Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:

… [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general.

Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.

A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:

This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.

But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:

When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

All of which need to be destroyed.

I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals.

[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.

Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]

The post You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you appeared first on The New Neo.

But the article I linked to in the above paragraph balances what I consider a suitable amount of skepticism with a suitable amount of hope, and a realistic acknowledgment that we simply don’t know:

Hamas says it’s finally ready to lay down its weapons, a feat that could reshape the Middle East after nearly two decades of war and bloodshed — but even President Trump had questions over whether it will actually happen during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday.

If implemented, it would mark the first time Hamas has formally agreed to dismantle its military wing since seizing control of Gaza in 2007. …

Now, a 14-day period of implementation will begin, with an official with Trump’s Board of Peace describing it as the “rubber-meets-the-road” phase.

“An IRGC terror proxy — and that’s clearly what Hamas is — is saying we are going to disarm,” the official said. “These are a historic set of accomplishments in the Middle East against all odds.”

As Phase 2 moves forward, here are the five questions likely to determine whether it’s a historic breakthrough — or just another false dawn.

1. Will Hamas really surrender all of its weapons? …

2. Who makes sure Hamas isn’t hiding weapons? …

3. Will Israel trust the process enough to leave Gaza? …

4. Who takes over Gaza? …

5. Can Hamas survive without its guns?

I’m not especially optimistic. But I’d be extremely happy if things work out better than I think they will.

The post Remember Hamas? appeared first on The New Neo.

But it’s a topic so important that I need to deal with it more often. Why is it so important, and not just to Jews? It’s an old saying but it’s true that the Jews are the canaries in the coalmine. Jew-hatred is the mark of a society that’s sick. It’s also a sign of evil, if you want to get metaphysical about it. And it’s one of the longest hatreds in the world, perhaps the longest hatred, and so flexible that it can shape-shift endlessly from old reason to new reason and back again.

There’s the envy part and the contempt part, the “Jews secretly rule the world and are trying to destroy the rest of us” part, the “Jews kill little children and use their blood to make matzoh” part and its current manifestation about Jews purposely killing Palestinian children in a genocidal war, there’s the ancient Islamic hatred of Jews and the ancient Christian “they killed Christ” part that sparked murderous pogroms against Jews, there’s the “Jews poisoned the wells” part and the “Jews want to destroy the white race” part and the “Jews are whites and colonist agents of oppression” part. I’m sure I’ve left some parts out, as well, but you get the idea[s]. Israel-hatred and its double standards are often a screen for Jew-hatred, which gives it a special oomph to which no other country is subjected.

But for the purposes of this post I’ll stick to one idea which I’ve seen expressed more and more often online by Jew-haters. It is, in my opinion, the main reason why Holocaust education not only doesn’t work these days to counter Jew-hatred but often actually works to amplify it. There is also the general tendency of today’s young people to say that the history they’re taught is a lie, but I think another very important part goes like this [my emphasis]:

One lesson … is not to indulge the “fantasy … that imparting information about the murder of the Jews of Europe will ensure its never happening again.” Showcasing one’s own weakness does nothing to placate illiberal enemies. To the contrary, what to the West looks like “innocence” appears more like an admission of guilt to those for whom violence is routine. “Something must be wrong with the Jews if they were selected as a target.”

Paul Berman would elaborate upon this point a decade later, analyzing the seemingly paradoxical success of grotesque Palestinian suicide bombings in turning world opinion against Israel. “Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis,” because the liberal mind could not could not otherwise make sense of such depravity. “Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” Politics against the Jews—indeed against the West that abhors depravity—has only become more explicit over the last three years. If Hamas and the Gazans that followed them to rape and pillage could commit such unspeakable acts, Israel’s sins must be even graver than previously thought. American support for the iniquitous regime, moreover, could not be because it sees Israel as a decent nation and democratic ally, but because the United States is controlled by Zionists.

It seems a paradox, but it has its own logic. Among other things, it makes sense of evil – defining Hamas’ acts on 10/7 as not so much evil as motivated and in some sense justified. It makes order out of the chaos of human life. I’m speaking not of those who spread the lies and hatred with full knowledge that they are spreading lies and hatred, but those who accept the lies as truth and believe themselves to be virtuous in doing so. The argument is that if Jews are attacked far and wide, and have been for centuries, they must have deserved it and continue to deserve it.

Even some Jews succumb to the reasoning. It’s something like what happens with certain abused children: rather than believe the world can be so unjust, they believe that they themselves must have done something very very wrong to be treated that way.

The post Why attacks on Jews lead to more Jew-hatred appeared first on The New Neo.

The Madison police officer who shot and killed Corey Ruiz should face criminal charges, civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Friday, after protests erupted in anger over videos of their struggle.

“They not only tackled him, not only tased him, not only kicked him, but you saw they shot him three times in his head and other parts of his body,” Crump said.

He spoke at an emotional news conference with Ruiz’s mother, siblings and 13-year-old daughter, Kah’liyah Aliomar.

Crump again.

What is left out? This:

Ruiz, 38, was killed on a busy city street Wednesday, just a couple of blocks away from his daughter’s home and along the route she walks to school. Police say Ruiz pulled a knife during a struggle with four officers, injuring one of them. That officer then fired the shots, according to police.

There is video, but it’s not from the police, it’s from a cellphone, and it does not show the incident from the police point of view. Madison is one of the few municipalities where the use of police videocams has been repeatedly blocked:

But unlike nearly every other similarly sized city, Madison doesn’t require its police to use body-worn cameras, so there is no footage from the officers’ perspective. Over the last decade city officials have repeatedly debated adopting the cameras — at times creating subcommittees and doing studies on the idea — but local officials have primarily blamed budget concerns and political inertia for the ongoing stalemate.

Another common source of opposition, identified in a 2021 feasibility study, came from community groups worried the cameras would be used to surveil and criminalize marginalized groups. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said Thursday that she expects the new budget that takes effect in January to include funding for body-worn cameras.

I wonder how the protestors address the fact that the police officer was stabbed. Perhaps they deny it happened. Or perhaps they think a little stab wound isn’t so much; police should just let themselves be knifed.

More:

Wisconsin court records show Ruiz had been in and out of jail over the past decade for mostly misdemeanor offenses including disorderly conduct, drug possession, auto theft, battery and invasion of privacy. He was also convicted of felonies including possession of cocaine and marijuana, robbery, strangulation, resisting an officer and causing bodily harm.

“People are saying he’s a criminal. So what? He had a family, he had me,” Aliomar said, breaking down into tears.

A person can be a dangerous criminal and also have a family. In fact, most criminals have families. The two things are unrelated.

More:

Police said they were at the street to investigate reports that someone was trying to enter parked cars, something Crump said amounted to only the suspicion of a low-level property crime.

Well then, no need for the police to be there at all, right?

And then you have this sort of thing:

Nearly 500 people marched from the intersection of Williamson Street and South Baldwin Street [in Madison] — where the 38-year-old was shot three times on Wednesday during a struggle with several police officers — to the Madison Police Department headquarters on Friday.

Video showed some demonstrators stopping traffic and confronting at a female motorist who insisted she was an “ally” during a streetside struggle session.

“You’re going to sit there and watch it all go by and you’re going to think about it, c–t!” one yelled at the helpless driver.

“I am 100 percent an ally of the community,” she pleaded with the protestors who surrounded her car.

“I have lived in this neighborhood for 27 years. F–k the cops. I wanted to join the protest!” she said. “This guy calling me a c–t doesn’t help anyone’s cause.”

She added: “I’m an ally. I wanted to join the protest. I want to be part of this.”

That may read like a Monty Python skit, but it’s very real.

Also this:

“White silence is violence!” protesters chanted at others sitting outside [at a restaurant] enjoying their dinner.

A few hours later, a pair of protesters hit a car window when the driver refused to stop for their procession.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation held signs reading “jail killer cop. Kiel Peterson. Justice for Corey Ruiz.” …

One woman held up a sign that read: “Corrupt cops deserve to die too!! …

“You’re gonna say the same thing you all say every time a black body gets shot down in this city!” [a] man, who identified himself as Carlos Jackson, shouted. Jackson then launched into a tirade about corruption, revolution and “Zionists.”

It all comes back to the Zionists, right?

I wonder who funds the so-called “Party for Socialism and Liberation.” Here’s the Wiki entry:

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist political party in the United States. PSL formed in 2004, when its members split from the Workers World Party.

PSL describes itself as a revolutionary socialist party in the Leninist tradition, because the party believes that only a revolution can end capitalism and establish socialism. PSL pursues this goal by participating in local protests, running candidates in elections, and conducting political education. …

PSL does not release membership numbers. In 2019, PSL reported branches in “some 90 cities” or “nearly 100 cities”. In 2022, PSL reported an “organized presence in over 100 cities”. In 2024, PSL reported being “in over 50 cities”.

PSL is a democratic centralist party, which means that “all members, including those who disagree, are duty bound to publicly defend and carry out” all PSL decisions.

So, “liberated” party members are not allowed to disagree with the Party of Liberation.

It’s no real surprise to learn that they are heavily involved in pro-Palestinian causes:

Since 2023, PSL has organized numerous rallies in favor of Palestinian liberation, including many of the Gaza war protests in the United States.

In 2024, PSL and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) organized a protest outside of Ohr Torah synagogue in Edison, New Jersey, in opposition to the synagogue holding auctions for property in illegal Israel settlements in the West Bank. A minor scuffle ensured. …

In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Rodriguez was a former PSL member. PSL stated that they “do not support” the shooting. …

In May 2026, PSL campaigned with Hasan Piker on behalf of Cori Bush in Missouri. In June 2026, PSL campaigned for Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant.

This group seems to have its finger in a lot of pies. The group also unites with some of the “woke right” in blaming the US and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also supported Assad in Syria. More here on its campaign against Israel and Jews, which turns out not to be peripheral but rather central to its purposes:

[The party] incorporates virulent anti-Zionism as a core organizing principle.

PSL has been involved in anti-Israel organizing since its establishment in 2004, ramping up its activity significantly following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror massacre against Israel. In the first 18 months after Hamas’s attack, PSL sponsored or co-sponsored over 1,700 anti-Israel rallies around the U.S.; the majority of these rallies featured antisemitic rhetoric, as well as expressions of support for Hamas’s attack, belligerent calls to “smash Zionism,” and flags and other materials of U.S.-designated terror groups and more. Some PSL events also included on-the-ground harassment.

The party legitimized Hamas’s attack in an October 7, 2023, statement as a “bold counter-offensive,” said “the actions of the resistance” were a “morally and legally legitimate response to occupation” and called to cut off all U.S. aid to Israel.

One of the group’s members is Jodi Dean, who is still a professor at Hobart teaching courses such as Feminist Theory as well as Communism. Shortly after 10/7 she wrote this:

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege…The paragliders who flew into Israel on October 7 continue the revolutionary association of liberation and flight.

Helping to shape young minds.

But the reason I went to that ADL link was to find out about funding of the group. This is all I discovered:

PSL offers little organizational transparency and does not release membership numbers. …

PSL’s funding sources are also unclear. The group claims not to take money from foundations or corporate sources. Members are expected to contribute to PSL’s major annual fundraiser, the National Fund Drive.

The article discusses the funding of an affiliated group, The People’s Forum (there are many many affiliated groups; it’s really a huge web):

The PSL-affiliated group is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that receives funding from various sources. In 2022 and 2021, for example, The People’s Forum received $21,539 from the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation and $8,350 from CodePink, a virulently anti-Zionist group, respectively. In 2018, The People’s Forum received $3,015,000 from the United Community Fund (UCF), a grantmaking body primarily associated with Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who has been accused of having associations with the Chinese Communist Party.

UCF has given most of its grants to The People’s Forum and the left-wing research institute Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. The People’s Forum’s Manolo de los Santos is also a researcher at Tricontinental.

In the fiscal year ending 2022, The People’s Forum had revenue of $4,428,869, significantly more than 2021’s $486,926. …

In 2023, the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) granted The People’s Forum $26,894. AFGJ is an Arizona-based organization that serves as a fiscal sponsor to several progressive and anti-Israel initiatives, including Samidoun, which is labeled as the international fundraiser of the U.S.-designated terror group the PFLP, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

And this utterance by a speaker at one of the many meetings organized by the group says a lot about their point of view on the relationship between capitalism and Israel:

As far as organizational activity, The People’s Forum convenes numerous panels, protests, events, and other “educational” experiences, many of which are virulently anti-Israel.

At one such event, De Los Santos said: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”

Whether or not that has any logic isn’t especially relevant. It has logic to a large group of very dedicated leftists.

When I began this post I did not expect it to end up with anything to do with Israel. And yet here we are. To the left, these things are all related – or at least can be described as related to a mostly ignorant and willing group of mostly young people.

The post And now there’s Corey Ruiz (or, do all leftist roads lead to Israel-hatred?) appeared first on The New Neo.

First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.” It has a very specific origin date and a founder: the date is 610 CE. So it’s 1,416 years old.

Yes, there are certainly passages in the Koran that show hatred of Jews. But no, there wasn’t any “war” – and one very basic reason is that for almost all of those years Islam has been in existence, right up till 1948, Jews had no army and couldn’t fight wars. They certainly were the victims of violence, but that violence was not mainly at the hands of Muslims; more of it occurred in Christian lands, and it was more in the nature of sporadic massacres than formal wars. The Holocaust was a very special case in which there was an attempt by Nazis (with the cooperation of many others) to eradicate the Jews of Europe and it was during a war, but that was not a Muslim endeavor.

But to go back to the origins of Islam – Islam is a religion that claims to spring from Judaism and Christianity in that it incorporates some elements of each, but in a different way, and it believes it superceded and ought to replace both worldwide. Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion (Luther had a similar reactoin – he thought he could convert the Jews and when they said no he turned on them with vicious hatred). There are definitely some hadiths that are anti-Jewish.

However, over the centuries, Islamic countries actually “tolerated” their Jews – and they had many many Jews within their borders. Attitudes varied over the years, but as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres. But the massacres of Jews in Muslim lands tended to kill fewer than the ones in Christian lands for many years during ancient and medieval times. And as far as I can tell, Muslim countries did not expel their Jews, unlike many European Christian countries who periodically did so over the centuries. Therefore, Muslim countries often had stable Jewish communities that had lasted for well over a thousand years.

Of course, Jews didn’t have a country until 1948. However, starting a couple of decades before that, the Nazis began to influence Arab leaders in particular to hate Jews in the Nazi-esque way. That’s when the more serious trouble began to rev up for Jews in those lands. Google AI has a nice summary of what happened:

Prior to the 1930s, antisemitism in the Arab world was primarily social and religious, but the rise of Nazism and the intensification of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine fueled a toxic cultural fusion of European conspiracy theories and radicalized local prejudices.

Ideological Penetration: European antisemitic literature, notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, began circulating in the Arab world in the 1920s and 1930s.

Strategic Alliance: Following the 1937 British Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, Nazi Germany reversed its earlier policy and began actively supporting Arab opposition forces. Germany supplied money and arms to radical Arab leaders to undermine British colonial control and check Jewish influence in the Middle East.

Anti-Zionist Mobilization: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, received ideological and financial assistance from Nazi Germany, shifting from a primarily religious group to a heavily mobilized, anti-Zionist, and vehemently anti-Jewish political force.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the most prominent Arab leader to collaborate with the Axis powers.

Al-Husayni utilized his overarching religious authority to fuse traditional Islamic anti-Jewish sentiments with modern European totalitarianism.

He sought to secure Axis approval to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine, eventually broadcasting Nazi-sponsored, anti-Allied, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East during World War II.

The Nazis circumvented the non-Aryan prejudices in their ideology by framing the conflict strictly against “International Jewry,” characterizing it as the shared enemy of both the German state and the Arab peoples.

Propagandists often invoked selective readings of the Qur’an and linked them to Nazi ideology to frame Zionism as an existential threat to Islam and Arabs.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration by Britain, prior to that, also fanned the flames of Arab anger because it promised the Jews a homeland. There were several massacres as a result of these forces, years before Israel became a country (see this, for example).

These days, half of Israel consists either of Jewish refugees from Arab and North African Muslim countries or their descendants. Many fled during the 1940s and 1950s till the 1970s. Some came to this country as well. As far as I know they never received any compensation. Until that period, they had lived in Muslim lands with some problems, but nothing like what was happening in the 20th century.

Also from Google AI:

Approximately 600,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa to settle in the State of Israel, primarily between 1948 and the early 1970s.

In total, an estimated 850,000 to 900,000 Jews left the Islamic world during this period, with the remaining refugees migrating to France, the United States, and other Western countries. This mass displacement was largely the result of escalating persecution, state-sponsored expropriation, and anti-Jewish violence following the establishment of Israel.

I often wonder how widely any of these facts are known. My sense is: not widely at all. And so the “cycle of war for thousands of years” myth goes on.

The post Have Muslims and Jews been “at war” for “thousands of years”? appeared first on The New Neo.

Mamdani’s plan is to have DCWP [Department of Consumer and Worker Protection] work with the City Council on new legislation that would stipulate landlords could require either a credit check — paid for by the landlord or broker — or proof that an applicant’s income meets the common 40-times-the-rent standard, but not both. …

The 68-page report laid out an ambitious slate of tenant-focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing HPD to investigate every heat complaint citywide and requiring landlords to disclose any AI-generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings so applicants are not misled by doctored apartments.

The report’s ideas came from “Rental Ripoff Hearings” where 2,300 of tenants across the five boroughs detailed housing conditions, fees and landlord practices they wanted City Hall to change.

The idea, as many people have said, is to reach the endpoint of city confiscation of these rental properties. Freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartment and make it almost impossible for landlords to get the money to pay for repairs and all the rest, and then as landlords pull out of the business entirely the city can take over. There seems to be little to no public acknowledgement by the present city administration that landlords are not money fountains, but that the rental business is subject to market forces and landlords have to make money in order to keep apartments in working order.

Oh, and Mamdani has some other plans of the more international variety:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) says he is reviewing whether his administration could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his anticipated visit to the city for the U.N. General Assembly this fall.

The mayor made these comments an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday episode of The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”

No surprise there.

The post And then there’s Mamdani appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s been cumulative, but the Rogan interview is somewhat of a turning point for me. Initially, I was – if not a Vance fan, exactly – of the opinion that he might gain the sort of experience as VP that would make him a good presidential candidate in 2028. He’s clearly a smart guy, and he’s had a way with words when talking to the regular press and pointing out their illogic and lies. In his debate against Tim Walz he was excellent, and he used a delicate and deft touch. Among his other assets, he has a wife who seems as though she would make a wonderful First Lady.

But in recent months, Vance’s refusal to say something about Tucker Carlson’s horrendous viewpoints has been very disquieting. Carlson isn’t just anti-Israel and a spreader of classic lies about Jews, but he’s a historical revisionist, a Qatar and Putin shill, and has become a platform for some of the worst ideas around these days. For a while, Carlson’s son worked for Vance (although he’s quit now), and it’s long been known that it was Carlson who promoted to Trump the idea of Vance as VP. So in a very real way Vance owes his present job to Carlson.

That meant that there was a simple explanation for Vance not speaking out against Carlson as Trump had. That reason was loyalty. Blind and unwavering loyalty is not necessarily a good thing, but as long as Vance kept neutral on the subject of Carlson, I was willing to give him a pass and to wait and see. And then Vance decided to go on Rogan’s podcast, and he began to sound somewhat like Tucker himself. Not just that, but the interview was an exercise in buck-passing, which is not a good look.

This article by Lee Smith describes it quite well:

During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …

Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.

Epsteingate is a reboot of Russiagate, a conspiracy-theory template holding that Trump is controlled by a foreign power. During Trump’s first term, that power was Russia. Now, in the second term, it’s Israel. Epstein became crucial to the narrative because his supposed role in running a pedophile blackmail ring at the behest of the Mossad provided a mechanism by which Israel could extort Trump and other high American officials into doing its bidding.

Smith goes on to explain why this is preposterous, but I think it’s of great interest that Vance was willing to hint at this route despite – as he himself admitted – having zero evidence of it. Vance even explicitly said that there was no evidence Trump was involved in sex with minors. But Vance has to know – unless he’s stupid, which I submit he is not – that Vance’s wink and nod about Epstein and the Mossad, and Israeli influence on the US, not only appeals mightily to the Jew-hating Tucker wing but is an indirect way of saying Trump is controlled by Israel.

I very much doubt Trump is happy about that.

More from Smith, on the origins of the story Vance is pushing or at least nodding along when Rogan mentions it:

The rumor that Epstein was a high-level global intelligence asset—as opposed to a rich pervert and con man—seems to have started with Steve Bannon, who left the first Trump White House in disgrace after leaking to the press. Bannon has ignored calls to release the 15 hours of interviews he reportedly taped with Epstein, presumably because they show Epstein was not a spy—or, at the very least, because Bannon failed to press the late sex offender to address a rumor he continues to popularize. The idea the Jewish financier pimped out underage American girls to compromise liberal elites for the purpose of advancing Israeli interests was most ardently promoted by Vance’s political patron, Tucker Carlson.

This is the Jew-hating Tucker wing. They have their own agenda, and I believe it is somewhat parallel to the DSA agenda for the Democrat Party. The goal is to take over the Republican Party. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but it won’t be for lack of trying. And now I strongly believe that Vance has hitched his wagon to him.

Vance is pragmatic, and may back off from this. It’s a long way to 2028 and a lot can happen. But he has shown, at the very least, that he’s willing to go very low in his own pursuit of power and need to excuse himself from responsibility for the failure of the negotiations with Iran.

It gets worse [emphasis in original]:

And to explain why his memorandum of understanding failed, Vance sourced the reading at a supermarket checkout counter. “There’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” said Vance, pointing to a recent article in Time magazine. In fact, the story is about a former Trump deputy paid by Israel to pay pro-Israel influencers to post pro-Israel content, to combat the rising tide of campaigners on the right targeting Israel and paid for by Qatar.

Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told the media he is “not aware of any intelligence about a secret information operation to try to change American public opinion on negotiating under the memorandum of understanding.” Also, no one prevented Vance from negotiating the MOU, because it got signed. Yes, there was plenty of criticism on social media, but as Cotton said, it was the Iranians who blew up Vance’s deal by continuing to blow up ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which they declared to be their own private waterway—contrary to long-standing treaties that guarantee freedom of the seas.

But Vance insists it’s on Israel. “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” he told Rogan. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”

Vance challenges anyone to show how he’s antisemitic. But claiming that Israelis want war for the sake of war, indefinitely, toward no specific objective, is a pretty good place to start. Vance’s denials are part of the act: I didn’t say something recognizably antisemitic; it’s on you to prove that the classic antisemitic conceit I used is antisemitic, you paranoid freak. My point is clearly just that Israelis simply kill people for no reason or purpose because they enjoy spilling blood, and they will continue doing so forever, to satisfy their perverted, inhuman lusts.

That is the part that seems to me to be the most revealing of Vance’s actual position.

Rubio, on the other hand, seems to actually have some integrity, and to have thought more deeply on these sorts of issues. Not only that, but he has a great deal of experience in government and in particular in foreign policy. He’s the child of Cuban refugees, and knows a lot about Communism and its effects. Plus, he’s quite expert on Latin America and has been active in dealing with that part of the world.

Rubio recently gave a much-praised speech on left-wing violence (you can find the text here). And he also gave a speech in Germany against 3rd-world migration that got a standing ovation [ADDENDUM: The video at that link, of the ovation, might be of an earlier speech; hard to say, but I’ve seen some statements to that effect].

The contrast between the two men is stark.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently said this about J. D. Vance [emphasis mine]:

I think if JD Vance were president, of course he would not be at war with Iran.

It’s impossible for me to imagine JD Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program.

It’s too insane. I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that.

I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn’t happen. I love JD.

I don’t agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he’s an honest, very smart, decent person. That puts him above almost all politicians I’ve ever met.

That’s an endorsement.

The post More reflections on Vance – and also on Rubio appeared first on The New Neo.

Yesterday Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some things that indicate agreement with Carlson. Here’s a report:

JD Vance has claimed he is the target of an Israeli-funded propaganda campaign over his Iran peace push, and that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the ‘highest levels’ of Mossad.

The vice president made the explosive allegations during a nearly three-hour sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan.

Vance pointed to a Time magazine report he said proved American influencers were being paid to attack the Iran deal. The report notes that money has flowed through a former Trump campaign operative and is bankrolled by elements of the Israeli government.

‘My response to that is, well, go to hell,’ Vance said of those taking the cash to smear him. The vice president, who complained he has been branded an anti-Semite, declared that Israel is losing the public opinion battle in America.

He also said that ‘figures’ inside the Israeli government are manipulating American public opinion to keep the war going ‘indefinitely.’

Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’

These are claims that have been aired by the Tucker wing for quite some time, and the evidence for them is extremely poor and mostly rumor and innuendo. The following is about Vance’s allegation about Israel sabotaging the peace negotiations, which he says he based on an article in Time:

… [T]here is apparently a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to derail negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, according to Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan’s show last night. Why is the Vice President perpetuating this dubious claim? The reason is simple: it benefits him too.

Much like other theories that find a home on Rogan’s podcast, this one is thinly sourced and vastly misinterpreted. The article Vance cites for this conspiracy does indeed point to an Israeli-funded influence operation—a FARA-registered, Israeli-government-funded campaign, run through political consultant Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X, pushing pro-Israel content into the MAGA ecosystem, including through paid influencers who reportedly received suggested language via private group chats and compensation tied to engagement.

Where the article cuts against him is on the one point his whole story depends on: that this was a deliberate campaign built “to derail the negotiations” and keep the war going indefinitely. The Time magazine reporting establishes no such intent. Per the article, the contracted goal was preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel—a reputation campaign, not an anti-ceasefire operation. The sabotage motive is Vance’s attribution, not the reporting’s finding.

And the two people best positioned to know deny his version.

So, whatever you think of Vance’s using a Time story as support for his allegations, he’s not even citing it properly.

Vance was heavily involved in the negotiations with Iran. Now he’s indicating that he didn’t fail; Israel stabbed him in the back. I wonder if this sort of statement on Vance’s part represents a rift between Vance and Trump on this or whether Vance is doing this with Trump’s permission, to keep the Tuckeresque right in the GOP camp for the midterms.

Another statement of Vance’s is somewhat in the same vein:

Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’

When Rogan noted that most people believe Epstein was working for Mossad, the vice president did not dispute it. Vance noted that it was Mossad ‘or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country or both.’

Vance, who described himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on Epstein, said that anything tying the pedophile to spy agencies was likely destroyed after 2006 – when the financier was first arrested.

Get it? Epstein was a Mossad agent but he conveniently destroyed the evidence, so we can never know.

Actually, Epstein had “connections” to a lot of people who had nothing to do with his pedophilia; he was a famous guy with a lot of money and influence. I would have hoped this sort of insinuation would be beneath Vance, but apparently not:

On Epstein, the vice president agreed with Rogan that the financier was running an operation to pressure or compromise powerful people.

‘I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there,’ Vance said, though he admitted he cannot prove it.

‘And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.’

There, Vance sounds like Candace Owens, who likes to say she doesn’t know-know but she knows.

More here:

Asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, Vance pointed to social media posts and leaks to reporters.

“They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely,” he said.

Vance said critics had accused him of being influenced by Qatar and other foreign governments and of taking “marching orders from Tucker Carlson.” …

“When I open up the pages of Time Magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell,” Vance said.

Boo hoo, those Israeli-funded meanies were attacking him and that’s why Iran didn’t just give in to his brilliant negotiations.

It’s also of relevance that Vance chose the Joe Rogan podcast to air these grievances against Israel and these excuses for himself. Rogan is not Israel-friendly, nor is his main audience. I doubt Vance would go on Tucker’s show – Vance is smart, and he knows better than that. But Rogan’s show is the next best thing without being especially controversial.

For quite some time I’ve hoped that Rubio is the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. I’m certainly open to other possibilities, but so far Vance is not one of them.

[NOTE: When Carlson decided to split from the Republican Party, I wondered who he’d be supporting for the presidency in 2028. For a while I considered that Tucker himself might want to run. But now it occurs to me that it’s possible that he’d be supporting Vance for the head of a third party. This would be disastrous, IMHO, and could easily cause a Democrat to win if enough people ended up supporting Vance.

I’m not saying this will happen. I still think Vance wants to be the GOP nominee. But if he doesn’t get the nomination, I can easily imagine a situation in which he goes third-party to ally with Tucker and Tucker’s followers.]

The post Vance reveals himself, and it’s not pretty appeared first on The New Neo.

Another conundrum trying to understand the mind of leftists. I know…an impossible task. But someone explain to me why the ones I know enthusiastically cheer every drone strike the Ukrainians make on Russia? Why is that such a just war? I’m not saying it isn’t, but their hypocrisy in not supporting the US getting rid of the 50 year threat of Iran having a nuke. Ukraine good, US bad.

The answer has several elements to it. The first is that the Ukraine War, and our position of helping Ukraine, began during the Biden administration. Had Trump been president and done the exact same thing as the Biden crew in taking Ukraine’s side, the reaction from the left probably would have been much less supportive of Ukraine. In fact, the left might have been against it. On the other hand, Trump’s war against Iran obviously must be condemned by the left, much like everything Trump does.

That’s not all, though. Another factor is that Putin is still connected in their minds to Trump, either by a continuing belief in Russiagate, or just by the idea that they’re both dictators and birds of a feather. Therefore of course the left will support Ukraine rather than Putin in the war (and by the way, I also support Ukraine, but for reasons which I’ve aired before).

Then there’s Israel. The left has come to uniformly hate and demonize Israel, and Israel is a major beneficiary of and military partner in the current war against Iran. Therefore the majority of the left must be on Iran’s side, just as it is mostly on Hamas’ side and on the Palestinians’ side.

So the whole thing is not hypocrisy or even inconsistency if you understand that the left’s guiding principles go like this: Trump bad, Israel bad.

The post Leftists, Ukraine, and Iran appeared first on The New Neo.

Israel’s ban on Palestinian workers has left families hungry and parents unable to pay for their children’s school fees. Still, the ban is being justified in the name of security, and shows no signs of abating.

It reminds me of the old joke about the man who murdered his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

As Katie Pavlich writes on X:

Israel is a sovereign country and Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank have zero right to work in that country – especially after Israelis who lived on the border with Gaza invited Palestinians into their homes to work and break bread. Gaza Palestinians returned the favor by taking notes about where safe rooms were, layouts of the homes, if there were dogs, etc. in plans for their ultimate slaughter, pillaging and rape on October 7. Dozens of Americans were murdered at the NOVA peace festival down the road.

So yeah, they’re not allowed to work in Israel anymore. Maybe you should be asking the governments of Gaza and the West Bank to foster economies that benefit their people so they don’t have to go work in the country next door.

However, it’s actually more complicated than that. There were indeed early reports that many Gazan workers spied on the kibbutz residents and helped Hamas with gathering information for the slaughter. But this spying was apparently not as widespread as initially reported – or was it? I’m referring to this report:

According to a Channel 12 report on Wednesday, the Shin Bet has investigated some 3,000 Gazans who had permits to work in Israel to assess if they had provided the terror group with information about the communities it was planning on attacking and has concluded that no such concerted effort was made.

The report noted that the Shin Bet did not completely rule out the possibility that some individual laborers had cooperated with the terror group.

“There’s no concern that the people who were investigated passed information to Hamas as a result of their work in Israel,” Channel 12 quoted the Shin Bet as saying. There was no immediate confirmation of the report from the agency, which rarely responds to inquiries.

What is the political bent of Israel’s Channel 12? I’ve read in that past that it’s on the left, and Google AI seems to think it’s center or center-left. At any rate, the issue is that this is (a) a report about a report, with no confirmation (b) a report based on interviews with 16% of the workforce; but who comprised this 16% and how were they made available for interrogation? (c) a report that there was no “concerted” effort.

What does “concerted” mean in this context – does it mean sheer numbers or does it mean coordination? Were the 16% typical of the group as a whole? How did Shin Bet determine whether they were telling the truth or not? Does the report even exist? If it does, is it being fairly represented? Not only is it not available for reading, but Shin Bet hasn’t even confirmed the story.

I don’t know the answers. What I do know is that Hamas is the government of Gaza and at the time of the attack had the support of the vast majority of the people of Gaza. It’s harder to tell how people in Gaza feel now, but I think it’s safe to say that many continue to harbor an intense hatred of Israel. Hamas itself is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Israel is under no obligation to employ any of the people of Gaza.

Another response to the New Yorker tweet asks the question: why can’t Egypt employ the unemployed Gazans? After all, they’re next door and many are of Egyptian descent. But we all know why: Palestinians have been a destabilizing element wherever they go.

In other news of Israel and Hamas, it appears that Israel continues to make inroads in Gaza, if this report is true:

The post Israel and Gaza: you’re mean if you don’t hire your sworn enemies to work for you appeared first on The New Neo.