratitude doesn’t poll as well as grievance. That is the whole difference between the false morality that treats privilege as an insult and the real morality that treats it as a debt. Wouldn’t you rather vote for the one who’s honest about what he was given than the one who divides the world into haves and have-nots and then lies about which side he’s on?

None of this requires wealth to get right, which is what makes Casablancas’s failure so complete. A kid raised by a single mother in a walk-up apartment still had a mother who loved him, and a kid who watched a friend end up in prison, or in the ground, learned something from watching, whether or not he had a word for it. Gratitude is available at every income level, because the test was never how much a person inherited. The test is whether he noticed, and what he did with it.

Sir Moses Montefiore had privilege. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild had privilege. They used it to help support Jews fleeing persecution and giving them the means to create industries and live with dignity in the land of their forefathers. That is a hell of a lot better use of privilege than spouting antisemitic tropes to the Oxford Union.

What Casablancas does with his privilege is to stoke hate and call it insight. He is entitled to the school of kings. He is not entitled to lecture Oxford about the imagined privilege of a people who have spent the last century rebuilding from ash, in a language of moral responsibility he has never once applied to himself.

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09/27 Links: IDF kills terrorist filmed abducting Noa Argamani; Israel marks two years since Nasrallah eliminated; UK police arrest several men in explosives probe near US-used RAF base

From Ian:

Deborah Lipstadt: Jews targeted by antisemitism need more than statements of sympathy from politicians

Unlike so many people who, though deeply disturbed by this development, feel helpless to make their voices heard, I have had and continue to have that opportunity. Long before, during my time in office as the United States’ Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and since then, I have had numerous opportunities to sit with leading government officials worldwide to discuss responding to this scourge.

After impressing upon them the gravity of this situation, I have warned them not to think of this as solely an attack on Jews, Jewish institutions, and those associated with them. Antisemitism poses a multi-tiered that encompasses more than just Jews. In fact, they and the societies they lead are in the crosshairs. Those engaged in these attacks – rightists, leftists, and Islamist jihadists – are also aiming at democracy, rule of law, and international security and stability.

Some of the haters are home-grown and some are foreign. Some are ideological Jew-haters, e.g. Iran, Muslim Brotherhood, and Russia. They want to harm – including lethally – Jews, because they despise them.

But some are utilitarian antisemites, e.g., China, and Russia. (Yes, Russia falls into the ideological and the utilitarian category.) The utilitarians use antisemitism as a means of fostering rifts in society, creating dissension, and destabilizing the social compact.

The plethora of incidents of Jew-hatred rolls off the tongues of those who follow these developments, like some sort of incantation: Washington D.C.’s Capitol Jewish Museum (2 dead), Boulder, Colorado (1 dead), Golders Green (2 stabbed, 1 beaten badly), Manchester (2 dead), Ontario (2 seriously wounded), Pittsburgh (11 dead), San Diego (1 dead), and the list goes on.

But this is not what has left me sick and tired. I knew that this was the case when I entered this field of study and when I accepted the Presidential appointment as an Ambassador with the portfolio of addressing this hatred.

No, what has left me sick and tired are the pious sympathies and sincere regrets issued by government leaders, Prime Ministers (UK, Canada), Mayors (London, Manchester, New York), University presidents (worldwide) and so many others. Their aides must have a file on their computers which they can expeditiously open when something happens. Maybe it’s entitled: “Reactions to Attacks on Jews.” They just need cut and paste from previous declarations. Last year, in the wake of the Golders Green stabbing, this newspaper put those platitudes on its front page. I was exhausted just reading them. [“Our thoughts and prayers are with you”; “An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us”; “We stand with you.” And the one that I find most infuriating: “This hate has no place in our society.” Has no place? It’s already here… and it’s thriving.]

Do I think leaders should condemn these acts? Of course. They must speak out unequivocally and expeditiously and with no contextual hesitations. But those condemnations must be accompanied by action, including difficult actions, ones that might have political costs. Political leaders must be willing to name the source of these attacks, call them out specifically, and demand that the communities and political enclaves spit out the hate mongers who have taken refuge in their midst.

Leaders must do this even at the risk of losing votes. They must also recognise, as those in the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, among other places, have failed to do, that when their most energetic foreign policy actions are aimed at Israel, when they reward Hamas even when it has made no moves towards peace, the attackers are invigorated. Despite being warned, as Foreign Secretary Miliband was by Chief Rabbi Mirvis and other Jewish leaders, that this singling out of Israel motivates attackers to harass, attack, and murder Jews worldwide, they ignore the warnings.

Why, my interlocutors ask me, is this happening now? In part because the haters know that there rarely are consequences for attacking Jews. So please spare me your pious sympathies, sincere regrets, and worn-out protestations. I am not just sick and tired of them, I consider them – and you – to be hypocritical and self-serving.

I – together with so many others – have had enough.

Argentina shows that fighting antisemitism requires more than condemnation

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin American office has spent years working with institutions throughout the region to promote understanding of contemporary antisemitism and provide training on how to identify it. Since the IHRA definition was adopted in Argentina, it has been applied in dozens of cases. The López proceedings demonstrated what those efforts can mean in practice.

One of us, Ariel Gelblung, testified twice as an expert witness, first during the preliminary investigation and later before the Judicial Impeachment Court. His testimony addressed the meaning and implications of López’s statements, the antisemitic tropes they invoked, and the international standards used to identify hate speech and discrimination.

The result matters beyond one judge and beyond Argentina. Judges occupy a distinctive position in democratic societies. Citizens who enter a courtroom must be able to trust that their religion, ethnicity or identity will not determine how they are treated by the person sitting on the bench. When a judge publicly traffics in prejudices about a group of people, that trust is fundamentally compromised.

The lesson from Argentina is not that every hateful statement should be prohibited by law. Different democracies draw different legal boundaries around speech, and freedom of expression remains an essential democratic principle. But freedom of expression does not mean freedom from professional or institutional accountability, particularly for public officials entrusted with extraordinary authority over the rights and lives of others.

That distinction is especially important today. Democratic societies frequently respond to outbreaks of antisemitism, racism and other forms of hatred with statements of concern. Those statements have value, but they cannot substitute for infrastructure. Fighting discrimination requires clear standards, education, training and institutions willing to enforce the principles they have adopted.

Simon Wiesenthal understood that confronting hatred cannot be limited to documenting the past. The lessons of history matter most when they equip societies to recognize warning signs in the present and act before prejudice becomes normalized in their institutions. Argentina’s experience shows that democratic institutions are not powerless in the face of antisemitism.

Removing one judge will not defeat antisemitism. But this case demonstrates something increasingly important at a time when hatred can spread quickly and become dangerously normalized: Democratic institutions can draw a line. And when they do, it matters.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Tells the UN: Palestinian Reforms Are Complete. The Evidence Says Otherwise

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas presented an extraordinarily positive picture of the reforms he claims his government has carried out. According to Abbas, the Palestinian Authority has fulfilled the commitments it made to the international community.

Last year alone, the United States determined that these payments ["Pay-for-Slay" rewards to the families of terrorists and "martyrs"] had amounted to $156 million — including to 5,000 families in Lebanon — much of which enabled, fungibly, from the European Union.

The US State Department, however, had reached a very different conclusion from that of Abbas. In a September 16, 2026 statement, the State Department said that the Palestinian Authority was "continuing to pay stipends to terrorists and to glorify acts of terrorism and terrorists in public pronouncements and school textbooks." The Palestinian Authority, the State Department added, had once again failed to live up to its commitments to the United States, including its commitment concerning terrorism and reform.

Last April, the State Department had already been even more explicit in a report to Congress. The report noted that despite changing the mechanism and ostensibly replacing the old system of paying prisoners with welfare system supposedly based on needs, "the Palestinian Authority continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through new mechanisms and under a different name." The report concluded that changing the mechanism did not amount to ending the payments.

In November of 2025, the European Union Commission also acknowledged its assessment that payments and benefits to terrorists and their families were continuing.

If accountability and rule of law have been strengthened to the degree Abbas claims, why are Palestinian human-rights organizations still documenting such cases?

The contradiction becomes even more disturbing when it comes to education.

Abbas told the UN that the Palestinian Authority has continued reforming its education system in accordance with international standards and in cooperation with UNESCO.

The findings of IMPACT-se's comprehensive review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority curriculum tell a very different story. The organization examined 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides and found that the curriculum remained..."substantively unchanged from prior editions and documented recurring patterns across subjects: promotion of jihad and martyrdom, glorification of terrorism, incitement of antisemitism, rejection of peacemaking and the two-state solution, and erasure of Israel from maps."

IMPACT-se also found textbooks and teacher guides that continue to present armed struggle and violent figures in a positive light.

If the international community is serious about bringing democracy and accountability to the Palestinians, it should demand verifiable reforms rather than accept declarations of success.

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09/25 Links Pt2: What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel; The insane case of the blacked-up Palestine activist; Ro Khanna calls on Israel to release Marwan Barghouti

From Ian:

What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel

At the beginning of the month I was invited to see the play Wiesenthal by Tom Dugan at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London – a stone’s throw, if that is an appropriate phrase, from Cable Street – but I found myself unable to go. But it set me off thinking about the first time I heard the name of the legendary Nazi-hunter: and that would have been in the pages of Frederick Forsyth’s second novel, The Odessa File, and I would have been about 12. (Everyone was reading it, and its predecessor, The Day of the Jackal.)

Because it was so very long ago when I was 12, I had forgotten all but the barest bones of the plot, which involves a secret group dedicated to getting ex-SS officers out of Germany, and a concentration camp commander known as “the butcher of Riga”. I thought I’d re-read it, just for the heck of it.

Revisiting the book for the first time in half a century gave me more of a jolt than I expected. It starts like this: a Hamburg journalist comes across the diary of a 56-year-old Jew, who looks 76, and has (and only as I type these words do I realise the savage irony) gassed himself in his flat on (coincidentally) the night of JF Kennedy’s assassination. The journalist finds his diary of his times in a concentration camp in Latvia, which also contains the reason for his suicide: he was a Kapo, and was forced by the Commandant to kill his wife. He can’t live with this any longer. He also feels he can’t go to Israel: he feels too morally stained. I remember being moved, almost as physically as you can be by a punch to the stomach, the closing words of the diary: “But if ever these lines should be read in the land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say khaddish for me?” Because I am not Jewish, I didn’t have the faintest idea what “khaddish” meant, but I got the gist, and somehow these words kind of rammed home the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. When I re-read those words I felt that punch to the stomach again.

Forsyth was more of a storyteller than a writer, but he put in as many factual elements as he could to make the story plausible. One such factual element was Wiesenthal, who appears as a character: for which, presumably, he had given permission. (The Riga camp commander, whose name I will not utter, was also a real person.) The striking thing about the novel, though, was that Forsyth, who in his later years portrayed himself as a growling mastiff of the establishment Right, was clearly motivated by a deep hatred of Nazism, and genuine anguish at what happened to the Jewish people as a result of it. There was a moral clarity to the book; and now I come to think of it, it’s partly because of this early exposure to the evil of the Holocaust that I write for this paper today.

Two other things struck me: Forsyth makes it very clear that opposition to the state of Israel was entirely motivated by hatred of Jews, and not a humanitarian desire to found a Palestinian state. In the book, there’s much about a plot based on historical events hatched by Egypt to get ex-Nazi rocket scientists to develop a proper guidance system for ballistic missiles, loaded with either strontium-90 or plague bacilli, to kill everyone in Israel. The establishment of a Palestinian state isn’t mentioned, because that wasn’t even a notion then.

David Collier: When the Facts Don’t Fit: BBC News Invents a Motive

The Pen Behind the Sword
The journalist Brandon Drenon is not new to me. I first wrote about his BBC reporting more than two years ago, raising concerns about the way he framed Israel-related stories. Since then, the media watchdog CAMERA has also challenged his reporting on several occasions. In April 2024, Drenon falsely told BBC readers that the International Court of Justice had found the accusation of genocide against Israel “plausible.” It had not. Following a complaint, the BBC amended the article.

But there is a broader pattern worth noting. Drenon has repeatedly produced sympathetic human-interest reporting centred on Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activism. Just a few examples:
October 2023: ’I wake up and check if my family in Gaza is still alive,’ says Palestinian American
November 2023: Palestinian-Americans struggling with “survivors’ guilt”
May 2024: US campus protests: ‘Student arrests will be my final college memory’
April 2025: Anxiety at US colleges as foreign students are detained and visas revoked
October 2025: US campus activists relieved – and anxious – after Gaza ceasefire deal

I looked for the other side. I could find no comparable standalone feature from him centred on Jewish or Israeli-American experiences of October 7, the hostage crisis or the subsequent surge in antisemitism.

Nothing.

Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. When I last reported on Drenon I noted he came from a social justice background, and had married a Syrian-Palestinian from a family of anti-Israel activists.

And now we have his coverage of the shooting in Vermont.

Once again, the problem is not simply what Drenon reports, but the story he invents beyond the facts. His article introduces the Gaza war, Islamophobia, Arabic and keffiyehs in quick succession – leading readers to assume a motive that the evidence never established.

We Should Not Have to Pay for This
The BBC’s motive seems considerably clearer than Jason Eaton’s. We know Eaton shot three young men on a dark street in a peaceful city. Nearly three years later, we still do not know why.

What we can see clearly is what the BBC has done with that uncertainty.

This was a local shooting in which nobody was killed. Would BBC News have reported the conviction of an American who shot and wounded three strangers in Vermont nearly three years earlier if the victims had not been Palestinian?

But having chosen to report it, the BBC then supplied the missing narrative itself: Gaza, Islamophobia, Arabic and keffiyehs – all pointing the reader towards an anti-Palestinian motive that was never established.

But the bottom line is this. I do not actually care if BBC News wants to employ activist journalists who produce one-sided, skewed and misleading coverage.

There are plenty of dreadful media outlets in the world. One more will make little difference.

But here is the crunch: if the BBC has abandoned impartial journalism for student-level activism, then there is no justification for forcing the British public to pay for it.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Campaign to Islamize Canada

At least three ideologically aligned organizations—CMPAC, CJPME, and GTP—registered as third parties with Elections Canada. In the Canadian context, “third parties” are entities other than political parties or candidates that engage in political advertising. Their registration enabled coordinated messaging campaigns centered on specific policy demands, including calls for a Gaza ceasefire, the institutionalization of anti-Islamophobia measures, and the repeal of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21. A pre-election survey conducted by CMPAC found that 75% of Canadian Muslim respondents identified Palestine as the most important issue influencing their vote. A post-election poll conducted by Mainstreet Research on behalf of TCMV identified Palestine as the dominant issue for respondents at 45%. These findings reflect the sustained salience of transnational politics on domestic electoral behavior within the Muslim community.

Though these groups claimed to be merely guiding and empowering the Muslim community to vote on values and principles rather than partisan lines, the explicit promotion of their preferred parties and candidates suggests they essentially canvassed Muslims to vote for those who would support their radical agenda. For example, while CMPAC endorsed 47 Liberal, New Democratic Party, and Green candidates via its MuslimsVote.ca platform, a joint endorsement statement issued by CMPAC in tandem with four other Muslim advocacy organizations—Arab-Canadian Vote, Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network, HIKMA, and the National Muslim Action Fund—unanimously backed 41 candidates.

The statement encouraged Muslims to not only exercise their franchise in favor of these candidates but also to support and volunteer with them. A “Joint Statement of Muslim Organizations on Federal Election 2025” was drafted and approved by a committee including CMPAC, TCMV, and the NCCM. Prominent Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Islamic Circle of North America and the Islamic Society of North America were among its signatories.

Similarly, CJPME’s report card-styled Federal Election Guide 2025 gave the NDP and the Green Party the joint-highest grades for their strong support on issues concerning Palestine and Islamophobia, while the Conservative Party received a failing grade. A popular campaign called Vote Palestine—backed by CJPME, CMPAC, and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an entity with ties to the U.S.-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—secured the full endorsement of 344 candidates from four federal parties: the NDP, the Green Party, the Liberal Party, and the Bloc Québécois.

Based on this evidence, the 2025 federal election cycle reveals a broader transition from passive demographic influence to active, organized political intervention. Through a combination of third-party campaigning, coordinated voter mobilization, and targeted advocacy, Brotherhood-aligned networks and their allies demonstrated a capacity to influence electoral dynamics, particularly in tightly contested ridings, in ways that are likely to prove decisive in future elections.

Islamophobia featured among the stated priorities of the 2025 joint electoral statement issued by CMPAC, NCCM, the National Muslim Action Fund, The Canadian Muslim Vote, and over 100 signatory organizations, including the Muslim Association of Canada and 23 of its centers, ISNA Canada, and ICNA Canada. The statement urged voters to question candidates on Gaza, human rights, Islamophobia, and economic justice, and identified Quebec’s Bill 21 as evidence of rising Islamophobia.

The sustained advocacy of these entities has yielded tangible policy responses. In January 2023, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Elghawaby as Canada’s first special representative on combating Islamophobia, following relentless pressure from the NCCM. However, this initiative was soon deemed insufficient by the NCCM, which in the leadup to the 2025 federal election publicly pressed political parties to advance a comprehensive national strategy on Islamophobia as a prerequisite for securing support from Muslim voters.

Legal and quasi-legal constructs further shape the operational environment. Frameworks such as Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, in the specific institutional contexts examined, affect administrative behavior, influence the interpretation of conduct, and alter the terms on which scrutiny and accountability are applied. Their significance lies not in abstract definition but in their practical interaction with broader narrative and organizational dynamics. Taken together, these elements indicate a structural environment characterized by reinforcing domains rather than by a single causal factor. The cumulative effect is the normalization of specific narratives, practices, partnerships, and associations within institutional settings, alongside uneven scrutiny and variable response.

The implications are systemic. Effective responses require a framework capable of addressing the interdependence of narrative, institutional, financial, regulatory, and legal domains with consistency. Without that, individual interventions are unlikely to alter the underlying conditions identified across universities, civil society, and public life.

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09/25 Links Pt1: Netanyahu’s UN speech: ‘J’accuse’ against the West; Sukkot and the United Nations: Two competing visions of Israel’s history; Ontario Gunman shouted ‘you’re going to die for the Jews’

From Ian:

Netanyahu’s UN speech: ‘J’accuse’ against the West

Netanyahu confronted the fundamental distortion of Israel’s long war of self-defense, a struggle that has continued for decades but has been recast as colonialism. An army that has saved Israel from annihilation is instead criminalized for doing so.

He laid out, in a matter of minutes, the pillars of the case Israel has struggled to make to the world: the manipulation of the media; the role of Qatar, Hamas’s closest patron, through Al Jazeera and its enormous financial influence in American and European institutions; Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields; and Israel’s efforts to warn civilians and move them out of danger.

He spoke of the food and vaccinations provided in Gaza—facts that contradict the accusation that Israel is committing genocide.

It was a j’accuse directed at the world.

But it was also a celebration of Jewish resilience: 3,000 years of attachment to the same land and the same faith, a civilization that gave the world monotheism and the sanctification of life.

Netanyahu spoke of the heroism of Israeli soldiers and their understanding of the magnitude of the task before them. He cited Neryiah Leiter, the son of Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter, and his words of complete dedication to serving his country.

They echoed the spirit of Netanyahu’s own brother, Yoni, who was killed leading the mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976.

We will prevail because we have no choice.

Netanyahu finally turned to Iran. He promised that the murderous regime that persecutes and kills its own people will ultimately disappear, even as the West has too often failed to raise its voice forcefully against it.

Netanyahu’s speech was not simply a defense of Israel. It was an indictment of a world that has turned reality upside down, treating those defending themselves as aggressors and too often excusing those who openly seek their destruction.

It was his j’accuse.

And his warning was directed far beyond Israel: The war Israel is fighting against terrorism, jihadism and totalitarianism will not end at Israel’s borders. A common thread unites all forms of totalitarianism.

Recognizing that threat should likewise unite the world’s democracies in defending freedom.

Jake Wallis Simons: The West joins the UN’s anti-Israel hate fest

There is something almost reassuring about the United Nations General Assembly. However much the world changes, however many wars rage and dictatorships rise and fall, you can be sure that sooner or later, everybody will start hating on Israel.

At this year’s gathering in New York, the hatred came sooner rather than later. What was different, however, was the identity of some of the people doing the hating. During the Cold War, the most lurid denunciations of the Jewish state came from Arab autocrats, Soviet satellites and assorted Third World dictatorships. Western democracies might have criticised Israeli governments – sometimes severely – but they generally retained some sense of proportion.

No longer. This week, the rhetoric of Israeli wickedness was found firmly in the Western mainstream. Take António Guterres. In his final address to the General Assembly as UN Secretary-General, he rightly described the Hamas atrocities of October 7 as “abhorrent”.

But then came the qualification. “What followed,” he said, “was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”

Really? As Jon Snow famously remarked in Game of Thrones: “What did father use to say? everything before the word ‘but’ is horse s**t”.

Let’s look at the facts. Guterres has occupied the post since January 2017. His tenure therefore encompasses the Tigray war in Ethiopia, one of the most appalling and under-reported catastrophes of our age, but one of which the UN should really be aware. Estimates of its death toll vary enormously, but as many as 600,000 people are thought to have died through violence, starvation and lack of medical care.

His tenure also encompasses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths since February 2022 – while stressing that the true figure is considerably higher – alongside astronomical military casualties. And I don’t even need to mention Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar. These wars may not have commanded the headlines, but they should certainly have commanded the attention of the UN. Guess not.

Gaza is unquestionably a human catastrophe, entirely of Hamas’ making. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been reported killed since October 7, including a significant number of combatants. But the suggestion that nothing in the past decade compares with Gaza is simply malicious nonsense, designed – yet again – to demonise Israel.

Then there was Emmanuel Macron. The French president became so carried away while berating Israel that he found himself claiming that “Hamas has never operated in the West Bank.” I’m not joking; he actually said it. Incredible, no?

As any world leader – especially one who is so vocal about “Palestine” – should understand, Hamas has operated there for decades. Its cells have been repeatedly uncovered; the Palestinian Authority arrests Hamas members. Even Le Monde, hardly a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu, described Macron’s assertion as a “factual mistake” and said the position was “indefensible”.

Indeed, a French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father-of-six, was shot dead on the West Bank just two days before Macron’s speech, by a Hamas gunman.

There was something revealing about Macron’s error. Israel’s critics increasingly appear so certain of the moral architecture of this conflict – powerful Israel, powerless Palestinians, Israel guilty and the Palestinians victims – that facts simply dissolve.

Not so with Netanyahu. Like him or loathe him, and there are plenty of reasons for both, his address on Thursday contained a string of home truths that the diplomatic world needed to hear.

Sukkot and the United Nations: Two competing visions of Israel’s history

The general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations illustrates how the international system is no longer a mouthpiece for objective justice, but rather a stage on which the spirit of the age determines what will be considered “truth.”

Concepts such as “human rights” and “self-defense,” or those that have become sacred to the Jewish people such as the “Holocaust” and “concentration camps,” are emptied of their original meaning and moral weight and mobilized as political weapons, directed precisely against the people who set out to defend themselves against genocide and who rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, while authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations benefit from systematic disregard.

The phenomenon displayed at the UNGA represents the greatest danger facing modern society: a society that has lost the ability to distinguish between victim and aggressor is one that has lost its moral conscience, its values, and consequently its identity.

This is precisely the picture that emerges from an institution in which an automatic majority can legitimize falsehood and grant legitimacy to the attempt to erase the Jewish people’s right to live in their land as a sovereign and free people.

Sukkot: Memory as the foundation of national existence
Against the lies voiced from the UN podium stands the holiday of Sukkot, offering a far deeper conceptual alternative: historical memory as a condition for survival.

The Torah commands: “You shall dwell in booths for seven days ... so that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:42-43).

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain, wrote extensively about the uniqueness of Judaism as a civilization that placed memory, and not merely dry history, at the center of its national life.

Unlike great empires that were erased from the pages of time, the Jewish people survived for thousands of years precisely because of their ability to carry their story and their books with them, to know where they came from, and not to relinquish their identity even under conditions of exile and rupture.

Dwelling in a fragile and temporary sukkah is not merely an agricultural or seasonal ritual. It is a deliberate act of education in national memory.

It reminds us, year after year, that our security does not rest solely on concrete buildings, nor on the approval of international institutions that present themselves as the conscience of the world, but on deep roots and faith in the justice of our path.

Political fashions at the UN change from generation to generation, but the historical truth of the Jewish people in their land is as firm as a rock.

The national memory that we revive every Sukkot inoculates us against attempts to rewrite history, whether through denial of the Jewish connection to the land or through obscuring the circumstances of the war forced upon us by the murderers of October 7.

At the Israel Defense and Security Forum, we have placed at the heart of our mission the understanding that standing firm in the face of international pressure requires not only diplomatic and military tools, but first and foremost a strong cultural and spiritual foundation.

The holiday of Sukkot provides precisely this perspective: one that looks beyond the background noise of global diplomacy and recognizes that the Jewish people’s right to their land is rooted in the eternity of Israel, which does not lie or deceive.

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