My views are my own and do not reflect the views of my university or the state of Virginia.
Arlington, VA
Based in United States
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I shouldn't be at this point, but I am nevertheless stunned that country A can plot to murder country B's citizens in country B, and country B continues along with its relations with country A as if nothing happened.
EVIL: Here’s Ed Miliband today “standing up for what is right” by shaking hands with Abbas Araghchi of the IRGC’s Quds Force, which—according to British intelligence—is behind over 20 potentially lethal terror plots in the UK targeting British Jews, journalists and dissidents.
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"Sheikh Mohammed told Mr. Burns that, during the phone call, he had spoken to Mr. Netanyahu about a looming threat of violence in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip carried out by Hamas."
This was the big warning? There was always a looming threat of violence from Hamas, without more specifics this was pretty useless.
The @nytimes did their own fact-check of Israeli newspaper @haaretzcom’s reporting that UAE President warned Netanyahu of Hamas attack but didn’t tell his security chiefs.
Very important piece of journalism.
Here’s what they independently found:
“A person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack.”
“The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Mr. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times.”
Netanyahu told his security chiefs not to strike Hamas leaders:
“Instead, he told them that the goal should be to maintain calm in Gaza, and he pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, the minutes show.”
A notable phone call reported between UAE head and CIA director:
“Sheikh Mohammed mentioned his September 2023 phone call with Mr. Netanyahu months later in a discussion with William Burns, the C.I.A. director at the time, according to a person familiar with that discussion. Sheikh Mohammed told Mr. Burns that, during the phone call, he had spoken to Mr. Netanyahu about a looming threat of violence in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip carried out by Hamas.”
nytimes.com/2026/09/25/world…
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WTH is going on in Canada? A Jewish journalist posted about him and other Jews being harassed outside their synagogue on Yom Kippur, and now he has been pulled off the air and is being "investigated," apparently for being a Jew with a conscience.
torontosun.com/opinion/colum…
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David Bernstein retweeted
This is really remarkable. A Persian student asks El-Sayed to condemn the Iranian regime and those who support it, and he responds with some blather about how the US can't be the world's policeman--which of course doesn't stop him from incessantly condemning Israel.
Abdul can’t even condemn the IRGC, a group that murdered an estimated 40,000 Iranian civilians in the last year alone.
Abdul can’t condemn Hamas, the IRGC, the Houthis, or the enemies of America.
We deserve better.
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Note that Hamas if Hamas wanted to release hostages, it never had to "offer" to do so. It could have not taken them to begin with, or could have released them at any time without "offering."
What Hamas wanted, in fact, was to release a small subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not undertaking any military effort after 10/7, including to rescue the remaining hostages.
Hasan of course knows this, and what he's really saying is that Israel should have let Hamas win a a war by murdering 1,200 Israelis, and then exchanging most of the hostages for every terrorist in Israel's prisons, with Hamas then able to prepare for infinite repeats of 10/7.
It's not an exaggeration to say that such a "deal" would have meant the end of Israel. Hasan of course knows that too, which is why he thinks it was a good idea.
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It's also why they tore down Israeli hostage posters. They have a psychological need to see Palestinians only as victims, and Israelis only as perpetrators.
The savagery of October 7 caused too much cognitive dissonance with the progressive image of noble white-hearted Palestinian and wicked Israeli. They NEED the genocide narrative as a psychological corrective to return equilibrium to their internal worldview.
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I testified before a House panel a couple of years ago. I was surprised afterwards to see one of the Congressmen on line at the cafeteria.
I asked why he doesn't just ask an intern to pick up the sandwich for him. He said it's against House ethics rules.
I assume it's even more against House ethics rules to ask your legislative staff to go to your house to feed your chameleon.
There’s something deeply broken in the culture of Democratic Party staffing that people would think it is unreasonable to be asked to feed your boss’s pet while she does a job that involves commuting back and forth to Alaska.
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"there have very likely been war crimes in the current war"
Scholars of such things estimate that even in Western armies, 10% of soldiers commit war crimes, 1-3% serious war crimes.
Even if that's off by a factor of five, it would still amount to a lot of criminal behavior in a big war. So it would be shocking if 500K Israeli soldiers deployed in the wake of 10/7 didn't commit any.
Boudry isn't suggesting otherwise, but it's worth emphasizing that there is a difference between finding that an individual soldier or unit did something illegal, and systemic war crimes solicited and approved of by the military and political command.
The fact that war crimes are reasonably common even in Western armies that are trained otherwise is one of many reasons that war should be avoided at all costs. But if the possibility of war crimes was a reason to avoid fighting any war, ever, then any country that actually cared about human rights would be rendered completely defenseless.
Anti-Zionism is really melting people's brains. Apparently nobody pauses to reflect on the obvious contradiction here: if Israel intends to indiscriminately kill every single Gazan (which is what "genocide" means), why on earth would it pour resources into sophisticated AI algorithms to calculate the expected civilian casualties of every single strike? What perpetrator of a "genocide" would ever bother doing that?
It's like a librarian meticulously cataloguing every book by genre and quality, only to shovel them all into the same bonfire. Or a doctor carefully identifying which cells are cancerous, then administering the same lethal dose to every cell in your body. Are these people just plain stupid?
Of course, the Israeli army is not beyond reproach, and there have very likely been war crimes in the current war. But can the critics at least get clear about what exactly they're accusing Israel of?
commentary.org/seth-mandel/n…
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This isn't getting nearly the attention it should, so let's reiterate:
El-Sayed called on the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, his parents' birthplace, to purge non-Islamists from the media.
El-Sayed in the Senate would be a national security threat, not because he is of Egyptian origin or Muslim, but because he is a supporter of the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood, down to urging the Egyptian MB to purge its opponents.
Abdul El-Sayed signed on to an Arabic-language statement in 2012 demanding that the Muslim Brotherhood “purge” media and police in Egypt.
The repressive Islamic group carried out a brutal religious crackdown on the press soon thereafter, @LevineJonathan reports.
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We should acknowledge that a great deal of success in a "meritocracy" comes down to luck--more than anything, the natural endowments you were born with, and what sort of support--intellectual, academic, and otherwise--you get from your parents.
And that society should reward "merit" anyway, because the point is not that the individual inherently "deserves" his success, but because rewarding achievement is good for everyone.
This tweet can be summed up in a sentence: Now that East Asian and Indian kids are doing better than white kids in school and the job market, we need to rethink meritocracy. It's the same logic that led colleges to put quotas in place to limit the number of Jewish students.
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Useless is much too kind.
Argentina's President Javier Milei used his time in front of the UN Assembly to say the UN is useless. "This has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-meaning bureaucrats."
Now that's telling them like it is!
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These sorts of analyses always miss the most salient point: at any time after starting the war with its brutal massacre, and Hamas could have ended it by releasing the hostages and surrendering.
Hamas, however, has no mercy or empathy for the people of Gaza, so it refused to do so even after it was abundantly clear that (a) it had lost militarily and (b) the war, and Hamas's strategy of fighting it within civilian infrastructure, was a catastrophe for Gaza's civilians.
So you're asking Israelis to show much more concern for Gaza's civilians than said civilians own government showed.
And to do so after many Gaza civilians participated in the atrocities of 10/7, cheered them afterwards, and participating in holding the hostages in captivity.
You are, in short, asking Israelis to be more saintly than any other people at war has ever been known to be.
I wonder if we went through The Economist's archives how much concern for the suffering of German civilians during World War II we'd find?
Did British troops facilitate massive aid to the German population during the war?
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In my experience, there are many who care, but the Jewish community doesn't have a clue as to how to harness their concern into practical assistance, and part of the problem is that a very large % don't come from the demographic/ideological/regional sources that Jewish organizations have long considered their natural allies.
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