In some ways, the post-10/7 wars have gone better than expected for Israel. At the beginning, it seemed as though Hezbollah, for example, would be a more formidable foe than it has been. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, or that Israel can ever rest. But it does mean that 10/7 acted more as a wakeup call to galvanize Israel into taking the threats seriously and understanding that its enemies really do mean to destroy it.

Unfortunately, another thing that’s been learned is how powerful Jew-hatred is, including when it’s cloaked in a fake “anti-Zionism” that is nothing more than a vicious double standard that will not allow Israel to defend itself. This did not begin on 10/7; I’ve written two posts so far about how far back it goes, and how instrumental the Soviets were in spreading the word (please see this as well as this).

The anti-Jewish forces got busy right away, as early as 10/8 when Israel had done nothing as yet except be viciously attacked. But Jew-hatred always finds fertile ground, and it has spread immensely since 10/7, both on left and right. A lie really does get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. It is sobering and depressing, but it’s reality these days.

Please see this:

Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?

I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough. …

… [F]olklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.

Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable.

The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all.

And an extremely successful lie, at that. On the left in the 2026 election in the US, it is almost required that a Democrat candidate support the claim. The right – or the former right, such as Tucker Carlson – has its adherents, as well.

Powerline has this post of remembrance. The stories remain heartbreaking, just like the 9/11 stories. But there is no going back and undoing what happened. The only way is to go forward. But how to do that in the face of the remarkable moral inversion of much of the world? Here is a comment there which deals with that question:

The most stunning thing to me is the response of Western Civilization to the horrendous Satanic acts of Hamas on October 7th. In a functional, optimistic and honorable civilization, our collective response should have been total commitment to the eradication of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamism in general. Sadly, the opposite has happened. Many (mostly European) countries have doubled down on Jew hatred, admiration for the sub-human “palestinian cause” and total fecklessness in the face of their suicidal choices of importing millions of proto-terrorists into their own countries.

Israel and the United States of America* have stood virtually alone against the creeping scourge of “submission”.

And there’s this, on Britain’s Green Party:

‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.

It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.

I have been meaning to post this interview with Dara Horn, who has written penetratingly on Jew-hatred and what is actually behind it. Now seems like a good time to recommend watching it. A great many people have tackled that topic, to be sure. But I’m especially impressed with her insight:

The post On the third anniversary of 10/7 appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s an excerpt from Netanyahu’s speech that I think encapsulates the irony of the situation:

Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.
Now, you want to hear the ultimate irony?

In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall!

In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.

There is a great deal of charade in the Middle East, and a great deal of destructive maneuvering at the UN. Netanyahu is telling the truth, but it won’t matter.

The UN has been an anti-Israel force for a long long time, which is also ironic because it was a UN vote that helped establish the modern state of Israel. For the history-challenged (which is an ever-increasing number of people), see this:

Throughout 1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine examined the Palestinian question and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end.

Other ironies: it is Hamas and other terrorist groups who would dearly love to genocide the Israelis/Jews if they could, and 10/7 was a step in that direction with greater ambitions than it achieved. It is Israel that has neither wanted to commit genocide nor taken steps to do so, and yet it is Israel that is widely accused of genocide. It is Hamas and other terrorists groups that purposely kill babies and other children in Israel as well as purposely putting their own children in harm’s way, whereas Israel tries not to kill children but sometimes does so as collateral damage, and yet it is the Israelis who are accused of targeting children.

The latest salvo in the “child-killer” rhetoric is this pernicious propaganda film:

Israel’s culture minister has called for the Oscar-winning Israeli co-directors of Naza, a documentary that accuses the Israeli army of mass civilian killings in Gaza, to be stripped of their citizenship over “treason against the state”.

Named for the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, the film speaks to 24 unidentified Israeli military and intelligence officers who outlined the AI-powered targeting systems used by the Israeli army to bombard Gaza in the war triggered by the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

Twenty-four unidentified Israeli military and intelligence officers. Hey, can I be one, too?

More:

How does a film reliant on masked “witnesses,” unverified testimonials, and zero cross-examination command instant international acclaim?

You know how – it fits the preferred agenda of the Israel-haters and Jew-haters and Netanyahu-haters around the world, and in particular the left but hardly limited to it.

Co-director Yuval Abraham claimed the film was created to “spark a public discussion about the Israeli government’s actions.” But if the genuine goal is to spark a meaningful, honest conversation, you must present full context and transparent information. You must give people the complete picture so they can make an informed judgment. True dialogue requires context, nuanced expert analysis, and an honest acknowledgment of the existential security threats Israel faces. …

Much of the Western public exhibits an insatiable appetite for any narrative that delegitimizes or criminalizes the State of Israel, or its IDF. We see this cycle play out constantly: initial, unverified claims or inflated casualty figures following an Israeli strike make front-page headlines and send thousands into the streets in protest. Days later, when independent reviews reveal the original reporting was false or misleading, the retraction is buried in quiet, footnote-sized corrections that nobody reads. The damage is already done. Without verifiable identity, specific context, or cross-examination, some audiences trust and applaud the authors’ narrative on faith.

None of this is to claim that any military, including the IDF, operates flawlessly or above critique. Evaluating military ethics in asymmetric warfare is agonizingly complex.

How do you calculate proportionality when fighting an enemy that deliberately embeds itself behind its own civilian population? When terrorist cells operate out of homes, schools, and hospitals, using human shields, every military response carries tragic potential costs. But judging operations strictly by their heartbreaking outcomes—while entirely ignoring the explicit strategy of human shielding that causes them—presents a fundamentally distorted view of reality.

Distorting reality in the interests of a narrative is the point. What’s more, it has been very very successful.

The post Mamdani didn’t stop Netanyahu from speaking at the UN after all appeared first on The New Neo.

Ballistic missiles are cheap. Anti-ballistic missiles are expensive.

But drones are dirt cheap — like switching to Walmart from Tiffany’s — and interceptors are still expensive.

Lasers are cheap to fire, but can be expensive to develop — if the military really did spend just half a billion dollars to put laser defenses in the field, that’s something to cheer. It was a year ago almost to the day that the New York Times reported the Army would “soon” field lasers, and quoted Electro Optic Systems’ chief executive Andreas Schwer saying, “The Ukrainian war and the Gaza war were key trigger events that everybody thought, ‘It’s the time now to make this operational. We should not spend any more years in doing demonstrations, tests and prototyping.'” …

Lasers also come with extreme power requirements and some serious limitations, particularly distance. But when it comes to point defense, there might not be a better solution to the drone problem, and it’s good to see them getting a workout in Iran.

“Somewhat surprisingly,” the Post claimed, “the laser weapons are operated by soldiers using reconfigured Xbox game console controllers.”

Winning wars is about many things, but one of them is technology. That goes way way back into antiquity. For example, there was the crossbow:

Thought to have been invented about the time of the First Crusade by western Europeans, the crossbow actually arose around 500 BC simultaneously in China and Greece. The impetus for its creation was the desire to improve upon bows of the time. It would come to later redefine war in the Middle Ages. …

The medieval crossbow, or “arbalist” as it was called during the Middle Ages, was resurrected in the form of a hand-held weapon in the 10th century, and its use spread rapidly across Europe. From 1200 to 1480 it evolved through several stages to become a powerful and deadly weapon. Its popularity had much to do with the ability of its missile, called a bolt, to penetrate mail body armor at close range. As such, the crossbow became a class leveler—a man of even modest means could afford one, it was very easy to mster, and unlike the knight who had to maintain armor, horse, and retainers at enormous expense, the owner of a crossbow needed only bring bow strings and bolts to the field of combat.

The medieval crossbow and its user were disparaged by the era’s military elite, i.e., the horse-borne knight. But aristocratic disdain could not erase the fact that the mounted warrior of the Middle Ages was at great risk from this plebeian, generally infantry, weapon.

Sounds as though the crossbow was slightly analogous to the drone in terms of lowering the expense of a weapon.

Before the crossbow, there was the chariot:

The first evidence of humans using vehicle in warfare are Sumerian depictions of four-wheeled wagons pulled by semi-domesticated onagers. These war wagons were slow and cumbersome, but provided a protected elevated platform for javelineers and slingers. Chariots with spoke-wheels pulled by horses were lightweight and fast which made it feasible to outrun light infantry and wagons. Although horses have been ridden as from at least the 4th millennium BC they were most likely largely relegated to transporting warriors, who fought on foot. Until the invention and widespread adoption of the saddle, chariots remained the primary form of cavalry, as they offered a controllable and reliable platform from which fighters could rapidly manoeuvre around the battlefield and engage with projectile and melee weapons, dismount and fight on foot or climb on to make a swift retreat.

The list is long and I don’t see it ending any time soon, unless it ends catastrophically. About the latter – I grew up thinking I wouldn’t grow up, because of nuclear weapons, but fortunately that turned out to be untrue.

The post Instead of star wars … appeared first on The New Neo.

That’s to say, [the UN has] become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites, masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.

I would remind them of what Mises said: good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings.

Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their task.

Instead, they allowed chaos, violence, and international terrorism to flourish.

The alleged defenders of human rights have sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.

They have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa.

It’s really quite simple as well as obvious. But the institution is fatally flawed and the words will fall on deaf ears.

The post Milei tells the UN bureaucrats some harsh truths appeared first on The New Neo.

“This decision, shortly thereafter, was to go to a mosque,” Bush said on Wednesday evening. “I did so because I was deeply concerned about stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”

Bush revisited his 9/11 response during a conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” held at his presidential center in Dallas. …

“I want you to talk about a couple of those events. You talked about going to the Islamic Center and trying to make sure that our Muslim American citizens knew that we didn’t blame them for what had happened,” said Rice.

“I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion,” Bush added.

That turned out to be a greatly-criticized statement, for obvious reasons. At the beginning, however, it’s understandable he didn’t want vigilante justice wreaked on ordinary Muslim-Americans. But that could have been done by just saying it – that ordinary Muslims were not terrorists and should not be attacked in retaliation. To characterize Islam itself as a “religion of peace” was absurd then and is absurd now.

That’s not to say there aren’t Koran verses supporting peace, but there are Koran verses for almost anything, including many supporting war. Nor is the religious text the only point, although the Koran probably has more advocacy of war than exists in other religions. More importantly, it’s pretty obvious that, at least in the last few decades, people acting in the name of Islam are involved in an enormous amount of the terrorism and war-making in the world, both internal (Muslim on Muslim) and internationally.

Polls are an indicator of how much support violence has in the Muslim world, including in the US. For example, in a 2024 poll (obviously taken post 10/7), 37% of Muslims in the US saw Hamas positively. And in July of 2026 the Hamas approval rate among Muslims in America had risen to 44%.

Those are, quite simply, terrible figures.

The post George W. Bush: again with the “religion of peace” appeared first on The New Neo.

This is impressive, if true:

US special forces spent four months conducting a secret mine-clearing mission in the Strait of Hormuz in an attempt to open up the waterway, the Financial Times reported Sunday.

Iran has said it placed mines in international and Omani waters following the outbreak of the war. The International Maritime Organization estimated in June that roughly 80 mines had been deployed along important shipping routes.

The covert operation was carried out amid ongoing exchanges of strikes between the US and Iran in and around the Strait, according to people familiar with the mission.

Navy SEAL divers worked with unmanned vessels, robots, and specialized underwater equipment to locate and remove suspected Iranian mines, often operating at night.

Military engagements engender something called the fog of war. This is somewhat different, though – it indicates a secret operation, which are also common in wars. Those who don’t trust the Trump administration or the Jerusalem Post (or the Financial Times?) are free to say the report is a lie. It doesn’t sound like a lie to me.

Others who are against the Iran war will probably dismiss it as irrelevant or unimportant. But to me, it’s emblematic of how much in war goes on outside of our awareness, both good and bad.

The post The clandestine clearing of the Strait of Hormuz mines appeared first on The New Neo.

The Trump administration has been saying for a while that as many as nine million barrels of oil a day are traversing the Strait of Hormuz. That claim has been “fact checked” and derided by just about everyone. …

Only–oops–it turns out that President Trump and Secretary Wright, one of his cabinet’s most impressive members, were right all along, as Kpler now confirms:

“An average of 8.6 million barrels of oil a day have been flowing through the Strait of Hormuz — more than previously reported, maritime analyst firm Kpler confirmed in a new update that matches estimates from the Trump administration.
***
“Kpler and other trackers had initially put the number closer to 5 million, but new data includes “dark transits,” where ships turn off their transponders and secret ship-to-ship transfers, which the group wasn’t previously tracking.

“The nature of the transits left Kpler and other analysts to report only a handful of crossings every day, figures that were picked up by media outlets and used to point out the discrepancy between what was being reported and what the Trump administration was claiming.

“The White House has long-maintained that the data firms were missing a chunk of the exports due to the dark transits, with Kpler now confirming the fact as the dark ships start reappearing and painting a clearer picture of the oil flow.”

I seem to recall a considerable amount of discussion on this blog in the past about this topic.

The post The Strait of Hormuz appeared first on The New Neo.

By the way, about the idea that the Bush administration thought the Iraq aftermath would be easy (“a cakewalk”), I beg to differ and I wrote about it in this post from 2005.

The problems in the present campaign against Iran – and they are many – stem from the fact that Iran is a much bigger country than Iraq with a larger population and a more religiously fanatical leadership unafraid to kill vast numbers of its own people, plus the IRGC has a structure that makes it exceptionally difficult to break, with power to control or threaten to control the vital Strait of Hormuz. In addition, we no longer tolerate having any boots on the ground, or nation-building of any complexity or length, and the Iranian leaders are well aware of that fact.

The post How did that war on terror go? 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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the U.S. and Ukraine plan to build a drone factory in the U.S. as part of a new defense partnership combining American manufacturing with Ukraine’s battlefield-tested drone technology.

Speaking in an interview with far-right influencer Laura Zoomer, Zelensky said the agreement would expand on an initial drone cooperation deal reached with the U.S., describing the project as beneficial to both countries. …

Zelensky told Loomer that Ukraine’s drone capabilities continue to advance, with some systems now capable of operating at ranges more than 1,800 miles, adding that engineers are working to extend the distance even further.

A White House official told Reuters that the details of the agreement were under discussion ahead of Zelensky’s planned meeting on Tuesday with President Trump.

It’s a little bit like our military partnership with Israel, which has much greater depth and width. The Buchanan wing of the right is against both, but has mostly ignored the obvious benefits or lied about them.

This is a very interesting part of the article, however:

Zelensky met with Loomer this week in Kyiv after the far-right influencer, who is a loyal ally of Trump, reversed her long-held vocal opposition of U.S. military aid to Ukraine amid the Russian war.

She cited her firsthand experience witnessing air raid sirens while visiting Ukraine helped change her perspective and issued an apology to Ukraine and its government for her past critical comments.

It’s not common to change one’s mind so publicly on such an issue.

Drone warfare seems to be the wave of the future, and we need to play catch-up on it.

The post Ukraine will help us with drone warfare appeared first on The New Neo.