From Ian:
Iran, not Israel, is escalating this war
The West’s admonishments of Israel certainly cannot be put down to simple wavering on Joe Biden’s part. Despite his oft-professed claim to be a staunch supporter of Israel, he has been equivocal in backing Israel in its war against Hamas. Crucially, he has also avoided discussing the Hamas-Iran connection despite it being transparently clear. As Gadi Taub, a veteran Israeli journalist, noted last year: ‘From the get-go, the US denied Iran’s fingerprints on the Hamas attack. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan said there was no “direct” evidence of Iranian involvement.’ That was despite the fact there was ample evidence, including public statements by Hamas leaders thanking Iran for its support.
Last month, the Biden administration approved a sanctions waiver worth $10 billion to Iran – a nation it has publicly declared to be a state sponsor of terrorism. America could have chosen to suspend or discontinue this waiver in the wake of Iran’s assault on Israel, but it has not done so. That it remains in place is all the more remarkable given that a drone attack by an Iranian-backed group recently killed three American soldiers and injured 30 others in Jordan. You don’t have to support the sanctions to notice the wide gap between America’s words and its deeds when it comes to Iran.
Biden’s relatively soft stance on Iran is actually in line with a political realignment among Democrats dating back to the Obama administration, when Biden was vice-president. As Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has noted:
‘Those policies began in the week after President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. In one of the 44th president’s first acts of foreign diplomacy, Obama sent an offer of reconciliation to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That June, in his historic Cairo speech, Obama became the first president to refer to Tehran’s regime as the Islamic Republic of Iran – legitimising the oppressive theocracy – and stood aside while that republic’s thugs beat and shot hundreds of Iranian citizens protesting for their freedom.’
There are two distinct motivations for America’s long-term attempt to tilt away from Israel and towards Iran. The first is geopolitical and the second lies in the sphere of domestic politics.
Where geopolitics is concerned, the Democrats are keen to draw the Islamic Republic, a regime that has condemned America as the ‘Great Satan’, closer into the US’s orbit. Officially, the US has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980, the year after the Islamists took power in the Iranian Revolution. They have instead tried to maintain relations by other means. These have included the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), unofficially known as the Iran nuclear deal, promoted by Obama and later by Biden.
This is all part of a broader US strategy known as the pivot to Asia. The aim is to reorient American foreign policy away from the Middle East and towards East Asia. Its priority is to contain China.
The Biden administration’s hope is that defusing tensions with the hostile forces in the Middle East will make its pivot to Asia easier. Yet since the pivot was announced, the US has found itself dragged into further conflicts in the Middle East, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. America has also found itself reluctantly drawn into the periodic conflicts between Israel and Hamas. Biden wants to untangle America from this bitter strife as much as he possibly can. This means downgrading its commitments to Israel.
What’s more, the Biden administration, like Obama before it, is increasingly influenced by domestic identity politics. Many grassroots US Democrats see the conflicts involving Israel in simplistic black and white terms. Israel is today portrayed as a regional bastion of privilege – supposedly akin to those who enjoy privilege at home in America – with the Palestinians representing the oppressed. The involvement of Islamist movements in the region, which have pledged to destroy Israel, is ignored or at least downplayed. The activists who hold this view have placed considerable pressure on Biden to withdraw support for Israel.
There are also notable overlaps between the Islamist worldview and the woke worldview. Both tend to see Israel representing the side of evil. Both fail to distinguish between the Palestinian people and Hamas, with its goal of an international Islamic order. And both also tend to downplay or even dismiss the role of anti-Semitism as a key motivating force in the current conflict.
Today, Israel faces not just the wrath of its genocidal enemies – from Hamas to Iran and its other proxies. It also has to contend with its increasing isolation from the West. This is a dangerous moment.
Bernard-Henri Lévy:
Israel Must Respond Forcefully to Iran’s Attack
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not just a failed regime, economically ruined, disavowed by its youth, women, and its living elements, revealed to have the force of a paper tiger.
It’s also a country that—like the USSR of recent times, where there coexisted both a real country devastated by economic misery and public demoralization, and decoupled from that, an ultramodern military-industrial complex able to compete with the United States—established a secret but effective nuclear industry.
It’s a country whose programs in that area have only grown and prospered as America changed course, over the last 15 years, oscillating between Obama’s ineffectual and misbegotten policy of détente and, under Trump, ineffectual ranting.
And, as for Iran’s nuclear programs, their sites have been moved and often buried over the years; their centrifuges have become capable of producing enough enriched uranium to build stockpiles 22 times above the limit authorized by the 2015 nuclear deal; IAEA inspectors no longer have meaningful access to them. These sites have become giant black holes, off the radar, from which the world could learn, in six months, in a year, suddenly, that Iran has been allowed to join North Korea and Russia in the club of dictatorships capable of setting the planet on fire …
I’ll add that the same Iranian drones that, with the exception of a young girl in the south of the country, systematically missed their targets are the very ones that Putin has used, for two years now, to ravage Ukraine.
And I’ll add that the same Iran that was mocked, this Monday morning, for its pathetic failure in the face of the solidity of the Iron Dome, recently engaged, in the Persian Gulf, in joint naval maneuvers, largely unnoticed, with the Russian and Chinese navies.
Let’s imagine, then, that the Iranian regime emerges unharmed from this adventure.
Let’s imagine that it sees this adventure not as a lamentable defeat, but as a dress rehearsal. And let’s suppose that they repeat it, six months, a year from now, with faster and more accurate drones and missiles, equipped with operational nuclear warheads.
That, for Israel and, beyond, for the region, is a terrifying prospect. It is a clear existential threat.
And that is why it feels unreasonable to me that “cowardly relief” reigns among Israel’s allies and dictates, everywhere, the same recommendation for “de-escalation” and “restraint.”
Iran has declared war.
There is no other choice, alas, but to retaliate.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?
Before the Biden appeasement of Iran, the Trump administration had isolated and nearly bankrupted Tehran and its proxies. Its Revolutionary Guard terrorist planners proved to be easy targets once they operated outside Iran.
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.
Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shia neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?
Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon—as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?
In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression—and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Columbia Anti-Semitism Hearing
Columbia’s anti-Semitism problem is so advanced that today’s hearing was devoted solely to the esteemed former King’s College. The school’s representatives at the hearing were President Minouche Shafik, trustee cochairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, and its anti-Semitism task force head, law professor David Schizer (a one-time COMMENTARY contributor).
In December, the three school presidents failed to answer in the affirmative when they were asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ policy on student harassment. Shafik and Co. were ready for that question today…but were unprepared for a host of others. Ironically, Stefanik saved Shafik from a late-hearing blunder regarding one of the most important questions of the entire proceeding.
It began when GOP Rep. Bob Good asked Shafik: “Have there been any anti-Islamic demonstrations on campus? Any anti-Muslim demonstrations on campus? Any anti-Arab demonstrations on campus?”
Shafik’s initial response, a telling indication of the warped worldview prevailing in academic spaces, was: “There have been many pro-Israeli demonstrations on our college campus.”
That was, by far, her worst answer of the day. Good stopped her and the two of them clarified together that as a matter of fact, there have been no anti-Arab or Islamophobic rallies on the Columbia campus.
That stands in contrast to the fact that the Columbia campus exists in an almost perpetual state of anti-Jewish agitation. That is true of plenty of other schools around the country as well. The key fact of the past six months in university life has been this: whether it be protests, harassment, intimidation by teachers and students, or administrative discrimination, no other group has been facing anything like what Jews have faced. University faculty, administrators, and student groups are guilty of no other organized campaign of out-group harassment. No other group is consistently told by campus security officials to hide evidence of their religion or ethnicity for their own safety. On the nation’s college campuses, nothing else exists that is comparable in any way, shape, or form to the campaign against Jews.
Matti Friedman:
Homage to Orwell
Many of Orwell’s comrades took his honesty about Soviet Communism as heresy, and he spent years afterward avoiding old Stalinists in pubs. An account of this time appears in a superb new biography by D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The New Life, which was published last year. Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, wouldn’t touch his book about Spain because of its anti-Soviet angle, as the biography recounts, and the New Statesman turned down his essay “Eye-Witness in Barcelona” for the same reason: it would “cause trouble.” The magazine’s editor, Kingsley Martin, explained later that though the article may indeed have been true, the editor’s decision must actually be based “on general public grounds, to the end that one side might win rather than the other side.”
All of this sounds as if it were drawn precisely from my own experience seven decades later working in the Western press in Israel, which left me with similar conclusions and ultimately led me to Orwell’s essays. It is obvious that the story in the Middle East and North Africa in our times is the rise of violent and conflicting strains of Islam and the move of these ideologies and their adherents into the West. A great deal of effort goes into obscuring this, even though the phenomenon is visible from Algeria through Syria and Yemen and Iraq to Afghanistan, and from the Twin Towers to the Bataclan theater to the Nice promenade and the Manchester Arena. For a reporter in Israel, the main local incarnations of the phenomenon are the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by the Arabic acronym Hamas) and Islamic Jihad among Palestinians and the more formidable Party of God militia (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, all allied to some extent with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all working to forge a new Islamic order, and all explicitly dedicated to erasing the unbearable pocket of Jewish sovereignty on 0.2 percent of the land of the Arab world.
This is depressing but not very complicated. However, during my time in the press, we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam’s two billion adherents and pretend the region’s key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel. Because this was mostly fictional, my colleagues and I were forced into increasingly ludicrous contortions as we “built emotional superstructures over events that had never happened,” in Orwell’s words, and buried much of what was actually happening—like Israel’s rejected peace offer of late 2008, for example, which we were instructed not to cover, or like the way Hamas followed Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza by methodically wiring the territory like a suicide bomber, building a system of tunnels under the entire civilian landscape and quite clearly condemning vast numbers to death in the holy war they promised was coming.
This all fits what Orwell understood about the way Western observers are guided chiefly by their own politics and imaginations. Atrocities in war, he wrote, “are to be believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete unwillingness to alter one’s beliefs as soon as the political scene alters.” He would have understood the refusal by many observers in our times to believe the details of the Hamas murders, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, while being eager to believe a few weeks later that Israel had purposely bombed a hospital—and also the unwillingness of some on my own side to admit any civilian suffering in Gaza, and the desire to dismiss anything that makes us feel bad as “Pallywood.”
Some elements of Orwell’s writing suggest he would grasp the nature of Israel’s dilemma. One example stands out in particular: a striking line from a 1938 article phrasing the horrific dilemma of modern industrial war, which I read for the first time in Taylor’s biography. “The only apparent alternatives,” Orwell wrote, “are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more willing to do these things than you are yourself.” He hated wars, nationalism, and the British Empire, whose rapaciousness and racism he’d seen up close while a young man serving as a colonial policeman in Burma. But when World War II came, he tried to join the British Army, was rejected because of poor health, and ended up an enthusiastic recruit to the Home Guard. A responsible person will have to choose among poor options or different kinds of evil.
Everyone has right to self-determination, except Jews
We have recently been provided with fresh evidence of this moral collapse: Starting with the high priestess of progressivism, Judith Butler described Hamas as a progressive movement and the events of October 7th as acts of resistance. And it continues with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, who shamefully failed to condemn the call to genocide of the Jewish People.
The events of October 7 brought antisemitism to new heights of insanity and hatred: blatant support for the rape and murder of innocent men, women, and children, the demonization of IDF soldiers and the state of the Jewish people, comparing them to Nazis, the distortion of the Holocaust, and the application of hypocritical double standards tailored to specifically target one people and one state alone.
Streets in Europe are once again unsafe for Jews, and many of its leaders, instead of showing courage, are demonstrating weakness.
Instead of standing with the truth, they align themselves with false Palestinian propaganda. Instead of supporting the victims of the attack, they choose to side with the aggressors.
This moral laxity may serve short-term interests, but make no mistake: The ultimate result will be the intensification and strengthening of radical Islam barbarism.
It is enough to see what is happening on the streets of London to understand where we are heading. Just recently, British MP and friend of Israel Mike Freer was forced to step down from his position due to threats on his life from Islamists after his office was set ablaze by Hamas supporters.
Freedom is waning in the country that brought the Magna Carta to the world, and people can no longer speak freely; even Churchill’s statue requires protection to keep it from being vandalized.
Freedom is waning here, in the capital of the European Union, as we are all currently experiencing at this important conference. With strong “progressive” forces, doing everything to not allow up to speak up and share our voice.
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminds us: “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.”
Those who turn their back on the righteous war we are fighting against absolute evil will eventually bring it to their doorstep.
Those who seek to deny us our historical rights in our eternal homeland will see their rights undermined.
The future belongs to those nations that will relegate political correctness and woke culture to the dustbin of history.
The future of the West hinges on courageous nations willing to swim against the current, and re-cultivate the values that Judeo-Christian civilization has brought to the world: the importance of tradition, the sanctity of the family, and the vitality of a robust community.
It depends on education that fosters a familiarity and appreciation of the past to comprehend the present and shape the future.
Dr. Chazoni, in one of your essential articles on conservatism, you wrote the following lines: "...The only forces that grant the state its internal consistency and stability are our national and religious traditions."
The unique national tradition is the foundation, and upon it is added the floor of individual freedoms and the limitation of executive authority, not vice versa. This is the essence of the conservative view.
This worldview is shared by a series of exceptional leaders, some of whom are with us here today, such as Prime Minister Victor Orban. Under his leadership and action, Hungary is one of the safest countries in Europe for its citizens and also for its small Jewish community that can express its identity in public freely without fear of harassment and violent attacks.
The leaders who stand firm on the right of Israel today do not do so because it is a startup nation, nor because of its cherry tomatoes.
They do it because they draw inspiration from the history of an ancient nation that has risen from the ashes and rebuilt its ruins. They are inspired by the eternal book that forms the foundation of our civilization.
They do so because of the values we share — human life, faith, family, and freedom. Eternal values that will survive both the storm of Jihadism that sanctifies death and the storm of "progress" that sanctifies nothingness.
This world is fundamentally good, this is our belief, which is why we bring sweet children into it even during difficult times, and why our anthem is "Hatikvah", The Hope.
From Ian:
Elliott Abrams:
How Israel Can Win in Gaza - and Deter Iran
In the wake of Iran's attack on Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles last weekend, Israel must decide how to calibrate its response. One part of Israel's response must be to stay the course in Gaza, despite tremendous pressure from the U.S. and others to retreat. That means entering the southern Gaza city of Rafah and eliminating the Hamas brigades and leaders based there.
In 2006, Hizbullah attacked Israel, and the George W. Bush administration, in which I was serving at the time, gave the Israelis strong support - but only for a couple of weeks, after which Washington pressured Israel to end the war by extending assurances that have never been met and never seemed likely to be.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006 included an end to arms transfers by any state to Hizbullah and total Lebanese army control of Lebanon's south. Neither stipulation has ever been enforced - a testament to the dangers of relying on a paper peace rather than conditions on the ground. That is why Israel is resisting international pressure, especially from Washington, for a ceasefire that would leave Hamas in control.
Israelis across the ideological spectrum agree that Hamas must be crushed because they see the fight as an existential conflict. All of Israel's enemies are watching to see whether Israel can fully recover from the Oct. 7 attack. If they conclude that it cannot, the Jewish state will find itself in mortal peril. Israel gained Arab partners in the region through demonstrations of strength, not acts of restraint.
Polls make it clear that both Israelis and Palestinians are highly unenthusiastic about and wary of the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gallup polls found that 65% of Israelis opposed the two-state solution and only 25% supported it. Among Palestinians, polls that Gallup conducted before Oct. 7 found that 72% of Palestinians opposed the two-state solution and only 24% supported it.
Moreover, the PA lacks the ability to lead a Palestinian state that would be free and democratic, have a decent and effective government, and build a prosperous economy. Palestinian nationalism still seems to be more about destroying the Jewish state than about building a Palestinian one. In addition, an independent Palestine would represent yet another route through which Iran would seek to attack Israel.
In last weekend's mammoth Iranian aerial assault, the Islamic Republic deployed hundreds of drones and rockets against Israel. Israelis understand that their country's long-term survival depends on reasserting deterrence by striking back: displaying resilience, determination, and military prowess.
Caroline Glick:
What happens when children seize the wheel
Since Saturday night, U.S. officials and supportive commentators have played up the “international coalition” that came together to prevent Iran’s missiles from causing harm to Israel. This ad hoc group, which included Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it is said, are proof that Israel can depend on America and that if Israel follows Washington’s directives, it will enjoy peace and security even as Iran grows in power, and its proxies prevail, thanks to America’s protection.
But the truth is far different. The Saudis and the Jordanians are directly threatened by Iran. Unlike the children running U.S. policies, the Jordanians and Saudis were aghast at Iran’s assault, which they rightly understood was not a tit for tat, but an unprecedented escalation of Iran’s war. They realized that the attack was a sign that Iran believes that thanks to the Biden administration, it is now immune from counterattack, to the point where it dares to attack Israel directly. Their intervention wasn’t on Israel’s behalf, per se. It was self-defense, as officials from both countries have stated.
The U.S. posture in this war has rattled Israel and the U.S.’s Sunni allies to their core. Like Nasrallah, all of them now understand that while the United States is the most powerful actor in the region, it is also delusional. It fails to understand the reality of what is happening. Washington’s policies for contending with the war that Biden and his top officials refuse to acknowledge are just making things worse.
If Israel fails to defeat Hamas in Gaza, then there will no longer be any restraints on Iranian and Iranian-proxy aggression against Israel. And there will also be no restraints on Iran’s efforts to overthrow the regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. If the United States successfully forces Israel to stand down in the face of Iran’s shocking attack, then that attack will be the baseline for future assaults—conventional and unconventional—against Israel and the Sunni Arab states.
Iran itself is so certain that this is the case that its top officials are now speaking openly about using nuclear weapons. As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported, on April 7, Iranian nuclear scientist Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri said in an interview with Iranian television that Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei can change his religious ruling forbidding the production of an atomic bomb whenever he wishes. Aghamiri said that Iran’s nuclear capabilities “are high,” and that once a country has nuclear capabilities, making a nuclear bomb “is not complicated.”
The administration’s refusal to recognize the existential nature of the war Iran and its proxies are now waging against Israel places Israel in an existential dilemma.
Israel today is compelled to decide between two options. It can fight the war to win it, in Iran and Gaza, first and foremost, and risk a rupture of relations with the United States.
Or, it can lose the war and accept the position of a U.S. protectorate, with the full knowledge that the United States will not permit its protectorates to challenge Iranian hegemony.
In other words, if Israel fails to risk a rupture in relations with the United States, it will accept a position that will lead to its destruction.
Matthew Continetti:
Biden's Bad Advice for Israel—And America
In statecraft, defense without retaliation is exceedingly dangerous. It leads to a false sense of security. It emboldens the aggressor. This isn't academic international relations theory. This is Hamas 2024.
For over a decade, Israel believed it could disengage from the Gaza Strip by relying on its layered missile defenses and periodic "mowing the grass" air campaigns to degrade terrorist capabilities. The two-pronged strategy would hold Hamas in check. The promise of economic integration, with Palestinian workers crossing from Gaza into Israel, might even promote reform within the Strip.
Such was the logic behind the "Conceptzia" that governed Israeli policy toward Hamas.
The Conceptzia died on October 7. Land-based missile defenses such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling are remarkably effective. They have saved lives. But they haven't changed the nature, aims, and objectives of Hamas. They changed its tactics.
To protect its personnel and weapons from the Israeli air force, Hamas built a submerged state of tunnels and spider holes. Meanwhile, Hamas's leadership planned the surprise land, air, and sea attack that killed 1,300 Israelis, wounded thousands, and took hundreds captive.
You can shield your population from harm, but threats will remain until the source of the attacks is neutralized. That was the lesson of October 7. It should be the takeaway from April 13.
If Iran's attack goes unanswered, a new precedent will be set in the region. Fire whatever you want toward Israel, and so long as we intercept the projectiles, you won't pay a big price. Such an outcome would be a disaster. No sovereign state should be forced to accept such vulnerability. Yet that is precisely what will happen if Israel takes the "win" as President Biden suggests.
A real win would reestablish deterrence against Israel's and America's enemies. It would make Iran think twice before launching any more drones in Israel's direction. And the way to reestablish deterrence is to ignore the arms of the octopus and go straight for its head.
Take away something Iran's leaders hold dear—their nuclear program. By destroying Iran's nuclear infrastructure, you not only exact a heavy cost for the regime's malign behavior. You guarantee Israel's security.
After all, why did America come to Israel's defense but not to Ukraine's? Both nations are under assault. The difference is Israel's assailant has no nuclear weapons. Ukraine's enemy has thousands.
Would America coordinate a similar operation to defend Israel if Iran had nukes? Maybe a future president would do that. This president would not.
I understand Netanyahu's position. A superpower is not easily dismissed. Especially when that superpower—despite counterproductive rhetoric and diplomatic incoherence—continues to deliver unconditional military aid for operations against Hamas. Especially when that superpower helped Israel fend off the Iranian attack. Israel wants to keep America on its side, where America belongs.
Yet lines must be drawn. Leaving Iran to fight another day, and leaving Hamas intact in Rafah, weaken the state of Israel and diminish the future of the Jewish people. Talk all you want, Mr. President. But if you call this a win, God help us if we lose.
From Ian:
Phyllis Chesler:
Behold the 21st-century boycott
Some 73 years after Adolf Hitler fired Jewish professors from German universities—and burned and banned Jewish books—British academics were leading the pack against Israelis.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science condemned the British boycott, as did one of my groups, the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. We launched our own petition. Many who signed were professors of physics, medicine, math and computer science who were not as “politicized” as those in the social sciences and humanities. And many of them described the British boycott as “shameful,” “repugnant,” “indefensible,” “anti-academic” and “dangerous group thinking.”
By 2010, the leading British journal of medicine, The Lancet, published a scurrilous article that blamed indigenous gender apartheid practices (wife-beating, etc.) among Middle Eastern Arabs on the so-called “Israeli occupation.” Their so-called study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority and was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. No control group based in Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia (where similar violence against women was normalized) was used. The Lancet did it again in 2014, by publishing an Open Letter that accused Israel-only of crimes it had not committed. This letter had also been funded by known Palestinian terrorist organizations.
The Lancet has long been viewed as a distinguished journal of science. Increasingly, their work descended into political propaganda which, no doubt, has influenced (or bullied) the coming generations.
Recently, I have been told about some authors in the West who were discouraged from writing—or submitting—anything “Jewish,” be it about Judaism or Israel. Publishers are shying away from this topic.
This is where it all started—in the academy. It influenced two or three generations of professors and students, journalists and international organizations, and is now flourishing in the streets, jihad-style, at loud and aggressive anti-Israel demonstrations all across America and Europe. Cheers for Iran after it attacked Israel with missiles and drones. Remember, there were similar shouts of joy for the Hamas demons on Oct. 7.
I must note that each successive wave of Israel-blaming took place when the Jewish state was under attack and fought back to save itself. That is again the case now.
Seth Mandel:
Media Revive the Classic ‘Jewish Oppressor’ Stereotype
So here’s how the Washington Post frames the Rutgers situation: Pro-Hamas people are having their lives ruined by Jews who highlight their public comments, and this Rutgers fellow is an example not only of that but of essentially doxxing. (Doxxing means to reveal personal identifying information that is either nonpublic or requires enough effort to find that it is, in a practical sense, nonpublic.)
Here’s what actually happened. Members of the Student Bar Association sent their group chat anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages after the Oct. 7 massacre, and an Orthodox Jewish law student in the chat, Yoel Ackerman, responded. He shared the messages with the Rutgers Jewish Law Students Association. For this, the law school opened disciplinary proceedings against Ackerman, with the law school dean telling her colleagues “we have a Jewish law student seeking to take and publish the names of those he deems to be supporting Hamas.” He was then subject to a Sovietesque impeachment hearing from the Student Bar Association. Ackerman, without receiving sufficient explanation, was berated for three hours in what amounted to administrative harassment. In order to dispense of their troublesome Jew, the SBA then moved to suspend its own constitution in order to expel Ackerman.
That’s when Rutgers University stepped in, and briefly suspended the SBA while it could sort out the mess that Hamas propagandists and their enthusiastic supporters among the deans had made of the school. The SBA was soon reinstated.
This, the Washington Post tells us, is an example of a Jew oppressing the poor gentile.
This is not biased reporting. It is Jew-baiting propaganda with a long and very disturbing history. The rest of the article, meanwhile, is biased reporting: Verma simply launders the exterminationist language of domestic extremists into legitimate criticism of a foreign government.
The whole article is science fiction. But the apology the paper owes Ackerman is very real.
Congress must pass Define to Defeat Act as definitive stand against antisemitism
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has been embraced by President Biden, former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, 36 U.S. states, and dozens of other countries — not to mention the vast majority of Jews across every spectrum. It underwent a comprehensive, decade-plus-long review conducted by a multitude of experts and is the only definition with an actual track record of demonstrable effectiveness in curbing anti-Jewish hate and bigotry.
As it relates to this act, the IHRA definition of antisemitism also contains the appropriate caveats and carefully balanced safeguards that take into account the importance of nuance and context in situations that involve allegations of discriminatory intent.
For example, the definition makes clear that criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic and that all of the examples are not meant to be dispositive but rather are the types of things that could, taking into account the overall context, be evidence of antisemitism.
The Define to Defeat Act builds on the bipartisan momentum created by Rep. Mike Lawler’s Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify Executive Order 13899 and require the Department of Education to make use of the IHRA definition when assessing unlawful discriminatory behavior under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Mr. Lawler, who has long been a leader on this issue, was working on that bill well before Oct. 7. Since that time, however, it has unfortunately only become clearer that the Jewish community needs the protections clarified in other contexts as well. Hopefully, that bipartisan support will continue; it is hard to imagine someone being supportive of Jewish people being properly protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act but not, for example, under Title VII of that same law.
According to the FBI, the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States are committed against Jewish people. That number is on the rise despite the fact that Jews make up only about 2% of the population. This trend is terrifying, and there is much work to be done to defeat it.
That work starts with defining the problem, and God willing, Congress, led by the members from New York, will now do that.
From Ian:
The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy
Just because you shoot at someone and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.
Then again, virtually every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)
Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where IRGC terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.
Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.
Now, it is something of a cliché to contend that Israel must be right 100 percent of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. The lo-fi Hamas attack last year was a devastating failure for the Jewish state and its leadership. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.
Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”
Meanwhile, Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. Anyone who’s paid five minutes of attention to Israeli politics knows that Netanyahu is frustratingly cautious. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.
We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.
Despite what Obama’s retreads demand.
Richard Goldberg:
The path that led to Iran’s attack on Israel was one of US appeasement
Amazingly, America became even less hawkish than the Europeans on Iran in some respects. What Iran learnt from all of this is that it can get away with anything. The regime can keep moving towards that nuclear threshold and still get offers of economic relief.
It was only the murder of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s “morality police” and the protests this sparked across the country that briefly halted the appeasement.
Last year, the US offered to open up spigots of money while allowing the regime to trade oil freely with China. In exchange, they asked Iran to stay below the 90 per cent weapons-grade uranium threshold, to not send short range ballistic missiles to Russia and to stop attacking Americans in the Middle East.
Iran came into a major windfall as oil exports rose above two million barrels per day for the first time since the JCPOA period, and $6 billion was released to them as part of a ransom payment to free five American hostages.
Then October 7 hit. What was the response of the US, the UK, and everyone else? Nothing. We downplayed Iran’s connection to Hamas and insisted the Islamic regime was not behind this attack.
A UN Security Council embargo on missile sales to Iran was due to expire ten days after October 7. All the UK, France and Germany, with US support, had to do was send a letter to the Security Council to trigger a snapback sanctions resolution that would have stopped that embargo from expiring. But they didn’t.
Perhaps they fear escalation. But again, what is Iran learning? A $10 billion sanctions waiver allowing the Iraqi government to buy energy from the regime got renewed in November a month after October 7 and it got renewed again last month.
Meanwhile, three Americans have been killed in Jordan by Iran-backed militias, missiles are now raining down on the Red Sea from the Houthis, and Israel is being attacked from Lebanon.
International pressure is applied to Israel while we see ever greater escalation from Iran. Over the past three years, we have allowed an arc of accommodation that has emboldened the Islamic Republic and increased the chances of regional war. It must end now.
WSJ Editorial:
Hamas Rejects Biden’s Hostage Deal—Again
After months of negotiations over the release of 40 hostages among the women, older men and the sick, Hamas now says it can produce only 20, and it wants far more Palestinian terrorists in return. It demands 30 for each civilian hostage and 50 for each captive female Israeli soldier, including 30 terrorists who are serving life sentences.
As usual, the needs of Palestinian civilians mean nothing to Hamas, but how about the needs of the U.S. President? Mr. Biden staked his Gaza strategy on coercing Israel to make the concessions to get a deal and cease-fire. But the holdup wasn’t on the Israeli side.
The more desperate the President appeared for a cease-fire, the more distant it became. When he blamed Israel for all civilian suffering and demanded new Israeli concessions, Hamas raised its demands.
“Thank you to the Americans,” as the Israeli commentator Amit Segal put it on Tuesday, “for your deep understanding of the principles of the Middle Eastern bazaar.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment.
Hamas scorns a deal because the President has given it reason to expect to get the cease-fire it wants without releasing any hostages. Mr. Biden had been slowly delinking the two while creating a public breach with Israel. Doubtless he thought about the signal these steps would send to Dearborn, Mich. Did he think about the signal he is sending Hamas about the five American hostages who may still be alive?
Hamas is unlikely to cut a deal until it feels the knife on its neck, as it did when Israel stormed Gaza City. That yielded the release of 105 hostages. But since Mr. Biden declared himself Protector of Rafah, Hamas’s final stronghold, and Israel withdrew most of its troops, the odds of a deal have declined.
The best hope on the horizon is from Iran’s miscalculation in striking Israel directly. This gives Mr. Biden an opportunity to reset his policy and exert real pressure. When Rafah is on the table, and the terrorists in fancy suits are threatened with expulsion from Qatar, there will again be a reason to talk.
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
How woke leftists became cheerleaders for Iran
The truth is that Iran has been laying violent siege to Israel for decades. Through its proxies, it has slaughtered thousands of Israelis. The fascistic pogrom of 7 October was the bloody handiwork of an anti-Semitic army backed by Iran. Two other Iran-backed militias – Hezbollah and the Houthis – have fired hundreds of missiles at Israel since 7 October. The idea that Israel’s bombing of Iranian military men in Damascus was unprovoked, out of the blue, a cunning ploy to drag poor little Iran into a war, is a grotesque inversion of reality. Iran had already declared war on Israel. And visited war on Israel. And made clear its desire to destroy Israel. It isn’t even coy. ‘Death to Israel!’, Iranians cry at regime-sponsored gatherings. The same words are emblazoned on the literal flag of the Houthis movement that does Iran’s dirty work in Yemen.
Surely, it makes more sense to see Israel’s Damascus attack as a ‘retaliatory strike’? Retaliation for the unspeakable barbarism of 7 October, for Hezbollah’s missiles, for the Houthis’ virulently anti-Semitic warmongering? Those who rage against Israel and make excuses for Iran are about as far from being anti-imperialists as you can get. Rather, they’ve thrown their lot in with Iranian imperialism, with the theocratic tyranny’s deployment of war, terror and political favour to the end of fortifying its regional influence. Whatever their placards might say, these activists are objectively pro-war, objectively pro-domination.
The Western left’s blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel’s actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East’s fate, while the rest of them – Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran – are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel’s vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says ‘white’ people are powerful and ‘brown’ people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too.
The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its ‘Zionist’ oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran’s crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself. In encouraging our young to hate their own societies, we’ve made them moral fodder for a far worse society.
Seth Mandel:
Who, Exactly, Does the Hezbollah-Flag-Waving Dirtbag Represent?
Politicians used to chase the Soccer Mom vote. Now they appear to be chasing the Execute-the-Soccer-Mom vote.
Also among the demonstrators were those wearing Hamas headbands. Hamas is the Gaza-based version of Hezbollah and it started the current war by murdering and kidnapping Americans and Israelis. These protesters are ostentatiously anti-American: They were burning American flags and yelling “death to America.”
Again, non-rhetorical question for the politicians who cower before those who yell “death to America”: How many of your constituents do they represent? What is it you stand to lose by forfeiting their vote? What slice of your political coalition chants “death to America”? And why, pray tell, are the opinions of Lebanese terrorists so important to your assessment of the war in Gaza?
We hear a lot about the way these folks intend to deter President Biden’s reelection prospects, which is why the president sent his aides to try to placate a large group of them in Michigan. Can the president explain why he wants the vote of somebody who burns American flags on behalf of a group holding Americans hostage?
The political behavior of a fair number of Democrats has changed in accordance with the demands of these groups of protesters. That is what you do when you must be inclusive of all parts of your electoral coalition. So don’t just obliquely refer to the demonstrators; claim them. Tell us what they mean to you, and why you need them, and why U.S. policy should be shaped by them.
Or stop running from them and start standing up for yourselves.
The News Media Has Helped Normalize Hamas
As a former foreign correspondent in the Middle East, I've frequently found myself defending the industry with Israelis who charge media bias. But as I observe the cluelessness of Hamas apologists worldwide, I realize we have failed to tell the story of a jihadi outfit considered a terrorist group by the U.S.
Support for Hamas in this war is not support for the Palestinian cause of an independent state on a share of the Holy Land. That is not only not the cause of Hamas - it is precisely what Hamas has for decades been laboring to prevent. Hamas is not in power in Gaza due to elections but because of a coup. It runs a quasi-theocratic mafia state where opposition will get you killed, and it seeks eternal war till total victory. Since the 1990s, whenever there were peace talks, Hamas tried to scuttle them with terrorism.
In the case of the Gaza war, the media has largely stuck to its instincts for impartiality: "Both sides" have their narratives, and both have good and bad. One may be a terrorist group and the other a Western-leaning democracy, but in this era of progressive decolonization narratives, an association with the West will not get you very far with much of the Western media.
Hamas is a violent fundamentalist movement that seeks not just the demise of Israel but also, with its jihadi fellow travelers, of the West. Hamas and its accomplices share none of the values that drive the modern world, from respect for human rights to freedom of speech to the rule of law. Are so many Westerners too feeble-minded to get this?
Some argue that no one appointed journalists to connect the dots for people, and that the wisest approach would be to just "report the facts." But when the result is the normalization of a monstrosity like Hamas, that is malpractice.
Pro-Hamas ‘Journalists’ Blur the Line between Coverage and Propaganda
The latest high-profile Gaza-based journalist to have her terror support on full display is Hind Khoudary, who has even been profiled by the New York Times, among other papers. After briefly examining her social-media pages, I posted a thread last week on X (formerly Twitter) that highlighted some of the publicly available content from Khoudary’s social-media accounts to show that she was unfit to don a press vest, including her affiliation with the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Switzerland-based organization with deep ties to Hamas, and the fact that she has repeatedly glorified terrorists and violence. Such behavior should be completely unacceptable for any media outlet using Khoudary’s work (as well as for the United Nations World Food Programme, for which she works as a content producer).
Unsurprisingly, upon posting the findings about Khoudary, I faced the wrath of pro-Hamas activists for supposedly putting a “kill target” on her and insisting that I should be held responsible if she were to be killed. All because I simply reposted her own content.
A similar situation occurred when the founder and editor of the Free Press, Bari Weiss, brought attention to disturbing posts by Refaat Alareer, a Gazan professor, poet, writer, activist, and journalist who once tweeted, under the account “Gaza Writes Back,” “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are.” Weiss was subject to the mob’s ire for flagging a post in which Alareer mocked babies who were slaughtered by terrorists on October 7. When Alareer was later killed in an Israeli airstrike, radicals unjustly placed the blame on Weiss.
Journalists in conflict zones bear a significant responsibility. Ideally, they serve as objective sources from which the public can derive reliable information on which to base their own opinions. However, the reality often falls short of this ideal.
Given these alarming examples, perhaps the most troubling revelation is that the objectivity of a journalist, once the cornerstone of trustworthy reporting, is no longer a chief concern for many. This shift, evident in the media’s acceptance and even glorification of biased narratives during the current war, underscores a worrying trend in the dissemination of news and information.
In a world increasingly fragmented by biased narratives, the role of journalism becomes even more critical. And in such a world, contrary to the claims of some vocal online activists, journalists should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny.
From Ian:
Benny Morris:
Iran Contra Israel
While everyone understands that actual American military power remains robust, there is a perception of America’s weakness of resolve and reluctance to use force, rooted in two pre-Biden episodes. The first took place under President Obama in 2013, when Biden was vice-president, when Obama warned Syria’s President Bashar Assad not to use chemical weapons against his opponents in the Syrian Civil War. Despite Obama’s warning that this was a “red line,” Assad went ahead and used chemical weapons anyway and Obama refrained from doing anything in response. The second episode took place in September 2019. In a kind of preview of the recent assault on Israel, Iran launched cruise missiles and drones against Saudi Arabia’s oil installations, causing major damage, yet President Trump did nothing to help America’s ally. (In the 14 April assault, the Iranians launched more than 10 times as many missiles: at least 110 ballistic missiles, 30 or so cruise missiles, and more than 170 drones.)
To this catalogue of incidents highlighting American irresolution and lack of resolve, we should add Washington’s striking reluctance to provide Ukraine with F-16 fighters and various advanced munitions and, of course, America’s unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, culminating in the shameful retreat from Kabul. This is not how Great Powers behave.
In the context of the current Middle East war, Biden said “don’t” back in October, in the hope of deterring Iranian and Hezbollah involvement, just after Hamas’s savage assault on southern Israel. Washington even sent a naval task force to the region. Nonetheless, Hezbollah and the Houthis, obviously directed or at least authorised by Tehran, went ahead and launched their wars of attrition against northern Israel and in the Bab al Manad straits—and the two groups have persisted in, respectively, launching daily rockets at Israeli military positions and communities and in launching rockets against both Israeli and non-Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Indeed, the day before their missile strike against Israel, the Iranians, in defiance of international law, brazenly hijacked a Philippines ship in the Straits of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Clearly, Tehran does not fear Washington’s wrath.
How exactly the Iranian attack of 14 April and its frustration will affect the war in Gaza is unclear. The Iranians may have wanted to signal their support to Hamas—even though the attack appears to have been mainly motivated by Iranian calculations regarding their own position in the Middle East. Since launching its assault on Israel’s southern border communities on 7 October, Hamas has hoped to widen its war with Israel and ignite a regional war, involving Iran and its other proxies, who might rain down missiles on Israel from the north, east and south. The mini wars of attrition Hezbollah is waging from Lebanon and the Houthis from Yemen have only partly fulfilled Hamas’s hopes. Perhaps the Hamas leaders see the Iranian missile strike on Israel as a further token of regional support for their war.
On Israel’s part, the country has certainly drawn comfort from the fact that Jordan helped to block the Iranian strike (the Jordanians reportedly shot down several Iranian drones), and Washington certainly views Jordan’s cooperation as a sign that its plans to consolidate an Arab Sunni bloc to impede Iran’s ambitions to dominate the Middle East are bearing fruit. We should expect an improvement in Israeli–Jordanian relations over the coming weeks.
But the key question is whether Israel will agree to join the emergent bloc, which Biden has been advocating since 7 October, even if it entails accepting a two-state peace settlement with the Palestinians (which would imply eventual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and perhaps East Jerusalem) and allowing the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority to take over the Gaza Strip after Israel completes its withdrawal when the war with Hamas comes to an end.
So far, Netanyahu has agreed to neither of these conditions and is unlikely to agree to them in the future, given his desire to maintain his right-wing coalition government. This is a major reason why Washington—together with Israel’s liberals and left-wingers—is seeking Netanyahu’s ouster as quickly as possible. The problem is that Netanyahu’s ruling coalition controls 64 seats in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset (parliament) and, unless a handful of coalition members defect, there is no way to unseat Netanyahu and his coalition before the general elections scheduled for 2026. Hence, Biden’s geopolitical plans are out of synch with internal Israeli politics.
Meanwhile, Israel has withdrawn most of its forces from the Gaza Strip, has allowed tens of thousands of Gazans to move from the southern end of the Strip back to their homes in the north, seems undecided about conquering the town of Rafah and its environs—the last piece of Gaza still under full Hamas control—and has reached a dead end in the negotiations for the return of the remaining hundred or so hostages whom Hamas abducted from Israel on 7 October. So far, Hamas has refused any deal and insists that Israel must definitively end the war and pull all its forces out of the Strip before Hamas will even contemplate an exchange of hostages for Palestinian terrorists (or “freedom fighters”) in Israeli prisons.
The “Don’t” Doctrine
This capitulation to aggression against a key ally embodies the flaws of Biden’s “don’t” doctrine: words followed by minimal action toward adversaries, and pressure on allies not to respond to attacks. It’s an approach that recalls the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the tepid response to Houthi terrorist-pirates attacking American-owned vessels and destabilizing crucial shipping lanes. Thanks to the “don’t” doctrine, Iran has established a new status quo: it can fire scores of rockets and drones at an American ally and emerge materially unscathed.
The only saving grace of the “don’t” doctrine, and the associated capitulation to Iranian aggression, is that it inadvertently highlights an important truth often overlooked by the U.S. government, media, and punditry: that the Iranian regime is fundamentally responsible for the ongoing chaos in the Middle East and the deaths in Israel and Gaza.
Moreover, the situation underscores the potential of the Abraham Accords, the series of agreements seeking to normalize Israel’s relations with Arab states. Jordan’s and Saudi Arabia’s participation in the joint defense effort against Iran’s attack demonstrates how security cooperation between Israel and Arab states can enhance regional stability—a potential nearly derailed by the Biden administration’s initial reluctance to embrace the accords.
The U.S. urgently needs a shift in strategy. Biden must abandon his ineffective “don’t” doctrine and adopt a more assertive regional posture. This does not mean deploying American ground troops, a move widely opposed in the U.S. and Israel alike. It does, however, mean rallying Democratic support for unconditional defensive weapon sales to Israel, allowing Israel to strike back at Iran, reinstating the embargoes on Iranian drones and missiles that expired in 2020, and initiating a broad international sanctions regime to isolate Iran further.
Unfortunately, the G–7 summit convened by President Biden to address Iran’s attack resulted only in a strongly worded statement condemning the Tehran regime. The administration needs to do much better than this.
Aviva Klompas:
Biden said 'don't,' but Iran attacked anyway. How should Israel respond now?
Biden wants diplomatic response to Iran attack
The question is, now what?
President Joe Biden has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States won’t support a counterattack on Iran, according to a White House official. In a statement released Saturday night, Biden said the United States seeks a “diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
But what message does that send Iran?
Understandably, nobody wants to spark a regional war or, given the tinderbox that is the Middle East, the next world war. For that reason, Israel has until now withheld from directly confronting Iran.
At the same time, a tepid response to this weekend’s large-scale assault reinforces the message that there are no real consequences for Iranian aggression. The regime already assessed as much when it decided to launch a direct attack.
Iranian leaders have seen Israel’s allies repeatedly backtrack on their “unwavering” commitment to Israel.
The ayatollahs have watched in recent days as the United States allowed the United Nations to pass a cease-fire resolution that didn’t tie the end of hostilities to freeing hostages. They have seen the calls on Capitol Hill to halt military aid to Israel spread beyond the left-wing fringe.
And they’ve taken note that Canada and Sweden resumed funding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees despite that group’s ties to terror.
On Friday, when Biden was asked about Iran’s plans to attack Israel, his response was: "Don’t.”
But Iran did.
The regime is dangerously emboldened, having already destabilized Iraq and Syria and empowered its terror proxies to exert power in Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza. Iran has learned there are no red lines. Not for financing and directing terror groups. Not for disrupting maritime trade in the Red Sea. Not even for killing three American soldiers in Jordan earlier this year.
How will Iran be reined in after latest aggression?
Where, then, is the red line?
Iran will continue to foment unrest and destabilize the Middle East unless there are consequential repercussions for its aggression.
Now is the time to finally show resolve and deliver a morally unambiguous lesson that the ceaseless war fomented by Iran and its radical Islamist proxies is neither normal nor acceptable.
How Biden helps Iran pay for its terror by refusing to enforce current sanctions
President Biden has spent his three years in office making it clear to Tehran’s terrorist regime that America won’t make it pay a price for attacking our allies, bankrolling Hamas and expanding Iranian nuclear capabilities.
In fact, by refusing to enforce sanctions already on the books, Biden is helping Iran foot the bill for its aggression, including the first direct attack on Israel in the regime’s 45 years in power.
Each year since Biden took office, Iran has steadily increased oil exports — its most lucrative revenue source — following a historic collapse of sales during the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure campaign.
The increase is no accident. “U.S. officials privately acknowledge they’ve gradually relaxed some enforcement of sanctions on Iranian oil sales,” Bloomberg revealed last year.
This month, Iran boosted oil production to an estimated five-year high of 3.4 million barrels per day — primarily for China, which buys the commodity at a discount.
From oil alone, the regime has earned upwards of $100 billion — and a handy cushion from the consequences of its own actions.
Another source of Tehran’s revenue is liquified petroleum gas, which the regime has started to export in record quantities, rendering it the top seller in the region.
In public, the administration denies it is going easy on Iran. Accordingly, the sanctions it should be enforcing are still on the books: specifically, regulations requiring the administration to sanction individuals and foreign financial institutions that trade in Tehran-origin commodities.
The administration has also left in place Executive Order 13846, issued by Donald Trump, which provides a toolkit to penalize anyone involved in the “purchase, acquisition, sale, transport, or marketing” of regime petroleum.
So why isn’t the administration acting?
In a word: appeasement.
Team Biden — populated by many Team Obama veterans — believe dogmatically that they can keep the Middle East quiet and finally pivot to Asia by paying Iran to behave.
The Oct. 7 massacre proved otherwise — Hamas depends on Tehran’s reliable provision of funding, training and weapons.
The administration’s flawed ideology has also led Washington to pull its punches across a spectrum of Iran-backed threats: the regime’s advancing nuclear program; dealing with Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militias; the Houthis’ attacks on global shipping; and the unprecedented arming of Russia with missiles and drones for use against Ukraine.
Tehran is more capable of attacking the United States, Israel and our allies thanks to its windfall from US sanctions nonenforcement.
From Ian:
John Podhoretz:
Israel’s Splendid Isolation
So maybe there is a certain type of rueful wisdom to be taken from these undeniable statistics. Maybe the thing is, Israel doesn’t need the support of the international community and the Council on Foreign Relations and the panel on Washington Week in Review and the jawboners at the Aspen Institute and the billionaires who drink ambrosia from the boots of tyrants at Davos. Maybe the thing is, Israel is a nation that has had this miraculous rise because it has a purpose, which is something most other countries do not have or need, and something that Thomas Friedman and his ilk are (again) too unnerved by to understand.
Israel is engaged in a purpose that is both world-historical and outside history. It exists as a refuge and haven and homeland for the world’s most stateless people, and its claim to statehood is not just due to its need for protection but based in part on a literally transcendent claim. That’s why I say it exists outside history as well.
To ensure the continuity of its existence, Israel must act. First, it must beat back those who would destroy it and who have been coming at it relentlessly since the day it was founded—genocidal evildoers whose Amalekite faces are now showing themselves even in America, really for the first time in our history.
Second, it must not only survive but thrive, because the fulfillment of its purpose depends upon it slowly making Jewish power a simple and undeniable and enduring reality in a world that has not known such a thing before—and is, as I said before, unnerved by it.
That was, in fact, happening during the 2010s with the Abraham Accords—until that progress was halted in part by a bizarrely feckless Biden administration that decided to hinge our national policy toward the world’s most important oil-exporting nation on the murder of a single person in a consulate in Turkey several years earlier. The fact that Israel had grown the way it had grown and shown how to be an innovative nation in a region mired in backwardness was its calling card.
But perhaps it was too focused on hurrying time along. For over the course of the past decade, Israel somehow found itself, like the sightless Samson in John Milton’s imagining, “eyeless in Gaza”—and made itself vulnerable to the worst single event in its history. At least Samson had been blinded by enemy Philistines; Israel’s leaders blinded themselves. They didn’t see the gathering danger because they wanted to look elsewhere and do other things.
Its response has, yet again, isolated Israel. That isolation is wearing away at the determination of some Israelis to see this war through to victory or is causing them to despair that there can be victory. It is a hateful thing, the isolation. It is unjust, it is foul, it is hypocritical, and it is, of course, anti-Semitic at its root.
But as the past six decades have shown us, when it comes to Israel’s purpose as both a change agent in history and a representative of a force outside of history, the isolation doesn’t matter at all. They—we—are not isolated. They—we—are chosen.
Christine Rosen:
Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism
In fact, the decision to downplay the anti-Semitic threat from the left is deliberate. Left-leaning media do not like to cover the behavior of their own, as the inconsistent coverage of the Jew-baiting members of the Democratic Party’s “Squad” during the past several years attests. Mainstream reporters at outlets like the New York Times take great pains to provide context and explanations for Representative Ilhan Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, for example. A 2019 piece gave Omar and her defenders ample space to claim she was being unfairly targeted for criticism because she was a progressive Muslim woman while glossing over the fact that she had repeatedly accused Jews of having dual loyalties.
Amid the current conflict, it’s evident there is tacit agreement among most in the mainstream media that because Israel is defending itself by trying to root out Hamas in Gaza, the behavior of protesters is somehow justifiable and acceptable—but only because it involves Israel and the Jews.
This goes well beyond the deliberately misleading stories and factual errors about the war that have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post. As Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff outlined in National Review, in a deep dive of the Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, the newspaper “has been a case study in moral confusion and anti-Israel bias” and has “violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.”
Similarly, a recent story in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, a long-time editor and reporter at National Public Radio, described how NPR “approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms,” which meant “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”
By contrast, imagine if an elderly African-American civil-rights activist were being heckled and bullied with racist taunts while trying to speak before a red-state city-council meeting about the need to properly recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Every major newspaper, magazine, and television and cable network would air nonstop coverage of the event.
The double standard at work in mainstream media has become impossible to ignore and is a sign of a deep moral failing in the profession of journalism: When it comes to threats and attacks against Jews, integrity is sacrificed on the altar of ideological conformity. Thus the self-proclaimed seekers of truth became handmaidens to barbarity and the world’s oldest and most destructive hatred.
Seth Mandel:
The Evil Campaign to Remove Jews from the Public Square
In her book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn recounts the furious response she received once when she mentioned, in a lecture, that the common story of immigration officials changing Jewish family names at Ellis Island is a myth. Immigrants’ names were taken from ship manifests, which were compiled using the immigrants’ own passports. Inspectors were there to confirm, not record, each passenger’s name.
Name-changers in the early-20th century were often Jews, but they were much more likely to be already-settled middle-aged parents of children who were pursuing a trade or a degree in higher education. In 1932, according to the historian Kirsten Fermaglich, 65 percent of those petitioning to change their name had Jewish-sounding last names. Most of the name changes—for Jews and non-Jews alike—at this time were motivated by the desire “to abandon ‘foreign’ names that were ‘difficult to pronounce and spell’ and to adopt instead more ‘American’ names,” Fermaglich writes. “These individuals were hoping to shed the ethnic markers that disadvantaged them in American society by taking on unmarked, ordinary names that would go unnoticed.”
This came at a time when public opinion in the United States had been turning against immigrants for a decade. Especially Jewish immigrants. A restrictive immigration bill would become law (over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto) in 1917. Momentum would soon get rolling toward another, even more restrictive one in 1924. Because immigration law was country-of-origin focused, there could be no official “Jewish quota.” But there were quotas for the parts of Europe that Jews were seeking to leave, and those quotas could be reduced in favor of more “desirable” countries of origin.
“The Hebrew race… in spite of long residence in Europe, is still as it has always been an Asiatic race,” thundered prominent immigration restrictionist Prescott Hall. Bolshevism, he said, was a “movement of oriental Tatar tribes led by Asiatic Semites against the Nordic bourgeoisie.” The historian Howard Sachar quotes a U.S. foreign-service officer inveighing against the Polish Jews seeking to come to America: “They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Most of them “lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit, and the majority of this percentage is mentally incapable of acquiring it.”
That last line was intended to convey the point that assimilation into American ways was impossible for Jews. Therefore, one was right to be suspicious of them—whether or not they were born in America. Thus no one with a Jewish-sounding last name was spared the suspicion that he might not ever be truly American. Clubs and hotels and even residential neighborhoods tightened their policies excluding Jews. In 1922, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell repeatedly encountered potential donors who demanded to know how the president planned to “leave our university free of this plague.” Official quotas were still controversial, but the Ivies ultimately figured out the same thing the congressional crafters of immigration quotas did: You could limit your intake of Jews by adjusting geographic quotas. By the 1930s, Harvard had dropped its share of Jewish enrollment from over 25 percent to 10 percent, and Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Swarthmore had gotten their Jewish share into the single digits.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
Strangling Israel slowly
What country other than Israel would be told by the so-called civilised world that it must not respond to an onslaught of more than 300 cruise and ballistic missiles and armed drones fired at the entire country?
If a minute fraction of such an attack were to be mounted against America or Britain, they would declare themselves at war and destroy the enemy before it could attack them again. It’s only Israel that is not to be allowed to defend itself in the same way.
After Sunday night’s attack, in which Iran stopped hiding behind its proxies and revealed itself openly for the first time as the actual enemy of Israel and the free world, Israel reportedly intended to attack Iran but was stopped by US President Joe Biden in a phone call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden’s public comments through his spokesman were grotesque. Israel, he said, should “take the win”and not “escalate tensions” with Iran since the attack had caused minimal damage and casualties as a result of Israel’s “military superiority”.
So because Israel fended off that attack it must now do nothing against Tehran and wait for Iran to attack it again? Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles pointing at the whole of Israel. They are fast and accurate, and the fear is that Hezbollah will unleash so many they will overwhelm even Israel’s effective defences.
Does the Biden administration need to see a few thousand Israelis killed in skyscrapers if missiles get through to Haifa or Tel Aviv before it comes to its defence again?
Deterrence does not mean being able to defend yourself against attack. Deterrence means deterring an attack in the first place. Biden’s prohibition would destroy the very concept of Israeli deterrence and allow Iran to continue to tighten its ring of proxy fire around Israel in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen — and Gaza (where Biden wants Israel to submit to a Palestinian terrorist administration after the war).
Michael Oren:
How Did the War Begin? With Iran’s Appeasers in Washington
Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran to repeatedly assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.
While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. Press reports about President Biden’s refusal to support an Israeli counterattack against Iran indicate, sadly, that nothing substantial in the U.S. position has changed. He has reportedly urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to see the coordinated response to the attack as a “win.”
The Iranians, though, will not see things that way. Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity. If Israel follows Biden’s advice it will send one message to the ayatollahs: “You can launch another 350 missiles and drones at Israel or try to kill Israelis by other means. Either way, the United States won’t stop you.”
Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”
The story of America can end only one of two ways: either it stands up boldly against Iran and joins Israel in deterring it, or Iran emerges from this conflict once again unpunished, undiminished, and ready to inflict yet more devastating damage.
Seth Mandel:
Why Weren’t Iran Sanctions Immediately Triggered by the Attacks?
On Sunday morning, barely twelve hours after the conclusion of Iran’s unprecedented missile barrage on Israel, White House spokesman John Kirby was asked on Fox News Sunday about the Biden administration’s recent decision to waive some sanctions on Iran.
“You know the conversations about unfreezing assets, about waivers on sanctions,” Shannon Bream began. “Could this administration have been tougher on Iran? Did it sense an opening?”
Kirby responded: “It’s hard to look at what President Biden has done with respect to Iran and say that he hasn’t been tough on Iran, or that we haven’t put pressure on them.”
Is it? Because it seems to me that if the administration was prepared militarily for the Iranian attacks Saturday night, and if the president doesn’t want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to retaliate, then a punishment of some kind could have been ready to be instituted immediately, and certainly two days later. At the very least, it would have been easy for the president to cancel the recent sanctions waiver.
It is certainly not the case that sanctions are somehow off the table, at least conceptually. “Biden on Sunday convened leaders from the Group of Seven nations, who said they would consider new sanctions on Iran,” reports the Wall Street Journal. The Journal article, like most of the reporting since the attacks, stressed that the president wants a diplomatic response. It is also clear from the statements that Biden considers sanctions a plausible contribution to such a diplomatic response.
So, where are the sanctions?
The Germans don’t seem to be an obstacle here. “I am strongly in favor of extending [sanctions] to Iran, because we can see how dangerous its actions are at the moment,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.
Would the British consider more Iran sanctions? “Yes, absolutely,” says Foreign Minister David Cameron. “We already have 400 sanctions on Iran. We put in place a whole new sanctions regime at the end of last year, which is proving very effective. We’ve sanctioned the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in its entirety, and we’ll continue to look at what further steps we can do.”
Great. So once again, where are they?
Were the allies waiting to see how much damage was done by the Iranian missiles and drones? If so, that’s an indication that no, there will not be sanctions immediately forthcoming. And there is evidence for this idea that the seriousness of the attack would only be judged by the seriousness of the damage it caused. It’s an absurd scale on which to weigh a response because, like spritzing a misbehaving cat with water, it loses its effectiveness if not done right away. The West had the ability to ensure that this case would be more like touching a hot stove: Iran would immediately feel the burn, triggering a response that was basically automatic.
Having the debate over sanctions now—or any retaliative measure, to be honest—only makes it seem as though you can escape punishment by attempting and failing to murder lots of people.
From Ian:
Matti Friedman:
The Real War in the Middle East Comes into Focus
Last night should make clear, for those still in doubt, that Gaza is just one part of the broader story of Iran’s growing power and its tightening encirclement of Israel. When understood in this context, the behavior of Israel and its opponents becomes easier to understand.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are one link in the Iranian encirclement. The Houthis in Yemen, who have been harassing commercial ships and firing at Israel’s southern port of Eilat, are another link. The Iranian-backed militias in Iraq make up a third. The Iranian forces and proxies in Syria, including the Revolutionary Guard commanders killed in the recent Israeli airstrike in Damascus, are a fourth. (The strike on April 1, which came after months of attacks against Israel by proxies directed and armed by the Revolutionary Guards, is typically being cast by Israel’s opponents as an unprovoked attack on a diplomatic facility, as if the commanders were cultural attachés in town for a goodwill concert.) Lebanon’s Hezbollah, whose bombardments have depopulated a swath of northern Israel since October 7, is the fifth. If you look at a map, you’ll see that Iran has methodically installed proxies that can strike Israel from almost any direction except the west, where we border the Mediterranean.
The importance of last night’s barrage was that for the first time, the full Iranian alliance gave us a practical demonstration of its scope, orchestration, and intentions. The radical departure here was that the Islamic Republic itself dared to attack directly for the first time. If you’d been watching from space, you probably could have seen the lines of this new Middle East etched in orange and red across the map of the region. You might have also seen the second part of the story, which is the successful defense mounted not just by Israel but by the U.S. and Britain, and also by Jordan and, apparently, by Saudi Arabia—a welcome development hard to imagine a few years ago, and still puzzling to a Western observer fed stories about an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Whether this attack was a masterstroke or an error by Iran will eventually become clear. But it’s already obvious that they’ve done observers a favor by emerging from the shadows to end any doubt about what this war is and who’s fighting it.
Col. Kemp:
The world stands on the brink of all-out war
Israel will have no choice other than to respond to this Iranian attack, as every country would. The IDF has of course been preparing for that as well, perhaps by striking military targets inside Iran and other countries from which any missiles or drones are launched.
As the US sought to prevent Iran from attacking Israel by intensive diplomatic efforts, the Biden administration will likely try to pressure Israel to limit its retaliation, in other words to de-escalate. However, even if limited damage is inflicted in this attack, Israel should strike back hard – perhaps with even greater strength – to deter further attacks.
While hostilities directly with Iran are unlikely to expand beyond air attacks and possibly naval conflict, a major attack by Hezbollah might well lead to an all-out war in Lebanon, which has been on the cards since October.
This latest development in the Middle East shows that this is not just a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The war in Gaza was initiated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both Iranian proxies, and has been joined since the start, in the form of attacks on Israel, by Tehran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the West Bank.
The ayatollahs have been declaring their intention to eradicate the Jewish state for many years and have built a proxy “ring of fire” around Israel to achieve that, as well as working on a nuclear weapons programme.
However this conflict develops, Israel’s allies, including the US and UK, must do all that is needed to stand strongly by their main ally in the Middle East, if necessary with military action. Failure to do so will increase the prospects of escalating conflict in the region.
Seth Mandel:
Israel-Arab Normalization Proves Its Worth
The 1991 Gulf War, in which President George H.W. Bush organized a coalition to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Iraq, offers a good point of contrast. The Desert Storm coalition notably included Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a diplomatic coup for Bush. In order to try and split off the Arab world from the coalition, Hussein ordered the firing of dozens of Scud missiles at Israel, intending to provoke a response that would force the Arab states to the sidelines. Bush understood that the breadth of the coalition was a historic achievement and that as the Cold War ended, the emergence of a pro-Western bloc in the Gulf would be of immense strategic value.
This meant Israel had to sit on its hands, despite fear that some of the Scuds might be carrying chemical weapons. In return, American Patriot interceptors would protect Israel from the Scuds. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed.
The problem was that the Patriots were far less effective than expected. Israeli civilians were killed both by direct Scud attacks and by heart attacks and unnecessary injection of anti-nerve-gas medications. The absence of the promised protection made it harder for Israeli leaders to hold their fire. (It didn’t make it any easier that the U.S. was claiming an absurdly high interception rate that wasn’t publicly debunked until well after the war.) This was less a matter of effectiveness—the U.S. needed no help defeating Saddam’s troops, so Israeli intervention was viewed as high-cost and low-reward—than a basic demonstration of self-defense of a nation under fire.
In the end, Israel held its fire but won itself no favor from the Bush administration for doing so, leaving a sour taste in many Israeli mouths.
Fast forward to 2024, and we read this report in the Times of Israel: “Jordanian jets downed dozens of Iranian drones flying across northern and central Jordan heading to Israel, two regional security sources said in a dramatic show of support from Amman, which has heavily criticized Israel’s prosecution of its war against Hamas in Gaza.
“The sources said the drones were brought down in the air on the Jordanian side of the Jordan Valley and were heading in the direction of Jerusalem. Others were intercepted close to the Iraqi-Syrian border. They gave no further details.”
The coalition was mobilized not for offensive moves but for the sole purpose of defending Israeli territory from Iranian missiles. Israeli and American and Jordanian and British jets flew a coordinated defense maneuver, presumably with the tacit support of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states.
This is the post-Abraham Accords Middle East. And it is the key to understanding the true strategic accomplishment of those peace agreements: all these states are in a very public coalition not only with the United States but with Israel. Recognition and normalization of ties with Israel by Arab states enables the U.S. to organize and broaden its own alliances. The only variable now is whether the Biden administration wants those alliances to thrive or whether it will continue its courtship of Iran, whose overarching goal is the destruction of all of America’s strategic gains over the past 30 years.
Friday, April 19, 2024
