Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa against October attack

It is an embarrassing critique for Hamas, which has used religious arguments to justify its actions.

bbc.com

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

A fatwa is a non-binding Islamic legal ruling from a respected religious scholar usually based on the Quran or the Sunnah - the sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

Jihad means “struggle” in Arabic and in Islam it can be a personal struggle for spiritual improvement or a military struggle against unbelievers.

Dr Dayah adds: “If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.”

For Hamas, the fatwa represents an embarrassing and potentially damaging critique, particularly as the group often justifies its attacks on Israel through religious arguments to garner support from Arab and Muslim communities.

The 7 October attack saw hundreds of Hamas gunmen from Gaza invade southern Israel. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign to destroy Hamas, during which more than 43,400 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Dr Dayah argues that the significant civilian casualties in Gaza, together with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and humanitarian disaster that have followed the 7 October attack, means that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Islam.

Hamas, he says, has failed in its obligations of “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians and their shelters, and providing security and safety as much as possible in the various aspects of life... security, economic, health, and education, and saving enough supplies for them.”

Dr Dayah points to Quranic verses and the Sunnah that set strict conditions for the conduct of jihad, including the necessity of avoiding actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

He also stresses that Muslim leaders are obligated to ensure the safety and well-being of non-combatants, including by providing food, medicine, and refuge to those not involved in the fighting.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” Dr Dayah states.

His opposition to the 7 October attack is especially significant given his deep influence in Gaza, where he is seen as a key religious figure and a vocal critic of Islamist movements, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

His moderate Salafist beliefs place him in direct opposition to Hamas’s approach to armed resistance and its ties to Shia-ruled Iran.

Salafists are fundamentalists who seek to adhere the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations who followed him.

Dr Dayah has consistently argued for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that adheres strictly to Islamic law, rather than the political party-based systems that Hamas and other groups advocate.

“Our role model is the Prophet Muhammad, who founded a nation and did not establish political parties that divide the nation. Therefore, parties in Islam are forbidden,” he said in a sermon he gave at a mosque several years ago.

He has also condemned extremism, opposing jihadist groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and has used all of his platforms to issue fatwas on various social and political issues, ranging from commercial transactions, social disputes over marriage and divorce, to the conduct of political violence.

The fatwa adds to the growing internal debate within Gaza and the broader Arab world over the moral and legal implications of Hamas’s actions, and it is likely to fuel further divisions within Palestinian society regarding the use of armed resistance in the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Sheikh Ashraf Ahmed, one of Dr Dayah’s students who was forced to leave his house in Gaza City last year and flee to the south of Gaza with his wife and nine children, told the BBC: “Our scholar [Dr Dayah] refused to leave his home in northern Gaza despite the fears of Israeli air strikes. He chose to fulfil his religious duty by issuing his legal opinion on the attack”.

Ahmed described the fatwa as the most powerful legal judgment of a historical moment. “It’s a deeply well researched document, reflecting Dayah’s commitment to Islamic jurisprudence,” he said.

Harrowing video shows Hamas torturing innocent Palestinians

The horrifying incidents appear to have been filmed inadvertently by CCTV cameras inside a Hamas military base in northern Gaza raided by Is

Mail Online

Israel's military says it has discovered thousands of hours of sickening footage showing Hamas interrogators torturing innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The harrowing videos show male prisoners with sacks over their heads, chained to floors and ceilings in painful positions.

Men writhe in agony as they are beaten with sticks on the soles of their feet.

In one distressing clip, a hooded man appears to be screaming and remonstrating with his captor.

The horrifying incidents appear to have been filmed inadvertently by CCTV cameras inside a Hamas military base in northern Gaza raided by Israeli troops earlier this year.

The footage was said to have been discovered on computers seized from the abandoned compound inside the Jabalia refugee camp. It is unclear why the men were being held.

But human rights experts have previously warned that innocent Palestinians have been kidnapped from their homes and tortured by Hamas thugs who have ruled Gaza with an iron rod since 2007.

Gay men and adulterers are among those who have been tortured by Hamas, along with political opponents and anyone accused of collaborating with Israel.

A time stamp in the corner of the footage suggests the torture took place between 2018 and 2020.

Often, the guards appear casually at ease, chatting as the abuse unfolds.

One interrogator reclines on a chair, with his arms folded behind his head, in front of a chained-up prisoner hanging from the ceiling by his arms.

Another film features a man, with a red sack over his head, chained up so awkwardly he can just about place one foot on the floor. One captor later appears to brutally choke the man.

A senior Israeli military source told The Mail on Sunday: 'The IDF found these CCTV images in March. It took months to go through them all.' It has not been possible for the videos to be independently verified but human rights groups have long warned of abuses by Hamas against civilians in Gaza. Amnesty International published a 44-page report detailing a brutal campaign of abduction, torture and killings by Hamas against its own people following the last Israel-Hamas war in 2014.

Many were accused of collaborating with Israel. Hamas has also tortured and killed gay men in Gaza, where homosexuality is against the law.

Hundreds of gay men risked their lives to cross over the border to Israel or Egypt before the most recent conflict.

One, Abdul, previously told Israeli media how he lived in fear in Gaza after Hamas discovered he was gay. He was tortured repeatedly before he fled to Egypt.

In a chilling account that matches up with the torture captured in the footage found by the IDF, he told i24News: 'They put me in a tiny room. They wouldn't let me sleep or go to the bathroom inside. There was no food.

'They would torture me so badly. Sometimes, they would tie my feet up and beat them with a stick. After that, every few years, they would arrest me and torture me in the same way.

'They made me swear on the Koran that I won't be gay again.'

Last night another Hamas torture victim, Hamza Howidy, 27, told The Mail on Sunday how he was detained for protesting against the regime in Gaza.

'They would torture you until you broke and say whatever it is they wanted,' he said. 'I could hear my fellow protesters scream in the next room.'

Mr Howidy, an accountant who later fled Gaza, said he believed he was held in western Jabalia in 2019 but it is unknown if he appears in the footage.

He said: 'Hamas controls everything. They confiscated my laptop and had issues with my conversations with my girlfriend.

'Collaborating with Israel would warrant a severe punishment and homosexuality would result in a death sentence.' Mr Howidy said one man was detained for three years and tortured three times a week. 'He had objects inserted into him,' he added. 'One man was given electric shocks for two years before his innocence was eventually discovered.

'The first thing he did was shoot dead the Hamas officer who reported him – his uncle.

'You would never get a lawyer and your family would have no idea what happened to you. I was lucky because my family paid a price for me. I managed to leave for Europe via the Egyptian border in September last year, which cost a fortune, but my family there were told that should I return I'd be a dead man walking. Luckily I got them safe passage too.'

He added: 'You just cannot tell who is a Hamas snitch or not.

'One friend of mine was forced to divorce his wife when he got caught for something. There is a growing hatred towards Hamas now, especially after the war, but because Hamas controls the media and people are afraid, we hardly hear of it.

'People outside of Gaza call Hamas freedom fighters when they are killing innocent Palestinians for nothing. Hamas is holding the people of Gaza hostage.'

A former Israeli intelligence officer, known as Guy C, told this newspaper that Hamas' leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by the IDF last month, was 'obsessed with finding collaborators and held thousands against their will'.

He added: 'They have been known to melt plastic over skin, electric cables on their body.

'Some are electrocuted on electricity pylons or dragged on a chain from a vehicle until they die.

'Even worse, they won't allow the families a proper burial, and the bodies have a sign on saying they were collaborating.'

Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkharib, who is now based in the US and is a fellow at the Atlantic Council think- tank, said: 'Extreme torture has been a fundamental component of Hamas' governance strategy to ensure they deter people and instil fear in those who speak out.'

How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative

a powerful group of editors is hijacking Wikipedia, pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about Hamas,

piratewires.com

a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence

• A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack
• Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas
• The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”
• A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord
• Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.

While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”

The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.

“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”

The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.

Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”

In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.

According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.

The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.

So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads “This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”

But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.

In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”

At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called Ïvana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.

With Ïvana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.” The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with Ïvana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)

In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”

Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”

The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with Ïvana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.

There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.

One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Against Racialism, Left and Right

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the

Compact

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the political aisle. First visible on the political left with an eruption of protests and even of violence on Ivy League campuses, it also appeared soon enough on the political right.

What has transpired is a complex story about the academy and the internet, the elite and the fringes—one that we must confront directly as it reveals something rotten in our politics. This concerning trajectory can only be changed through the restoration of higher principles that once kept these threats in check. In the face of dangerous identity-based ideologies, it is crucial to return to America’s historic defense of colorblindness, meritocracy, and fair play.

Left-wingers have participated in anti-Israel and pro-Hamas agitation, in some cases even defending the Hamas militants who massacred approximately some 1,200 innocents, including at a music festival. Keffiyeh-clad student protesters captured buildings at Columbia, eventually setting off a wave of copycat flashpoints at other universities. Elites institutions like Harvard—which previously had issued statements on political controversies ranging from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to the war in Ukraine—suddenly went silent on the Israel-Hamas war in the name of protecting freedom of speech.

These institutions have failed to keep in check the simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed ideology that undergirds the worldview of today’s left. The provincial-minded elites that call the shots in these institutions tend to filter every conflict through this ideological lens, looking primarily to skin color and then power dynamics as the main criteria for judging the rectitude of a cause. Palestinians, with their slightly darker skin tone and less developed economy and military, fit the “oppressed” mold, thus making the Jewish state their “oppressor.” 

Though this line of thought dates back to the 1960s (think of the Black Panthers’ alliance with the Palestinian cause), this is the first time that it has come to dominate discourse on university campuses. This is thanks in part to the collapse of intellectual diversity on campus. But it also has attracted numerous students and professors because of the prevalence of victim worship and the subsequent resentment toward successful groups. In their eyes, Palestinians are a kind of eternal victim. A pseudo-historical narrative tells us they have been victimized for time everlasting, and lack any agency in their own fate. Ironically, the oppression of the Jews dates back to biblical times, yet American Jews are one of the most successful groups in academia and other intellectual professions. The success of a minority group throws a wrench into the left’s narrative gears.

Across the political aisle, anti-Semitic ideologies have a history of appearing in the form of conspiratorial thinking on the fringes of American conservatism. Lately, it has been the non-traditional right-wingers—who, because of how our politics works, have been lumped in with “conservatism” writ large—who espouse such views. Take Kanye West, who was a kind of ally to Donald Tru.mp and then embedded himself within the right, eventually suffering from mental breakdowns and going off on anti-Semitic rants. 

Or Candace Owens, who, although always controversial, once understood where the lines lay. This was in part because of her employers, her partners, and the rules on platforms like YouTube or X (formerly Twitter). Yet in recent months, she began questioning whether the Axis powers deserved Western antipathy, and even apologizing for Kanye’s threat to “go defcon three on some Jews” and musing about a “small ring of people in Hollywood who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield” their supposed crimes (always careful to hedge, she insists this characterization doesn’t apply to American Jewry writ large, but the hallmarks of classic anti-Semitism are unmistakable in her discourse).

On X, many right-wing accounts espouse open anti-Semitism, often posting allegedly ironic memes about Adolf Hitler. I once posted something about critical race theory, and was told by one of these accounts, “Well, you know that critical race theory was invented by Jews.” Though this kind of right-wing conspiratorial thinking is nothing new, the fact that it has become so commonplace on online platforms like X is an alarming novelty that merits our concern.

The growing distrust of mainstream institutions that is characteristic of today’s right can’t be written off completely. This sentiment—ushered in by figures like Donald Tru.mp—swept away the broken establishment Republican consensus, yet it has failed to fill the ideological vacuum it has created. Tru.mp tried to fill it with partisan politics but lacked an adequate intellectual framework. Those who retrofitted their ideologies to Tru.mp attempted to create an intellectual substructure for his presidency, in some cases ushering in a kind of chaotic element. To be sure, chaos can create space for creativity. But it always comes with a downside.

This ideological vacuum is compounded with relaxed censorship policies on platforms like X, thanks to its new owner, Elon Musk. To be sure, this has allowed more space to express legitimate viewpoints and is preferable to the old censorship system. But it has also allowed conspiratorial thinking to gain traction. Worse, it has opened the door to alt-right influencers and the so-called Groypers, who have taken politics as a method of garnering attention and then monetizing it either on or off their platforms. This has all been exacerbated by the disappearance of gatekeepers and overall quality control within the post-establishmentarian right.

At face value, the fact that such seemingly opposed cultural subsets can find a point of convergence is perplexing, to say the least. One is in the academy, an elite group pursuing prestige. The other is on the internet, a fringe phenomenon, pursuing clicks. But if we take a closer look, we find that both are identity-based movements. Both movements are driven by envy, resentment, fear, and the impulse to locate a scapegoat to achieve their general political objectives. What’s at stake in these two groups having such an influence over discourse is something much bigger than the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

Should we fail to restrain their growth, we will have two large factions in the United States that want to abandon the principles of colorblind equality, fair play, and judging individuals on their own merit. Thus, this isn’t just a question of anti-Semitism, but a question of how we want to govern our society. It is in our best interest as a nation to reject both left-wing identity politics, which seeks to categorize everyone in an intersectional hierarchy and then use the state to force equity or the equalization of outcomes, and right-wing conspiratorial thinking, a form of pessimism used to pin one’s failures on someone else’s success.

We are blessed to live in a country where people can succeed when they work hard and put their talent to good use. It is imperative that we fight to maintain a narrative that reflects this reality, rather than capitulating to pessimistic ideologies divorced from the facts. 

In 1790, George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI. This letter offers us a model of how American principles can assimilate minority groups and, in particular, American Jews. Some scholars view it as the first time that Jews were welcomed as full citizens of a modern national polity. Washington acknowledged that Jews have the same liberties, rights, and benefits of citizenship. And that citizenship requires all of us to work hard, to contribute to society, and to play by the rules. 

Washington’s letter should cause us to reflect on how far we have come since the time he wrote it. Today, our nation is home to a diverse mix of people from a variety of continental, racial, and religious backgrounds. The principles that Washington laid out are precisely the ones that can still work today if we are dedicated to them. The recent surge in racialist and conspiratorial thinking calls us to renew the case for these principles and to argue for them. 

This is the only way forward for the country.

And finally, New Rule: To mark the October 7th anniversary, we must launch a campaign to educate young Americans about the Middle East. And the way I'd like to begin that process is by addressing an open letter to Chappell Roan.

Now, to those viewers who aren't watching this while also looking at their phones, let me explain. Chappell Roan is not the name of one of Tru.mp's golf courses, she's actually a great new recording artist who, like a Hezbollah pager, is really blowing up. In just a few months, she went from a struggling artist to getting three billion plays on Spotify. Netting her almost 11 cents.

But here's what caught my eye. She seems like a Gen Zer who can be reached, because I saw her on TMZ say: "it's like, obviously, fuck the policies of the right. But also, fuck some of the policies on the left." That sounds like something I would say!

She also said, "I think it's important that people use critical thinking. I think it's important for me to… question myself… question my algorithm, question: is some person that tweeted something about someone else even true?" Preach, queer ally, preach.

But then we get to Israel, and Chappell, this is where we must put to the test your pledge to use critical thinking and to question whether what you're reading on social media is true. Because it isn't. There's a whole history of the Middle East that you and your fans aren't hearing about. So, why don't you let me be your spirit guide through this?

But before I do, let me tell you a little about myself, since you may have no idea who I am, considering that when this show went on the air you were barely old enough to be told you were in the wrong body. So, my name is Bill Maher, I'm 35. I've been to all of Diddy's freak-off parties, and I work at the same place as Euphoria. In fact, she's right down the hall. My TikTok handle is "B-Nasty" and I go live every Friday night with the anime filter on, and I once won a smoke-off against Willie Nelson, Woody Harelson and Snoop. Okay, that one's true.

But, no, look the truth be told, I'm a baby boomer, I remember phone-booths and cars with ashtrays and vaginal sex. And I didn't learn about the Middle East from TikTok, which is a Chinese company whose totalitarian government would just love to have America's youth hating America. That's some of that algorithm stuff you say you want to look into.

Now, first off, the fact that you don't know much history isn't your fault. You live in the United States where the schools stop doing that whole "teaching facts" thing a while ago. But getting all your history from TikTok is like getting all your calories from Hostess.

I know you're moved by what you see on there, we all are. The dead Palestinian bodies. But it's odd that your generation didn't seem nearly as moved by the Jewish bodies on October 7th. You killed at Coachella this year, but when Hamas kills at a music festival it's a whole other thing. Doesn't the sight of so many young women raped at a music festival make it a little personal? My guess is that Gen Z hearts are hardened by the propaganda you see on TikTok, which likes to call the Jews "colonizers." But colonizers are intruders who have no history in an area, like when Spain conquered the Mayans. Or when your mom took over Facebook.

When the Dutch took over South Africa, they had no history to the land, they just wanted it. But Israel is the Jews homeland. And Jews have always lived there, I cap you not. You can look it up. It's in this book called The Bible, which is horribly wrong about sex ed, slavery, science and cooking, but the archaeology checks out. It says the Jews built a temple with a really big wall seven centuries before Muhammad or Islam ever existed, and sure as shit, you can still go there and touch it. Calling Jews colonizers in Israel is like calling Native Americans colonizers here. It's ridiculous.

Chappell, did you know that for 2,000 years, Palestine was like an Uber driver with a three star rating? Nobody wanted it. And there was never any Arab country called "Palestine." It was an orphan province, and if you ask people what they thought about it back then, they'd say it gave them the ick.

But after World War II, and after the Jews were very nearly wiped out by an actual attempted genocide, they decided it was time for their historic homeland to be an actual country so that for once they could defend themselves.

And the UN - we like them, right? Yeah, they agreed, and voted a country for each of the indigenous peoples. One side agreed to that. But the Arabs had a slightly different proposal. They said, "how about we keep it all and wipe you out?"

Chappell, if you think it was repressive growing up queer in the midwest, try the Mid East. You're a female drag queen and you sing, "I fucked you in the bathroom when we went to dinner, your parents at the table." Yeah, that wouldn't fly in Gaza. Although you would, straight off a roof. The same goes for, "knee deep in the passenger seat and you're eating me out." Yeah, my guess is the morality police would figure out that one's not about the drive-thru and kill your featherboa wearing ass. You know when you sing that LA is where "boys and girls can all be queens every single day"? You're welcome, but offer not good in the West Bank.

Chappell, you're not wrong that oppression is bad or that Palestinian and many other Muslim populations are oppressed and deserve to be freed. You just have it completely ass-backwards as to who is doing the oppressing. Hamas is a terrorist mafia that took over Gaza. The Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist mafia that took over Iran. ISIS is a terrorist mafia that took over Iraq. The Taliban is a terrorist mafia that took over Afghanistan. These are the oppressors and when you make it all about Israel, you take the pressure off of them. You enable them.

The Iranian regime has killed 600 protesters after a 22-year-old woman died in police custody following her arrest for the crime of wearing her head covering incorrectly. Just to be clear, that's your team. Iran is who sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah. Are you sure this is who you want to throw down with?

Meryl Streep spoke at the UN recently and said this about the Taliban, who are only slightly more conservative than your heroes in Hamas. She said, "today in Kabul a female cat has more freedoms than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today… A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not." You're a singer and you're advocating for a place and a culture you would never want to live under.

Gender may not be binary, but right and wrong kind of is.

The ancient Greeks loved the theater and ancient Greek actors enjoyed a position of eminence and respect. In contrast, although entertainment and drama were similarly adored in Ancient Rome, theater performers were often demeaned by the upper-class society and also perceived as morally unclean.

In Israel, Every Day is October 7. In the U.S., Every Day is October 8.

Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned it

Jewish Journal

Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Ever since witnessing an ecstatic pro-Hamas celebration in Time Square just 24 hours after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I thought nothing could surprise me. Then to commemorate the one-year anniversary of those atrocities, the Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it?” Klein asks. “Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?”

As someone who encountered gruesome videos of Hamas’s “cynical exploitation” and “weaponization” of Israelis’ trauma exactly a year ago, watched as terrorists referred to terrified Israelis in the South — those who just happened to be most likely to oppose “settlements” — as settlers and dogs, and heard firsthand from people who witnessed livestreams of family and friends held at gunpoint, most of them murdered or taken hostage, I found the premise grotesque.

It was particularly appalling because beyond the therapeutic effect of creating artwork, the cri de cœur that motivated the art installations from Tel Aviv to American college campuses, “kidnapped” posters across the globe, the Nova Exhibition, online maps of the massacres, and documentaries about October 7, is the denials of the trauma itself. And the feeling that since that horrific day, we have been abandoned. That we are profoundly alone. That every day in Israel is October 7th.

Given the depth of depravity of what happened that day, some Jews initially believed the world would finally stand with Israel. I didn’t. But I did think that everyone would at least condemn the atrocities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Israel has faced obscene denialism and false accusations while young people across the globe celebrate monstrous barbarism and valorize those who perpetrated it. Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Where is the world’s outrage? Where is the world’s empathy? Where are the calls for Hamas to return our stolen souls? Where is the Red Cross? Where are the organizations and so-called allies with whom we stood, we marched, we campaigned? It’s #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

American college students have borne the brunt of the rise in antisemitism. Days after the massacres, rapes, and kidnappings, when antisemitic student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) used images of motorized hang-gliders to advertise their anti-Israel demonstrations, I wanted to believe that they didn’t know what really happened. When they used the same image to advertise celebrations of their “resistance” and “martyrs,” marking the one-year anniversary, they no longer had an excuse. “Happy October 7th everyone!” at least one school’s SJP posted on Instagram. They all refer to the massacres by the name the terrorists use for it, “Al Aqsa Flood.” To mark the anniversary, the openly pro-Hamas student group “Within Our Lifetime” (WOL) organized demonstrations, calling them “Students Flood NYC for Gaza.”

Last semester, Columbia University student activist Khymani James publicly declared, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” His anti-Zionist student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) issued an apology for his remarks. This year, the group apologized to him for its “so-called apology,” which, they declared, “does not represent Khymani or CUAD’s values or political lines.”

That was apparent when CUAD celebrated a recent terrorist attack at a light rail station in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. Terrorists murdered 7, including the young mother of a baby, and wounded at least 16. The group referred to the horrors as a “bold attack” and a “significant act of resistance” that “reached deep into the heart of settler-colonial territory, further destabilizing the Zionist regime’s claims to security…”

Almost a year after going to the October 8 Times Square demonstration, I went back to the scene of the crime. This time, there were signs glorifying not just Hamas, but Hezbollah. There were also more activists, more keffiyehs, more police, and more of the same familiar chants calling for the eradication of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people.

“There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” (Bonus points for harking back to the Nazi “final solution.”) “Palestine,” if they got their way, would extend “from the river to the sea,” making everything within Israel’s current borders as Jew-free as the Palestinian territories. If you thought they wanted an end to the shootings, stabbings, beheadings, suicide bombings, rapes, tortures, kidnappings, burning people alive…etc., you’re sadly mistaken. “Globalize the intifada.” “Long live the intifada.”

To hear the media tell it, though, especially when demonstrators add “ceasefire now” to their chant list, they’re “anti-war activists.”

This year, while students across the country attempted to hold anniversary vigils for the victims of October 7, terrorist-sympathizers celebrated the same events within earshot. As if that weren’t enough, anti-Zionist posters now include images of red anemones, the symbol of Israel’s South — where the atrocities happened. This is especially galling because survivors of October 7 see the red anemone as a symbol of their connection to the land. Many now have tattoos of the flower to remind themselves of resilience, possibility, and hope.

Relatedly, a chant that stood out to me as I left the Times Square anniversary celebration is “Hey hey, ho ho; Zionism has got to go.” Maybe because it seems banal compared to the others, it doesn’t get much attention. But in some ways, it’s more illuminating. We all know that for terrorists and their supporters, intimidation, harassment, and unimaginable violence is their love language. “From the river to the sea” is a threat. “Intifada” is a call to arms. But “Zionism has got to go” is something else.

Our connection to our ancient, biblical, historical, and permanent home is intolerable to those who hate the Jews. Perhaps that’s why student-jihadis now appropriate not just the date of the worst massacre of Jews in most generations’ living memory, but’ symbols too: In addition to red anemones, there seems to have been a proliferation of Anti-Zionist charms and t-shirts sporting maps of Israel.

That our connection to the land predates the birth of Mohammed, that we are the prototypical indigenous people and our presence in the land has been continuous, that we acquired the land through purchases and other legal means, that the majority of Israelis have relatives who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries, that the only non-colonial, non-imperial sovereign power that has ever existed in that land was, and is, Jewish, and that the State of Israel came about in exactly the same way as countries that don’t face delegitimization campaigns, all puts the lie to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are “white settler-colonialist” robbers and thieves sent from Europe who stole land rightfully owned by ethnic Palestinians in 1948 — a time when there was no such designated ethnic group.

The Zionist-hating chant illustrates how antisemitic terrorists intend to take more from us than our land. They want to rob us of our hopes and dreams, too.

Maybe that’s why we always end up singing Hatikva when confronted by those who wish to destroy us — as if to say, “you might take our ability to live in peace today, but we won’t let you take our hopes and dreams.” As long as the heart within the Jewish soul yearns, and toward the East, an eye looks to Zion, our hope is not yet lost. Our hope is two thousand years old: To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

A day before Klein’s poisonous piece, the New York Times published a fawning article about a student-founder of WOL, one of the anti-Zionist organizations behind many of the activities that make campuses hostile to Jews. “Pro-Palestinian Group Is Relentless in Its Criticism of Israel, and It Isn’t Backing Down,” the headline reads. The goal of WOL, to be clear, is to destroy Israel“ within our lifetime.” Calling that “criticism of Israel” is like referring to the defacing of priceless artwork as “criticism of Monet.”

WOL “has galvanized pro-Palestinian activists who are calling for the end of Israel,” the subtitle reads, “and [are] facing accusations of antisemitism.” The message seems to be: Let’s be reasonable. They don’t hate Jews. They just want to destroy the home of more than half of them — the one country where Jews aren’t a minority. Can you believe they’re accused of being anti-Jewish? The poor dears.

In the past year, I noticed a chant I don’t remember hearing before. It’s in Arabic, and it means “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” Anyone who thought this would finally put an end to the nonsensical claim that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” wasn’t about the destruction of Israel might be right. It seems we’re all on the same page now: It is a call for the annihilation of Israel.

But get with the program; calling for the destruction of Israel is now merely “criticism.” To quote from Dr. Strangelove: Our source is the New York Times. 

Harvard, Columbia rank last in free speech nonprofit’s scorecard: ‘Abysmal’

For the second year in a row, Harvard University’s “abysmal” free speech climate earned it the lowest ranking among 251 colleges and univers

New York Post

For the second year in a row, Harvard University's "abysmal" free speech climate earned it the lowest ranking among 251 colleges and universities scored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“This year, however, Harvard has company. Columbia University ranks 250, also with an overall score of 0.00,” reads the report released Thursday.

New York University, University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College rounded out the bottom-five colleges, according to the report.

FIRE, a pro-First Amendment nonprofit, worked with College Pulse to survey tens of thousands of students about the free speech environments on their college campuses for its annual College Free Speech Rankings.

“We’re trying to provide an indication of where students can get the best experience in college in terms of being exposed to a diverse set of views,” FIRE’s chief research adviser Sean Stevens told Fox News Digital.

A Barnard spokesperson told Fox News Digital the college is “committed to protecting academic freedom and freedom of expression, and to fostering environments where students, faculty, and staff can engage in open and respectful dialogue.”

Barnard has adopted the Chicago Principles, a free speech policy previously endorsed by FIRE, and this school year a faculty committee will develop “a Barnard-specific framework,” the spokesperson continued.

Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

The universities that ranked poorly all experienced incidents in which speech was censored, suppressed or shouted down, Stevens said.

Since FIRE started ranking schools in 2020, the bottom-five colleges and universities have been “consistently bad performers,” he added.

“They rarely stand up for speech,” Stevens said.

“When a controversy arises, the speech typically gets punished. A speaker gets disinvited. A faculty member gets sanctioned in some way, or a student or student organization does.”

The poor performers share another notable trait, according to FIRE’s analysis.

“Most of the students are very upset with how the administration has responded to protests over the past year,” Stevens said.

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the war that followed “sent shockwaves through American college and university campuses,” according to the FIRE report. Protesters occupied the South Lawn at Columbia for about two weeks in April before police broke up the encampment.

After the start of the encampments, researchers noticed a large increase in the percentage of Columbia students who said they self-censor in classroom discussions or in conversations with professors or other students.

At the other end of the free speech spectrum, the University of Virginia earned the top ranking. Michigan Technological University, Florida State University, Eastern Kentucky University and Georgia Institute of Technology rounded out the top five.

The full rankings can be viewed here.

Stevens noted that the schools that performed well tended to have fewer controversies overall and, when controversies did arise, administrators typically defended speech rights.

He said he hopes parents and prospective students use FIRE’s ranking tool to make better-informed choices. The tool also provides a look at the liberal-conservative ratio on campuses, and a deeper look at student attitudes toward free expression.

“Experiencing open inquiry and that process, having to grapple and have their views challenged” sets students up to be better “adult citizens in our country, once they graduate,” Stevens said.

FIRE and College Pulse surveyed students at 257 schools in total, but excluded six from the main rankings and gave them “warning” ratings.

The private colleges, which include Pepperdine University, Hillsdale College, and Brigham Young University, all “have policies that clearly and consistently state” that they prioritize “other values over a commitment to freedom of speech,” according to the FIRE report.

2025 College Free Speech Rankings

The largest report of its kind, the 2025 College Free Speech Rankings draw from more than 58,000 student survey responses at 257 colleges an

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

For the fifth year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit organization committed to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and College Pulse surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.

This year’s survey includes 58,807 student respondents from 257 colleges and universities. Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 25 through June 17, 2024. 

The College Free Speech Rankings are available online and are presented in an interactive dashboard (rankings.thefire.org) that allows for easy comparison between institutions. 

1. The University of Virginia is this year’s top ranked school for free speech. Michigan Technological University, Florida State University, Eastern Kentucky University, and Georgia Tech round out the top five.
2. Harvard University is this year’s bottom ranked school for free speech for the second year in a row. Joining it in the bottom three are Columbia University and New York University. All three of these schools have an “Abysmal” speech climate. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College round out the bottom five and each has a “Very Poor” speech climate.
3. All of the bottom five schools experienced a number of controversies involving the suppression of free expression. They also received significantly lower scores than the top five schools on “Administrative Support,” “Comfort Expressing Ideas,” and “Tolerance Difference,” which measures the strength of students’ favoritism when it comes to allowing liberal or conservative speakers on campus.
4. Since 2020, UVA, Michigan Tech, FSU, North Carolina State University, Oregon State University, Mississippi State University, Auburn University, George Mason University, Kansas State University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Chicago, and Claremont McKenna College have all consistently performed well in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings.
5. A majority of students (55%) said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult to “have an open and honest conversation about on campus,” a record high for a topic on this question in the five years we have asked it. At least 75% of students on 17 of the campuses surveyed responded this way to this question.
6. The percentages of students who said shouting down a speaker, blocking other students from entering an event, and using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable all increased since last year. 
7. A majority of students said that six of eight hypothetical controversial campus speakers should “probably” or “definitely” not be allowed on campus.
8. Student concerns about self-censorship have declined. This year, 17% of students said they feel like they cannot express their opinion on a subject at least a couple of times a week because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond. Last year, this percentage was 20%, and in 2022 it was 22%.

The Beginning of the End for the Squad?

Jamaal Bowman, the Representative for New York’s 16th congressional district, has lost his primary election. Bowman was defeated by Westches

restorationbulletin.com

Jamaal Bowman, the Representative for New York’s 16th congressional district, has lost his primary election. Bowman was defeated by Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a Democrat, to be sure, but one a little more in tune with the policy preferences of his affluent soon-to-be constituents. This makes Bowman the first member of the infamous “Squad,” a cadre of far-left Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to lose his seat. If we are lucky, perhaps this is the beginning of a positive trend. Bowman was a rising star in progressive politics, known for willfully pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. to delay a budget vote, for which he was formally censured.

More recently, Bowman has been in the spotlight for embodying another time-honored Progressive tradition: deliberately antagonizing his own constituents to score political points online. Specifically, Bowman has been one of the most vocal anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politicians in Congress, in a district with a rich and powerful Jewish community. Roughly 9% of his district is Jewish – a small, but politically engaged demographic. Bowman found that out the hard way.

Bowman’s flop campaign might reasonably lead one to assume he was running in Gaza. To understand why Bowman lost, let’s start from the beginning.

* * *

In the days after the attacks on October 7th, when the world was still reeling from the senseless tragedy, Bowman took time out of his busy schedule to call reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women “propaganda.” Bowman posted a TikTok video in which he said, “There was propaganda used in the beginning of the siege… There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” Bowman posted this video in November just days after lawmakers viewed a 45-minute video of the attacks on Israel. Bowman only began to backtrack on these claims once the evidence became unquestionably clear. Nonetheless, Bowman only apologized for the remark last week in a vain attempt to stem any further vote hemorrhaging.

Also in October, the House passed a resolution with near-unanimous support declaring that the United States "stands with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists." Exactly ten members of Congress voted against the resolution, nine of which were Democrats, including Bowman. The resolution condemned Hamas and demanded the terrorist group release all hostages immediately.

Bowman has also called Israel’s actions “genocide.” He’s described Israel as a “settler-colonial project.” And he believes Hamas’ attacks were not unprovoked, claiming “If we’re calling this an unprovoked attack, that means we’re going to ignore 18 human rights organizations calling Israel an apartheid state, and we’re gonna ignore 75 years of military occupation…or several hundred thousand settlers expanding into the West Bank.” He followed that up with, “I am not justifying the killing of civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7, there is no justification. It’s just an explanation of what the circumstances were that led to Oct. 7… If you want to end extremism, then we need a free Palestine.”

So far, this is all par for the course for recent Progressive politics: blame Israel for everything while condoning, equivocating, or covering for terrorists and their sympathizers. Of course, as should be familiar to all of us by now, scratch the contemporary Progressive and you will often find an antisemite. Bowman is no different. Many of his bizarre claims about Israel and his dismissive actions towards his own constituents expose his thinly-veiled antisemitism.

In January, Bowman took the honor of introducing Norman Finkelstein to a panel on the Israel-Hamas war in his home district. Finkelstein is notorious for his book The Holocaust Industry, which claims that Jews are exploiting memory of the Holocaust for their own benefit. “I’m a bit starstruck,” Bowman said, and he thanked the panelists “for being here and coming to Yonkers and delivering the truth to us.”

In April, Bowman called Jews in his district a “segregated” community. He said, “Westchester is segregated. There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate. Scarsdale, parts of White Plains, parts of New Rochelle, Riverdale. I’m sure they made a decision to do that for their own reasons… but this is why, in terms of fighting antisemitism, I always push — we’ve been separated and segregated and miseducated for so long. We need to live together, play together, go to school together, learn together, work together.”

Things became nasty when Bowman turned his ire to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. When Jewish activists, organizers, and leaders successfully encouraged Latimer to challenge Bowman in the primary, everything became about AIPAC. On Latimer’s entry into the race, the Bowman campaign released a statement saying, “Congressman Bowman's focus remains first and foremost on delivering for the people of his district and standing up to powerful special interests in Congress. It's not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges, and is funded by the same Republican mega-donors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz, has recruited a candidate for this race.”

In a campaign speech earlier this month, Bowman screamed into a microphone that, “because I am fighting against genocide, I am being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.” In May, at a campaign event in the sliver of the Bronx in his district, Bowman told volunteers, “They are so afraid of us — those who oppose the working class, multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy that we are trying to build… They’re spending more money in this race than they have ever spent in the history of any race. That’s how afraid AIPAC is.” In his concession speech Tuesday evening, Bowman spared no invective. He said that “We should be outraged. We should be outraged when a Super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true… They spent a record amount of money, the most in US history, to beat this Black man.”

When Jews in his district are the driver of “segregation,” when they are told they are brainwashed by AIPAC, when the contrast is between a Jewish neighborhood and a “multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy,” any sane Jewish voter would be justified in thinking Bowman might have lost his marbles. And lost his marbles, he did. Bowman’s personal social media is a treasure trove of conspiracy theories and deranged technobabble. His recently uncovered YouTube page reveals Bowman’s engagement with 9/11 truthers, flat earthers, and theories of CIA time travel devices, alien technology, and secret elite communication frequencies. In other words, Bowman was already primed to believe antisemitic conspiracy theories well before he ever got to Congress.

Bowman was right about one thing, however: AIPAC was working behind the scenes to tank his campaign, it just wasn’t as important as he thought. In targeting AIPAC, Bowman exposed his two incorrect assumptions: that his opponents were nothing without AIPAC, and that all external money was pouring into his opposition. In reality, neither of these are correct. Yes, AIPAC invested $14 million into the race, but AIPAC funding did not sink Bowman’s campaign. As others have already pointed out, polling indicated that Latimer was up by double-digits well before AIPAC had contributed a single dollar to the race. (I note in passing that AIPAC’s funding is justified given the Antisemitic vitriol spewed by Bowman and his campaign.)

Meanwhile, only 10 percent of Bowman’s own funding came from contributions inside his district. The remaining 90% is from outside sources. Conversely, half of Latimer’s donations came from within the district. If you want to see dark money in action, look no further than the Bowman campaign.

Bowman failed for entirely predictable reasons: he lost touch with the real, specific needs of his constituents. Bowman came to care more about what radical progressives online thought and less about his district. He pandered to a rabid political coalition that was organized only in Gaza, on Twitter, and in the tent encampments scattered across a few dozen elite universities. At the same time, he became obsessed with a shadowy cabal of Jews masterminding his takedown, a theory which slotted neatly into his pre-existing conspiratorial mindset. Latimer, on the other hand, was a seasoned politician who had been working the area for decades before Bowman ever showed up. He could be seen at nearly any local event and he knew the district very well. The irony of Bowman treating the race like a proxy-war for the Israel-Hamas conflict is that Latimer rarely talked about the issue. The campaign ads that AIPAC funded almost never touched the subject. Bowman was playing to an issue that everybody else wanted to go away. It takes two to tango, and Bowman was dancing all alone.

For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group.

For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.

In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.

In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”

In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians.

Despite Israel’s ferocious effort to kill him, Sinwar has survived and micromanaged Hamas’s war effort, drafting letters, sending messages to cease-fire negotiators and deciding when the U.S.-designated terrorist group ramps up or dials back its attacks.

His ultimate goal appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause.

President Biden is trying to force Israel and Hamas to halt the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to permanently ending the fight before what he calls “total victory” over Hamas.

Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.

It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Sinwar, now in his early 60s, was roughly 5 years old when the 1967 war brought him his first experience of significant violence between Israelis and Arabs. That brief fight reordered the Middle East. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip, where Sinwar grew up in a United Nations-run refugee camp.

The conflict was a constant presence. Sinwar published a novel in 2004 while in Israeli prison and wrote in the preface that it was based on his own experiences. In the book, a father digs a deep hole in the yard of the refugee camp during the 1967 war, covering it with wood and metal to make a shelter.

A young son waits in the hole with his family, crying and hearing the sounds of explosions grow louder as the Israeli army approaches. The boy tries to climb out, only for his mother to yell: “It’s war out there! Don’t you know what war means?”

Sinwar joined the movement that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s, becoming close to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and setting up an internal-security police that hunted and killed suspected informants, according to the transcript of his confession to Israeli interrogators in 1988.

He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

During the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the Shalit swap, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis.

He wanted to release even those who were involved in bombings that had killed large numbers of Israelis and was so maximalist in his demands that Israel put him in solitary confinement so he wouldn’t disrupt progress.

When he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, violence was a constant in his repertoire. Hamas had wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict a decade earlier, and while Sinwar moved early in his tenure to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions, he warned that he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way.

In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan.

“We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.”

In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.

Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis.

But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks. One aim was to end the paralysis in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and revive its global diplomatic importance, said Arab and Hamas officials familiar with Sinwar’s thinking.

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories had lasted more than half a century, and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were talking about annexing land in the West Bank that Palestinians wanted for a future state. Saudi Arabia, once a champion of the Palestinian cause, was in talks to normalize relations with Israel.

Though Sinwar planned and greenlighted the Oct. 7 attacks, early messages to cease-fire negotiators show he seemed surprised by the brutality of Hamas’s armed wing and other Palestinians, and how easily they committed civilian atrocities.

“Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

This became a talking point for Hamas to explain away the Oct. 7 civilian toll.

Early in the war, Sinwar focused on using the hostages as a bargaining chip to delay an Israeli ground operation in Gaza. A day after Israeli soldiers entered the strip, Sinwar said Hamas was ready for an immediate deal to exchange its hostages for the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

But Sinwar had misread how Israel would react to Oct. 7. Netanyahu declared Israel was going to destroy Hamas and said the only way to force the group to release hostages was through military pressure.

Sinwar appears to have also misinterpreted the support that Iran and Lebanese militia Hezbollah were willing to offer.

When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and deputy Saleh al-Arouri traveled to Tehran in November for a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were told that Tehran backed Hamas but wouldn’t be entering the conflict.

“He was partly misled by them and partly misled himself,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator who has known Sinwar since his days in prison. “He was extremely disappointed.”

By November, Hamas’s political leadership privately began distancing themselves from Sinwar, saying he launched the Oct. 7 attacks without telling them, Arab officials who spoke to Hamas said.

At the end of November, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and the release of some hostages held by the militants. But the deal collapsed after a week.

As Israel’s army quickly dismantled Hamas’s military structures, the group’s political leadership began meeting other Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan. Sinwar wasn’t consulted.

Sinwar in a message sent to the political leaders blasted the end-around as “shameful and outrageous.”

“As long as fighters are still standing and we have not lost the war, such contacts should be immediately terminated,” he said. “We have the capabilities to continue fighting for months.”

On Jan. 2, Arouri was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut, and Sinwar began to change the way he communicated, said Arab officials. He used aliases and relayed notes only through a handful of trusted aides and via codes, switching between audio, messages spoken to intermediaries and written messages, they said.

Still, his communications indicate he began to feel things were turning Hamas’s way.

By the end of that month, Israel’s military advance had slowed to a grueling battle in the city of Khan Younis, Sinwar’s hometown. Israel began to lose more troops. On Jan. 23, about two dozen Israeli troops were killed in central and southern Gaza, the invasion’s deadliest day for the military.

Arab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold.

Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said.

“Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message.

At the end of February, an aid delivery in Gaza turned deadly as Israeli forces fired on Palestinian civilians crowding trucks, adding U.S. pressure on Israel to limit casualties.

Disagreements among Israel’s wartime leaders erupted into public view, as Netanyahu failed to articulate a postwar governance plan for Gaza and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, privately warned against reoccupying the strip. Israelis grew concerned the country was losing the war.

In May, Israel again threatened to attack Rafah if cease-fire talks remained deadlocked, a move Hamas viewed as purely a negotiating tactic.

Netanyahu said Israel needed to expand into Rafah to destroy Hamas’s military structure there and disrupt smuggling from Egypt.

Sinwar’s response: Hamas fired on Kerem Shalom crossing May 5, killing four soldiers. Hamas officials outside Gaza began to echo Sinwar’s confident posture.

Israel has since launched its Rafah operation. But as Sinwar predicted, it has come at a humanitarian and diplomatic cost.

Sinwar’s messages, meanwhile, indicate he’s willing to die in the fighting.

In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain.

“We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.”

For 25 years or so, I've been thinking about the taunt that the jihadists - whether they are from Al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS - the taunt that they make to freedom loving people to citizens of liberal democracies. They always have the same taunt. They say, "we love death more than you love life."

And I've heard this for such a long time. And I've heard it from people who've killed friends of mine from Afghanistan to France, and I've always founded it an incredibly disturbing taunt. It seems almost something you couldn't-- it's almost insuperable, almost unsolvable. What would you do with an enemy that genuinely, genuinely loves death more than we love life.

But recent months in this country have enormously inspired me. Because I've realized, of course, there is a very obvious answer to it. Which is that there is no crime in loving life this much. We will not apologize for loving life. We will not apologize if you bring up your children to hate that we bring up our children to love. We will not apologize if you indoctrinate your children into totally inconsequent and unproductive hatred, if we bring them up to live productive and meaning-filled lives.

And, in the end, it seems to me, actually now between these two world visions, the people who love death that much have no chance of winning against the people of life.

Key Results – May

harvardharrispoll.com

• Almost 80% support Israel
• Almost 75% support the operation in Rafah
• Almost 70% agree Hamas is responsible for the whole mess
• 2/3 reject any ceasefire without release of the hostages and removal of Hamas from power
• 78% agree that Hamas needs to be completely taken out
• 69% agree that Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties
• About half regard Hamas' numbers as untrustworthy

What's it like being gay in Israel at war with Hamas? | National Post

archive.ph

At a trendy cafe in the bohemian Florentin district of Tel Aviv, Niv Nissim, a 30-year-old gay Israeli, described the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as “maybe the worst moment for everyone who lives in Israel.” He spoke of an acquaintance who perished at the Nova Festival massacre. “He went to dance and he was murdered. Most of the people that got murdered and kidnapped are people with the same values that I have — peace advocates,” Nissim said.

He was shocked to see international queer activists glorify Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre. “They don’t know what Hamas is. They think Hamas is like a group of superheroes — and that’s the thing. It’s a terror organization. Same as al-Qaida,” Nissim said. “For gay people around the world to be pro-Hamas right now is crazy. And it’s wrong.”

After Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, LGBTQ activists across the western world mobilized. On city streets and university campuses, they called for the destruction of Israel and carried “Queers for Palestine” banners alongside rainbow Palestinian flags. Claiming that queer and Palestinian advocacy are inextricably linked, they minimized the brutality of Hamas, who they portrayed as freedom fighters.

Their behaviour ignited a global debate about western queer activism. Commentators noted that not only does Hamas murder gay people, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports queer rights. Was it not delusional for activists to side with Hamas?

And what exactly did people mean when they shouted, “Queers for Palestine”? For some, the slogan represented a principled commitment to the human rights of the Palestinian people, without supporting Hamas. But for others, it meant the dismantling of the Israeli state, which implies the ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews, and the glorification Hamas’s war crimes.

Throughout this debate, the everyday lives of LGBTQ Israelis and Palestinians — their fears, trauma and triumphs — were largely ignored. In May, I visited Tel Aviv through a trip spon.sored by the non-profit Exigent Foundation, a Jewish group that focuses on public education. Arriving a few days early, I independently spoke with queer people in the city to find out what their lives were really like, what they thought of the war and how they felt about western activists’ views on the conflict.

I interviewed four gay Israeli men, each with distinct experiences and perspectives. They were by no means a comprehensive cross-section of Israel’s LGBTQ community, but they opened a window into their world. Amid tight timelines, I was unable to secure interviews with gay Palestinians, who can be notoriously difficult to track down because they fear revealing themselves, so as an imperfect substitute, I asked my Israeli interviewees to share their insights on them.

These are their stories.

Niv Nissim is an actor who gained moderate fame after starring in “Sublet,” a 2020 Israeli film about a gay travel writer who rents an apartment from a film student. Unsparing in its depiction of gay hookup culture, the widely acclaimed film could not possibly have been made anywhere else in the Middle East.

Nissim said he has not personally experienced homophobia in Israel. “I’m not scared of walking hand-in-hand with my partner,” he said, before clarifying this was likely because he lives in Tel Aviv, which exists within its own cosmopolitan bubble. Homosexuals from across the country, indeed the entire world, flock to the city, with official statistics suggesting that roughly a quarter of the local population identifies as LGBTQ.

Gay life is different in Israel’s smaller towns, as well as in Jerusalem, which is known for being religious and conservative. In those places, being openly gay could sometimes be “frightening,” he said, because of the possibility that religious Arabs or Orthodox Jews might beat you. Still, he said he felt extremely lucky to be Israeli considering the lethal homophobia elsewhere in the Middle East. His own family had fled from Iran, where being gay is legally punishable by death.

Palestinians are “a big part” of Tel Aviv’s gay community, Nissim said. One of his close friends is a Palestinian fashion designer who organizes parties in the city’s underground voguing scene (voguing is a flamboyant style of dance closely associated with queer culture). “It’s not even a weird thing. We don’t look at them as different or something,” he said.

Many gay Palestinian men, facing violence back home, escape into Israel to live in relative safety. Organizations across the country help them find shelter and get back on their feet (the same services are also provided to queer people fleeing Orthodox Jewish families). “If you are a gay person who needs help, no matter where you come from, you’ll get help,” said Nissim.

He said he was unaware of any serious anti-Palestinian racism in Tel Aviv’s queer scene. “(It is) really weird if someone will be racist here in the gay community.” Nissim is a Persian-Israeli, and while the relationship between the Ashkenazis (European-descent Jews) and Mizrahis (Middle Eastern-descent Jews) may have been fraught decades ago, everyone is now quite “blended.”

Like many artists, Nissim and his friends are politically progressive and empathize with the Palestinians. “It’s not a real life. They don’t have real rights. They can’t go anywhere. Kind of open-air prisoners,” he said. For much of his life, he advocated for Palestinian self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. “We wanted to say, enough with the oppression. Enough with the war — both sides — let’s not advocate war. Let’s advocate peace.”

Under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Nissim said artistic productions that criticized the government or featured positive Israeli-Arab relationships — “impossible love stories,” he described them — faced increasing censorship. Over time, he and other Israelis came to see Netanyahu and his allies as corrupt and autocratic. “It was starting to look like a very Third World country.”

In a bid to stay in power, Netanyahu formed a coalition government with several ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties in November 2022. Two months later, the new government announced its intention to impose controversial reforms that would curtail the independence and influence of the country’s judiciary.

While Israelis rebelled against Netanyahu’s reforms in nationwide protests, many within the LGBTQ community worried their rights would be rolled back. Nissim said it is rare to find gay supporters of the present government; it’s like “shooting yourself in the leg,” he said.

Neither same-sex nor interfaith couples can marry within Israel, as only religious marriages can be conducted in the country. However, Israel fully recognizes international civil marriages, including same-sex marriages, so queer Israelis simply tie the knot abroad. Some of these marriages occur over Zoom, through a legal loophole that allows officiants in Utah to provide virtual ceremonies to couples anywhere in the world — these marriages are quick, cheap and valid under U.S. law. Fearing Netanyahu’s coalition partners might restrict same-sex marriage rights, Nissim and his boyfriend decided to get a “Utah marriage” last year, just in case.

Then Oct. 7 happened, and the political tumult of the preceding months was, briefly, vaporized. In recent weeks, large protests against Netanyahu’s coalition government have resumed, especially in Tel Aviv.

Like the rest of Israeli society, a chasm now exists within Tel Aviv’s gay community — one side calls for a ceasefire and the other supports Netanyahu’s plans to fully eradicate Hamas, whatever the cost. Nissim supports the first camp, though he could see both sides.

His heart was filled with uncertainty. He said he used to chant, “Free Palestine,” but now felt he no longer had the right to do so while there were still hostages in Gaza. “What are we going to do now? What can we do? How could we fight for human rights after what happened? How can we do it?” he asked.

He understood the hate by both Palestinians and Israelis. “What happened was the worst thing — for me, for them, for everyone. Killing and raping and burning and taking people. And not only people, like good people, who fight for peace. It’s the worst thing … When gay people wanted our rights to be given to us, we didn’t burn buildings or kidnap people. We didn’t kill people. We shouted and we went to the streets. We protested for our rights and for peace,” he said.

Nissim has learned to adapt to the heightened tensions of war. When Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in April, he and his boyfriend simply sat outside and watched the Iron Dome shoot them down. They looked like meteors or shooting stars. “It’s surreal, but this is our life here. You have to develop some kind of rough skin. And just somehow be cool.”

Michael Tubur, a 31-year-old gay soldier with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sits at a sunlit park, recounting his experiences evacuating wounded soldiers from Gaza last October and November. “It’s very difficult to do surgery on the field. Our job was just to give them the first aid, just to stop the bleeding and stuff, and take them outside very fast,” he said, smiling often.

It took two weeks for Tubur’s unit to enter the Gaza Strip, as the IDF had to ensure that the surrounding Israeli land had been cleared of Hamas fighters. By that point, Gaza had been heavily bombed. The destruction was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

One of the first things the IDF did was take everyone’s phones away. Hamas had used fake social media accounts featuring stolen photos of beautiful women, to install spyware on Israeli soldiers’ devices, allowing them to eavesdrop and track their locations. For three weeks, Tubur was completely cut off from the world. The situation was tense and uncertain, and he felt afraid.

“At the beginning, we thought that we are going to see an actual army. And we discovered it’s not going to be like that. They went into the tunnels. You don’t know where they’re going to come out from,” he said.

Hamas fighters would ambush soldiers with rocket launchers or guns and then melt away. After these attacks, it was imperative for the Israelis to confirm whether they were being lured into a trap. On several occasions, Hamas purposely used smaller assaults to attract medics and then followed up with larger, lethal bombardments. Tubur’s unit would wait on standby, keys in the ignition, ready to race in once they knew the situation was reasonably safe.

“You just act. You don’t have time to think. Someone else’s life is on the line,” he said. “There were days that nothing happened — and you’re just sitting and doing nothing. And days when everything went from zero to 100, and I was just dying to go back inside the sleeping bag and close my eyes.”

He maintained the IDF did its best to minimize civilian casualties amid a “very, very complicated situation.”

At the beginning of the war, Israeli soldiers would automatically attack unknown individuals within a 400-metre radius around them, he said, but the response to anyone further away was scrutinized and debated. To protect civilians, that radius was later reduced to 50 metres. That meant Hamas fighters could freely roam nearby so long as they were unarmed and pretended to be non-combatants. These fighters would then access weapons caches hidden throughout Gaza, launch lone-wolf ambushes, and then abandon their weapons and pretend once again to be regular Palestinians.

“So, then the mission became much harder. And the progress was very, very slow — because now you need to move house by house, building by building, and make sure there is no weapons there,” said Tubur. Sometimes the IDF would miss caches or tunnels, which allowed Hamas to attack from behind.

While critics, including the International Court of Justice, claimed that Israel is committing “genocide,” Tubur found this accusation perplexing. If that was true, he said, the IDF could have simply been ordered to “just bomb everything,” rather than commit to a complicated ground operation at the cost of Israeli lives.

“I’m very sad that people got killed — children and mothers. But it’s a war and war is complicated. Everyone wants to do the best and try to make as less casualties as they can.”

Tubur, who has Arab friends, believed that Israelis and Palestinians could peacefully coexist. But this would require Palestinian imams to embrace more moderate interpretations of Islam, he said.

In some ways, he was grateful for the war and how it helped show traditional Israelis that gay men deserve equal rights as they are “equal in death.” Many traditionalists believed that queer people simply party in Tel Aviv, parade naked on the streets and disregard everyone else’s troubles, Tubur said. “Then suddenly you saw gay warriors and commanders, like major commanders, people who were in the intelligence, in the Air Force, in everything. Then you saw gay guys who were killed.”

Shattering stereotypes is important for Tubur. He came from a religious family that had never seen a gay person until he came out of the closet. They thought all LGBTQ people were drag queens or transgender, which made it hard for him to accept himself. He struggled to reconcile his homosexuality with his masculine persona and some of the traditional values he cherished, such as starting a family.

When he finally came out at age 26, his parents assumed he was a “special gay,” because he didn’t fit the stereotype. Over time, they met his gay friends, including some in the military, and realized they were just people.

Tubur hoped the war would help other conservative families broaden their perceptions of what it meant to be LGBTQ, and make it easier for them to accept their gay sons. “There was a story about someone (who) was in the closet and got killed. And his boyfriend posted a letter where he said, ‘I cannot tell you your name. But I miss you so much. And I cannot share it with anyone because you’re in the closet.’ When I read it, I was crying, because how can someone bear this kind of pain by himself?”

Military service is mandatory for almost all Israelis, which makes the IDF a microcosm of wider society: progressives and conservatives serve side by side. During the quieter days in Gaza, Tubur and his comrades spent hours talking and learning about their lives. “You are a unit, and you need to sit next to each other, be with each other. You don’t have any other option,” he said.

He recalled a fellow soldier, an Orthodox Jew, who told him that being gay was unnatural. Rather than take offence, Tubur talked things out with him. They did not agree on many issues, Tubur said, but they developed an understanding.

“He still doesn’t accept the way I live, but now he knows how it is. He knows what it means. He knows how it feels. I think that, in the long term, this thing’s done very good. Because when the war will be over, people will go to their houses, people will go to other places, but they are a different person — you understand?

“This time, he won’t be so against the gays. He will think a little bit before he will shout,” Tubur said.

Yariv Mozer, a documentary filmmaker in his 40s, met me at the Haaliya Community Country, a new recreational building that acts as a de facto hub for Tel Aviv’s LGBTQ community. Rainbow flags hung above the pool and the gym was packed with gay men. As we entered, a trans woman who helped manage the place welcomed us warmly.

Ten years ago, Mozer directed a documentary, “The Invisible Men,” which followed the lives of three gay Palestinians who had fled to Israel and then found asylum in the west. Through this film and other projects, he is keenly aware of the challenges gay Palestinian men face.

Not only is Palestinian culture deeply religious and conservative, Mozer explained, but communities are also organized into sprawling tribes where a family’s reputation is paramount. “You can be gay, so long as no one knows about it. But if someone will catch you or see you, or you will be exposed as being gay, this can harm the honour of the family. So you hear a lot about honour killings and punishments.”

These murders are tolerated by local authorities and occur in parallel to state-backed violence against sexual minorities. One of the characters in Mozer’s film was tied up by his father after his family learned of his homosexuality. The man escaped with his life, but not before his father sliced his face with a knife, leaving him with a permanent scar.

Mozer said both Israeli and Palestinian security forces prey upon the vulnerability of gay Palestinians and blackmail them into acting as intelligence assets. “A lot of men are very much afraid of being openly gay or being suspected as gays, because they will know that they can be exploited by both sides.” Mozer recalled the story of one of his interviewees who the Palestinian Authority had suspected was a gay collaborator. They interrogated him for hours, beat him and held his head in a toilet.

Caught between violent relatives and predatory security forces, many gay Palestinians from the West Bank flee to Israel for safety (those in Gaza, where the borders are sealed, escape to Egypt). But even in Israeli cities, they cannot breathe easily. In 2022, a 22-year-old gay Palestinian man, Ahmad Abu Marhia, was kidnapped into the West Bank and beheaded — he was waiting to emigrate to Canada at the time of his murder.

The Israeli government has historically refused to grant asylum to queer Palestinians, out of fear that could lead to a flood of false claimants, said Mozer. In recognition of the genuine dangers this population faces, the government instead issues temporary residency permits on humanitarian grounds, which must be renewed several times a year.

Approximately 90 Palestinians hold such permits but, until 2022, they were not allowed to legally work, which forced many of them to survive in the underground economy, particularly the sex trade. Those who cannot secure these permits often choose to simply live undocumented, as illegal migrants.

With such a precarious existence, many of these queer Palestinians eventually seek asylum in the West. But in February, the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs ruled that Palestinians fleeing persecution based on sexual orientation or gender expression are now eligible for full asylum. The wider implications of this decision, including on third-country asylum claims, remains unclear.

While filming his documentary, Mozer found that gay Palestinians were “very much isolated, with a very small group of people that they could trust.” He said they were often afraid of meeting or dating Israelis because of issues with racism. He speculated that Nissim’s contradictory experience might be a generational difference.

Mozer is empathetic to the Palestinians, but has a scathing hatred of Hamas. “I’m in favour of a two-state solution. That has nothing to do with Hamas. Hamas is a brutal, extreme, fundamentalist religious group, which believes in the power of violence to achieve their goals.”

Seeing Western queer activists romanticize Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7 felt like a betrayal to him. “I see it and I’m amazed. How stupid are you? You are building them to become a legitimate part of this world … It’s shocking,” he said.

“You’re almost unable to be openly gay in Ramallah. So, you want to be openly gay in Gaza? No way. That’s the most extreme religious society in this area of the world.”

The activists are not helping the Palestinian cause, he said, and in fact, are making the situation worse through their embrace of extreme and polarizing rhetoric. “Wake up to understand that you don’t share values with those people. Hamas represents humanity in the most darkest times of our history. That is Hamas. No freedom for women. No equal rights for LGBTQ. All the things that we value as democratic countries — freedom of speech, freedom of art, music, dance. All of this doesn’t exist there.”

Mozer is now working on a documentary that follows 15 survivors of the Nova Festival massacre, one of whom is gay. Upon reviewing the footage shot by Hamas’s fighters, he noticed that some of the terrorists repeatedly jeered “omo, omo, omo” — homosexual — at captured male Israelis who had piercings or earrings. “It’s a small moment that explains so much about Hamas and the way they treat gay men,” he said.

Mozer did not have kind words to say about Netanyahu, either. He called his far-right coalition “one of the most negative things that happened to our country. It’s a mixture of all the evil and bad things that this country could bring together in one government.”

Mozer came out of the closet in the 2000s, when the Israeli LGBTQ community was bursting into the mainstream. He is grateful for the generations before him who, through persistent legal activism, set the stage for LGBTQ acceptance in the late 1980s and 1990s. “A lot of gay men had to sue the country for their own equal rights,” he said.

While he has seen LGBTQ rights steadily improve, he believed influential ministers in the Netanyahu government wanted to undo some of that progress. “They wanted to make a big legal revolution in Israel and change a lot of things and take them backwards. They didn’t succeed because there were a lot of protests,” he said.

Mozer said that most of Israel’s queer community falls within the political centre-left, like himself. While the country’s conservatives want to erode LGBTQ rights, the far left is anti-Zionist and does not support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. “I see myself as Zionist. My grandparents came here from the Holocaust. I truly believe that this is the right place for Jews to live independently, but not at the expense of the Palestinian people.”

Amid war, debates about social policy have temporarily taken a back seat for many Israelis. “Now, the main goal of all of us is to bring (the hostages) back home, stop the war, go into ceasefire. It’s this goal that is above everything,” said Mozer.

Tal Kallai, one of Israel’s most famous drag queens, who performs under the name “Talula Bonet,” talks on a patio beside the Tel Aviv Municipal LGBT Community Centre, The conversation is repeatedly interrupted by gay men who greet and hug him.

Kallai was born and raised in Jerusalem, where, despite its conservative reputation, had a vibrant gay scene in the early 2000s. He wanted to be an actor as a teenager, but found that theatre roles for women were much more interesting than those for men. At age 16, he saw his first drag show at a gay bar and fell in love with the art form.

At first, drag was just a hobby for him — one he continued to develop after moving to Tel Aviv to study at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio. Then he was scouted by a local producer to do professional performances in the city, so he and three other drag queens from Jerusalem created a troupe called the Holy Wigs.

In the beginning, the Holy Wigs saw themselves as more intelligent and cultured than their competitors in Tel Aviv. “We weren’t doing like folk songs and stuff. We were doing musicals and theatre. We were very snobbish. We thought all the drag in Israel is so low-level,” said Kallai. Their ambition was encouraged by “drag mothers” (industry mentors), who taught them how to produce more theatrical performances.

As a professionally trained actor, Kallai wanted to move drag from the bars into the theatres. So that’s what the Holy Wigs did. Soon fans brought their parents and heterosexual friends, who were more comfortable seeing drag in a “respectable” cultural setting. Things snowballed from there.

With their popularity skyrocketing, the Holy Wigs hired a director and costume designer and went on tour. “We did all the history of Israel in drag, and it was very funny,” said Kallai. There were over 100 costume changes during the show, which they performed more than 350 times around Israel, predominantly in larger venues and theatres.

Throughout, Kallai continued his regular drag performances in Tel Aviv’s gay bars, including a weekly open stage event for new drag artists. He hosted this event for 11 years, helping countless performers establish themselves. “Now there is a very big drag culture in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and in Israel,” said Kallai. “It’s 50 shades of drag.”

He recalled that during the early 2000s, gay Palestinians in Jerusalem had “their own community and their own parties — because they were very under the radar and not legally there.” The scene was “very big,” but hidden, with the use of “secret places with secret codes.”

There were even two Palestinian drag queens in the city during that period. One was an Israeli-Arab, married with six children. “He snuck around them and did the shows without his wife knowing,” said Kallai. The other queen was an illegal migrant from Gaza who eventually received asylum in Sweden. Kallai was glad that the Gazan queen found a safe home, even if she had stolen one of his wigs. “If this is the price I had to pay for her freedom, I’m happy,” he said.

Drag culture may be popular in Israel, but there has always been opposition to it. Kallai recalled seeing “lots of bad responses” when he performed at Jerusalem’s first Pride parade in 2002. The following years were not much better for Jerusalem Pride. In 2005, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three participants with a kitchen knife. Kallai said that another protester attempted to stab one of his friends, either the year before or after. “He passed me with the knife and went to her, but the police arrested him.”

Today, at Pride events, domestic opposition has been replaced with international scorn from anti-Israeli activists. As an ambassador of Israeli culture, Kallai has performed all over the world, sometimes with the spon.sorship of the Israeli government. In the early 2010s, a man spit on Kallai’s face at Berlin Pride after learning he was Israeli. Around that same time, at London Pride, pro-Palestinian protesters amassed in the audience of one of his shows, shouting and waving flags. He said that many famous drag queens are afraid to perform in Israel because of the potential backlash. For the ones who do come, “you can’t see any of it on their social media.”

For many years it was “very trendy” to be anti-Israeli within the LGBTQ community, but he was surprised when, after Oct. 7, Western queer activists supported Hamas. “You are supporting a movement that the first thing it will do is kill you because you’re queer — you’re so stupid.”

He used to spend considerable time on social media explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to anyone who would listen. He even made a viral Instagram video, where he and another drag queen, in full costume, deconstructed the contradictions of “Queers for Palestine” social influencers. But it was like “talking with deaf persons,” he said.

After getting ignorant comments from internationally famous drag queens, he decided to stop caring about what the global drag community thinks. He gave up explaining.

When the theatres reopened after Oct. 7, Kallai debated whether it was appropriate to start performing again. He decided Israelis wanted to be cheered up, so he returned to the stage. But he emphasized that what he does is not “escapism.”

“Many people are using this word, you know, escapism, escapism. Like, I’m drinking beer with my friend — it’s escapism. I’m walking on the beach — escapism. No, I’m not trying to run from reality. I’m trying to deal with the reality and this trauma that we all had here,” he said.

He once advocated for Palestinian rights, but Oct. 7 changed everything. He was struck by how the residents of the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip were gleefully murdered, even though they were “peace fighters,” who helped sick Palestinians find medical treatment in Israel.

“In the past, I was a person who believed with all his heart that there is a partner for peace. Now, I’m not sure,” Kallai said.

I witnessed Israel choosing life as it fights against a ‘death cult’

I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza.

New York Post

Adapted from Douglas Murray‘s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.

I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza.

I was here in New York on the 7th of October, and on the 8th, I went down to Times Square.

And there were these men and women, waving signs, celebrating the massacre.

They were holding these signs in Times Square, “by any means necessary.”

At a time when we already knew what those means included.

I thought I had to get to Israel as soon as I could, that we were going to see a kind of Holocaust denialism in real time, and therefore I should see with my own eyes everything that had happened.

In Israel, I joined the pathologists in the morgues of Tel Aviv as they were trying to identify the dead.

An unbelievable task, which they do with extraordinary delicacy and religiosity.

I had the great opportunity to witness firsthand Israel’s response, because unlike some countries today, Israel doesn’t just sit back with equanimity when it’s attacked.

Some of the world would like it to do so.

Seeing one of the fences that the terrorists broke into, I thought people aren’t going to realize the scale of this: This was a 4,000-person, battalion-sized terrorist attack that aimed to go all the way up the center of the country.

What do I make of all this?

I think often of the line from Deuteronomy, when God says, “I’ve set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life that you and your descendants might live.”

Because when I think of the seventh now, I don’t only think of the victims.

I think of the extraordinary heroes.

There’s a young man who’s a friend in his 30s, who woke up in Jerusalem, realized the seriousness of what was going on, got into his car, drove south, collected some guns, left a farewell message to his children and his wife on his phone, got a call from his company commander on the road saying, you have to come back to base in Jerusalem.

And he said, no, we’re needed south now.

And his battalion commander said, are you defying an order?

He said, yes.

We’re needed in the South.

And he fought for the next 48 hours, and he survived.

I think of my friend Moshe.

I noted he had a bullet mark down the top of his helmet.

He explained that it was from the 7th.

He drove right into the middle of the firefight on the highway.

He got out and he fought and he killed three terrorists with his gun that he carries with him, thank goodness.

And he fought for the next two days.

I think of the extraordinary people of the Hatzalah, first-responders unit.

The head of that organization said in 30 years of doing this job, the whole 30 years altogether wasn’t like one minute that morning.

The lights just went off everywhere.

And I think of a young woman who was 23.

She was a beautiful girl, a photographer.

And she decided she had to go and reenlist.

Her parents begged her not to, but she said she had to.

And she was killed on her first day by a rocket that landed on her in Sderot.

In a letter she left for her parents she said how sorry she was.

But she said, I wanted to live life, and now I want you to live it for me.

I think, finally, of the extraordinary evening in November last year.

I was at the Schneider Children’s Hospital when the helicopters came returning the first hostages, the first children who Hamas had stolen from their homes in the south.

But when the helicopters emerged in the night sky, the people of Tel Aviv realized what was happening, and every car stopped.

And I noticed there was applause from the citizens, the Tel Avivians, and then there was singing, all the way through the streets of Tel Aviv.

They were singing “Haveynu shalom aleichem”: We brought you peace.

Now there’s millions of stories like this across Israel.

The country rings with them, it resounds with them.

The thing is, perhaps it does require life to become serious again.

Perhaps the students that we see at these destroyed universities, perhaps they just need a dose of reality someday.

I always pray that that day never comes to them because it’ll be the biggest wake-up call anyone has ever had.

But all I would say is that any country should be so lucky as to have a young generation like that in Israel.

They were weighed in the balance since October the 7th, and they’ve been found to be magnificent.

What Israel has been up against is not just a people of death, but a cult of death, a cult, which wishes to annihilate an entire race, and which after dealing with that race has made very clear what it wants to do with Christians, everyone in Britain, everyone in America.

I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.

"the people of Tel Aviv realized what was happening, and every car stopped."

Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App

@wokal_distance: 1/ Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press

threadreaderapp.com

Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press call them "non-violent"?

Well, as it turns out these are well trained activists using intelligent, highly developed tactics. Here's a primer:

First off: none of this is spontaneous.

IE: The protestors in the video going around have shields. (pic 1)

In 2020 we learned these shields can take hours to make and are made by volunteers working all day. You don't do that spontaneously. It takes planning. (pics 2 +3)

Here's a thread on the shields used during the 2020 Portland protests. They are well built and are distributed to those wishing to engage in "direct action" (AKA violence and vandalism).

Not all shields are built like this, but this is typical:

Another clue that this is all VERY well planned is the fact they tend to all have the same tent.

This is because the organizations that run and fund the protests purchase the tents in bulk and then give them to the protestors as needed.

Again, It is all VERY well planned.

Further, these are NOT "student protests."

Lisa Fithian is a 63 year old professional protestor, not a student. She's planned protests for decades.

According to the NYPD 1/3 of the people arrested at Columbia, and most of the people arrested at the CCNY, were not students

Now we need to understand the TACTICS that are being used here.

The first strategy is to put their target in a "decision dilemma." This is where they select a method of protest that leaves the person with no good options. No matter how the target reacts they look bad.

As John Searle explained in his 1971 book "The Campus War," the strategy is to leave the University with no good options:

They either let the protestors take over, or call police and then students play victim and use the optics to look like sympathetic martyrs for the cause.

The decision dilemma strategy is paired with: "the real action is your targets reaction." You use someone's reactions to your protest against them.

IE: Taking over a building. If the police arrest you, you film it and play the martyr. If they don't, you control the building

Those two strategies are used hand in hand to create actions which activists can turn to their advantage.

When they do this correctly they can paint themselves as the sympathetic powerless underdogs even when they are the aggressors.

It's social and political jiu-jitsu  This is performative, but not in "look good to your peers" kind of way.

The principle is "play to the audience that isn't there." Activists protesters want to LOOK good to the people on Youtube or watching the news.

It's the OPTICS that matter.

Toolbox — Beautiful Trouble

Dive into the Beautiful Trouble toolbox, an interconnected web of ideas and creative best practices that puts the power of organizing for so

Beautiful Trouble

Please pay careful attention to this:

Activists want to LOOK like they are trying to change the minds of people they protest against, but that's just for show. They see their targets unrepentant evil doers that are just props in the drama they are staging.

This is awful.

The point of the protest is not to change the mind of the people whose building they have taken over, the goal is to use the protest as a way of building social and political pressure against the people they are trying to make give it.

THAT is the goal. 

This next strategy is self-explanatory: "do the media's work for them."

This is where activists find press releases and film footage that make them look good get into the hands of sympathetic journalists. This explains a lot of what gets on TV

Toolbox — Beautiful Trouble

Dive into the Beautiful Trouble toolbox, an interconnected web of ideas and creative best practices that puts the power of organizing for so

Beautiful Trouble

So how do they do all this and still get sympathetic coverage?

The strategy is: "lead with sympathetic characters." It's EXACTLY what it sounds like. They put sympathetic people out front to garner sympathy and create the APPEARANCE of underdogs fighting against the powerful.

This is why in the coverage of these protests you rarely see the images of smashed glass, trashed buildings, broken doors, and blood on the street, but you will often see pictures of the people below which are meant to make the protestors look sympathetic.

The protestors have a highly developed theory of protest optics. They understand videos can be sliced and diced to tell any story, and the story that "resonates" with people most, wins. So they are intentional in trying to create moments on video that can go viral... 

That isn't to say they aren't also intentional in doing damage. They are. The book Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent by author AK Thompson is the starting place for their theory of what counts as violence, and when violence is justified. 

Here is Alex Hundert writing is rabble defending "a diversity of tactics" which is a euphemism for allowing violence at protests. Hundert explicitly states a commitment to non-violence is "dogmatic" and "stifles debate" about which tactics to use.

So the violence and vandalism at these protests is intentional. Where the elderly protestor is meant to win hearts, the black bloc is there to intimidate. If police react to the violence with arrests protestors claim the police "attacked students."

See how the game works?

The point is that none of these protests are happening spontaneously.

These are well planned protests, using high level tactics that are given to people supported by a well organized protest infrastructure (where did you think the tents and shields came from?) 

These radical protestors have organized an infrastructure to, in their words, disrupt, dismantle, and deconstruct your society.

I don't want to scare any of you, I just want you to know what's happening because you can't push back against what you don't understand.

Every single one of these protests operates according to a set of methodologies, principles and tactics and theories that have been created with the specific goal of allowing the radicals to gain social and political victories by creating and controlling the narrative.

As @realchrisrufo points out, the conflict at Harvard is reaching a "decision point," but Harvard can't end the conflict without looking bad and damaging their own reputation.

This is the result of activist tactics applied perfectly against Harvard.

Do not underestimate the ability of radical leftist protestors to win the narrative battle, particularly since we have a media complex sympathetic to leftist causes.

The goal here is not to scare you, but to show you what's going on under the hood of these protests....

Beating woke activists means understanding their tactics are so you can anticipate them and respond in a way that is effective. If universities had anticipated the Activist tactic "occupation" They would have known the goal was to put them in a "decision dillemma" (pic 2)

And the activists will explicitly tell us that these occupations are "well planned" (that's why I keep using that phrase" and that they want to expose the "power holders" (in this case universities) inability to enforce the rules. That's literally the whole point...

Had universities known this they would have understood that the right move is to eject the encampments the minute they start. There was not way to negotiate with the protestors because, as the activists themselves tell us, negotiating is not the point. The point is to create a situation where the University has no good option and expose the university as weak, and then use that to extract concessions and make the university fold because they have ZERO good options.

Knowing that this is the strategy allows you avoid the trap by taking the PR hit and ejecting the protestors and tearing down the encampments on day 1. You're taking a PR hit no matter what, so take the hit day 1 and then ride it out. The longer the protests last, the bigger a story they become, so end it quick and kill the momentum.

Instead universities did not know the tactics, thought they could reason with the protestors or negotiate in good faith, and now they are in exactly the bind that @realchrisrufo lays out here:

Learn how the woke activists operate, learn how their tactics function, and learn how to respond accordingly when they seek to impose their will on you using these tactics.

Thanks for reading.

/fin 

Melanie Phillips: Dead Israelis disturb the narrative. They upset the narrative. By which I mean that it's not just a view, it's become a kind of-- not even just a cause, it's a kind of article of faith among the progressive West that Israel was created by the Jews through Western guilt over the Holocaust, being parachuted in to a country called Palestine and uprooting the indigenous people of Palestine who've been there since time immemorial and taking over and booting them out and then oppressing the rest who remain. And who wish to expand their territory as a result.

Every single part of that is untrue. It's a lie. It's a falsehood, okay. But that is the narrative. The narrative is of oppressive Israelis and oppressed Palestinians. And therefore, because in our victim cultural world, if you are a victim and you are oppressed, you are given a moral free pass for anything that you do. Anything that you do that's bad, cannot be-- you cannot be morally responsible for it. It must be the result of what's been done to you.

So, Palestinian terrorism has been regarded as, okay we don't-- we don't approve of it, we can't bear violence but nevertheless it's resistance, it's understandable given the despair that they are in.

And conversely, anything the Israelis do as the oppressors cannot ever-- they cannot ever be victims. They cannot ever be victims; they can only be oppressors.

Suddenly one has, suddenly, people with this mindset have been faced with the appalling visual proof that the people and the cause they've supported resulted in acts of barbarism, of a kind that nobody ever thought they would see again after the Holocaust. And it's been perpetrated by people that they have broadly supported and a certainly a cause they have absolutely supported. And suddenly the cause turns into something which is genocide.

But they've been accusing Israel of genocide, which is amazing considering the population of Gaza and the Palestinian territories has increased by what, three times, four times since 1948 when Israel was created? That's some genocide. But put that to one side.

So, it's to serve the narrative and they can't have that. Now, why can't they have that? Why can't they say, okay it's a bit embarrassing to have to admit that the cause I've pinned my idealism on for the last 30 years is actually fake, but nevertheless, I have to agree, um, uh you know, uh, right.

Now, why can't they say that? And my view having been part of that way of thinking for a long time and certainly having had all my friends and colleagues as part of that way of thinking for a long time, and studied them up close, my view is that they can never say this to themselves because it's not simply a question of saying they're wrong, their belief system is based on the fact that every single thing they believe encompasses and embodies moral virtue.

They believe in the betterment of society, they believe in creating a better world, they believe in standing up for the oppressed against the oppressor, they believe in justice against Injustice, they believe in in all these wonderful things. And consequently, anybody who stands up and says anything against them, against any of these wonderful things is not only wrong but evil and has to be stamped out as basically an enemy of humanity. Now, we see this in our domestic politics, victim culture and all of that, over a range of domestic issues.

But it is absolutely part of their moral personality. What they dread more than anything else, the worst thing in the world that could happen to them, is to take a position which in their minds would make them a right-winger and therefore evil, or evil and therefore a right-winger, because all evil comes from the right and all right wingers are evil.

And consequently, faced with this situation that they saw on October the 7th unfolding in front of our horrified gaze, they are faced with the challenge in which they say to themselves, you know am I supposed to junk what I've believed? That will make me an evil right-winger. And that's so terrible to them because they think that will disintegrate their entire moral personality.

So, they're going to find a way of dealing with this. So, we hear, for example, on the one hand the silence. The silence from so-called "feminists" who have told the entire male population of the world they are intrinsically evil because they're all intrinsically potential rapists and therefore, you know, "the patriarchy" and all the rest of it you know.

Untold numbers of men are unable to have proper relationships with women because of that. All those feminists are silent. Well not perhaps all, perhaps some have come out. Silent when faced with the appalling rapes of women in that October the 7th atrocity. And the way they deal with it is by saying saying, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Regardless of what we've all seen and heard.

So, there's those people who are silent. And then there are people who try to invert it. They say, well, I mean it was terrible, yes and of course I abhor these brutal things, but nevertheless, but, but, but...

As soon as you hear the "but," you know. The cause, the cause. And when you say to them, as I have done over decades, what are you talking about, the cause? What cause of despair? You're talking about the fact they don't have a Palestine state? They have been offered a Palestine state over and over again from the 1930s onwards. The last offer consisted of approximately 95% plus of the territory they were demanding, and their reaction has always been to refuse and to start murdering Jews again.

And when you say that to them, they say, no, no that's not true, that's not true, and they bring up a whole load of chaff, verbal chaff. In other words, their reaction is, it's not true, it's not true, I'm not believing what I'm seeing in front of my eyes even.

Because they cannot ever tolerate this idea that their moral personality was based on a monstrous inversion of morality.

Take off the masks, you anti-Israel cowards! Protesters aren’t really scared of COVID — they’re hiding shame of their prejudice

Remember when we were all told to “Mask up”? Well perhaps it’s time for us to change that rule. How about: “Mask off.”

New York Post

Remember when we were all told to “Mask up”? Well perhaps it’s time for us to change that rule. How about: “Mask off.”

It still astonishes me how many New Yorkers still scuttle around this city with their N95s clasped to their faces. Assistants in shops. Straphangers on the subway. Even people hurrying through the windy streets.

With some people I get it. A few have underlying health conditions — like morbid obesity. Or different-bodyness. Or whatever it is we’re allowed to call what we used to term “overweight.”

And sure some elderly folks now on their 9th boosters have decided to treat COVID as they once did the winter flu season.

But how to explain all the young people — particularly the young protestors — who seem to be so unnaturally scared of COVID?

How to explain all those rage-filled keffiyeh-wearing students who just happen to mask up whenever a camera is around?

Perhaps the students at Columbia and other campuses really do have a mortal fear of COVID.

In which case let me set their minds at rest.

New York State no longer has a COVID-19 problem. At the height of COVID, in the week ending April 11, 2020 the CDC reported that there were 6,900 total NY State COVID deaths that week. By last month the total was down to 15 deaths in a week.

What is more, young people are at the lowest risk of dying from COVID. Last year COVID was the eighth leading cause of death for young people in the United States.

According to the official data people aged 18-29 comprised just 0.7% of COVID-related deaths in the US. And that is from a group that makes up 16.4% of the total US population.

College-age Americans are more likely to die by homicide, suicide or being hit by a bus than they are through complications caused by COVID.

Even better news for the mask-wearers — NY State is one of the most vaccinated populations in the world. Fully 81% of NY State’s population is fully vaccinated. While a full 95% of the state’s population has gotten one dose of the vaccine or more.

So rejoice, oh brave protestors. The masks can come off!

And yet, with something like inevitability, there is one thing you can predict about protestors in New York today.

Which is that anytime that they are protesting they will be strangely scared of COVID. At the height of the BLM protests in 2020 you might say that there was some excuse for this.

There’s nothing like a fear of COVID to keep you cautious as you smash up a store.

Indeed I am sure that it was always perfectly natural that people swiping a set of sneakers for social justice would at the same time mask up to protect their respiratory system.

But why is that in 2024 today’s brave protestors in New York are nearly always wearing a mask?

Why should it be that the students making their demands for ceasefires in the Middle East and humanitarian aid at home have to holler their demands through a piece of cloth?

What is it about the outside trouble-makers who come onto this city’s campuses that makes them at one and the same time brave enough to cause disruption to students and citizens and yet terrible hypochondriacs over COVID?

Well I would like to suggest a reason. And it has nothing to do with CDC data, vaccination rates, COVID or anything similar.

The reason is that they are bullies. And like all bullies they are at the same time terrible cowards.

Despite pretending that they are world-beating revolutionaries the protestors who now push people in this city around are trying to keep their identities hidden.

Perhaps it is because they are professional agitators — drafted in by a range of left-wing “grass-roots” organizations to cause trouble. That is certainly what many people — including the police — believe.

Perhaps these people want to cover their faces because the media in this country might just notice that the same professional revolutionaries tend to turn up wherever there is trouble, almost as if they are paid to do so.

Presumably they want to keep their identities hidden as much as possible.

But what about the students at Columbia and elsewhere who want to sit in their tents and “bravely” protest about something they don’t know anything about?

Maybe, just maybe, they too are not actually afraid of COVID. What they are afraid of are the opinions they are espousing.

Because they know, at some level, that bullying other students and shrieking about things they don’t know about is not a good look. They want to intimidate people, but they never want to be intimidated themselves.

So I have a suggestion. At all future protests in New York State let’s have a masks off policy.

The KKK was the last organization in America that was so proud of their beliefs that their members covered their faces during protests.

Now “Students for Jihad” are doing the same job. For strangely similar reasons.

So let’s demand they take the hoods off too.

Sorry — I meant masks.

Talking of Columbia, yesterday morning I was invited to give an “alternative” Commencement address to students who have completed their studies.

Since the leadership at Columbia had canceled their official graduation ceremony, a number of faculty and student leaders arranged an alternative event for students and their families.

Attendees at the event in the city included students who had served in the US military, Jewish students, Christian students and conservative students. All from a bewildering variety of backgrounds.

We also heard from one of the students who had protected their campus when student radicals were trying to trash it earlier this year.

It was a great honor to speak with them all. And a great pleasure to give them a few words of advice as they set off on what I’m sure will be great and adventurous careers.

But what an indictment that students at Columbia who can actually think have to organize a graduation for themselves.