COMMENTARY / OPINION
I Heard You Want Your Country Back! – Nicholas De Santo [17:29]
Anglo Italian Comedy
July 18, 2025
Trump calls STUPID and FOOLISH whoever believes the ‘Epstein Hoax’! [8:54] Jesus Enrique Rosas
July 17: Youtube pulled this video so we can no longer see it!
July 16, 2025 The Body Language Guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1beNkASTL
[Ed.: Yes, I would much rather be “stupid and foolish,” than “deplorable” or “garbage.”]
WATCH CAREFULLY: Mark Levin Drops New BOMBSHELL Findings on Zohran Mamdani [16:20] Rabbi Pinchas Taylor
Jul 16, 2025 – Mark Levin Uncovers The dark History of Zohran Mamdani you might not be aware of.
Trump REALLY wants to bury the Epstein case [14:57] Jesus Enrique Rosas
Jul 16, 2025 The Body Language Guy
Download my FREE 100+ Body Language and Persuasion tips, here:
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:03 Defending Pam Bondi (again)
3:36 A democrat fabrication
6:51 “This is how we’ll call it now”
7:59 ‘Past supporters’
9:55 MAGA reaction
11:57 If the system will collapse, then so be it
This war isn’t about Gaza. It’s about God. MARY F HOLLEY
We’re living through a spiritual armageddon — and most people don’t see it.
JUL 16, 2025
Writer’s note: This essay is excerpted in part from my book, “Esau’s Kiss: The Repentant Evangelist.” I think it is important to change our perception of Jews. I don’t want to present them as foreign and distant “they” and “them.” In this essay, when I speak of “we” I speak of us Christians; when I speak to “you” I speak to Jews.
The level of demonic hatred and polarization in our society has reached a fevered pitch that is drawing out of every person what exactly they love and hate, and precisely how much. A spiritual force of evil, falsehood, and hatred has fallen over our society of such magnitude and intensity that it defies human origin. A similar force fell over Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Now it has returned at a global level.
The focus of that demonic power is the same as it was 80-to-90 years ago, the Jews, as a people and as individuals. The past two years since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023 have seen a worldwide explosion of hatred directed at you Jews and those who support and admire you. It is not a natural power, but a supernatural one.
The reasons for their hatred are not reasonable but rather irrational and impervious to evidence and argument. The force and magnitude of it is proof positive that you Jews are God’s Chosen People, the fulcrum upon which the balance of human morality is being measured.
Military conflict is a component of this spiritual Armageddon, but it is not the primary battleground. The military portion of the attack on Israel is coming from Iran, its proxies, and its Russian and Chinese allies. It is taking place in geopolitics in real-time, involving powerful armies and sophisticated weapons, exposing alliances between superpowers and terrorists, advanced civilizations and barbarians. We are seeing just how savage an advanced civilization can be.
But the real battle is a spiritual one that takes place within each one of us. It is Armageddon between tribal animal cruelty and slaughter and moral civilization and life, between opportunistic lies and honest legitimacy, between racial bigotry and genuine egalitarianism, between parochial religious supremacy and compassion for the least of these.
In other words, are we humans really just smart animals, or are we godly intelligent persons? What voices do we choose to believe, and why? What actions are we willing to take, and when? How cruel, how savage, how hateful do we want to be?
How are we doing in spiritual higher math? Can we cut through moral ambiguity and see the wrongness in the good guy and the rightness in the bad guy? Or is everything still white hats and black hats, angels and demons, our side and the other side? Do we mentally and emotionally live in caves, like Neanderthals? Or do we rise up to the heavens, capable of loving an enemy, a “bad guy,” and doing good to those who despise us?
How twisted and corrupt are our governments and institutions? Has our media been bought off by Islamist forces? Are our United Nations and international courts in bed with Jew-hating Islamofascists? Are our leading universities pawns of wealthy Middle Eastern kingdoms? Is Islamic influence shaping the curriculum and discipline standards of our public schools? Who is shaping the minds of our children, training them in enlightened hatred and virtue-signaling bigotry?
Are our religions actually tribal warriors who cannot countenance the salvation of anyone but us? Do we see other religious groups as competitors, or as children of God who speak a different language? Did not one Creator make us all? Can we identify a true religion that unites a believer with the God who created all of us? Can we distinguish that from a cult that manufactures hatred and division? Do we believe our religion is superior to all others? Or can we see the gifts and beauties of the Holy Spirit in people who worship God differently?
Our answers to these questions are demonstrated for all to see in our reaction to God’s Chosen People, the Jews. A tiny minority of humanity has been set aside to be different from all others, a people who lives apart. Parental favoritism is a prevailing theme in the book of Genesis, one that God makes no apology for. He stated clearly that we would be judged based on our reaction to that Chosen People: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3).
As God’s Chosen People, you Jews were stripped of your land and ancient heritage and sent to wander the world, dodging swords and bullets, while keeping the faith of your forefathers. The word for exile, galah, also means to reveal. To exile Israel is to reveal her to the rest of the world.
Now you are coming home. “‘I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them,’ says the LORD your God” (Amos 9:15). Our reaction to God’s planting of Israel in your own land reveals our attitude not just towards Israel, but towards your God.
Islam’s violent response to that planting was its reaction to the disproof of its assumption of religious superiority and it was swift and brutal. Vicious pogroms were launched against Jews immediately after the 1917 Balfour Declaration1 and the 1921 League of Nations charter that followed.
If you regained control of Israel, Torah was true and Islam was proven to be a lie. Thousands of Jews who had lived in the Land of Israel (eventually renamed “Palestine” by foreign invaders) for 3,000 years were slaughtered without mercy over many years because of the religious insult of Jewish sovereignty on land Arabs had colonized on behalf of Islam, importing Arab language, religion, and culture into a historically Jewish land. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not really about land, colonialism, or resistance; it is religious hatred disguised as a political cause.
With each act of God in re-establishing the State of Israel, defending and expanding your borders, restoring Jerusalem to Israeli control, asserting her right to exist, and the Muslim religious ego exploded. The years 1921, 1937, 1947, 1967, 1973 — Islam’s battle against the God of Israel has seen riots of violence against Jews, tanks and armies, missiles and drones, suicide bombers, slaughters of families, rape of women and decapitation of infants. Islam has proven the content of its character in its reaction to the works of God.
A post from X illustrates the intensity of Islamic hatred for a nation that dares refute its religious superiority by taking back its ancestral land and archeological treasures that prove Israel’s ownership. Cheryl, an Israeli woman, engaged a Muslim woman in conversation:
She attacked one of my historical posts aggressively. Venomously in fact. So I just asked her what her opinion was on the topic. She attacked first, replied with more anger, but as the conversation continued she seemed to calm down and became normal. She gave me her thoughts and I replied with mine. It remained respectful for almost 3 hours of back and forth. I offered my solution that I felt would possibly allow peace between our two people.
And that’s where the conversation suddenly changed. And so did my entire approach to X. Her solution was simple, and she wrote it with such ease and clarity and confidence. She wrote that for her, the only solution was for every Israeli man, woman and child to die. But not just die… to be slaughtered slowly and painfully and for her people to build their cities on top of our rotting corpses including any of us that may still be alive. She had no doubt. She didn’t flinch. She wanted us dead and wiped out, and our entire history erased from memory to be replaced by Islam.
I remember pausing, and not knowing how to even reply. And all I could get out was “Are you saying that you’re not interested in peace or a state of your own, but simply to complete massacre all of us”. And in an instant she replied “Yes, that’s exactly what I want. The land is not important. We don’t care about the stupid land. All the land belongs to Islam and we will take it and your lives, including your children.”
And at that point, something snapped in my mind. Because unlike her and so many millions of haters like her calling for my death and that of my children a thousand times a day, I’ve actually lived that experience. I know what it’s like to lose my entire family. I know what it’s like to watch those you love be slaughtered in front of you exactly as she was describing.2
The nerve that was struck in that Muslim woman is the vulnerable and super-sensitive nerve of “What if Islam is a fraud?” The very existence of Israel insulted the validity of their religion and offended Muslim notions of superiority. The bottomless pit of “maybe we were wrong” beckoned for the Muslims, and yet another genocide threatened Judaism, an existential crisis for both sides. Israel was vindicated by God, repeatedly, over the past 80 years.
Christianity was also stunned at the restoration of Israel in her biblical land. Unable to comprehend the salvation of a people who did not accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, we were left speechless for 15 years. The Catholic Church acknowledged in 1965 that Jews were beloved of God and published Nostra Aetate, “In Our Times.” It was a papal document that announced, in front of God and everybody, that you Jews did not have to convert to Christianity to be saved.
Nobody knew how God would manage to pull that off, the details were murky and the language vague, but Catholics were told to stand down. And they did. I can attest as a child of the 1960s that everything I was taught as a student growing up in Catholic schools was affirming and tolerant of Judaism. No other religion was handled with such grace.
On the Protestant side, there was no such central authority, but many denominations eventually made similar statements in the interest of ecumenical fellowship. Again, the details were obscure, but we were assured that God could handle His problem children, and we were not to interfere with His parenting of a rebellious teenage sibling. We did not know how to bridge the gap between you and “Jesus Christ is Lord” any more than they could reconcile your restoration with “There is no God but Allah.” But we knew a miracle when we saw it.
The largest subgroup of Protestants, however, are the evangelicals, still on the warpath, determined to save as many of you poor ignorant fools as possible, by any method necessary, including deceit and manipulation. Rather than question our theological assumptions, we double down on our Four Square Gospel. It is impossible for us to stomach the possibility that perhaps you know our Jesus better than we do, follow him more authentically than we do, and study his Scripture and chant the prayers that our Church has completely forgotten.
We fully expect you to break out in choruses of “Amazing Grace,” weep and mourn that you pierced your Savior, and come solemnly to our altar to eat your brother’s body and drink his blood. While we evangelicals badger you to convert to our semi-pagan religion, we offer you untold assistance in Israel as that is the landing pad for Jesus’ return, and your attendance there is mandatory to our eschatology. In that, our differing interests could align, and our generous assistance is genuinely appreciated by your wary rabbis. Up to a point.
That point has sharpened in recent years with a “Jews for Jesus” movement that includes a group by that very name, headquartered in California, with branches worldwide, but especially in Israel. There is still a strong current of evangelism directed specifically at Jews with the stated intent of wiping you off the face of the earth and replacing you with Bible-toting Christians who happened to have been born Jewish, a sort of spiritual holocaust. We might tolerate your innocent cultural gestures and customs but insist on a red-blooded acceptance of the “Gospel according to the fundamentalists” that brooks no dissent.
Our battle against the God who restored Israel is more subtle than that of the Muslims. We don’t threaten you with a dagger to the throat like the Muslims, but we categorically refuse to accept the idea that God might have enough love in His heart to bail you out of hell while still in a state of rebellion against our revelation from God.
Jesus didn’t die for the sins of the world, but only for the sins of our private and exclusive club. Your YHVH (the four-letter Hebrew name for God) could not possibly include the eternally preexisting Redeemer who presented himself to us Gentiles in the form of Jesus. We divide your God into three and then insist you only have one-third of Him.
“You are about to pass through the territory of your relatives the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir. They will be afraid of you, but be very careful … I will not give you any of their land, not even enough to put your foot on. I have given Esau the hill country of Seir as his own” (Deuteronomy 2:4-5). Jews for Jesus was founded by Jews who have loitered in Seir and converted to Christianity; they are your worst enemies.
They considered themselves “completed Jews,” and thus imply that you are incomplete. Generally, they were once passive and perfunctory Jews, suffering from religious dysphoria, have taken their hormone regimen and bought a new wardrobe, and have now transitioned to be enthusiastic and devoted messianic Jewish Christians.
They find themselves in an evangelical Christian church that looks, sounds, smells and tastes Jewish, and find themselves doing Jewish things like observing Sabbath and Jewish holidays, things they had not done as superficial or non-observant Jews. They are regarded by Gentile members of the messianic synagogue as rockstars and are given leadership roles they were never offered in a Jewish synagogue.
These messianic Jews have a vested interest in affirming their own religious trans identity by degrading your cis dedication to Torah and the faith of your ancestors as stubborn and irascible. If you are right, then they are wrong, an existential threat to them both personally and spiritually. Evangelical religion is terrified that you might be saved without confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, just like Islam is horrified that that you might be saved without admitting “Mohammed is his prophet.”
Messianic Jews charge you with inflexible legalism when you defend your Torah and your Jewish identity. Respect for the religious “other” is impossible to them. Unwilling or unable to find their own place in the broad space of Judaism, they jumped ship and now, like the apostates of Medieval times, they degrade the value and validity of a vessel that has weathered four thousand years of stormy seas.
They and their evangelical friends find it unacceptable that the Church as a whole has abandoned its job of converting you into them, abolishing Judaism as we know it, and making you just as self-righteous and arrogant as they are. They mock your Talmud even though the objectionable laws regarding Gentiles have been superseded by more modern ones for centuries. Torah is alive in your hands, not paralyzed in the 7th century.
Far more charitable than the Muslim who wants to cut your head off, Messianic missionaries dangle before your youth a promise of eternal life as if it were a spiritual bribe, a timeshare in heaven, not realizing that you already own the entire condominium. Your covenant includes complete forgiveness upon proper repentance on any day of any week without any animal sacrifice. They refuse to see the abundance of evidence of the Holy Spirit alive and active in your lives and faith since that contradicts their assumptions about who gets the Holy Spirit of God, when and how.
Jews who proclaim Jesus to be Lord and Savior are subscribing to the Gentile covenant and cannot at the same time participate in the Jewish covenant. Being Jewish by birth and retaining elements of Jewish culture does not change that. Once dedicated heart and soul to Jesus, believing him to be God incarnate, any residual Jewish practice is, by definition, devoted to Jesus.
The born-Jewish Christian’s primary commitment is now Christian, not Jewish. The very fact that he deems it necessary to convert you means he does not consider your love for God and trust in His salvation encompassed by or subsumed in his faith in Jesus. In other words, he considered Jesus a separate God. Such a believer is no longer a Jew, regardless of genealogy.
You are always one generation away from annihilation. In the U.S. you lose up to 75 percent of your young adults to interfaith marriage, usually to Christians. That does not have to be a loss. Our children may or may not convert to Judaism, but even if they do not, they and we are capable of assisting your Jewish children in keeping a Jewish home and raising Jewish grandchildren. Rabbi Kook, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, wrote in the 1920s:
“Our strong commitment to assure the continuity of Judaism, with its ideas and patterns of behavior, together with its corporate self on its own land, stems from the widespread recognition by our people that we still have a long distance to travel in order to complete what we began. We began to say something of immense importance among ourselves and to the world, but we have not yet completed it.”
“We are in the midst of our discourse, and we do not wish — and are unable — to stop. Under no circumstances will we abandon our distinctive way of life, nor our universal aspiration … just as we will not abandon our hope to return and be rebuilt, and exist as a nation in our historic homeland, as in ancient days. We cannot abandon these.”
On the other hand, we Gentiles are famous for exploiting and expropriating your culture, your identity markers and traditions, calling ourselves “messianic Jews” even though only a small fraction of messianic Jews are born Jews. The vast majority are Gentile evangelical Christians.
We do this with the explicit goal of temping, drawing, even deceiving authentic Jews, a bait and switch operation that would put Madison Avenue to shame. We are spiritual transvestites wearing a kippa and a tallis with a fish on it, using Hebrew and Yiddish words inappropriately, and we imitate your holiday observances. We pretend these superficial features will camouflage our obvious evangelical Christian message, like a six-foot-tall drag queen in the red-light district.
Even when we are not trying to entice you, we insult you with our crossdressing, our expropriation of your identity to serve our religion. We think we can replace you in your own space, Judaism, by being “better” Jews than you are, replacement theology on steroids. We modify your Passover seder and make it an Easter feast, even though the seder did not exist in Jesus’ time; it is a rabbinic Jewish rite that belongs to you alone.
Often our Judeophilia3 and charitable outreach to Jews is in the interest of establishing a connection through which to manipulate you emotionally with our love and caring. While many of our interfaith outreach programs publicly deny that they are baiting you into Christianity, their fundraising materials directed at Christian donors tell a different story.
They promise to subtly inject their “our way is the only way” Gospel message into interfaith humanitarian and antisemitism programs, “undercover” operations in the IDF, needy Holocaust survivors’ support, and immigrant settlement organizations in Israel. “Cursed is he who does the work of the LORD deceitfully” (Jeremiah 48:10 – New King James Version). They produce secular appearing archeologic and historical infomercials on Israeli television that end in a Gospel presentation. “Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau” (Genesis 32:11 – English Standard Version).
The Armageddon presented to you by the “hand of Esau” is not confined to the hostility and violence of Esau’s four hundred armed bishops at the Spanish Inquisition. “The hand of my brother,” our familiar friendship, is even more dangerous than the hostile hand of Esau. We put up a front of honor and respect, pretend to a genuine interfaith dialogue, and destroy what little trust and respect still exists between our peoples. Manipulation and deceit have replaced medieval torture.
I am a professional evangelist. I know my business. I know that my job is to bring lost sinners to your God. I do it by genuinely loving people. I have never been a drag queen, drug addict, or prostitute, but I can connect to our common humanity, identify needs and longings in other people, and show them a better way to meet that need or longing than the dysfunctional method they are currently using. I treat people with sexually transmitted diseases and counsel prison inmates with compassion and respect.
Evangelism like this works. It honors them as human beings, dignifies and explains the horrific situation they find themselves in, exposes the rational response they had to an irrational situation of abuse and degradation, and encourages them to honor and respect themselves as the hero that they are. They survived. Many of their compatriots did not.
That same approach to evangelism is what convinced me that Jews and other wise and holy people do not need Christianity. You already have the God we know as Jesus, and you don’t need our church. You have a powerful and beautiful relationship with God just as you are. What you and other people need is for me to be a solid and faithful Christian, faithful to my tradition and respectful of their tradition.
I bring an experience of the cross that is unique and powerful. I need your experience of Sinai revelation, their experience of Hindu poetry, of Islamic wisdom, of Sufi mysticism, of Buddhist meditation, to be a better Christian and a complete human being. Our engagement with your religious traditions is not to convert you, but to make ourselves better Christians for knowing how to build a Sukkah or light a Sabbath candle.
Your daily morning prayer service, over three thousand years old, is a world of meditation on the holiness of God. Our Uncreated Creator is larger than any of us know, larger than all of us together can possibly know, and we have all of eternity to explore each other’s hearts and minds to learn. God created us with an insatiable desire to learn, to master, to study, to explain, to understand, and with that drive He gives us infinite subject material, Himself.
By your return to the Land of Israel, you have demonstrated the truth of Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. You have proven that the Word of God given to you at Sinai is true and your stewardship of it for 4,000 years is valid. Our reaction to you is our reaction to your God. And that is why God could say 4,000 years ago, and demonstrate today: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3).
Thank you for reading Future of Jewish. Help us make more people smarter about Israel and the Jewish world.
A public statement issued by the British government in 1917, during World War I, expressing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in then-British Mandatory Palestine (historically the Land of Israel)
@CherylWroteIt on X
Defense, love, or admiration of Jews and Judaism
This is why Israel didn’t assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader. JOSHUA HOFFMAN
Ali Khamenei lives today not because Israel can’t kill him, but because Israel believes some lines should not be crossed, even when facing an enemy that respects none.
JUL 15, 2025 The Future of Jewish
Ronen Bergman is one of Israel’s best.
Based in Tel Aviv, he is an investigative journalist and author, as well as a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest paid newspaper.
So, when Bergman speaks, I listen.
This week, I had the chance to ask him why Israel didn’t assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the 12-day Israel-Iran war last month. After all, Israel is not gun-shy about targeted assassinations.
In Bergman’s bestselling book, “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” he explains why and how Israel has likely carried out more assassinations than any other country since World War II.
And we know this isn’t just history; it’s current events. Since October 7th, Israel has systematically eliminated senior Hamas and Hezbollah operatives, often in daring operations deep inside enemy territory, including Tehran and Beirut. Names that once seemed untouchable are now obituaries. Israel’s reach is long, and its message is blunt: If you slaughter our people, you will pay with your life.
The Israeli approach to assassination — what military planners call mabam, an acronym for ma’arecha bein milchamot (“the war between wars”) — is built on a core principle: Eliminate imminent threats before they materialize. From the earliest days of the Jewish state, this doctrine has been as much about deterrence as justice.
Examples include Operation Wrath of God from 1972 to 1988, which followed the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The Mossad launched a worldwide campaign to eliminate those responsible; targets were tracked and killed in Europe and the Middle East through car bombs, gun ambushes, and other covert tactics.
In 1988, a team of Israeli commandos stormed the villa of the Palestine Liberation Organization military chief in Tunis and shot him 70 times. He was behind dozens of attacks on Israelis, including the 1978 Coastal Road massacre.
Eight years later, Israel took out Hamas’ top bomb-maker, nicknamed “The Engineer,” by planting explosives inside his cell phone and detonated them while he was using it. His death crippled Hamas’ bombing campaign at the time.
In 2008, Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, the founding member of Lebanon’s Islamic Jihad Organization and number two in Hezbollah’s leadership, was assassinated by Israel via a car bomb that was remotely detonated as Mughniyeh passed by on foot in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, Syria. The official Israeli code name for this operation was “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Why? Because Mughniyeh had a wife in Beirut and three mistresses in Damascus.
Two years later, Mossad agents manipulated fake passports and disguises to infiltrate a Dubai hotel, where they suffocated Hamas’ weapons procurement chief in his room. Security footage later exposed the operation, sparking a diplomatic scandal.
A decade later, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, considered the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, was killed in a highly sophisticated operation using a remote-controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. The device was equipped with artificial intelligence to compensate for latency and recoil, and it was operated via satellite. Not a single Mossad agent was on-site during the hit, making it one of the most audacious and technically advanced assassinations ever.
And that was all before October 7th. The Israeli assassinations since that dreadful day have been just as remarkable, if not more.
On July 31, 2024, at 01:14 a.m. Israel time (01:44 in Tehran), the signal was given. Seconds later, the device detonated, killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — inside one of the most secure compounds in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ affluent northern Tehran residence, which is reserved for high-level meetings and “prominent guests” such as Haniyeh.
The bomb’s placement, angle, and concealment left no margin for survival. Intelligence officials say it was planted roughly two months earlier and required months of planning, surveillance, and even AI-powered precision. When confirmation came that Haniyeh was in the room, Mossad operatives inside Iran remotely triggered the device. The result was instantaneous.
Then, two months later, the Israeli Air Force carried out massive targeted airstrikes in Beirut, sending thick clouds of smoke over the city, including bombs totaling dozens of tons of powerful bunker-penetrating explosives, flattening six buildings. The bombing was not aimed at one point of attack but spread over an area of several hundred square meters above and below the ground.
It was the heaviest attack in Beirut throughout almost a year of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The target: longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who “is no longer with us” as one Israeli official said shortly thereafter.
So, with all that said, why wasn’t Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei next on the hit list? Why didn’t Israel take the ultimate shot? It surely has the means and capabilities to do so.
According to Bergman, the answer is both practical and philosophical: Israel has never assassinated the leader of a sovereign state, and it didn’t want to set that precedent now.
Even during existential wars decades ago, Israel never assassinated Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, or Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
At first glance, this sounds almost quaint: Israel drawing red lines in an era when its enemies ignore every norm of warfare. Hamas massacred civilians, raped women, burned families alive. Hezbollah rains missiles indiscriminately on Israeli towns. Iran bankrolls all of it. And yet, Israel restrains itself.
But dig deeper, and the logic becomes clear.
First, international law is murky on assassinations. It explicitly bans political killings during peacetime, but what about wartime? Especially a shadow war like this one — fought through proxies, cyberattacks, and long-range missiles? Technically, Israel could argue self-defense. After all, Khamenei is not a symbolic figurehead; he is the architect of Iran’s proxy empire and the man who greenlit October 7th by funding Hamas and Hezbollah for decades.
And yet, precedent is a powerful thing. Once you assassinate a head of state, you normalize the practice for everyone else. If Israel kills Khamenei, what stops Iran — or its allies — from trying to assassinate Israel’s prime minister? What stops Russia from targeting Zelensky? What stops anyone from turning world leaders into fair game?
Israel thrives on deterrence, not chaos. And killing Khamenei might have pushed the world into uncharted territory — a world where leadership decapitation becomes a legitimate tool of statecraft.
There’s another reason: Killing Khamenei doesn’t kill Iran’s regime. Iran’s system is designed for continuity. Khamenei’s death would trigger an emergency process to install a successor, likely someone just as hardline — maybe even more so. Instead of crippling Iran, his assassination could unleash chaos that empowers the Revolutionary Guards, the most radical faction in the country.
Worse, it could backfire diplomatically. For decades, Israel’s greatest weapon has been legitimacy in the eyes of the West. Assassinating a head of state, even one as malign as Khamenei, would erode that legitimacy overnight. Suddenly, Israel would be painted as the aggressor, its defensive war recast as state terrorism. The backlash could have been astronomical, such as a massive regional war, potentially pulling in U.S. forces; diplomatic collapse with Washington, D.C. and Europe; and legitimacy erosion, turning Israel from defender to aggressor in global eyes.
Here’s the irony: Iran openly plots assassinations in the U.S. and Europe, targets Jewish communities abroad, and brags about wanting to annihilate Israel. The world shrugs. Had Israel killed Khamenei, those same capitals that barely blink at Iranian terror would have exploded in outrage. Israel knows this. It knows that in a world obsessed with optics, how you fight matters as much as why you fight.
Paradoxically, keeping Khamenei alive may hurt him more than killing him. Every time Israel kills a top Hamas or Hezbollah leader — and does so inside Tehran or Beirut — it chips away at Iran’s aura of invincibility. Khamenei is alive, but humiliated. His proxies bleed, his capital is penetrated, and his enemies broadcast it to the world. Martyrdom could make him a unifying symbol; humiliation makes him a liability.
What’s more, Bergman’s answer highlights something profound about Israel’s ethos. Despite its reputation as a ruthless operator, Israel is obsessed with boundaries — moral, legal, strategic. It’s a paradox: a country willing to assassinate hundreds of enemy operatives, yet unwilling to cross a line that even its fiercest adversaries wouldn’t think twice about.
And that’s what makes Israel different. Iran and its proxies hide behind human shields, plots genocidal terror, and chants for Israel’s annihilation. Israel, by contrast, agonizes over proportionality, legality, and precedent — even in existential war.
Khamenei lives today not because Israel can’t kill him, but because Israel believes some lines should not be crossed, even when facing an enemy that respects none. Israel’s choice tells us something profound: Survival, for Israel, is not just about eliminating threats. It’s about preserving the moral and strategic boundaries that keep a brutal world from becoming even more lawless.
And in that sense, restraint is not weakness; it’s the ultimate show of strength.
MELTDOWN: Francesca Albanese freaks out when Hillel Neuer asks “Who funded you?” [2:53]
Jul 8, 2025 UN Watch – Pro-Hamas UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese appeared before the United Nations to tell terrible lies about Israel. Condemned for Holocaust distortion and antisemitism last year by France, Germany, Canada & the U.S., she now says “one people was enriched” by “erasing” Palestinians. Terrorist regimes embraced her. Then UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer took the floor.
00:00 Francesca Albanese: “One people enriched, one people erased…”
00:38 Arab League embraces her
00:44 PLO rep says those who support Israel are the “Antisemites”
00:49 Venezuela accuses US & Europe of acting like Hitler
01:02 Qatar’s infamous Ambassador of Hate Hend al-Muftah
(https://unwatch.org/qatars-envoy-lose…)
01:05 Islamic Regime in Iran
01:16 UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer
02:45 Meltdown by Francesca Albanese after Neuer asks about her pro-Hamas funders https://unwatch.org/report-un-orchest…
Tucker Carlson’s Jeffrey Epstein obsession is an antisemitic conspiracy theory Jonathan S. Tobin
The bizarre case and suicide of a sex trafficker seemed designed to foment over-the-top speculation. And that has inevitably led to it becoming a focus of Jew-hatred.
July 14, 2025 JNS
Conspiracy theories aren’t generally concocted out of whole cloth. They are almost always rooted in quite real and terrible events for which there are no conclusive and satisfactory answers.
That is why last week’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to take a deep dive into the records of the case of disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein produced no great revelations. Neither did it reveal a much-sought-after list of celebrity “clients” for whom he procured underage victims. The lack of any definitive results was bound to be met with anger from an Internet audience already prone to disbelieve any official response. Predictably, it strengthened the conviction among those who had immersed themselves in this sordid story that this, too, was just more evidence of a grand plot to fool the public and cover up unspeakable crimes.
But just as predictable was the next step down the rabbit hole of Epstein conspiracy theories. Within days of Attorney General Pam Bondi admitting that no evidence in the FBI’s files would allow the Justice Department to continue the investigation, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson doubled down on the idea of a government cover-up while speaking at the Turning Point USA conference in Tampa, Fla.
Not only was he willing to hurl such an accusation at an administration made up of his presumable political allies. He went further by claiming to an audience cheering his supposed courage in making such charges that Epstein was an agent of the government of Israel, whose vile actions were somehow part of an effort to blackmail politicians and celebrities. Unsatisfied with such slander, he also invoked the notion that the entire financial industry is some sort of scam—and attacked pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman for good measure.
Nor was Carlson alone in trying to make this about Israel and the Jews. Podcaster and former Fox News and NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, who is generally far more responsible than Carlson when it comes to flinging around conspiracy theories, echoed the allegation, also voicing the belief that Epstein was probably a Mossad agent.
A classic antisemitic trope
Why are they—and their legions of imitators and followers—latching onto the idea that the Israeli government is at the heart of one of the most notorious sex crimes in recent history? The answer is obvious. For podcasters and social-media “influencers” who thrive only to the extent that they can feed their audiences’ hunger not just for simple answers to complex problems but the kind of conspiratorial thinking that confirms their desire to view every bad thing as a diabolical plot, the Epstein case is a gift that never stops giving. To attach Israel to this sort of topic is a guarantee not only of millions of clicks on videos and podcasts, but also gives those saying such things an instant mass audience that is always willing to believe anything awful that can be said about the Jewish state or the Jews.
Two main points need to be acknowledged in discussing this topic.
One is that neither Carlson nor Kelly—nor anyone else talking about this publicly—has any tangible, concrete evidence of Israeli government involvement in Epstein’s sex crimes. And they freely admit as much.
All they have got are circumstantial allegations that they claim that “everyone” believes. That consists of the fact that the criminal was Jewish, involved in Jewish philanthropy and knew prominent Israelis. Add to that the fact that Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein’s one-time girlfriend/accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison term for conspiring to abuse minors, is alleged to have had ties with the Mossad some 40 years ago.
That’s a lot of smoke. Yet after more than a decade of obsessive global interest in the case, no fire has been discovered.
And no denial from Israelis like former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, no matter how persuasive or authoritative, will ever silence the conspiracy-mongering. It’s probably a mistake to even try.
The other is that attaching Israel, the Mossad or the Jews to this sort of a case is a classic trope of antisemitism, straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which Jewish plots to suborn society via sexual subversion and shadowy manipulation of world leaders and governments play a prominent role.
That’s why throwing out these sorts of charges is not merely run-of-the-mill clickbait; it would be defamatory and irresponsible at any time. But in doing so now, they are self-consciously throwing fuel on the fire of a global surge in antisemitism that has been taking place since the Hamas-led Palestinian assault on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
Carlson has been doing his best to stoke the global information war against Israel since then, using his podcast viewed by millions to platform smears of the Jewish state and more traditional antisemitic themes like Holocaust denial. A deep dive into the funding for his online network, where he has peddled pro-Iranian and pro-Qatar propaganda, as well as Russian disinformation, might (as some of his critics allege) reveal funding from nefarious sources like Qatar.
Having conspicuously failed to persuade President Donald Trump not to act to end the Iranian nuclear threat and work with Israel to destroy Tehran’s program, as well as all of his predictions of disaster if he did having been proven to be laughably false, has not deterred Carlson from jumping right back onto the Jew-hatred horse after he fell. That’s typical of antisemitic conspiracy theorists. The fact that he continues to claim that he is neither antisemitic nor anti-Israel is evidence not only of his shamelessness. It shows the way he is uniting with left-wing Jew-haters to try to move the Overton Window of acceptable discourse about Israel to make it safe to engage in antisemitism.
A true crime scandal
To note the way that the Epstein case is being used to legitimize Jew-hatred is not to deny the crimes that the perpetrator and his associates engaged in, or that there is a lot about the case that remains inexplicable and troubling.
That Epstein got off with a slap on the wrist when he was first charged with sex crimes has always had the odor of corruption, or at least misconduct on the part of the Florida prosecutors involved. The fact that he engaged in such conduct while hobnobbing with some of the most famous and powerful people in the world is also as outrageous and puzzling as how he got away with it for so long.
Then there is the question of Epstein’s suicide in a New York City jail, which occurred under suspicious circumstances, with some calling it murder by those who wished to silence him.
It’s also true that Epstein’s fortune made on Wall Street gave him access to some of the most influential and famous people in the world, including former President Bill Clinton, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a host of others. Some of them might have flown on his private planes on trips to his Caribbean island estate and/or participated in his crimes against underage girls.
Has evidence that would connect others to this scandal been destroyed? Maybe. It’s also possible that Epstein was smart enough not to have a document with a “client’s list” lying around to incriminate him and his pals. Scholar and Harvard Law school professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who was on Epstein’s legal team when he was first charged with crimes but later left it—and was himself the target of some libelous accusations of participating in his client’s wrongdoing that were ultimately walked back—has said that he knows the names of some of the guilty parties but can’t speak because of confidentiality pledges imposed by the court.
It’s likely that even revealing those names won’t stop the conspiracy from continuing to metastasize. What we do know about the Epstein case is enough to fill a library of “true crime” books and documentaries. What we don’t know about it—and at this point, likely never will—is equally vast.
Why do so many people care about the man and this case?
As with all true crime tales, it plays into the public’s hunger for prurient stories of sexual misconduct. Like reality shows that portray dysfunctional or depraved conduct, the focus on these investigations allows audiences to be both titillated and to feel morally superior to those depicted.
More than that, it also taps into most people’s understanding that even the best of political and legal systems are susceptible to corruption or injustice—particularly when, as was likely applicable to Epstein, a two-tier system in which the wealthy and well-connected are treated better than ordinary people. Throw in the belief by some that global elites are not merely wrong-headed and corrupt but devoted to the abuse of children, and you have a formula for an obsession.
That’s why it would have been nice if the government files on the case could have ended some of the wild speculation.
Egg on their faces
A big part of the problem now is the fact that three of the figures who hold positions of authority in the Department of Justice were, seemingly only yesterday, the ones who were engaged in spreading conspiracy theories about Epstein. That was true of Dan Bongino, a podcaster and media personality before his current appointment as deputy director of the FBI. The same could be said of the statements of Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel.
In February, Bondi told Fox News that an Epstein client list was on her desk to be reviewed. She also said that her department had obtained hours of video related to the case. In March, the White House invited 15 far-right influencers to an event where they received white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”; however, the documents provided were already publicly available.
But having encouraged conspiracy theorists when it was the Biden administration that was supposedly covering up evidence, they were left with egg on their faces when it turned out they had nothing to back up their charges.
That’s deeply embarrassing for Bondi, Patel and Bongino, who were forced to eat crow. It’s also provoked a round of recriminations within the Trump administration and among conservatives on the Internet.
As a result, people like Carlson are now not only hyping long-running assertions that Epstein’s crimes were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of egregious conspiratorial wrongdoing but are now aiming their fire at Trump. The president urged his supporters to move on from the story, leading some on the right to lament that he, too, has been co-opted by the global conspiracy. Some on the left are now alleging that he is being protected by the cover-up with the same irresponsible lack of proof that those on the right have used when speaking of the case.
Carlson has no influence
There are two conclusions to be drawn from all this.
One is that, as appalling as the discourse about the Epstein case has been, it is, like the debate about Israel and Iran, further distancing the Trump administration from “woke right” antisemites like Carlson.
Perhaps Bondi will ultimately be dropped by Trump. But like the fact that he is disappointing those on the far right who imagined that “America First” meant an anti-Israel foreign policy, the White House’s determination to move on from the obsessions of Carlson and his ilk continues to demonstrate that they have very little influence on the policies and actions of Trump 2.0.
There are strong arguments to be made that, as bad as Epstein’s crimes were and as Trump himself has now said, other important threats to America and the West are higher priorities. We might like to know for sure who did what and with whom on Epstein’s plane and island. But for the government and the media to be chasing their tails seeking answers to questions that might have no conclusive answers on an old scandal is not a good use of anyone’s time.
It’s also true that it won’t stop the conspiracy theorists or the antisemites from continuing to promote the idea that the Epstein case demonstrates that Israel or the Jews were promoting sexual crimes and then hiding them. Like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and other such fodder for those who dwell in the fever swamps, the Epstein case will live on and continue to feed on itself for the foreseeable future.
There was never a chance that even the Trump administration’s admission that the case is closed was going to satisfy those who are up to their necks in wild theories. Telling them that there is no “there” there was, no matter the truth of the matter, never going to silence the doubters or stop scoundrels from seeking to link it to hatred for Israel.
As with his promotion of Holocaust denial, Carlson’s stance that he is “just asking questions” about Epstein is disingenuous. While he will claim that he is being silenced even after he shouts his unsubstantiated charges to huge audiences, the time is long past to stop speaking of him and his “woke right” associates as if they aim to seek the truth about Epstein, Israel, Iran or anything else. Like the virus of antisemitism itself, unscrupulous hatemongers may always be with us. While it will never be possible to conclusively discredit those who spread conspiracy theories aimed at harming Israel and the Jews to those willing to swallow their smears, it’s incumbent on decent people to stop treating Carlson as a credible source of information or a representative of anything but the most irresponsible elements of society.
JONATHAN S. TOBIN Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
The F-35 Highlights Israel as a Unique Force-Multiplier for the USA Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
July 13, 2025
Does the US extend to Israel an annual military foreign aid, or does the US make an annual investment in Israel, which yields to the US taxpayer an annual Return-on-Investment (R-o-I) of a few hundred percent?
*Israel was the first country to use the F-35 in combat in (and since) 2018, overcoming critical technical and mechanical problems. The daily feedback from Israel has dramatically enhanced the F-35’s reliability, maintainability and capabilities.
* The October 26, 2024 and June 13, 2025 Israeli Air Force offensive on Iran were accomplished by using 100 (in October) and 200 (in June) US-made combat aircraft (F-35, F-16 and F-15), showcasing the battle-proven edge of the US combat aircraft over the global competition in China, Russia, Britain, France, Sweden and Italy. This proven edge of the F-35 has resulted in mega-billion of dollars in savings for the US research and development, enhancing US competitiveness in the global market. This also yielded a mega-billion-dollar increase of US exports, expanded the US employment base, and upgraded battle and training tactics for the US Air Force.
*According to the July 3, 2025 EurAsian Times, “Israel’s success in extending the range of its F-35I Adir stealth jets by [unprecedently] adding drop tanks and conformal fuel tanks [without compromising the stealth profile], and successfully deploying them for bombing Iran has impressed upon the US Air Force the need to increase the range of [its own fleet of F-35]…. Israeli aircraft had to fly through Turkey, Jordan, or Syria, and then Iraq [over 1,100 miles each way without being refueled and detected] to reach Iranian airspace…. The Israeli F-35s are modified in the following main areas [and mostly shared with the US manufacturer and Air Force]: command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I), electronic warfare, and weapons integration [as well as integrating new AI algorithms and predictive maintenance and counter measures]… and the US Air Force can also benefit from studying these modification…. Any augmentation of range without midair refueling [which undermines the stealth capabilities] will be beneficial for the US, as it could be involved in a confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific, [preferring to reduce dependence on mid-air refueling, which lacks stealth and is vulnerable in war]….”
*The June 14, 2025 issue of the Arlington, Virginia-based Defense.Info maintained that “Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Israel’s experience provides [the US] valuable insights into sustaining F-35 operations during high-intensity conflicts, particularly in the Pacific theatre, where the US military anticipates operating F-35s across vast distances with limited logistical support….”
*The June 13, 2025 issue of Defense.Info notes that “The Israeli F-35I “Adir” represents a revolutionary advancement in regional air power, featuring unprecedented modifications [mostly shared with the US] that no other F-35 operator has been permitted to implement…. Israel’s F-35I has fundamentally altered the strategic balance in the Middle East, while establishing new benchmarks for fifth-generation fighter integration…. Revolutionary Israeli modifications transform standard F-35A capabilities….
“The F-35I features unique Middle Eastern operational optimizations including conformal fuel tanks enabling 1,700+ kilometer missions without aerial refueling, electronic warfare systems specifically designed to counter the Russian S-400 and Iranian air defense systems, and enhanced C4I integration with Israeli intelligence networks. These modifications [mostly shared with the US] enable the F-35I to operate as an independent strategic asset while maintaining interoperability with allied forces through standard NATO datalinks. Multi-platform integration creates unprecedented force multiplication.
“The Israeli Air Force pioneered a sophisticated integration strategy combining F-35I stealth capabilities with F-15I “Ra’am” strike power, creating a force multiplication effect that exceeds the capabilities of either platform alone. This revolutionary approach leverages fifth-generation intelligence gathering with fourth-generation firepower through carefully orchestrated operational sequences…. The F-35I serves as an airborne sensor network, providing 360-degree situational awareness and threat warnings to conventional fighters operating in adjacent areas…. This multi-platform doctrine has been validated through thousands of combat sorties across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
“Israeli F-35I aircraft have conducted the most extensive combat operations of any F-35 variant worldwide, accumulating verified combat experience [mostly shared with the US] against sophisticated threats that no other nation has encountered…. Israeli F-35I aircraft achieved multiple historic firsts including the world’s first F-35 combat missions in Syria (2018), first F-35 air-to-air kills against Iranian drones (2021), and first operational use of external weapons configuration in combat….
“The F-35I integration represents a fundamental shift from platform-centric to network-centric warfare, with the aircraft functioning as a central sensor node connecting Israel’s multi-layered defense architecture. Integration with Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow systems creates comprehensive coverage across all threat ranges while providing real-time intelligence sharing through advanced datalinks.
“Israel’s F-35I capabilities [mostly shared with the US]… enable multi-domain operations combining physical strikes, electronic warfare, and intelligence gathering in single missions that create strategic effects far exceeding traditional air operations.
“Pentagon officials note Israeli F-35I operations provide critical lessons for U.S. Pacific strategy, particularly regarding sustained operations in contested environments and integration of allied technologies… and enhanced cooperation with U.S. forces through joint exercises and operations….”
*The bottom line: Israel is immensely grateful for receiving a few hundred advanced US military systems, which are critical to its survival. However, this is not a one-way-street, but a mutually beneficial two-way-street interaction. Each one of the hundreds of US military systems is employed by Israel, which serves as a unique showroom (Triple-A Store), battle-tested laboratory and innovation center of the US defense and aerospace industries, and a prime generator of battle tactics formulation for the US Armed Forces.
Therefore, the US does not extend foreign aid to Israel, but makes an annual investment in Israel, which yields to the US taxpayer an annual Return-on-Investment of a few hundred percent.
It Just Got MORE INSANE! Ghislaine Maxwell to EXPOSE EVERYONE! [15:31] Professor Nez
July 14, 2025 🚨BREAKING NEWS: Ghislaine Maxwell is reportedly ready to name names and expose the full Epstein client list! This could be the most explosive development in the Epstein saga since his arrest. If Maxwell follows through, some of the most powerful elites in politics, media, tech, and entertainment could be unmasked. Who’s on the list? Why now? And what happens next?
Leave Me Alone – Original by Gary Applegate and Joe Rock [2:47]
May 13, 2022 Gary Applegate and Joe Rock
LIVE: They Are Shutting Tousi TV Down [23:58] Mahyar Tousi
July 14, 2025 Tousi TV
American Virtues – 2025 Commencement Address Victor Davis Hanson
JULY/AUGUST 2025 | IMPRIMIS | VOLUME 54, ISSUE 7/8
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 10, 2025, at Hillsdale College’s 173rd Commencement Ceremony.
Before we begin, let me offer a brief contemporary observation. Has anyone noticed how the eyes of the nation have now turned to Hillsdale? This recent interest surpasses even the past considerable attention that Hillsdale has garnered.
One reason for this, of course, is that Harvard University suddenly wishes to be free of Washington, D.C.—at least as long as the current administration remains in office. And yet, in its confusion, Harvard still wishes to maintain over $9 billion in federal subsidies.
In answer, the public has been directing Harvard to consult Hillsdale, whose model disavowal of federal funding is long-standing and principled. Hillsdale’s declination of government money does not hinge on any particular administration, Republican or Democrat, being in power. Instead, Hillsdale has taken the position that the federal government should not dictate to private colleges, and that to ensure its independence, Hillsdale will neither seek nor accept taxpayer subsidies.
Another reason for the attention being given Hillsdale is that the Department of Education, in seeking to restore civic and classical education, looks in Hillsdale’s direction. If, in the past, Hillsdale was an atoll of common sense—a sanctuary of all that remains good in the largely lost and aimless landscape of American higher education—today it is more the nation’s guide to the rediscovery of personal integrity, gratitude to the old breed that came before, and happiness and hope about the future. In other words, Hillsdale College has become the nation’s 21st-century example of what higher education should be—and might still become.
So today, I would like to reflect on these three sometimes-forgotten American virtues—honor, tradition, and optimism—which are embodied on the Hillsdale campus and will serve to guide today’s graduates in the years ahead.
For 21 consecutive autumns, Hillsdale has graciously hosted me as a visiting professor of history and classics. Looking back on my first time here, in 2004, I was immediately struck by three observations that seemed unique in my decades-long associations with a number of other college campuses.
First, on my first full day here, I realized that I had left a bicycle unlocked on campus overnight. I walked to campus that morning expecting my bike to be either vandalized or stolen, yet there it was in the center of a now crowded campus—just as I had left it. That was something I couldn’t imagine happening on a modern college campus. I had certainly never seen anything like it in California where I had then been teaching for over two decades.
Second, that same day, when I visited the bookstore to check on the book orders for my two classes, I scanned the shelves and was equally stunned. I did not see a single course listing with the usual faddish “studies” suffix. There were no therapeutic course titles like peace studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, film studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, or sexual studies. Instead, there were courses listed in all classical aspects of philosophy, literature, languages, history, mathematics, and science. Here at Hillsdale I found only the disciplines that have endured for centuries and that, ironically, have encompassed and grounded the content of the “studies” classes not found on the Hillsdale campus.
What a strange thing, I thought, given the current landscape of higher education, for this contemporary American college to trust in the brilliance of some 2,500 years of prior Western educators—who in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem founded the disciplines and boundaries of their all-encompassing knowledge. And how much odder that at Hillsdale, almost uniquely, these classes remain constant and unchanged from their inception—even as academia as a whole believes that modernistic courses and novel therapies are needed to explain a supposedly new and ever-changing human nature.
And my third observation upon first arriving here was that students, faculty, and staff at Hillsdale College are happy. They smile. They say hello to strangers. They shake your hand. A shared confidence is entirely natural here. It is innate to the point that when I, the stranger, initially remarked on the rare upbeat mood of the campus, people here thought I was the strange one for expecting anything else.
We might shrug over how trivial this observation seems. But in fact, it is a glimpse into the fundamental Hillsdale notion of confidence in our civilization and the need for fellowship and positivity to preserve it. Such happiness is quite different from what one finds on most other campuses, where the youthful frown is now the normal expression. People pass each other by with a cold absence of greeting—as if proof of pseudo-sophistication. They often express a dourness of contrived seriousness and maturity. Students elsewhere seem to think that they alone—unlike electricians, farmers, and assembly line workers—bear the weight of global grievances and imperfections, past, present, and future. But not at Hillsdale.
Behind these three seemingly mundane observations of a bicycle left alone overnight, a bookstore unaffected by academic fads, and a buoyancy within the Hillsdale community remain larger truths.
Honor
You students of the Class of 2025 have been instructed in, have absorbed fully, and will pass on a code of honorable conduct that has become a natural part of who you are. And it will remain with you on the long road ahead. Hillsdale has taught you not to worry if you are not one with the current majority of youth, because you are certainly one with most of the past—and future—generations. Your confidence in your code of ethical comportment and personal standards will be your legacy to help guide future cohorts to come. Because your values are real, permanent, and ancient, you will not be won over by those who justify their lapses of behavior by situational ethics or feelings of victimization. Without such individual vows of honesty and compassion for others, civilization in aggregate cannot be sustained. It instead descends into the age-old banes of tribalism, disunity, and chaos.
Students at Hillsdale do not steal bicycles because their personal code of honor forbids it; because they are concerned that the poor victim would suffer without his property; and because they know that if this was common practice, then their own culture and civilization would crumble—as indeed it has in many places in America today.
Much of our society’s current crisis derives from this personal refusal or inability to respect the property of others, to tell the truth, to stand up to the bully, to protect the weaker, and to end each day in contemplation that you were more a moral force for the common good than either a neutral observer or on the wrong side of the ethical ledger. When individual behavior and decorum falter, so does a country, which is, after all, only the common reflection of millions of its individuals.
Tradition
The character of the Hillsdale student is nurtured and sustained by tradition—a word derived from the Latin noun traditio, meaning a transmission or handing down. So often in the age of presentism, we in our narcissism and arrogance confuse our technical and material successes with automatic moral progress. We seem unaware that thinkers of the past—as early as the Greek poet Hesiod, some 2,700 years ago—worried about just the opposite: they worried that material progress and greater wealth would result in moral regress, given the greater opportunities to gratify the appetites with perceived fewer consequences and to use sophistry to excuse the sin.
Likewise, without traditional reverence for the past, an ungrateful nation not only suffers a loss of knowledge but is plagued by hubris—so often the twin of ignorance—believing that it alone has discovered ideas and behaviors unique to itself and its own era, when they are in fact ancient. This closed mindset seeks a kind of perfection, a heaven on earth, instead of the good—and it ends up obtaining neither.
Are we not instead the sum total of all those who came before us, who for the most part here in America left us a constitutional system and infrastructure that allowed us to start our lives both materially and civically, in terms of freedom, far ahead of those in the past and those elsewhere today? Key to the endangered idea of reverence for the past is a recognition that it is neither fair nor just to dismiss easily those of earlier generations based solely on the standards of the present. Instead, we must remember the different circumstances faced by previous generations—circumstances like incurable illnesses, short life expectancy, and work entailing existential danger and physical drudgery. Yet our ancestors were able to endure suffering and challenges that we now can scarcely imagine.
The Hillsdale reverence for the Western tradition and the American past is a reminder that we should not easily condemn and erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged capriciously by future generations and found wanting—whether for the medievalism of our dangerous cities, the electronic cruelty of the Internet, or the fragmentation of the family.
Optimism
I wish to end on a happy note, in the manner I first encountered the Hillsdale College community.
Your generation is now witness to a counterrevolution of sorts. Millions of Americans are asking for a reexamination of our culture and society with an eye to restoring ancient decency and looking to the good of past generations. Critical to this restoration is your optimism. Such positivity is the child of gratitude for all that we have inherited and all that we wish to enhance and pass on to others not yet born. With optimism and confidence in the citizenry, a civilization grows rather than shrinks. It becomes secure, not depressed or beset by self-loathing. It looks to the future with reverence for the past, rather than with shame or hatred.
Of course, it is now chic to be moody and pessimistic and uncool to be upbeat and cheerful. But the strength of this country—even in its darkest days like those of April 12, 1861, or December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001—has always been its singular ability to remain not just unshaken, but confident in its values, its resilience, and its inherent strength to overcome all challenges.
In this current counterrevolution of sorts, it is neither the duty nor the desire of Hillsdale to become a political player. Nonetheless, the nation looks for guidance and the reassurance of the old wisdom. Therefore it is only natural, as I have said, that Hillsdale College and its moral and intellectual architecture have become preeminent to a degree scarcely imaginable in the past.
So you, the Class of 2025, as Hillsdale graduates, will be asked by your peers to provide guidance as never before. And I am confident that by your education, your code of comportment, your reverence, and your optimism, you will become natural leaders and exemplars in whatever paths you follow—in the era to come that will be America’s greatest renaissance and also, I think, its most decent.
Thank you, and may God bless you all.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He has written for several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and the Daily Telegraph. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize, he is the author of numerous books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/american-virtues-2025-commencement-address/
A Radical Company is Paying Supreme Court Justices Millions by Daniel Greenfield
July 9, 2025
- Jackson received a $893,750 advance for her memoir and is now reporting $2 million in profits last year. These would be record numbers for a Supreme Court Justice’s biography from a book that hardly anyone had noticed when it came out. And while books can become unexpected successes once released, there was little sign of that happening.
- Penguin Random House will be publishing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book for which she received a $2 million advance. That’s money the publisher seems even less likely to recoup considering that Barrett is hated among leftists and has a mixed approval rating among conservatives. Past polls show that the majority of the country can’t even name a single Supreme Court justice, yet they are receiving celebrity level advances for books no one cares about.
- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been previously criticized for not recusing herself in cases involving Penguin which had paid her over $3 million.
- Penguin is actually Bertelsmann: a German ex-Nazi publishing giant that has waged war on American parents, promoted racism and is trying to monopolistically gobble up all of American publishing. Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”, and, during WWII, “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth” all came out of Bertelsmann.
- While the ex-Nazi foreign corporation operates under familiar names like Penguin, Random House, Doubleday, Ballantine, Knopf, Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books and many others, it’s actually a foreign company pushing deeply destructive products. Even as parents tried to stop their children from being exposed to sexually inappropriate content, former CEO Markus Dohle went to war against them with a $500,000 legal fund.
- [A] foreign company that has tried to completely monopolize American publishing by seizing control of Simon and Schuster, and has intervened in American politics, is … troubling.
- Bertelsmann millions have gone mostly unexamined even as ProPublica, a leftist advocacy group, launched a smear campaign against Justice Thomas. The Thomas smears were repeated by every media outlet in the country which pursued the 76-year-old justice’s 96-year-old mother to find out where exactly she lives and who paid the tuition for his grandnephew, yet shrug when the Supreme Court can’t even form a quorum over millions from a multinational giant that has business before the court being directed to justices
- Justice Jackson making millions for a ghostwritten memoir after spending less time on the bench than most dustcloths is an equally obvious exercise in cashing in, not literary inspiration.
Last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, despite being in her early 50s and having an undistinguished career before her affirmative action appointment, published a memoir.
You might be forgiven for having missed it when “Lovely One” came out. As the media politely notes, it was “briefly” on the New York Times bestseller list and is now going for half price on Amazon. That is mostly to be expected of the ghostwritten memoir of an obscure judge.
Except that Jackson received a $893,750 advance for her memoir and is now reporting $2 million in profits last year. These would be record numbers for a Supreme Court Justice’s biography from a book that hardly anyone had noticed when it came out. And while books can become unexpected successes once released, there was little sign of that happening.
The actual sales figures have not been made public and perhaps ‘Lovely One’ sold millions of copies even while hardly anyone noticed before ending up in the remainder bin a year later. Certainly no one in the same media that pursued every living member of the Thomas family to find if anyone had ever done them a favor actually bothered obtaining the sales figure.
Even when the money was coming from an avaricious foreign publisher which has deluged Supreme Court justices with millions of dollars in generous publishing deals.
After Jackson’s memoir, Penguin Random House will be publishing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book for which she received a $2 million advance. That’s money the publisher seems even less likely to recoup considering that Barrett is hated among leftists and has a mixed approval rating among conservatives. Past polls show that the majority of the country can’t even name a single Supreme Court justice, yet they are receiving celebrity level advances for books no one cares about.
Penguin’s payouts previously made headlines when five Supreme Court justices, including Jackson and Barrett, had to recuse themselves from a case involving allegations of plagiarism by racist Hamas supporter Ta-Nehisi Coates whose works, including a book describing 9/11 firefighters as “not human to me”, were widely backed and promoted by Penguin.
The ‘Penguin’ recusals successfully allowed Coates to triumph in that latest court case.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been previously criticized for not recusing herself in cases involving Penguin which had paid her over $3 million. And the current Supreme Court is so badly conflicted over its Penguin cash that it can no longer decide cases involving it.
And that’s a problem because Penguin is actually Bertelsmann: a German ex-Nazi publishing giant that has waged war on American parents, promoted racism and is trying to monopolistically gobble up all of American publishing. Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”, and, during WWII, “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth” all came out of Bertelsmann.
While the ex-Nazi foreign corporation operates under familiar names like Penguin, Random House, Doubleday, Ballantine, Knopf, Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books and many others, it’s actually a foreign company pushing deeply destructive products. Even as parents tried to stop their children from being exposed to sexually inappropriate content, former CEO Markus Dohle went to war against them with a $500,000 legal fund.
Any corporation moving millions of dollars to Supreme Court justices in a way that has already successfully advantaged it in the Ta-Nehisi Coates plagiarism case would be suspect, but a foreign company that has tried to completely monopolize American publishing by seizing control of Simon and Schuster, and has intervened in American politics, is even more deeply troubling.
Yet the Bertelsmann millions have gone mostly unexamined even as ProPublica, a leftist advocacy group, launched a smear campaign against Justice Thomas. The Thomas smears were repeated by every media outlet in the country which pursued the 76-year-old justice’s 96-year-old mother to find out where exactly she lives and who paid the tuition for his grandnephew, yet shrug when the Supreme Court can’t even form a quorum over millions from a multinational giant that has business before the court being directed to justices.
No one in the media seems to have even bothered examining the sales figures for ‘Lovely One’ to determine how many copies were sold and which venues actually sold them. Sotomayor had become notorious for high-pressure sales tactics aimed at compelling venues to buy her books.
Supreme Court justices used to write on mainly legal matters (with notable exceptions such as Taft and Douglas) and reserved their memoirs toward the end of their lives. Newly minted justices like Jackson signing memoir deals is an obvious cash-in and Justice Sotomayor, after publishing a memoir no one was asking for ‘My Beloved World’, began writing children’s books.
Would Penguin really be publishing Sotomayor’s feeble efforts at writing children’s books, ‘Just Help!: How to Build a Better World’, ‘Just Ask!: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You’ and (coming soon) ‘Just Shine!: How to Be a Better You’ if she weren’t a Supreme Court justice?
And Justice Jackson making millions for a ghostwritten memoir after spending less time on the bench than most dustcloths is an equally obvious exercise in cashing in, not literary inspiration.
Judges putting their names on things to make money is not illegal, and maybe after this, Justice Jackson will have her own line of dish towels, sneakers or crypto coins, but Bertelsmann has not only monopolized the American publishing market, but has monopolized the market for justices. And considering its radical politics and vast ambitions, that is a major problem.
What happens when Bertelsmann triggers a court case with major legal implications and once again a quorum of justices can’t be found to sit on it?
Then the woke mega-publisher will have officially bought America’s legal system.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reprinted by kind permission of the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
- Follow Daniel Greenfield on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook
[Ed.:
The Iran Ceasefire: A Dicey Intermission by Amir Taheri
July 13, 2025
- [T]he recent flare-up has deeper reason than a concern about Iran building a nuclear arsenal, something which all directors general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from Hans Blix to Muhammad Al-Baradei and Rafael Grossi have repeatedly said they cannot confirm.
- Tehran’s fourth demand may be the hardest for any American administration to even contemplate accepting: Accepting the Islamic Republic’s right to “export” its model of governance, its Islamic values and its campaign for “global justice” just as the US does by propagating its values. In other words, Tehran says: Let us do what we please and we promise not to make the bomb that we have always said we never intended to build.
- [M]id-term election in the US… could transform Trump into a lame-duck president if Elon Musk’s new political Tesla manages to rob the Republicans of just six seats in the Congress and two or three in the Senate. At the same time, Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s numerous political enemies may eventually manage to bring him down.
- Thus, regime insiders believe it is imperative to prolong the current ceasefire, even through negotiations, until the two big clouds shaped like Trump and Netanyahu disappear like morning mist.
- The current political situation doesn’t have only two sides: steadfastness and surrender. The third side is change, of course. which means giving the enemy a victory it didn’t win with war.
With varying degrees of intensity and a diversity of locations, the war of Iran vs Israel and the US started more than four decades ago. Pictured: Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian watches a military parade during a ceremony marking the country’s annual Army Day on April 18, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
The recent attack by Israel and the US on parts of Iran’s nuclear project has already been dubbed by some commentators as the Twelve Day War.
However, that cut-off time was chosen by Tehran to back a claim that Iran managed to fight twice as long as Arab states led by Egypt did in the Six Days War of 1967.
In fact, with varying degrees of intensity and a diversity of locations, this war started more than four decades ago when the new revolutionary authorities raided the Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran and handed it over to PLO leader Yasser Arafat on a visit as special guest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A few months later, the new revolutionary regime repeated the exercise by raiding the US Embassy and seizing its diplomats as hostages.
Under international law, a nation’s diplomatic mission or embassy is part of its sovereign territory, and an armed attack on it regarded as causus belli (a cause of war). A year later, the US retaliated when President Jimmy Carter ordered a badly planned violation of Iranian territory, confirming the existence of a state of war between the two countries.
Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq provided a parenthesis in which both Israel and the US shipped arms and intelligence to Tehran against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad.
The war with Israel was resumed when Tehran started creating proxy mini-armies in Lebanon and to fish for potential mercenaries among various Palestinian armed groups.
By the early 1980s, Tehran, allied with the Assad regime in Damascus, had turned Lebanon into a battleground against the US and Israel.
In the 2000’s, Tehran started a low intensity war against US forces in Iraq while through proxies pursuing a war of attrition against Israel, wars that continue to this day.
All that needs to be re-stated to show that the recent flare-up has deeper reason than a concern about Iran building a nuclear arsenal, something which all directors general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from Hans Blix to Muhammad Al-Baradei and Rafael Grossi have repeatedly said they cannot confirm.
To be sure, the famous “one percent in risk” theory requires taking the possibility of a dangerous foe acquiring the ultimate weapon very seriously, something that all US presidents since Bill Clinton have done with various attempts at “containing” Iran, all to no avail.
Does that mean that the current regime in Tehran is totally unlikely to temporarily give up the potentially military dimension (PMD) of its nuclear project?
Judging by remarks by many figures within the Iranian regime, most recently by President Masoud Pezeshkian and in an oblique way by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, the answer could be a cautious: no.
The regime has hinted that it is ready to consider freezing the PMD of the project, something which it denies exists, in exchange for four concessions from the US and its allies, including Israel.
The first is to let the regime keep a straight face and proclaim a magnificent victory against the Great Satan and its little companion.
This is what Tehran is already doing both at home and, with help from anti-US and anti-Israel circles, across the globe.
The second demand is to abolish, not merely suspend or lift, all sanctions imposed on Iran.
The third demand is for the US and allies to commit themselves to never devise or support a regime change scheme against Iran. That means severing relations with dozens of Iranian opposition outfits.
Tehran’s fourth demand may be the hardest for any American administration to even contemplate accepting: Accepting the Islamic Republic’s right to “export” its model of governance, its Islamic values and its campaign for “global justice” just as the US does by propagating its values. In other words, Tehran says: Let us do what we please and we promise not to make the bomb that we have always said we never intended to build.
That message was obliquely transmitted through Tucker Carlson’s exclusive interview with President Pezeshkian: Let us boast about a great military victory and we shall let you claim a great diplomatic victory by returning to negotiations.
The ceasefire declared by President Donald Trump has injected an intermission into a deadly drama that started almost half a century ago. During the intermission, three clocks will be ticking.
The first is that of Khamenei’s physical and political life, both of which, though shaken, still appear tenable.
The second clock is that of mid-term elections in the US that could transform Trump into a lame-duck president if Elon Musk’s new political Tesla manages to rob the Republicans of just six seats in the Congress and two or three in the Senate. At the same time, Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s numerous political enemies may eventually manage to bring him down.
Thus, regime insiders believe it is imperative to prolong the current ceasefire, even through negotiations, until the two big clouds shaped like Trump and Netanyahu disappear like morning mist.
Finally, the third clock that is ticking is that of swelling anger among the Iranian people at what more and more of them see as an historic failure combined with unprecedented humiliation and hardship.
The current ceasefire is a dicey intermission in a war that started almost half a century ago and seems nowhere near coming to an end.
To sum up, this was the message in Tasnim, organ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, last Tuesday: The current political situation doesn’t have only two sides: steadfastness and surrender. The third side is change, of course. which means giving the enemy a victory it didn’t win with war.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
France and Europe: Increasingly Submitting to Islam by Guy Millière
July 13, 2025
- “We have imported another civilization.”– Former MP Philippe de Villers, YouTube, “eight months ago.”
- “[W]here do those who do this come from? And why are they still here?” — Éric Zemmour, president of Reconquest, a right-of-center party he created in 2021. When he spoke out, he was sentenced to heavy fines, X, June 1, 2025.
- When illegal immigrants are arrested, all of them are given an “Obligation to Leave French Territory” (Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français/OQTF) and ordered to leave France immediately. No one, however, including the police, deports them, so most do not go.
- France is being ravaged by the rise of Islam.
- The United Kingdom, with a smaller proportion of Muslims than France or Belgium, seems also to be undergoing a slow submission to Islam.
- Political parties in power for decades in all Western European countries — except Italy — seem deliberately blind to the danger facing them. Any party willing to take on the “great replacement,” is deliberately kept out of power.
- The Dutch election will be closely watched. Wilders’s chances of winning again in October could promise a revival for the Netherlands — a second Enlightenment — and a regeneration for Europe.
For years in France every celebration has led to riots, looting and violence. The police rarely intervene. If a rioter is injured by a policeman, the policeman could end up in prison. Arrests are few. Often those who are arrested are immediately released. Pictured: Riot police detain a man as Paris Saint-Germain supporters celebrate by rioting, after PSG won the UEFA Champions League soccer match, on the Champs-Elysees Avenue in Paris on May 31, 2025. (Photo by Lou Benoist/AFP via Getty Images)
Paris. June 21, 2025. Annual Music Festival. Ten years ago, orchestras played peacefully in the streets. Families strolled and stopped to listen. Security reigned and was taken for granted. In recent years, the atmosphere has changed — radically. Families no longer go out. Young men coming from the Islamic suburbs flood the city, prevent musicians they do not like from playing by shouting insults and threats, and by attacking anyone who gets in their way. This year, more than a hundred rape complaints were filed with the police. Countless knife attacks have left dozens injured. Stores are looted. What took place in Paris also took place in every major city of France.
Three weeks earlier, on May 31st, the victory of a French soccer team sparked the same chaos. Young men coming from the Islamic suburbs swarmed Paris. They set fires in building entryways and in ransacked shops. Firefighters who responded were attacked. Ambulances transporting sick or injured people were obstructed. People out for an evening walk were assaulted and forced to abandon their vehicles to looters and arsonists. Banners from the victorious soccer club were hardly in sight but Algerian and Palestinian flags were everywhere.
For years in France every celebration has led to riots, looting and violence. The police rarely intervene. If a rioter is injured by a policeman, the policeman could end up in prison. Arrests are few. Often those who are arrested are immediately released.
Former MP Philippe de Villiers described the situation as a “conquering Islamism” creating a “civilizational jihad,” “We have imported another civilization,” he said. “French politicians do not want to see it.”
Instead, French politicians, with few exceptions, appear to choose willful blindness. They never talk about what is taking place. When Éric Zemmour, president of Reconquest, a right-of-center party he created in 2021, spoke out, he was sentenced to heavy fines. “Is it possible,” he recently wrote on X, “to ask the awkward questions: where do those who do this come from? And why are they still here?”
It is not hard to see where they come from. More than 500,000 new immigrants enter France from the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa. The police and intelligence services see where they come from. It is also just as easy to see why they are’ still here. When illegal immigrants are arrested, all of them are given an “Obligation to Leave French Territory” O (Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français/OQTF) and ordered to leave France immediately. No one, however, including the police, deports them, so most do not go.
In addition to riots, there are sickening murders. They make the front pages for a few days and are then forgotten. Most of the murderers are those who should have been deported, but were not. When it comes time to try them, the French justice system is lax. On April 27, 2024, a young illegal Afghan migrant stabbed Matisse, a fifteen-year-old boy in Chateauroux, a small, quiet town in Loire Valley. The young migrant was sentenced on May, 28, 2025 to eight years in prison. If he does not make trouble there, he will be released in four years. Sometimes a murderer is not even tried, but viewed by a judge as not responsible for his actions. In 2017, Kobili Traoré, beat, tortured, and threw a Jewish grandmother, Dr. Sarah Halimi, to her death from the window of her apartment while he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”. He was found not guilty by reason of marijuana and sent to a psychiatric institution. The murderer of Alban Gervaise — a military doctor who had his throat slit in front of his daughter on May 22, 2022 in Marseilles by Mohamed L. (his name has not been released by the French authorities), but not on drugs — said he had acted in the name of Allah. On June 25, 2025, a judge declared that he was mentally unfit to stand trial and will be required only to have a psychiatrist monitor him for a few months. Gervaise’s widow published a statement saying she hopes the French state “will ask for forgiveness”.
Attacks in France against Jews have been decreasing, slightly, for the past year. There were so many after October 7, 2023, that most Jews in France still hide their Jewishness. Their number in France is also decreasing. It is now below 400,000. Those who remain are often too poor to leave.
The number of Muslims, conversely, is increasing. Not all in France, of course, are rioters or criminals; many just want to live peacefully. The proportion of illegal immigrants among them, however, has grown, as well as their refusal to integrate into a French way of life. This trend is particularly high among young Muslims. A survey a few years ago showed that 65% of Muslim high school students place Sharia law above the laws of the republic. Meanwhile, in France’s 751 no-go zones, everything is based on Sharia law. Radical imams there state, in accordance with Islamic dogma, that Islam must reign over the whole earth and that in France, it will soon reign supreme.
In May 2025, the French Department of the Interior published a 73-page report, “Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France”, detailing how the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrates and takes root in the school system, the army, sports associations, and the police. The report speaks of a “threat to the republic” and adds that the Muslim Brotherhood does not advance through violence and attacks, but in a way less visible. In response, the government promised to act. It did nothing. Unless a radical political change takes place, the government will probably keep doing nothing.
What is taking shape in France, and has been underway for more than three decades, as analyzed by hordes of authors, is the much-mocked “great replacement” of Christians by Muslims, and of Christianity by Islam — the same way the great Byzantine Empire was displaced throughout Turkey.
France is being ravaged by the rise of Islam.
When Renaud Camus came out with his book, The Great Replacement , in 2012, the mainstream media called him a conspiracy theorist. He has never been invited on television, and his publishers no longer want to publish what he writes.
Twenty years ago, in 2006, Georges Bensoussan, a historian, published The Lost Territories of the Republic. Since then, the “lost territories” have grown exponentially.
Only this year, on January 31, 2025, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Islamic-leftist party France Unbowed noted that, “Yes, there is a great replacement.” When he emphasized, bizarrely, that the great replacement was “necessary and positive”, no one called him a conspiracy theorist.
In the 2022 presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélnchon received 21.95% of the vote and 69% percent of the Muslim vote. He is planning to run again in the 2027 presidential elections. He is apparently hoping that sooner or later the great replacement will elect him.
France Unbowed, a radically anti-Israeli party, refuses to define Hamas as a terrorist movement. It includes several openly anti-Semitic members of parliament and an openly pro-Hamas European deputy, Rima Hassan.
President Macron, presumably seeking to avoid riots that are even more serious, sends messages of appeasement to whoever rules the no-go zones. After October 7, 2023, he supported Israel for a few days, then adopted a resolutely “pro-Palestinian” position He falsely accused the insanely careful Israeli army of deliberately murdering women and babies and said that it would be up to historians to decide if what the Israeli army was doing in Gaza constituted genocide. He refused to participate in a demonstration against anti-Semitism organized in Paris on November 12, 2023, when anti-Semitic attacks were on the rise. Last month, June 17-20, Macron tried to recognize a “Palestinian state” in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and to organize a major “pro-Palestinian” event at the United Nations. The Israeli army’s action against Iran’s regime and the destruction of its main nuclear sites by the United States forced him to postpone his plans. He then announced that he disapproved of what Israel and the United States had done in Iran. The Israeli government stated that Macron was leading a “crusade against Jewish state.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked that recognizing a “Palestinian state” less than two years after the October 7, 2023, massacre would be “a major reward for terrorism “. Macron did not reply.
Boualem Sansal, 80, an Algerian novelist who became a French citizen and criticized the threat from Islam, was arrested in Algeria and sentenced to a five year prison term for writing an “attack on national unity“. French Prime Minister François Bayrou stated that the condemnation was “unbearable,” but never confronted Algeria. “The only weapons we now have in France,” commented French writer Pascal Bruckner, a friend of Sansal, “are supplication, kneeling and hope.”
The 2027 French presidential election will be crucial. France is the European country with the largest number of Muslims, and that part of its population is increasing rapidly. The growing weight of the Muslim vote means that, as the France Unbowed party seems to hope, France’s situation will be impossible to reverse. France also remains the European country with the largest Jewish population. Each year, the number of cities where they can live in safety is fewer.
“[T]he chances of… France’s turning into an Afro-Mediterranean country are not to be dismissed,” wrote the French journalist Michel Gurfinkiel in 1997. ” Twenty-eight years later, the Islamization of France, as he predicted, has, for the most part, proven true.
What is going on in France is, of course, affecting other Western European countries as well. Belgium is undergoing rapid Islamization. Brussels is 23% Muslim and a city where radical Islamic and anti-Semitic discourse is now widespread. In the Netherlands, Islam has become the country’s second largest religion, and on November 6-7, 2024, violent anti-Jewish incidents took place in Amsterdam.
The United Kingdom, with a smaller proportion of Muslims than France or Belgium, seems also to be undergoing a slow submission to Islam. The mayors of several major cities — London, Oxford, Leeds, Birmingham —are pious Muslim. Hamid Patel, a mufti (a legal expert empowered to make rulings on religious matters), is currently the chair of Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, the British agency in charge of supervising organizations providing education, training, and childcare services.
The 2027 presidential election in France will be of critical importance. According to polls, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, had a good chance of being elected president. She has said that if she won, she would strictly limit immigration to France and fight the country’s Islamization. She immediately found herself sentenced to a five-year ban on running for public office, supposedly for embezzling EU funds. She was charged with using the EU money to pay European parliamentary assistants who also worked in Paris, François Bayrou did exactly the same thing and was acquitted by a Paris criminal court. Le Pen has appealed but may not be able to run.
The chairman of the National Rally party, Jordan Bardella, 29, could also have been a candidate, but on July 9, the police raided the headquarters of the National Rally party, after which two judges accused Bardella of illegally financing the 2022 and 2024 election campaigns and have threatened to ban him from running in 2027. “Never has an opposition party suffered such relentless persecution under the Fifth Republic”, Bardella remarked.
In Belgium, the new prime minister, Bart De Wever, is a member of the New Flemish Alliance, a party opposed to the Islamization of the country . He is at least trying to take action.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who won the Dutch elections in November 2023, immediately found himself facing a coalition of all the country’s other parties, which banned together to block him from becoming prime minister. Wilders recently asked the deputies of his party to bring down the government. A new election has been scheduled for October 29, 2025.
In the UK, recent polls show that Reform UK, a right-wing political party committed to combating the advance of Islam, could win the most seats in a general election and that its leader, Nigel Farage, could then become prime minister. The next election in the United Kingdom, however, is not due any time soon.
In Germany, in elections a few months ago, Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] secured the second position and is now the country’s leading party. Calls have already started for it to be banned.
Political parties in power for decades in all Western European countries except Italy seem deliberately blind to the danger facing them. Any party willing to take on the “great replacement,” is deliberately kept out of power.
The Dutch election will be closely watched. Wilders’s chances of winning again in October could promise a revival for the Netherlands — a second Enlightenment — and a regeneration for Europe.
The populations of Western Europe can see a danger approaching: the old continent appears to be teetering on the brink of a civilizational collapse and transmutation. Europe’s survival and the values of Western civilization are seriously at stake.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
[Ed.: One of the world’s three great religions?]
The Storm is Coming [6:08] JEROME R. CORSI, PH.D.
What Storm? You’ll see.
JUL 12, 2025 – President Trump continues to change everything, and Satan and his minions are running scared. TheTruthCentral.com is transitioning to CorsiNation.com. Other major changes are in the works, both from the administration and Corsi Nation. Buckle up, stay tuned, fear not, stand firm, trust in Jesus.
We’ve Seen This Before by Andrew Fox
History is repeating itself, not as tragedy or farce, but as a horror story
July 13, 2025 Special to IPT
I gave a talk to Holocaust survivors last month. More than one told me that the mood in the UK for Jews now resembles Germany in the 1930s. The difference between them and others claiming this is that they remember it from the first time around.
They are right. This is no longer hyperbole; it is fact.
The Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with graffiti, slurs, and whispers. It began with people asking Jews to account for themselves. Are you loyal? Are you one of us?
In 2025, that looks like: are you a Zionist?
I heard exactly that question last night over a pint with a friend who had attended a Jewish cultural event. The barman (in the Three Crowns in St James, if you’re interested) demanded of my friend, “Are you a Zionist?” The implication was clear that support for the Jewish state now carries a moral price tag. It is a litmus test for belonging, for acceptability. That is not political disagreement; it is a modern shibboleth meant to mark Jews for social exile.
We are witnessing a global rise in antisemitism at a scale not seen for generations. Some of it is overt. It is violent, chilling, and reminiscent of the pogroms Europe once vowed never to repeat. In Amsterdam last year, what was initially dismissed as football hooliganism was later revealed, through text messages and court transcripts, to be a lynching of Jews driven by pure racial hatred. Not “anti-Zionism”; pure Judenhass.
At Glastonbury, the “singer” of British act Bob Vylan, repeating popular blood libels against the Jewish state, stood before tens of thousands and chanted for the death of every soldier in the Israel Defence Forces. Again, I’m not being hyperbolic; it was his literal demand. A call for the wholesale killing of Jewish soldiers, which in practice means calling for the deaths of the sons and daughters of almost every Israeli family. That’s not resistance. That’s incitement. When crowds cheer that on, we are no longer in the realm of protest. We are in something else entirely.
What begins as words (“Zionist,” “settler,” “coloniser”) becomes real-world violence in short order. The language matters. Words shape permission structures. They signal what is tolerated and what is forbidden. When an artist calls for the death of every IDF soldier, and the crowd cheers, it gives a green light to every unhinged antisemite listening.
This hatred does not exist in a vacuum. It is fed, every day, by an information campaign unlike anything we’ve seen since the Cold War. Hamas and its allies have mastered the dark art of manipulating digital imagery, fabricating statistics, and weaponising words and emotion. They show the world what war looks like and demand that we call it genocide.
Civilian casualties in Gaza are not the consequence of genocidal intent, but the normal, tragic by-product of every war in history, compounded by the deliberate strategy of a terror regime that uses its own people as human shields. Hamas has stored weapons in schools, fired rockets from refugee camps, and built command tunnels beneath hospitals. Then they cry victim when those military targets are struck. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid is entering Gaza at record levels (on average, double the daily amount compared to before the war began, when there was no accusation of starvation), but activists still scream famine. The truth doesn’t matter when the lie is more powerful.
The twisting of words doesn’t end with outright lies. The greatest trick Hamas and their allies ever pulled was to conflate Judaism with Zionism. They have made the world believe they are one and the same, then claim that they are “only” against the latter. This sleight of hand has given countless antisemites the perfect semantic shield. “I’m not antisemitic,” they say. “I’m just anti-Zionist.” Yet their targets are Jewish schools, Jewish homes, Jewish shops, and Jewish friends.
I recently had dinner with a friend who told me that she no longer feels safe in her own social circles and does not wear her Star of David in public. Online, she is inundated with hate, a lifelong Londoner accused of supporting child murder simply for being Jewish. She is far from alone. Jewish students are being harassed on campuses. Mezuzahs are being chiselled off doorposts. Synagogues are being forced to increase security. The Israeli Embassy in London was recently the target of a foiled terror plot. The memorial to the Israeli hostages in Brighton was recently covered in faeces.
This is not about discomfort with Israel’s policies. This is about the dehumanisation of an entire race.
I do not believe that most people cheering these slogans or waving these flags are consciously antisemitic. Some will be; now they have a licence to act on long-held prejudices that they no longer feel the need to hide. Many, though, are what Lenin once called useful idiots: fellow travellers swept up in the fervour of a cause they do not fully understand. Others are overwhelmed by propaganda; duped into believing they are standing for justice, when in fact they are being used as foot soldiers in a much darker campaign.
Motivation doesn’t matter, though. We are watching words turn to violence in real time. The signs are all there, just as they were in the 1930s. We promised Never Again, but that promise is meaningless if we fail to act when it matters.
We are not yet where Germany was in 1938. However, we are close to where we were in 1933. The slogans, the silences and the scapegoating of Jews are back. Words matter, so let us call it what it is: antisemitism. If we keep showing cowardice on this issue, we will find, all too soon, that the violence is back too. The spiral from slur to slogan to stone is always shorter than we think.
This article was originally published on Substack
Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer. Recent senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Masters study in Middle Eastern strategy and Psychology. Now a think tank research fellow focusing on Defence, the Middle East and Disinformation. Read more about Andrew on his website. Follow Andrew on Substack
How Islam will subjugate Europe Giulio Meotti
Allowing uncontrolled free speech when your enemies make use of it to advance your destruction is the epitome of idiocy. Are we witnessing the dumming down of Europe? Opinion.
Jul 11, 2025, 3:52 PM (GMT+3) Israel National News – “Islamists march through the streets of Berlin, protected by the democracy they deeply despise. They call for a caliphate, they dream of a theocracy. And to all those who don’t want to believe it: try holding the same demonstration with the same signs in Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, Beirut, or Abu Dhabi.”
Ahmed Mansour captures the terrible paradox of European democracy.
Islamists call for the establishment of a caliphate during the demonstration in Berlin.
Berlin police wanted to ban the demonstration, but a court overturned the ban. Caliphate supporters were then allowed, separated by gender, to call for the establishment of theocracy in Europe.
Erdogan, “the moderate,” said it clearly: “Democracy is a tram, you ride it as long as you need it and then you get off.” Millions of Muslims in Europe must be thinking something like this.
What happened in the German capital was tantamount to a declaration of bankruptcy for the rule of law. The grand coalition led by Friedrich Merz had promised to repress Islamic extremism. But what we are seeing is the exact opposite: a judiciary that capitulates to the Islamists and a political system that stands by while our values are trampled.
“The Caliphate is the solution,” shouted the Islamists who took also the streets in Hamburg. They waved flags depicting the Shahada and raised their index fingers, the symbol of the Islamists. It’s all perfectly legal. The police said that “calling for the advent of the Caliph is not a crime.”
The Caliphate is no longer unstoppable in Europe, simply because population composition and birth rates have long since revealed their irreversible reality. Accelerated incredibly by high immigration, it seems unstoppable, even desired and promoted by a policy that attributes a disastrous Nazi gene to the Germans and hopes for a better East than the West.
Caliphate means submission. There are Muslims and those who convert to Islam. And Germany is already unrecognizable:
There are “no-go zones” for Jews, justices using Sharia law, schools banning miniskirts to avoid noises, muezzins calling for prayer, publishing houses censoring books critical of Islam, teachers critical of Islam forced to teach in bulletproof vests, street signs in Arabic, Sharia patrols in the streets, mass sexual assaults, attacks on those who disobey Islam in schools, a surge in forced marriages and students demanding the introduction of strict Islamic rules.
Alexander Kissler sums it up well: “A country that tolerates repeated calls for an Islamic caliphate is not tolerant, but decadent.”
And we know how decadent civilizations end.
[Ed.:
When NYC was Sinatra’s kind of town Jack Engelhard
Nothing lasts forever, but turning NYC into a wasteland is going too far. Opinion.
Jul 13, 2025, 9:56 AM (GMT+3) Israel National News – Oh yes. It was like that all right, once upon a time before anyone had heard the name, Zohran Mamdani, and threats to turn NYC into a wasteland.
Over at Katz’s Deli I’m sitting with Vaughn Meader, when I spot something out the window.
I say, “Look. That guy looks like Marlon Brando.”
“That IS Brando,” Meader explains. “This is New York, Jack.”
I was new. I was new to this environment, this town, this country, to this people and their slang. Just got off the boat.
Meantime I was on assignment for the Philadelphia Inquirer to do a feature on Vaughn Meader, the hottest act in America.
His impersonations of President John F. Kennedy were done to perfection. He regaled America and he was regularly featured on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Off-stage he was not funny. Things were going too well, he was getting rich, and this spooked him.
“Do you hear the talk?” he asked me. Yes, I had. JFK was his only act, and if anything happened to the President, poof goes Vaughn Meader, and the country.
This was more than chatter. The country was divided in half between those who loved JFK and those who hated JFK. Was he tough enough against the Soviets? Castro and Cuba?
Was he doing enough on Civil Rights? Why was he sending “advisors” to Vietnam?
These were hot topics on the Dick Cavett Show, where Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer nearly came to blows over their differing opinions.
Vaughn Meader had to spin all that into comedy. His material had to stay fresh. Lenny Bruce accused him of being a sell-out.
Liz Taylor and Richard Burton caught his act at the Au Go Go in the Village. So did Paul Newman.
This is New York, Jack.
My job was to find out what made Vaughn Meader click. Usually it was scotch on the rocks, and the horses. I took most of my notes while he was making bets.
These ended up in my novel about the 1960s, “The Days of the Bitter End.”
Like most of New York, he was always in a hurry, but always took time to sign autographs. He felt himself unworthy of so much fame and adulation.
At this time, he was bigger than Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who were performing at the Paramount.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Jerry advised Meader.
Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with the message that the times were a-changing..
The Counterculture was on.
Arthur Krock, the leading columnist at The New York Times, wrote that if an attempt were made on the President’s life, blame the CIA.
Since he was the President’s double, Vaughn Meader would also need extra protection. He had become more than a comedian.
People actually expected him to come up with real answers, as if he were the real deal. People still remembered the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missiles Crisis.
But his Peace Corps was a success, as was his promise to reach the moon. His New Frontier was intended to Make America Great Again.
Under JFK’s leadership, America was riding high.
Sinatra was at his usual hangout, Jilly’s. “Get yourself another routine,” he advised Meader. “Keep it in your pocket in case this one gets stale. Nothing lasts forever, kid.”
* * * *
Now available, a collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, “Writings.”
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. New from the novelist, the anti-BDS thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
From the esteemed John w. Cassell: “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the. conscience of us all.”
[Ed.:
All the Inconsistencies in Jeffrey Epstein’s Cell Block Video [39:39] JESUS ENRIQUE ROSAS
JULY 7, 2025 The Body Language Guy
Watch the FULL, original 11-hour video here: • Jeffrey Epstein’s Cell Block FULL footage …
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
2:08 Block Cell Setup
13:49 Epstein seen alive for the last time
16:33 Inmate taking out the dirty laundry
16:54 Folder under the door
19:19 One minute is missing!
22:10 Video editing software?
25:30 Big fella coming in
27:56 They fell asleep after 1am
31:39 Where did this woman come from?
32:39 They fell asleep again after 4am
34:33 The strange hoodie figure
38:06 Epstein is found dead
🚨Trump is BIG MAD at Kash Patel over Epstein & DROPS BOMBSHELL! [13:29] Professor Nez
July 12, 2025
President Trump just broke the internet with a fiery response to Kash Patel’s recent comments surrounding the Epstein saga! In a shocking twist, Trump did not hold back, unleashing his thoughts on Patel’s involvement and the swirling controversy over the Epstein files.
Behavior Analysis of Karoline Leavitt DEFENDING Pam Bondi’s INCOMPETENCE! [14:49] Jesus Enrique Rosas
July 7, 2025 The Body Language Guy
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