10/11 Links: Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7; The lone wolf illusion: Alone in action, not in ideology; 2,000-year-old Hasmonean aqueduct section uncovered in Jerusalem

From Ian:

Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7

The third anniversary of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel was filled with agonizing and loving remembrances of the many civilians slain by Hamas in their bedrooms and the soldiers killed combating the jihadist Palestinian stormtroopers ever since. But through it all, the overwhelming sentiment I heard was patriotism, resilience, and defiance, not defeat.

Much of the media coverage described Israel as traumatized by the massacre and exhausted by three years of war. This infuriates me because it is an erroneous, even nefarious, reading of the Israeli mood. It is a wicked and insulting take on Israel's national psyche. The reality is that Israelis are neither crushed nor dispirited. Instead, they are appropriately angry and motivated to win against all enemies.

All Israelis across the political spectrum are proud of the brave reservists who threw themselves into battle against Hamas, and the selfless volunteers who mobilized to strengthen their families, tend to the wounded, orphaned, and dispossessed, till the fields, and manage the home front. No one in this noble cohort is drained, defeated, or paralyzed by trauma.

On the global front, Israelis are furious at the hostility and hypocrisy of the Western world, which has largely turned its back on Israel. Classic antisemitic stereotypes have saturated Western media. The deranged demonization of Jews has once again been renamed as morality itself.

Israelis are angry at the politically malign accounts of their just, successful wars against Iran and its Hamas and Hizbullah proxy armies; at the raw antisemitism becoming mainstream discourse; and at the corrosive ideologies such as radical Islam that seek to undermine Western societies while destroying Israel. Israelis will resist all this. Israel intends to hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them or hemmed in by fickle allies.

One in five Israelis ‘still struggling to function’ since Oct. 7 – new study

One in five Israelis continues to report severe impairment in daily functioning due to mental health since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, according to a study released Sunday, with women particularly affected.

The study was conducted by the National Mental Health Barometer, an ongoing project sponsored by Clalit Health Services’ Research Institute, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.

The findings, based on a nationally representative sample of Israel’s population and updated through May 2026, show that while most of the population is recovering, a significant number of people continue to experience psychological distress.

Women reported higher levels of mental health-related functional impairment than men, three years after Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killed 1,200 people, and kidnapped 251 people into Gaza.

In the three years since, Israel has also been in a constant state of war, with combat in Gaza and Lebanon seeing thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes near the borders. There have also been two rounds of fighting with Iran,, which targeted most of the country with missiles.

“The findings show that alongside a steady increase in the proportion of people receiving mental health treatment, psychological distress is becoming chronic for a significant part of the population and is accompanied by deep functional impairment,” Prof. Ran Balicer, deputy director general and head of the innovation division at Clalit Health Services, said in a statement.

Unprecedented level of exposure
The study found an extraordinary level of exposure to significant trauma according to international standards.

Approximately 15% of all respondents described themselves as being at the highest level of personal exposure, meaning they were personally present at the events of October 7, 2023, or closely knew someone who was injured or killed during the subsequent fighting.

The researchers describe this as a dramatic and unprecedented level of exposure compared with other national trauma events worldwide. In comparison, following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, approximately 4% of the population experienced direct exposure.

“The data once again demonstrate just how unprecedented October 7 was globally in terms of the scale of the population’s exposure to trauma, both directly and indirectly through exposure to disturbing videos and media content,” Balicer said. “This helps explain the findings regarding the intensity of the national trauma and its lasting effects.”

How Israel Views Gaza, One Year after the Ceasefire

The Trump plan for Gaza, launched last year, explicitly laid out Israel's goals: releasing all the hostages (which was implemented), disarming Hamas, removing it from power, and ensuring that Gaza could no longer be used as a platform for threatening Israel.

The plan offered a mostly political path to realizing these elusive goals, without enforcement on the ground. Yet Israel does not believe this approach will work with a violent Islamist actor like Hamas. It has therefore kept constant physical pressure on Hamas, conditioning any reconstruction on the group's disarmament.

Israel has continuously targeted senior terrorists and military infrastructure in the area under Hamas control, with quiet American consent, disrupting Hamas efforts to reassert governance and recover some of its military capabilities.

For Israel, disarming Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza is the most important task. Israel insists that demilitarization be inclusive, comprehensive, verifiable, and permanent. Israel insists that until a full, verifiable disarmament process is completed, the IDF will conduct no further redeployments.

Despite the current environment of skepticism, Hamas has been significantly weakened militarily, financially, and politically. According to recent polls, Palestinian public support for the group and the "armed struggle" it represents has declined significantly.

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If Jews are really Khazars, why do Islamic prophecies about Jews apply to them?

Many Palestinians insist that today's Jews, especially Ashkenazim, are not descended from the biblical Israelites at all. They are supposedly Khazars, descendants of medieval converts to Judaism with no ancestral connection to the Land of Israel. This theory, which is contradicted by genetic evidence, is used to deny Jewish historical rights to Israel.

Yet Islamists routinely invoke Quranic descriptions of the Children of Israel and Islamic prophecies about Jews to condemn modern Israelis. 

If today's Jews are not really descended from the ancient Israelites, why should any of those religious texts apply to them?

I finally found a writer who actually addresses this contradiction. Or, more precisely, he handwaves his way around it. 

Dr. Omar Al-Jayousi is a member of the Palestine Scholars Association. He is also a regular contributor to Al Jazeera. But his latest article was published in Al Sabeel, a Jordanian site associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. 

In that article, after confidently asserting that modern Jews are descended from Khazars and Europeans rather than the biblical Israelites, al-Jayousi asks how Islamic prophecies about future confrontations can apply to them.

His answer is that the conflict isn't about genes or ancestry but ideology and behavior. Modern Zionists, he argues, have adopted the same mentality, superiority complex and historical claims as the ancient Israelites condemned in Islamic scripture.

He writes:

"The present group is the true ideological and philosophical continuation of everything against which religion warned."

In other words, modern Jews don't have to be descended from the ancient Israelites. They merely have to act like them.

A little clever, but theological sleight of hand.

Consider the notorious hadith in Sahih Muslim 2922, which predicts that Muslims will fight Jews in the end times, with rocks and trees calling out that Jews are hiding behind them and should be killed. It explicitly says Jews, not Zionists, colonialists or people who supposedly behave like ancient Israelites. Is a Muslim supposed to decide who fulfills the prophecy based on political ideology? Will the rocks and trees make that decision?  Nothing in the text suggests that.

The Quran is even more explicit about the identity of the Children of Israel. Quran 2:47 addresses them as recipients of God's favors. Quran 2:49 recalls their deliverance from Pharaoh, while Quran 2:61 recounts their subsequent disobedience. These verses concern a specific historical people, identified through their ancestry and shared history. They don't describe an ideology that unrelated people can inherit by behaving badly.

Al-Jayousi writes that when Islamic texts describe end-times confrontations, they are not concerned with DNA but with the ideology and behavior of the enemy. That enemy, he says, is defined by aggression, occupation and desecration of holy sites. The modern Zionists are therefore the ideological successors of the ancient Israelites, even if they are supposedly unrelated by blood.

But what exactly does this mean for the notorious hadith about rocks and trees? That prophecy doesn't describe a war against colonialism or occupation. It describes Muslims killing Jews, with rocks and trees revealing where Jews are hiding so they can be killed. There is no qualification about whether those Jews are Zionists, soldiers, settlers or innocent civilians. The language is explicitly about killing Jews as Jews.

If al-Jayousi insists that the prophecy is really about ideology rather than Jewish identity, does that mean the predicted killing also applies to Christian Zionists? He devotes an entire section to Christian Zionism, portraying it as the driving force behind Western support for Israel. What about American politicians who support Israel, or anyone else who endorses the supposedly colonialist project? Are they also the Jews whom the rocks and trees will identify? If not, why not?

He never answers these questions. Instead, he transforms a genocidal prophecy describing the mass killing of Jewish men, women and children into a struggle for human rights. He invokes international law, justice, liberation and the protection of holy sites, as though these concepts explain the hadith's indiscriminate language. But they don't. Human rights law protects individuals regardless of their religion or ideology. It doesn't authorize killing people because they belong to a group supposedly destined for defeat.

Al-Jayousi wants the religious authority of an ancient prophecy, the political appeal of anti-colonialism and the moral legitimacy of human rights, all at once. Yet he never explains how a prophecy about killing Jews becomes a universal struggle for justice.

And after declaring that ancestry is irrelevant, he concludes by celebrating how the alleged Khazar origins of modern Jews undermine their historical claims. Genealogy is decisive when denying Jewish rights, irrelevant when assigning Jewish guilt, and ideology can substitute for ancestry whenever the argument requires it.

The problem isn't merely that his definitions keep changing. It is that he uses those shifting definitions to make an explicitly genocidal prophecy to murder all Jews sound like a modern human-rights campaign.

Apparently, the only thing that must remain consistent is the hate.

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10/10 Links: Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity; The Nobel Peace Prize is now totally discredited; Why Dolly Parton sang a song about Daniel Pearl

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism plan cannot survive his October 7 statement

Mamadani right that the suffering did not begin on October 7, but the history undercuts his antisemitic fable. Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, and Hebron in 1929, where in a single morning they slaughtered 67 Jews after the circle around Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the era’s dominant Palestinian Arab leader, spread the lie that Jews were plotting against al-Aqsa. There was no Jewish state then, and no “occupation” to blame.

Husseini’s leadership rejected a Palestinian Arab state in 1937, 1939, and 1947. He spent World War II in Berlin as Adolf Hitler’s honored guest, urging Arabs over Nazi radio to kill Jews wherever they found them. His successors were offered a Palestinian Arab state in 2000, 2001, and 2008 and refused each time. In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and civilian out of Gaza; Hamas answered with terror, rockets, a violent takeover and, eventually, October 7. Hamas’s charter declares the land from the river to the sea an Islamic trust no one may surrender and quotes a hadith about Muslims killing Jews. Ninety-four years after Hebron, Hamas named its invasion and massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood.” From the mufti to Hamas, the throughline is a violent, fascist Islamist rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land.

None of this is hidden. The mayor left it out on purpose.

The genocide-libel itself collapses against the record. Genocidal regimes do not warn civilians to evacuate, pause fighting to vaccinate children against polio, or truck food to the people they are supposedly exterminating. In every genocide on record, the killers controlled when the killing stopped. In Gaza, Hamas could have ended the war any day by freeing the hostages and surrendering. Spreading that libel as mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel is reckless at best.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes rise in New York
The results are measurable. NYPD data show anti-Jewish hate crimes up about 8% in the first eight months of his tenure, with Jews targeted in more than half of all confirmed hate crimes. When the plan was announced, Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, warned that antisemitism would keep rising until the mayor recognized his own anti-Israel language as its main driver. Nine days later, the mayor delivered that same language to an audience of millions.

Most Jewish New Yorkers have no use for grant programs from a mayor who marks one of the worst days in Jewish history by calling the Jewish state a “genocidal apartheid regime funded by their taxes.” They have seen where that rhetoric leads: to their campuses, their synagogues, their streets.

Mamdani’s plan was written to show he takes antisemitism seriously. His October 7 statement showed it was written to give him cover for the hatred he keeps feeding.

Bill Maher mocks Mamdani for being ‘tone deaf’ criticizing Israel in Oct. 7 tribute

Mamdani’s reaction to the anniversary did not go over well with Maher, who harshly criticized the mayor.

“Mayor Mamdani, not all that sympathetic to this stuff, but he did make some nice remarks about it,” Maher said, referring to Mamdani’s statement.

“But then he pivoted right to, ‘but Israel made them do it,’” Maher said, offering his interpretation of the mayor’s remarks.

The comedian also mocked Mamdani’s past career as a rapper, during which he performed under the stage names “Young Cardamom” and “Mr. Cardamom.”

“You know, he used to be a rapper. His rap name was ‘Tone Deaf,’” Maher quipped.

Mamdani also faced criticism earlier this week after dining Wednesday at Ayat Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant.

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10/09 Links Pt2: An Abusable Past; Mamdani spit on the graves of October 7 victims; Rabbi Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History

From Ian:

Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past

Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.

One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.

Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.

The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.

In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.

The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.

In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”

But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.

Better the Devil You Can See By Abe Greenwald

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Which is why I like when my enemies come out of hiding and make themselves known. So two days ago, I found myself strangely satisfied by Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 denunciation of Israeli “genocide,” his statement of solidarity with its victims, and his dinner at an obsessively anti-Semitic Palestinian restaurant in New York.

Critics of Mamdani’s daylong stunt suggested that he “should have read the room,” released a statement of sympathy for victims of Hamas’s massacre, and just let the Jews grieve for one day. Or if he couldn’t do that, they offered, he should just have said nothing.

Why? Why despair that an anti-Semite chose not to hide his hatred? So we can go on playing pretend with evil people, helping them accrue more and more legitimacy until they can do large-scale harm?

Does every statement of anti-Jewish incitement put Jews at risk? Yes. But if our weapon of choice is urging our enemies not to say harmful things about us, the risk will become far worse.

Had Mamdani done what media critics suggested, he alone would have benefited from the con. Instead, his act of blatant anti-Semitism woke up a bunch of fence-sitting liberals (Jews and non-Jews alike) and sent them into our camp. I’ve spoken to some such people since, and it was the first time I heard “You were right” from any of them on any topic in ages.

I know exactly how those exchanges would have gone had Mamdani instead kept up the good-guy act. Liberal friends and family would have sent me screenshots of his pacifying mush along with digs about my unhinged position on him. I’d weigh the benefits of responding obnoxiously or trying to disarm with civility, knowing that either choice would only leave them in their ignorance. But Mamdani’s choice snapped them out of it for me. And while it’s tempting to punish such former Mamdani supporters for their blindness up till now, the truth is that we need them. So, I say, welcome to the land of the real and the side of the right.

Jonathan Tobin: A satire about Anne Frank explains woke antisemitism

A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.

What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.

Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.

Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.

Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.

Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.

Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.

Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.

Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.

This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.

Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.

The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”

While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.

And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.

A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.

“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.

Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.

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10/09 Links Pt1: Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?; October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight; The Nobel Committee Just Made a Mockery of Its Peace Prize, and President Trump Called It Out

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?

This morning the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. This appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.

As Jews around the world react with despair, I am reminded of an excellent article by Ahad Ha’am, written in 1892 and titled “Half Solace.” Observing the renewal of the ancient blood libel in his own time, the great cultural Zionist notes that “philosophers know that there is no lie and no evil that cannot obtain ‘general agreement’ if only the conditions of existence are suitable to it.” Unfortunately, however, “only philosophers know this, and in the eyes of the masses, even now there is no greater authority than ‘consensus.’”

It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. In Russia, for example, in the so-called Velizh affair of 1823, 43 Jews were arrested and interrogated over a period of 12 years on charges of killing a 3-year-old Russian boy. Many spent almost a decade in prison, and some died there. Of course, the accusation was a lie, and those who survived were eventually released without guilt. But what is particularly interesting about this episode is that even the Tsar Nicholas I, who personally signed their release, remarked in a postscript to his signature that he was not fully convinced these men were innocent, because there were so many similar Jewish crimes throughout history. How could all of these reports be wrong, he asked?

Or take another example, from a very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend. He told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be?

Ahad Ha’am concludes his essay with the same question. Is it really possible, he asks, that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right? “It is possible,” he answers, “and the blood libel proves it.” It is therefore precisely here, he says, that Jews can find a useful lesson and some consolation. We can free ourselves from the power of false prejudices and find strength in the conviction of our own moral cause.

As I write, Israelis and Jews around the world are marking the genocidal campaign waged against us on Oct. 7, 2023, and mourning the thousands of innocent lives taken that day. A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do that day.

Yet at this very moment, the masses are busy accusing us of genocide against our enemies. On university campuses and in the streets of capital cities, protesters used our day of somber remembrance to amplify the growing consensus that we are the ones committing unspeakable atrocities.

I’ve seen Naza and it’s a nasty piece of propaganda

The horrors of October 7, 2023, are almost impossible to comprehend. Behind the staggering scale of the Hamas massacres are individual stories of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. Stories that must not be forgotten.

Baby Kfir, for example. Or his brother Ariel. Or their mother, Shiri. The two red-haired Israeli boys were just nine months and four years old when terrorists from the Palestinian Hamas abducted them to Gaza. Videos of their kidnapping show the shock and boundless despair in their mother’s eyes as the Islamists, shouting “Allahu Akbar”, violently forced the young family onto a pickup truck and took them to Gaza.

Months later, news spread around the world that the terrorists had murdered the two brothers and their mother with their bare hands. In an act of breathtaking cynicism, Hamas handed over the Israelis’ bodies to the Red Cross. The event was staged as a family celebration, complete with music and cheering. On the boys’ coffins were images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a vampire drinking the blood of the Bibas family. Instead of returning the body of the murdered hostage Shiri Bibas, Hamas handed over the remains of a Palestinian woman.

It is difficult to imagine anything more despicable.

Yarden, the father of Kfir and Ariel and Shiri’s husband, survived 484 days in Hamas captivity. He will never see his children or his wife again. Nothing will ever be right again for Yarden. Nothing. Ever.

Or Vivian Silver. The Israeli peace activist lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, right on the border with Gaza. Throughout her life, the 74-year-old campaigned for the Palestinians in Gaza and for a two-state solution. Every week, she drove to the border to collect children suffering from cancer and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed her home, opened fire and then threw several hand grenades into the safe room where Vivian Silver had sought refuge. It took weeks to identify her remains. Her teeth were found beneath a pile of ashes.

Or Shani Louk, the radiantly beautiful 22-year-old German-Israeli woman who had gone to the Nova festival to dance and celebrate, only to be beaten, abused and shot by Palestinian terrorists, like so many other Israeli women. Afterwards, as Hamas triumphantly paraded her body before the people of Gaza, a mob of Palestinian civilians beat, spat upon and desecrated her remains.

A reminder: On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas breached Israel’s border with a single objective: to kill as many Jews as possible. The genocidal terrorist organisation murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel. At the same time, hundreds of rockets were launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian terrorists were supported by Hezbollah, the heavily armed militia in Lebanon supplied by Tehran. From Yemen, Iran, Syria, Iraq and the West Bank, Hamas’s allies also sought to destroy the Jewish state and its citizens – precisely as the slogan goes: “From the River to the Sea!”

Israel was surrounded by a Shiite ring of fire. Overnight, it found itself fighting a war on seven fronts. Once again, the country was forced to fight for its very existence.

At the same time, Hamas abducted more than 250 innocent Israeli civilians and took them into Gaza. Accounts have documented how hostages were raped, abused, subjected to horrific torture and starved to the brink of death.

For weeks, Hamas ignored Israel’s offers to secure the hostages’ release. Jerusalem responded to Hamas’s war of aggression, or, more precisely, Israel did what any state in its position would have done. It defended itself, sought to end the relentless rocket fire from Gaza and attempted to bring its kidnapped citizens home alive.

Why this lengthy introduction to a film review?

Because none of this is shown in NAZA (a title derived from the Hebrew word for “collateral damage”). That is the filmmakers’ prerogative. But it is dishonest.

Would a film depicting the Allied attacks on Nazi Germany be credible if it failed to explain why those attacks took place? Would a film be credible if it gave the impression that the Allies had attacked Nazi Germany for no reason whatsoever? Or even suggested that they had done so out of some bloodthirsty impulse to kill other human beings?

October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight

On Wednesday, October 7, like many Israelis, my wife and I made the long drive from Jerusalem to the Nova music festival memorial. We wanted to offer support to families whose tears, understandably, have not dried up three years later.

We met the ZAKA commander who led teams recovering human remains from the devastated festival grounds. With extraordinary dignity, he described what his teams encountered and carefully showed us what was appropriate to see.

A crowd gathered. Fighting back tears, he asked everyone to stand together, united as one nation.

On our drive home, his words stayed with me.

Because as Israel approaches another election, we are doing something we do extraordinarily well.

We are fighting among ourselves.

Who knew what exactly, before October 7? What did Netanyahu know? Which agencies and/or intelligence officers failed? Who ignored the warnings? Why are these accusations only appearing now before the elections? Why, three years later, are we still fighting over a credible commission of inquiry?

These questions demand answers. Accountability is essential. But instead of allowing October 7 to strengthen our common purpose, we risk turning its memory into another political battlefield.

Meanwhile, we are overlooking something potentially more consequential.

October 8.

Two dates. Two different wars.

October 7 was a catastrophic failure within a world Israel understands.

Israel knows armies, terrorism, intelligence, deterrence, and military technology. We built an extraordinary defense ecosystem: the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), defense industries, reserves, intelligence organizations, and alliances.

That ecosystem failed catastrophically. But we understand how to repair it.

October 7 revealed the failure of an ecosystem Israel already knew it needed since its inception.

October 8 revealed something entirely different.

An ecosystem we had never adequately built.

Before Israel’s military response in Gaza could explain the international reaction, anti-Israel demonstrations and narratives were already spreading.

The vocabulary of colonialism, apartheid and resistance was ready. Campus organizations, activists, influencers and digital networks were prepared to mobilize.

This did not require one giant conspiracy.

It required an ecosystem.

Foreign governments fund academics who produce ideas. Activists translate them. Organizations create campaigns. Influencers generate content. Algorithms amplify it. Demonstrations produce images. Media broadcast them. Politicians respond.

And the cycle accelerates.

Sinwar’s victory beyond the battlefield
Yahya Sinwar did not launch October 7 expecting Israel to remain passive.

He knew Israel would retaliate. He accepted the prospect of devastating consequences for Gaza while seeking a confrontation that could ignite additional fronts.

In effect, he launched a suicidal strategic gamble, sacrificing Hamas’s military position and exposing Gaza’s population to catastrophic consequences in pursuit of a larger objective.

Sinwar and his colleagues were killed. Hamas suffered enormous military losses. But we should not confuse military defeat with defeat on every battlefield.

Sinwar achieved a consequential victory in the battle for international perception.

Whether he anticipated every dimension of the international response is debatable. What is undeniable is that a preexisting pro-Palestinian ecosystem was capable of exploiting the war at extraordinary speed.

And where were we?

Still explaining. Still correcting. Still reacting.

A September 2026 Marquette Law School national poll found that 59% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, compared with just 29% favorably. Only 18 months earlier, Americans were evenly divided, 43% to 43%.

It is a dramatic deterioration in Israel’s standing among the American public. The consequences are for the political and social environment in which American Jews must live, and for Israel’s ability to manage current American government support.

Not all this change can be attributed to propaganda. Israel’s decisions, the war’s humanitarian consequences, and changing American attitudes matter. But that makes our strategic failure more urgent, not less.

We failed to build a sufficiently competitive ecosystem before the crisis arrived.

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The Anti-Zionist Master's Thesis That Says It Doesn't Need to Prove Its Thesis

There is a peculiar epistemic move at the center of the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide is one of the gravest accusations imaginable, so ordinarily it should require an extraordinary amount of proof. Instead, the moral force of the word is often used to reverse the burden. “Genocide” is treated not as a conclusion to be established but as an obvious fact that decent people are expected to recognize. Anyone who questions the evidence risks being treated as morally suspect merely for asking.

Once that happens, counterevidence loses its normal force. Evidence inconsistent with genocidal intent can be dismissed as irrelevant, deceptive or insufficient. The accusation is morally privileged before it is empirically demonstrated. Emotion is substituted for proof. The outrage attached to the word overwhelms the ordinary process by which evidence is supposed to test a claim.

A 2026 University of Lethbridge master's thesis, Palestinian Erasure in Alberta Schools, offers an unusually explicit example of the same epistemic method in a very different context. Deema Abushaban argues that Palestinian “erasure” has come to “dominate school and curricular discourse in alberta” and attributes this to dehumanization and “Zionist settler colonialism.” 

That is a major empirical claim. One would expect such a claim to be based on evidence: a survey of school materials and websites, interviews with principals and curriculum designers, systematic examination of textbooks, lesson plans, teacher materials, board policies, classroom observations or comparisons with how other foreign conflicts are treated.

This paper has none of that.

Instead, the thesis is centered on interviews with only three people, two former students and one teacher. All of them are Palestinian. One teacher says she was told not to teach about Palestine, but we are not told whether the same rule would have applied to other contentious topics. One student says “Free Palestine” was omitted from her yearbook quote, but even she wonders whether other political slogans like "Trump 2020"  would also have been barred. Another says Palestine was barely discussed in class, but the same interviews indicate that all international current events generally received little attention.

That is about it. A sample of three Palestinian participants, with no control group and no comparative curricular analysis, is close to useless for establishing the thesis that Palestinian erasure “dominates” Alberta schools. 

Also, how does not teaching something be considered "dominant?" If the schools also didn't teach about Belgium, does that mean that Belgian erasure "dominates" the curriculum?

But Abushaban does claim that “Zionist propaganda” dominates Alberta schooling. Again, no evidence is given. She does not establish that Alberta schools teach Israel positively—or even that they teach much about Israel at all. Her own evidence more often suggests that the subject is avoided.

But the real point is that she actually defends her lack of evidence! 

In the abstract she writes:

“The purpose of the thesis is not to prove Palestinian erasure, as facts speak for themselves.”

Later she is even more explicit:

“This is not a thesis in the general sense, in that it is not a hypothesis I have to prove.”

She describes her claims instead as “nonnegotiable truths.”

And when introducing her analysis of anti-Palestinian racism in schools, she again says she does not intend to prove its existence because it is an “undeniable, non-negotiable truth.” 

This is the epistemic playbook in unusually pure form. The strongest claim, the very title of the paper itself, is placed outside the realm of proof. Evidence does not test the thesis; it is gathered afterward to illustrate a conclusion already declared true.

That is exactly what happens in much of the genocide discourse. Ordinarily, the greater the accusation, the greater the burden of proof. Here the relationship is inverted: the greater the moral gravity of the accusation, the less acceptable it becomes to demand proof.

It isn't remarkable that an activist graduate student thinks this way. Activists are free to begin with whatever convictions they like.

The remarkable part is that a university accepted a paper that explicitly claims it does not need to prove its argument as a master's thesis.

What does it say about modern academia when a thesis can explicitly state that its central proposition does not need to be proven—and still satisfy the requirements of scholarship?

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10/08 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnist; David Collier: The BBC’s Spiteful Hamas Propaganda; NY Jews deposit hostage tags into new art installation on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnists

This movement has made a fetish of these Jewish fifth columnists. They include politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); talking heads like journalist Peter Beinart; political operatives like former Obama administration foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami; left-wing activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace; nongovernmental organization stalwarts like Human Rights Watch’s former executive director Kenneth Roth; and others.

Kerstein calls such people, who enjoy high social, economic, cultural or political status, “Jews of Privilege.” Such Jews, he writes, have always strongly disliked and often hated Zionism, feared its potential impact on their chances of assimilation and the preservation of their privilege, and have felt little or no solidarity with other Jews.

Kerstein gratifyingly skewers such people. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein sanitizing the Muslim fanatic Mamdani as being “thoroughly if banally liberal.”

Klein, writes Kerstein, has endorsed the ultimate conviction of the “Jews of Privilege” that only minority status is moral, only powerlessness is redemption, and that multi-ethnic democracy guarantees the safety of Diaspora Jewry.

But, of course, the past three years in Klein’s Western multi-ethnic nirvana have been a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. As Kerstein witheringly writes, the “Jews of Privilege” are facing demographic collapse while the Jews of Zionism are burgeoning in a state that has proved itself “remarkably resilient and successful.”

Kerstein’s account is all the more powerful because he himself originally shared these anti-Zionist views. Although he didn’t come from a privileged background, he was alienated from his Jewish identity and, as a teenager, believed that Israel had no right to exist. Much of his book is an account of how his personal voyage of the soul led him to move to Israel, discover the complexity of the Middle East—and find himself as a Jew.

Indeed, the nature of Jewishness is perhaps the most significant and least understood element in anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews want to detach Zionism from Judaism to uphold what they refer to as “Jewish values.”

What they’re actually doing is swinging a wrecking ball at those values.

For Judaism consists of a fusion of three elements: the religion, the people and the land. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine mission to establish a particular society in “Zion,” the land of Israel.

While Jews don’t need to prove their Jewishness through religious observance, living in Israel or even just supporting it, detaching the land from Judaism is to dismember it. Anti-Zionism is an attack on Judaism itself.

Anti-Zionist Jews want to reframe Jewish values—the most particularist set of principles on earth—as universalist. This inevitably privileges the values and interests of non-Jews over those of the Jews.

This is because, writes Kerstein, anti-Zionist Jews have decided that it’s impossible for the “vast and kind” non-Jewish world to be wrong and the Jews to be right. And the outcome of that attitude is the belief that Israel must be dismantled and the Palestinian Arabs granted domination over everyone else.

Kerstein has performed a vital service in holding such people to account. Jewish community leaders refuse to do so because they are terrified of disunity and of washing dirty linen in public.

Undesirable though that is, there’s worse. We are living through an unprecedented cultural emergency for Jews and for the West in which they live.

While it’s vital not to lose focus on the battle against those who are out to destroy the Jewish people, it’s suicidally reckless to turn a blind eye to those Jews who, in their abysmal ignorance and pathological confusion or worse over their Jewish identity, are assisting them in their infernal aim.

Inside NAZA’s Activist Network and Its Calls to “End Zionism”

NAZA, the documentary film that won Venice’s Special Jury Prize in September, grew from a reporting network whose editors and writers have publicly advocated ending Zionism and rejecting Israel’s nature as a Jewish state, according to a new Jewish Onliner investigation.

The documentary portrays Israeli military operations in Gaza as a system of “calculated mass killing.” Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, it draws on reporting published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. These institutional connections place the film within an openly activist media network, parts of which pursue political goals extending far beyond the documentary’s stated focus on Israel’s military conduct in Gaza.

A Local Call Editor Explicitly Demanded an End to Zionism
One of the clearest statements came from Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, the Hebrew-language publication whose reporting helped underpin NAZA. In a September 2025 essay published by +972, Noy wrote:
“Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”

She demanded a process of “denazification” across Israeli society and rejected the country’s combined Jewish and democratic identity. Her position explicitly targeted Zionism itself, not simply the government in power.

The Guardian Published Calls for the “End of Zionism”
In an August 5, 2011 column, David Hearst, then a Guardian foreign editorial writer, envisioned “The end of Zionism, no less.”

An April 24, 2024 essay by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein called Zionism a “false idol” and declared: “So tonight we say: it ends here.”

In July 2024, the newspaper published Ahmed Moor’s essay calling for the “end of Zionism.”

The newspaper’s involvement in NAZA went beyond commentary: it produced the film, drawing on reporting by The Guardian, +972 and Local Call.

David Harsanyi: America owes Mahmoud Khalil nothing

Pro-terrorist activist Mahmoud Khalil was asked by CNN the other day if he would condemn Hamas. He, of course, would not, calling the question “silly” and “disingenuous.” It is not “black and white,” he whined.

Even if you oppose Israel’s reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the answer is still black and white for any person with a conscience. Certainly, it should be for any person who wants to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. After all, Hamas is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization for, among other things, murdering Americans. Stay informed.Stay ahead.

But the fact that Khalil can’t condemn Hamas — and anyone paying attention understands that he supports the terrorist army — not only tells us that he deserves to be deported but also that it’s imperative we deport him.

During the 1960s and 1970s, immigration officials grilled newcomers to the U.S. and elsewhere about their affiliations with communist parties. Why would we import people who want to destroy our system? Newcomers were, and still are, compelled to disavow associations with illiberal movements, violent groups, and ideologies. They were also required to promise not to engage in any subversive or revolutionary activity.

Well, Khalil’s entire job as an “activist” is to engage in subversive or revolutionary activity.

Khalil is an Algerian, incidentally, not a Palestinian, though he is a champion of Palestinianism, one of the most nihilistic, bigoted, violent, anti-Western ideologies of the age. There’s no anti-American or Marxist protest or riot anywhere in the world these days where Palestinian flags are not prominent.

The French, of course, don’t need much impetus to riot. But protests that began over a lack of school funding a few weeks ago have now escalated into increasingly destructive and violent riots across France, clearly fueled in part by Marxist pro-Palestinian elements. The red-green alliance between Islamists and communists isn’t new — it’s just more popular than ever. France has over 5 million Muslims.

What you see happening on the streets of Paris is exactly what Khalil hopes to see in the U.S. We saw as much when he was the lead “negotiator” for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which rioted at the school in 2025. The group’s goal is to fight for the “total eradication of Western civilization,” “global intifada,” and the “armed resistance” of Hamas. That doesn’t sound very American.

Khalil’s friend, Mohsen Mahdawi, another leader of CUAD fighting against deportation, reportedly has a propensity to make Hamas-like statements, such as “I like to kill Jews,” “soon, very soon, we will annihilate the Jews,” and that “servants of the Jews or the Americans” will have their heads “cut off.” Would we give citizenship to a foreigner who said, “I like to kill blacks” or “I like to kill Christians”? I hope not.

Khalil is being deported for lying on his application, though he was initially picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for threatening U.S. foreign policy. These deportations should not be treated as a matter of botched paperwork but as a matter of national security.

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10/08 Links Pt1: Andrew Roberts: I documented the crimes of October 7. Too many still believe the lies of Hamas; After Oct. 7, Israel Rewrote the Rules of the Middle East

From Ian:

Andrew Roberts: I documented the crimes of October 7. Too many still believe the lies of Hamas

As the Red Army closed in on Auschwitz, the Nazis blew up the crematoria to hide the atrocities they had committed. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas did the opposite. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered his fighters to film their killing and broadcast it to spread terror. With GoPro cameras strapped to their chests, they filmed themselves gleefully slaughtering, burning, and raping Israeli citizens, young and old, and uploaded the footage in real time.

In three decades writing about war, I have rarely encountered an atrocity documented in such detail. The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report which I chaired, and the evidence that underpins it, runs to more than 300 pages. Yet the same organization that broadcast its own atrocities in real time began denying the specifics within hours. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told the BBC that Hamas never targeted women and children, and called footage of terrified families Israel's invention.

These same men now lead Hamas's negotiations, and their assurances sit at the heart of the diplomatic process. A movement instructed to showcase mass murder, not conceal it, cannot expect its word to be trusted - least of all on disarmament. Disarmament cannot depend on assurances. It must be verified: inspectors must have access to every depot and tunnel, a timetable must be published, and each missed checkpoint must trigger consequences, not renewed negotiation.

Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 "again and again" until Israel is destroyed. Those are not the words of a movement reconciled to peace, but of one waiting for its next opportunity. Peace does not require trusting Hamas; it requires ensuring Hamas no longer has the means to break it.

Bret Stephens: When Criticism of Israel Goes Off the Rails

Zealous criticism of Israel goes off the rails when it somehow imagines, or pretends, that blame for the crises in the Holy Land falls on one side alone and that Israel's security challenges are either a product of its imagination or payback for its own policies.

Israel came into existence with its enemies avowing its extermination, and nearly eight decades later those intentions remain unchanged.

The experience of Israelis in this century is that every time they have vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security.

Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that so many Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct. 7 - horrors that many of the world's so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or flat-out deny.

Constant critics of Israel might try to remember that Israelis aren't simply hallucinating their own peril.

Weaponizing the charge of genocide fuels an increasingly dangerous antisemitism

Genocide, the intentional annihilation of a group of people, is the gravest of crimes. As malicious actors weaponize the term and endanger Jews everywhere, meticulous use of the charge is more essential than ever.

We are honored to serve as the current and former chairs of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an institution memorializing history’s most well-documented genocide: Nazi Germany and its collaborators’ attempt to systematically murder every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe. They almost succeeded. Two-thirds of European Jews – 6 million – were killed. The global Jewish population has yet to recover, with fewer Jews alive today than in 1939, when World War II began.

Holocaust survivors fervently hoped antisemitism would wither when Germany was defeated and its crimes exposed. Yet, they knew from centuries of persecutions long before the Nazis, this ancient hatred is impossible to eradicate. Even so, after World War II, antisemitism became socially unacceptable. The shocking reactions from many quarters to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, three years ago, show this is no longer the case.

On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel intending to murder as many Jewish people as possible, bringing about the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As Israel defends itself, we reiterate our wholehearted conviction that Israel has not committed genocide, reflecting the United States government’s consistent and prevailing view. Rescuers and police escort elderly woman and others after synagogue terror attack in Manchester.

At the same time, we cannot forget the terrible tragedy many innocent Gazans have experienced as a result of the war. The loss of tens of thousands, including many children, is horrific.

As we mourn so many innocent lives lost, we cannot ignore that Hamas puts civilians in harm’s way as a central part of its strategy to demonize Israel. Despite this deadly strategy, Israel has made efforts to warn civilians when to evacuate, provide food and relief, and facilitate vaccine distribution.

Israel, like any country, is not exempt from criticism. And yet, whether out of ignorance or malice, people from all walks of life, often with little knowledge or legal expertise, including in the specific definition of genocide, continually wield the term. Others weaponize it to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. Regardless of their intention, the impact is a terrifying eruption of antisemitism and a more dangerous world for Jewish people everywhere.

Furthermore, state actors like Iran, Qatar, China and Russia spread antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial to stir hatred of Jews and sow chaos in democracies. They are succeeding. Antisemitism is no longer lurking at society’s fringes. It is marching openly through its institutions. Violent antisemitism is at levels not seen since the Holocaust. From Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue to Bondi Beach in Australia, to Manchester, England, and far too many other places, Jews are under deadly attack. And every day, Jews face relentless harassment and threats on streets, campuses and online.

Talk about "Genocide" Should Start with Israel's Murdered Mothers and Children

When I heard that students were planning a pro-Palestinian march through London on the third anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I thought how grotesquely insensitive is it possible to be? What is wrong with people?

You want genocide? Young women at the Nova peace festival, half-naked, strung up from trees the better to defile them. Twin baby boys, their mother slaughtered in the kitchen, their father riddled with bullets; the orphaned babies used as bait for 14 hours, little Guy and Roi, 10 months old, left to scream so they would lure neighbors to rescue them and those brave souls were then picked off by the terrorists lying in wait. Killing parents in front of their sobbing children, then setting the house on fire so those children are burnt alive.

Here we are, three years on from one of the darkest days in history, and it's Jews - not Islamists - who are either fleeing the UK or living in fear. Their children attend heavily fortified schools and worship in high-security synagogues.

I am not Jewish, but I believe the Jews deserve and need a homeland. I hate their enemies because they are our enemies. So that makes me a Zionist. If you have any sense of what history teaches us, you should be a Zionist too. No more "Yes, buts." Today, Oct. 7, of all days, let us stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters.

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Fecal Bacteria Insulted By People Using Election Flyers To Wipe (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

Jerusalem, October 8 - The microorganisms prevalent in human excrement begged Israelis today to stop using political promotional materials as toilet paper, as the practice - however cathartic to the humans involved - delivers a grievous insult to those microorganisms.

A representative of the gut bacteria in homo sapiens issued a desperate plea on Sunday to stop wiping with election flyers because, in addition to whatever damage may result to the colorectal tissue from using harder paper, the flyers are inherently offensive and make the bacteria sick to their own stomachs, rendering them unable to perform their metabolic and ecological role.

"We understand that it's free paper and toilet paper actually costs money," acknowledged Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. "We also realize that such materials are unworthy of any dignified use, leaving few options. Certainly we appreciate the need to maintain the dignity of bird droppings by refraining from lining cages with the flyers. We simply ask that humans show the same consideration for their microbiome, and not subject us to the repulsiveness that is political campaign 'literature.'"

The statement, released through a consortium of colonic residents and timed to coincide with the final week of flyer distribution, described the paper stock as “aggressively glossy in sentiment if not always in finish.” Bacteroides fragilis, speaking for the more numerous gram-negative faction, said the problem is not merely abrasive fiber or residual ink but the rhetorical content itself. “A slogan about 'Bibi the criminal' or 'we removed existential threats' arrives already warm,” the organism noted. “By the time it reaches us it has been folded, pressed, and rhetorically exhausted. We are then expected to process both the cellulose and the platform. One of those tasks lies within our competence.”

Environmentalists warn that in addition to profligate waste of paper, the use of flyers for any purpose pollutes the discourse and and streets. The movement has succeeded in preventing the incineration of trash as a power source, and, according to horticultural experts, the processed nature of the paper stock renders it ineffective as mulch even in shredded form.

Other proposals call for using at some of the vast quantities of printed, toxic detritus as filler for graves - but burial societies and traditional communities balk at the suggestion of letting loved ones' remains suffer the eternal humiliation of proximity to such heinousness.

Already, piles of the flyers have gathered in landfills, where scavengers that willingly consume dung and rotting flesh refuse to go near anything as horrific as political dross.

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The amazing hypocrisy of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, BRISMES, spent years warning that vague political standards, investigations of academics’ speech, and institutional pressure over controversial opinions threaten academic freedom.

But when it comes to Israel, suddenly its opinions do a 180.

In its 2023 report on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom in UK Higher Education,, which crtiicized the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, was produced with the European Legal Support Center. The report strongly criticized universities for investigating academics over political speech. It warned that even investigations that end without punishment can damage careers, chill speech and make academics afraid to discuss controversial issues. It objected to vague standards being used to determine when political expression crosses some poorly defined ethical line, and emphasized that academic freedom exists precisely to protect the right to question received wisdom and advance unpopular opinions.

Whether or not they apply to the IHRA definition, which includes a lot of caveats, these are reasonable principles. The problem is that BRISMES no longer seems to believe they should constrain BRISMES.

Its current “Mandatory Policy on Ethical Publishing and Participation Standards” gives BRISMES the power to exclude scholars from publication and participation based not merely on their scholarship but on their outside political speech and conduct. An academic may be excluded if BRISMES considers them “reasonably suspected of involvement in public incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide,” or if they engage in advocacy of hatred amounting to incitement. BRISMES explicitly reserves the right to demand clarification or additional information about an academic’s activities.

In other words, BRISMES created precisely the sort of investigatory mechanism whose chilling effect it had previously condemned.

The policy goes even further with scholarship itself. BRISMES says it will reject work that “glorifies or justifies” war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. But “justifies” is an extraordinarily dangerous word in an academic publication. Scholars constantly dispute whether particular acts actually constitute war crimes. A scholar arguing that an Israeli military operation complied with international humanitarian law could easily be accused by someone who begins with the opposite conclusion of “justifying war crimes.”

That is how an academic question becomes a loyalty test: first determine what the correct political and legal conclusion is, and then decide whether scholarship disagreeing with that conclusion is permissible.

Obviously, this policy is aimed at Zionist academics or anyone who justifies any of Israel's military activities.

The contradiction is even clearer in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, which BRISMES publishes with Taylor & Francis. BRISMES now has a mandatory territorial or land-acknowledgement policy requiring certain authors to include acknowledgements expressing BRISMES’s preferred political characterization of the land on which their institutions are located. Authors who refuse can remove their institutional affiliation instead.

BRISMES itself describes these acknowledgements as an “ethical and political gesture.”

That is compelled political speech as a condition of normal academic publication.

Curiously, BRISMES apparently recognized the problem when the same issue arose with its conference. After academic-freedom groups objected to mandatory land acknowledgements, BRISMES made the conference version voluntary. Yet the comparable requirement for journal authors remains mandatory.

The irony gets deeper because BRISMES has repeatedly argued that controversial anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expression must be protected from institutional censorship. Its 2023 academic-freedom report argued that universities should not suppress lawful political expression merely because it is offensive or deeply contested. Its 2025 statement defending academic boycotts likewise invokes academic freedom and open scholarly debate as core principles.

If BRISMES believes universities should be extremely reluctant to investigate Palestinian activists or anti-Zionist academics for controversial speech, it cannot simultaneously give itself broad discretion to investigate other academics for supposedly “justifying” crimes. If vague speech rules chill academic freedom when applied to Israel’s critics, they also chill academic freedom when applied to Israel’s defenders.

And BRISMES has created another problem for itself. Its ethical standards do not apply merely to outsiders. They expressly cover authors, presenters, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, committee members and others involved in BRISMES activities.

That makes consistency testable.

BRISMES maintains a large public Database of Expertise containing hundreds of scholars, while its journals and conferences have published or hosted many academics writing about Hamas, Palestinian resistance, armed struggle, October 7 and related subjects. There is nothing inherently improper about any of that; these are legitimate subjects of academic inquiry. But under BRISMES’s own standards, the relevant question now becomes whether it applies the same scrutiny to scholars who justify Palestinian violence, like describing it as "resistance,"  that it reserves the right to apply to scholars accused of justifying Israeli violence.

I have not gone through the individual cases here. That deserves a separate investigation.

The institutional contradiction already exists without them.

In 2023 BRISMES warned that vague political standards, investigations of controversial expression and professional penalties produce a chilling effect incompatible with academic freedom.

By 2025 it had constructed a system containing all three.

BRISMES wrote an excellent critique of its own censorship policy two years before adopting it wholesale.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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10/07 Links Pt2: Who still fights the war on terror?; Simon Sebag Montefiore: Iran, America, Israel, and the End of Khomeinism; Iran’s sickening celebration of October 7

From Ian:

Clifford D. May: Who still fights the war on terror?

Addressing Congress nine days after Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.” He added: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

A dozen years later, President Barack Obama announced that what had become known as the global war on terror “like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises.”

History doesn’t actually advise, though it can reveal patterns—and Obama drew the wrong one. Wars against an enemy driven by an ideology of conquest rarely end until that enemy is decisively defeated or abandons its demands.

Since 2001, some Islamist terrorist organizations have been diminished by the United States and its partners. But not one has surrendered. Nor have any forsworn what they call the jihad—the holy war that began in the seventh century and for more than a millennium drove the expansion of vast empires.

As for the Islamic Republic of Iran—long described by the U.S. State Department as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—it, too, is committed to jihad. Only three years ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader, said plainly that “Death to America!” should be understood as “not just a slogan; it is a policy.”

His challenge was to develop the capabilities necessary to implement that policy. If you understand that, you grasp why U.S. President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessors, decided to take concrete steps to end Tehran’s nuclear-weapons development.

The U.S. military and the Treasury Department have been depriving Iran’s rulers of the oil revenue they need to rebuild a missile arsenal that would shield their nuclear-weapons program, support their foreign terrorist proxies and utilize the Strait of Hormuz to hold the global economy hostage.

Meanwhile, more good news: Within a few days of one another, three attempted terrorist attacks—one in the Middle East, one in Europe and one in the United States—were foiled.

Jonathan Tobin: In Michigan, the issue is erasing Jewish interests, not the Jewish vote

Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) decision to campaign on behalf of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in her state, was, she says, a function of a desire to help someone who would be on what she calls “Team Fight” rather than “Team Flight.” By that, she meant someone who would battle President Donald Trump alongside her in the U.S. Senate, rather than seek compromises with the Republican administration like her more moderate colleague Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

In taking this stand, she has fallen in line with the rest of her party in backing El-Sayed. But in framing the question as one of “fight” or “flight,” she was deliberately avoiding the historic implications of her choice. One more Democrat in the Senate could give her party control of both houses of Congress, and make it easier for them to impeach and try Trump, regardless of the partisan nature of such a procedure.

Given that even under those circumstances, a conviction and his ouster from office would likely be impossible, the stakes won’t involve the future of the republic as much as handing Democrats the sinecures and power that come from being in the majority.

But electing an open antisemite like El-Sayed would be truly momentous not just for the Jewish community, of which Slotkin is a member, but for its implications for the future of her party and the nation. From that perspective, characterizing the decision as one of “fight” or “flight” is actually quite apt. But the truth is that what she and a host of other Jewish Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, are doing is engaging in “flight” rather than fighting to hold the line against antisemitism inside her party at a time when it is surging around the globe.

‘No such thing as Jewish voters?’
What made her decision to join forces with El-Sayed particularly interesting was revealed during a joint interview with him on the MS NOW cable-TV channel.

In it, Slotkin didn’t just play the loyal Democratic soldier swallowing the indignity of endorsing a man who seeks to drive the overwhelming majority of American Jews out of the public square. In doing so, she is supporting someone who embodies the illiberal red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that is taking control of liberal parties around the world.

When asked about the fact that most Michigan Jews, including the majority who are loyal Democrats and politically liberal, simply won’t go along with electing an antisemite, Slotkin’s reply was succinct.

She said, “There’s no such thing as the Jewish voters, just like there’s no such thing as the Muslim voters or the black voters. People have their own views, and the things that they prioritize are going to drive their vote.”

In a sense, she’s right. Citizens vote as individuals and not as part of groups. And, indeed, most American Jews have not voted in lockstep on issues like Israel, even if the majority of them are supporters of the Jewish state. That is especially true of Jewish Democrats, who have always placed Israel’s security below many domestic concerns, whether it was health-care costs or legalized abortion. It’s something that has particularly frustrated Trump, whose pro-Israel policies and efforts to fight antisemitism in education have not been rewarded by most Jewish voters.

To some extent, that’s also true of other groups, like Muslims and African-Americans, though both of those constituencies have been more likely to treat issues relating to their community’s safety as a priority. By contrast, liberal Jews tend to treat universal concerns as more important than those that personally concern them. As writer Cynthia Ozick famously said, “Universalism is the ultimate Jewish parochialism.”

Tolerating antisemitism
But as Jews in Michigan and elsewhere have come to learn in the three years since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities incited an unprecedented increase in antisemitism, El-Sayed’s candidacy is not, strictly speaking, about voters’ views about the Jewish state. It’s about their willingness to tolerate the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred here in the United States.

So, when Slotkin seeks to deny that there is such a thing as “Jewish voters,” she’s signaling something very different from the fact that not all Jews cast votes solely on the basis of a candidate’s views on Israel. Along with other Democrats, both Jewish and non-Jewish, she is seeking to establish something far more important.

'Not yet out of danger': Israeli envoy to US shares update on son following terror attack

Israel ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, whose son Neria was seriously wounded during a car-ramming terrorist attack in September, said Wednesday that his son “has severe head injuries, but in recent days he has begun breathing on his own.”

“He remains unconscious,” Leiter added in a video recorded for the Evangelical Christian community’s memorial ceremony honoring the victims of October 7, held in Jerusalem.

In an additional statement shared by the ambassador, the family clarified that despite several encouraging signs, Neria remains in very serious condition and is not yet out of danger.

The Leiter family said Neria is receiving the best possible medical care in the intensive care unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The family thanked the medical staff and the public for their prayers and immense support and asked people to continue praying for the recovery of Neria Dov ben Chana.

Seriously wounded in terror attack
Neria Leiter, an IDF reservist and American citizen, was seriously wounded in a terrorist attack at the Bell checkpoint on Route 443.

He underwent several hours of brain surgery at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where his family later received a visit from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Jerusalem Post previously reported.

The family also received numerous messages of support on X from Israeli leaders, including President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

From bedside of his son on life support from terror attack, Israeli envoy to US decries Mamdani’s ‘dangerous lies’

Yechiel Leiter, Israeli ambassador to the United States, was so put off by the statement that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released on the third anniversary of Oct. 7 that the envoy decried it from the hospital in Israel, where he is at the bedside of his son, who is on life support after a Palestinian terrorist hit him with a car.

“It’s actually hard to find a sentence in Mamdani’s post that isn’t a lie,” Leiter stated.

“Paying lip service to the victims of Oct. 7 just to spread blood libels about Israel might play nicely to the red-green/communist-Islamist alliance that he promotes in the United States, but those of us who know better see his perverted language for what it is,” the Israeli envoy stated. “This man is a defender of Palestinian terrorism, a promoter of antisemitism and an advocate of anti-Americanism.”

Even on the anniversary of the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, the anti-Israel mayor “can’t help but attack the Jewish state with absurd accusations and outright propaganda,” according to the Israeli envoy.

“The only attempted genocide in this conflict was perpetrated by the barbarians he supports, Hamas, who butchered, raped and murdered in the most horrific ways imaginable,” Leiter stated. “There is no genocide, ethnic cleansing or famine in Gaza. Hamas embeds itself among, behind and beneath the people of Gaza, knowing that the IDF will not, ever, intentionally target civilians. It robs its own people of the humanitarian aid that Israel has facilitated into Gaza since the war began.”

Leiter called the mayor, who campaigned on having the Israeli prime minister arrested, an ally of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization since 1997.

“Hamas knows that its allies, including Zohran Mamdani, will regurgitate its lies, demonizing Israel and endangering Jews everywhere,” the Israeli envoy stated. “Israel and its allies will not be deterred from defending civilization against terrorist savagery. Those of us who envision a peaceful and prosperous Middle East will root out the evil that is Islamic terrorism and build a better future for all, Jew and Arab alike.”

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