Israeli forces operating in the Gaza Strip, Feb. 8, 2024. Credit: IDF.
  • Words count:
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Headline
Hamas health ministry can’t find 10,000 names of those it claims died
Intro
"This is the first admission that it lacks an essential data point necessary to establish these deaths have even taken place."
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The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health can't provide names of more than 10,000 of the 34,000 it says have died during the war with Israel, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reports.

"While the Health Ministry conceded earlier this month that it has 'incomplete data' for nearly one-third of the deceased, this is the first admission that it lacks an essential data point necessary to establish these deaths have even taken place," the Washington-based think tank noted on May 2.

On April 24, the ministry released a graphic to mark the 200th day of the war that started when Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, repeating its claim that the hostilities had claimed more than 34,000 Gazan lives. However, it added that only 24,000 of the dead are “martyrs whose idintities [sic] are recognized.”

As of April 21, 10,152 of the ministry's fatality records had incomplete data. "An explanatory note in the April 1 digest says incomplete records lack one or more of five basic data points: ID number, full name, sex, date of birth, or date of death," FDD reported.

While it was unclear which of those data points was missing, "it is now clear the ministry does not have names for these individuals," FDD said.

U.S. President Joe Biden has cited figures from the Gaza Health Ministry without identifying them as such.

"Before citing them again, he should ask the intelligence community to evaluate the data’s sources and accuracy," FDD said. "Likewise, journalists should press the Gaza Health Ministry to explain the increasing number of inconsistencies in its reports."

Some have challenged the Hamas casualty figures.

Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in Tablet magazine in March, “The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work.

"The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters,” he wrote.

Wyner noted that child casualties should track with women casualties. This has to do with the daily variation in strikes on residential buildings and tunnels.

“Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported,” he wrote.

FDD noted in its report that economist Michael Spagat, who defended the ministry’s methods, admitted that when looking only at the complete records, “then the percentage of women and children drops to 53.3%,” as opposed to the 70% or more the ministry has often claimed.

Hamas began to retreat from that claim in April.

The IDF says it has killed more than 13,000 terrorists inside the Strip during the current war, and around 1,000 inside Israel on or immediately after Oct. 7

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  • Words count:
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  • Publication Date:
    July 10, 2025
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concluded his visit to Washington on Thursday with a statement about securing the release of hostages in the Gaza Strip.

After days of meetings with officials at the White House, Netanyahu declined to describe what decisions he may have made with U.S. President Donald Trump.

“What has been agreed upon between President Trump and me, on issues pertaining to Gaza, the region and even beyond the region, will be discussed at a later time,” he stated.

The Israeli leader said he had met with the families of living and dead hostages in D.C. on Wednesday and told them that he was “determined” that they be returned.

“I told them we are now attempting to achieve a release of half of the living and deceased hostages, in return for a temporary ceasefire of 60 days,” Netanyahu said. “In the beginning of that ceasefire, we will enter negotiations on a permanent end to the war—that is, a permanent ceasefire.” 

“In order for us to achieve that, this has to be done on the minimal conditions that we've set: Hamas lays down its arms, Gaza is demilitarized, there are no longer any governing or military capabilities of Hamas,” he added. “These are our fundamental conditions.”

Netanyahu also addressed concerns about why it has been so difficult to defeat Hamas militarily or reach a deal with them diplomatically and described the restrictions that the Biden administration had placed on Israel.

“We have had to contend with an American embargo: ‘Do not enter Rafah,’ ‘Do not conquer the Philadelphi Corridor,’” he said. “Those are not simple matters. We overcame that, and now we wish to complete that move.”

“We keep advancing in the Gaza Strip and retrieving deceased hostages,” he added. “We’re doing it in parallel—not pushing it aside even for a moment—and now as well, we’re not pushing it aside even for a moment.”

He also alluded to the public controversy in Israel about whether or not to prioritize the release of some hostages over others after he reportedly received analysis last week on the medical condition of each of the living hostages. One is believed to be at risk of permanent blindness; others are suffering from untreated chronic illnesses, including muscular dystrophy.

“We’re dealing with a brutal terrorist organization,” Netanyahu stated. “We, of course, would like to rescue everyone, and as far as we’re concerned, all of the hostages are humanitarian cases.” 

He stressed: “I wish to rescue everyone all at once. Here we are dealing with two stages, but the choice isn't always in our hands. We will do everything to maximize this release in the best way possible, but not everything is up to us.”

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The U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation into George Mason University on Thursday for alleged discrimination based on race in its hiring practices.

The department opened a separate Title VI investigation into the Virginia public research university on July 1 amid allegations it failed to respond to antisemitic discrimination and allowed for a hostile environment towards Jewish students and faculty after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—an environment that continued through the 2024-2025 school year.

For the most recent investigation, multiple professors at GMU allege the university “illegally uses race and other immutable characteristics in university policies, including hiring and promotion,” according to the department. GMU’s policies allegedly “give preferential treatment to prospective and current faculty from ‘underrepresented groups’ to advance ‘anti-racism,’” the complaint states.

GMU has “equity advisors in every academic department” that specifically take race, sex and other characteristics into account for faculty hiring, and guidance from GMU President Gregory Washington directed candidates to be hired on the basis of “diversity,” the complaint states, “even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate.”

“This kind of pernicious and widespread discrimination—packaged as ‘anti-racism’—was allowed to flourish under the Biden administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” stated Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights. “The Trump-McMahon Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights will investigate this matter fully to ensure that individuals are judged based on their merit and accomplishment, not the color of their skin.”

“That the leadership of a university named in honor of the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights—which informed the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—needs a refresher on the primacy of treating individuals equally under law is deeply disheartening,” Trainor stated.

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Hamas succeeded in planting an improvised explosive device (IED) in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, during a lull in air force and artillery strikes, where the Netzah Yehuda Battalion was set to pass through. As a result, on July 7, five soldiers were killed and 14 injured in a roadside explosion. All five who perished were in their 20s. Such news strikes at the heart of the Israeli nation. These soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice and deserve the highest level of praise for their service, but that’s not what they received.

Before the soldiers were even buried, the Shas Party’s spiritual leader made comments that tarnished their legacy.

In an open letter, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, claimed that “we are to blame” for their deaths. “Weakness in Torah study leads to disasters,” such as this, he said. His concern was that yeshivah students tend to lose focus in the summer months and hoped to motivate them to press on with their learning.

At first glance, this message seems productive. Whether or not you believe that Torah learning offers protection, study is a Jewish value. If the intention of the former chief rabbi was to motivate his community to increase learning in the memory of the fallen five, then I would have had no issue with that. But he went further, claiming that the soldiers died because others weren’t studying Torah.

This religious perspective is untenable.

When I was learning to be a rabbi, the popular book of the day was called The Garden of Emunah (emunah meaning “faith” in Hebrew). One teaching I recall is not to become angry with someone who offends you because they’re actually delivering a message from God. The author offered a metaphor to elucidate the point. When a slave is being beaten, he doesn’t blame the stick the master uses; that makes no sense.

This is the point where I stopped reading the book. According to this philosophy, when angering a friend or colleague, I’m not to blame. I had no control over my actions. God needed to teach that person a lesson, and I was just a tool—the stick—in the Divine plan.

This viewpoint is counterproductive because we’re not meant to listen to messages from God while ignoring the world around us. When someone angers us, we need to inform them so that they—or the angered person—learns better behavior. Even if we were to seek meaning from tragedy, how could we ever discern God’s intent? Rav Yosef seems to connect lapses in Torah learning to the deaths of the five soldiers, but how could anyone know such a thing?

As we learn from the book of Job, there is no rhyme or reason to this world. Although a core Jewish tenet, we cannot understand how reward and punishment work. Job was devoid of sin, yet God still made him suffer. The story teaches us that we cannot know why God does anything and that attempting explanations is futile.

However, there are times when claiming knowledge of God’s will is insensitive. We’ve all heard someone give reasons for the death of a loved one. When a child dies, for example, and the devastation is unbearable, people say things like, “God must have needed him for something” or “God needed someone unblemished by sin.” Or worse, it happened because “You are strong enough to handle it.” I doubt mourners find comfort in such statements.

The rabbi also missed an opportunity to unify the citizens of Israel. The divide between those who serve in the IDF and those who don’t is only growing. The government’s attempt to enlist 50,000 Haredi soldiers will certainly exacerbate the issue. Instructing the Haredi community to intensify their learning will most likely lead to more resistance in joining the rank-and-file of Israeli society.

If he truly wanted to honor these five young men, then he should have called for his followers to stand with them—in uniform, in unity and in shared responsibility for the nation’s safety. That would have been a message worthy of their sacrifice.

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Anti-Israel extremists on both the left and the right are becoming more vocal and dangerous. Still, according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City primary and the rebuff of Tucker Carlson by President Donald Trump demonstrate that the left is far more dangerous right now.

https://youtu.be/iZcASFAVTeM

He’s joined on this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Guy Benson, poticial editor of Townhall.com and a Fox News radio host who is deeply troubled by the way so many people have sympathized with the rapists, murderers and kidnappers of Hamas rather than democratic Israel after the terrorists atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.

Benson considers this a manifestation of something bigger than just hatred for Israel and Jews and poses a threat to America. He argues that what he calls the “dirtbag alliance between Islamism and hardcore leftism” is creating a bizarre political alignment. “They hate the West, they hate Western values, they hate Western civilization itself, they hate the United States, and they hate Israel. So that's where they align.”

He is equally concerned about the way the majority of Democrats now oppose the Jewish state and the mainstreaming of antisemitism that has been part of the post-Oct. 7 incitement against Jews. The trouble is, he maintains, that people like Mamdani are now mainstream on the left rather than outliers. The liberal establishment gives the Democratic mayoral candidate a pass for extremism and even for calling himself an African-American on his college applications.

That’s because, Benson says, they apply different rules to their side as opposed to what they say about political opponents. He believes most Americans are sick of this and that, among other things, explains why President Donald Trump won in 2024.

Benson believes that the anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic “woke right” is more marginal than the extremists on the left. He nevertheless believes that people like Tucker Carlson and the “deranged” Candace Owens were not just dead wrong in opposing Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They are, he states, chasing conspiracy theories to continually tell their audiences that they are being lied to by the establishment as they seek the next “sugar high of crazy” in a “demented echo chamber divorced from reality.”

Listen/Subscribe to weekly episodes on SpotifyApple Podcasts, YouTube MusiciHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Watch new episodes every week by subscribing to the JNS YouTube Channel.

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https://youtu.be/iZcASFAVTeM
  • Words count:
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An impromptu press conference took place on Monday evening, just as U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and functionaries from both administrations were sitting down to their much-touted working dinner at the White House. It would be the first of several meetings this week between American officials and the Israeli leader to discuss several pressing issues. Among these was the joint defanging of the Islamic Republic’s ballistic-missile and nuclear capabilities.

Asked by a reporter about the U.S. military’s June 22 airstrikes on Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, Trump paused to give credit to the men and women of the U.S. Air Force who carried out the spectacular surprise operation.

“We had the pilots here yesterday, as you know, and they were incredible,” he said. “And we also had the mechanics. There were, I think, 170 people, a lot of people, that had to do with that incredible journey—a journey that could have been horrible. You remember what happened with Jimmy Carter, with the helicopters and all, and ultimately hostages. We had the exact opposite. It went perfectly.”

Trump’s mention of the mechanics went unnoticed, though the people responsible for the literal nuts and bolts of the mission must have been pleased to be acknowledged. After all, it is due to their skill and their diligence that the aircraft performed properly and that all the pilots were able to return home safely.

This bears stressing, and not only in light of the possibility—if not probability—that additional sorties over Iran will become necessary. In any case, the Israeli Air Force has been busy targeting terrorist bases and infrastructure in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and, of course, Gaza. Due to its masterful precision before and during the current war, the IAF has always been treated with well-deserved awe at home and abroad.

It’s thus hard to remember—and difficult to believe—that six months before the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a group of IAF reservists used their elite status to engage in political extortion. When the then-new Netanyahu-led coalition announced plans to reform the overactive, power-grabbing judiciary, this cadre pulled a stunt that should have cost them their wings: They declared that they wouldn’t serve under such a government. A few of them even declined to turn up for crucial training exercises.

Their tantrum wasn’t the only reason Netanyahu decided in early April 2023 to give President Isaac Herzog a chance to broker negotiations toward a compromise between the opposing sides. Many other groups were protesting in an equally ugly way—with demonstrators traipsing around in Handmaid’s Tale costumes and threatening to shut down the economy if even the slightest alteration was made to the judicial system.

Following Netanyahu’s statement that he was halting all legislative moves to calm tensions and allow for dialogue, the pilots in question said they’d return to duty, but with a caveat. As one senior IAF officer put it, if the upshot of the talks at the President’s Residence isn’t to their liking, his compatriots would resume their refusal to fly. Some went as far as to threaten not to participate in what was at the time an almost unfathomable “potential” attack on Iran.

Their crossing of a bright red line was bad enough. Worse was the response of their superiors.

IAF commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar penalized only one of his out-of-line subordinates, Col. Gilad Peled, for acting “contrary to the orders of the commander of the force and in a manner inappropriate to his rank and status.” Yet the very next day, he reversed the sacking when Peled claimed that he hadn’t encouraged any other IAF personnel to refuse duty. That travesty occurred a month before Netanyahu paused judicial-reform measures, by the way.

Just as jaw-dropping was the fact that then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi didn’t call either Peled or Bar to task. On the contrary, he, too, had been listening to the “concerns” of the men and women in uniform about the looming “destruction of Israeli democracy” and “rise of a Netanyahu dictatorship.”

It needs noting that the above pilots were in the minority. Yet their expertise, funded heftily and happily by taxpayers, provided them with the clout that made for sensationalist headlines in anti-government media outlets.

One consequence of the already nasty business was the devastating effect it had on IAF mechanics. Their crushed morale was detailed in a letter to Bar, Halevi and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. It was drafted by former F-16 pilot and flight-school commander Maj. (res.) Shay Kallach—today the founding chairman of Netsach Israel, a movement for the restoration of Zionist values in the Jewish state—at the behest of his brother, a longstanding IAF technician.

“We work all hours of the day and night, on Shabbat and holidays, to maintain the aircraft, revving the engines, fueling up, removing pins, closing panels and much additional dirty work,” the missive read, in part. “When you [pilots] board a plane during the winter with your flight gloves on, our hands are sore and frozen from the icy iron of the plane so that you can take off and land safely. … We have always maintained and armed the planes brilliantly, being the best soldiers we could be—even though we didn’t pass the selection for the pilots’ training course the way you did. But we always felt first-rate, like you … However, now that you’ve made it clear that our voice isn’t equal to yours, we feel second-rate. … The hands that salute you before you leave the aircraft shelter and taxi to the takeoff point no longer have the strength to do so.”

It went on, “We’ll let you in on a secret, our beloved pilots. Every time we prepared the plane for you, it wasn’t really for you; it was for the people of Israel, for the security of the State of Israel, because we … knew that we were serving the nation, without reservation, and that we all share the same unconditional love. Therefore, we will not emulate you and refuse to serve. We won’t rebel and call for a military coup. We … won’t allow political disputes to enter our holiest of holy IDF. But we are calling on you to reverse course immediately—to apologize to us; to salvage the last vestige of respect we still have for you; and restore the enormous motivation that was instilled in us.”

It continued, “And please don’t explain to us that by refusing to serve, you’re rescuing democracy and safeguarding the unity of the people and the state, because through your action, you have burned our ballots. The army and all its soldiers must, at all costs, be kept out of every [political/ideological] argument and dispute.”

Finally, it urged the IAF to create a “mechanism and deterrence and punishment to ensure that such things don’t happen again for political reasons,” and demanded that “those who don’t retract their refusal to serve and apologize be stripped of their wings, as they aren’t worthy to serve the State of Israel alongside us, the technicians of the IAF.”

It’s not clear whether the pilots being addressed ever deigned to repent by saluting the unsung heroes they had taken for granted. But it became moot not long thereafter.

The Hamas invasion and accompanying atrocities caused Israelis across the spectrum, in every branch of the army, to turn up for duty without hesitation. And the IAF pilots took to the skies as they have been doing ever since, including over Tehran.

For this, they’ve received endless accolades. Less gratitude and respect are showered on those who’ve been slaving away “all hours of the day and night, on Shabbat and holidays, to maintain the aircraft, revving the engines, fueling up, removing pins, closing panels and much additional dirty work.”

Trump gave a nod to the USAF mechanics. The rest of us should do the same for the members of the IAF without whose arduous dedication no planes would get off the ground, let alone wow the world with prowess.      

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  • Words count:
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    July 10, 2025

The Australian government’s envoy for fighting antisemitism unveiled an action plan on Thursday that recommended withholding public funding from problematic institutions, but the country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, wouldn’t say that he would implement it.

In a 20-page document, Jillian Segal suggested recommendations that require “action by state governments. Some of them require action by society,” Albanese told a reporter who asked him at a press conference about implementation. “This will be a process, my government is committed to working constructively,” he said.

The plan follows a surge in anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli incidents in Australia that some, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have blamed at least partly on the relatively critical approach that Albanese’s Labour-led government has taken vis-à-vis the Jewish state.

Australia experienced a fourfold increase in documented antisemitic incidents in 2024—the steepest rise among English-speaking countries with available data—according to a report published in May. The tally of such cases rose from 495 in 2023 to 2,062 last year, according to the report by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).

Responding to the torching of a Melbourne synagogue in December, Netanyahu said at the time that “it is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia.”

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said last year that Canberra would consider recognition of a Palestinian state. Her government has walked back the decision by the previous Liberal Party government to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Last year, she lumped Israel together with China and Russia, saying she expects those countries “to abide by international law.”

Australia has banned entry to Ayelet Shaked, a former Israeli minister of justice and interior, and to Hillel Fuld, a pro-Israel activist whose brother had died in a terrorist attack. The report mentions Israel once, and does not reference the government’s policies towards it.

Israel’s minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, earlier this week sent Albanese a letter expressing his “deep alarm following a profoundly disturbing weekend in Melbourne.” Chikli referenced an arson attack on July 4 on the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation synagogue and vandalism targeting the Israeli restaurant named Miznon.

“This alarming climate is unfolding under your government’s watch—and is further legitimized by recent decisions to deny entry” to Shaked and Fuld, Chikli wrote.

One of the assertions in the new plan for fighting antisemitism is that “the envoy will work with the government to enable government funding to be withheld, where possible, from universities, programs or individuals within universities that facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.”

‘Face the full force of the law’

The opposition party of Australia—called the Liberal-National Coalition—welcomed the plan in theory, though expressed disappointment at the prime minister’s refusal to say whether or not he will implement it, and if so, which parts.

“We note that when the prime minister was asked directly if he would commit to implementing the plan in full, he refused to do so. Despite being willing to launch the plan today, it is not clear which measures the Albanese government supports and which it does not. Australians deserve some clarity on this,” the opposition said in a statement.

Under the envoy’s guidance, federal and state legislation addressing antisemitic and other hateful conduct should be reformed and made more stringent.

The envoy also advises encouraging media organizations to “avoid accepting false or distorted narratives.” Her plan further features a recommendation that there be protocols for arts festivals and organizations to respond to antisemitic incidents, as well as greater education efforts toward tolerance of Jews and more robust policing.

This “kind of hatred and violence that we have seen on our streets recently is despicable, and it won’t be tolerated,” Albanese also said at the press conference. “I want those responsible to face the full force of the law,” he added.

Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the ECAJ Jewish group, welcomed the plan but added that “the test, of course, is going to be in the implementation” in an interview with ABC News.

Violence and other types of attacks against the Jewish community have made life “incredibly difficult” for some Jews, said Ryvchin.

“We have faced fire bombings, faced exclusion, boycotts and doxing,” he said. “But a lot of the harm has been more what we might call everyday antisemitism—Jewish school kids in school uniform are abused, and flashed ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes and chased down the street.”

Such mayhem “used to be extremely rare in this country,” he added, but “over the past 20, 21 months, it’s become normal.”

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  • Words count:
    742 words
  • Type of content:
    Opinion
  • Byline:
  • Publication Date:
    July 10, 2025

The United Kingdom has banned the activist group Palestine Action under terrorism legislation. This might seem like a win for law and order, and in many respects, it is. But outlawing a group with strong support exposes the fragility of its legal system, the limits of state authority and the deep divisions undermining social cohesion.

Through direct action and intimidation, Palestine Action targeted U.K. arms manufacturers linked to Israel and, in some cases, successfully shut them down. Its members vandalized banks, attacked Jewish-owned businesses, and, most infamously, stormed the U.K.’s primary military airbase—an escalation that ultimately led to its classification as a terrorist group.

The state will move to target its organizers, freeze its funds and seize its assets. But the situation extends far beyond the group itself. On the day the ban took effect, July 5, police arrested nearly 30 protesters in London, galvanizing resistance.

Estimates suggest that Palestine Action has tens of thousands of supporters in the United Kingdom. Parliament member Richard Burgon said the legislation risked “criminalizing thousands of volunteers and supporters,” including “students, nurses, retirees and professionals,” highlighting the diverse coalition backing the group and the potential for perceived overreach.

If these protests continue to grow, will the police attempt mass arrests of supporters? Politically and practically, that seems unthinkable. The challenge now is not just about suppressing the group, but about navigating the broader consequences of public dissent.

We’re entering dangerous territory with a law that exists on paper but is unevenly applied. Supporting the group carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years. But selective enforcement—applied for some, absent for others—undermines counter-terrorism laws and the principle of equal justice. It also breeds cynicism and resentment.

The double standard is even starker when it comes to public figures. Multiple government officials voiced support before the ban, and Parliament member Zarah Sultana even declared, “We are all Palestine Action.” If they repeat their endorsements today, would they face prosecution like members of the public might? It’s hard to imagine.

One public figure has already tested the boundary. In a video released after the group was declared a terrorist organisation, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters called them “great” and voiced his support. Comfortably numb to what that now means under terrorism law, he revealed the dark side of the ban: no investigation, no prosecution. The only pressure so far has come from pro-Israel U.K. lawyers and the activist group Campaign Against Antisemitism, which have raised the alarm themselves and have said that they will pursue private legal action if the authorities do not. As of now, there is no public information showing that law enforcement has taken any action.

Such an enforcement gap emboldens the supporters of this group, encouraging them to view the conduct not as criminal but as justified resistance. For many in Palestine Action, this mindset frames tactics like vandalism as part of a moral struggle against what they perceive as a complicit or genocidal state.

Extremists and terrorists always believe that their cause is just. Yet there is an uncomfortable reality: The sense of righteousness motivating Palestine Action is no longer fringe. The narrative that the State of Israel is committing genocide has gained traction in the mainstream. This belief fuels public debate and motivates direct action with real consequences for social cohesion and public order.

Against this backdrop, the government’s ban targeted Palestine Action’s illegal tactics, not free speech or the right to protest. It failed, however, to influence how this distinction was portrayed in the media and by other activist groups. As a result, many people who oppose the tactics of vandalism, harassment and intimidation ended up conflating the group’s illegal methods with legitimate protest. This weakens public trust and complicates enforcement efforts.

When the shared legitimacy of law breaks down, and when large parts of society reject who is labeled an actual criminal, the government’s power to govern is weakened. This signals a deep political and cultural fracture that can’t be patched over with legislation. It forces a reckoning: What kind of society do we want to be, and whose values define the law?

The ban was justified, but in a deeply divided country, the government faces a choice: Enforce the law selectively and lose authority, or enforce it strictly and risk unrest? There’s no easy answer, and every step risks deepening the very divisions that threaten public order.

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  • Words count:
    872 words
  • Type of content:
    News
  • Byline:
  • Publication Date:
    July 10, 2025

A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.

The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”

Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.

He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.

“I was just shocked by the set of facts,” Rachel Lerman, vice chair and director of appeals and critical motions at the Brandeis Center, told JNS. “We all think we’ve seen it all, but this guy, he’s really traumatized by what happened.”

‘Fraudulent results behind his back’

On Laps’s first day, Terra Lin, a research assistant in the lab, who “knew nothing about him other than that he was a Jewish scientist from Israel,” told him “never to speak with her in person” and if he needed anything, he must do so in writing, according to the Brandeis Center.

“When Laps tried to join a group of co-workers, including the lab staffer, for lunch, the lab staffer instructed Laps not to sit with her or other lab employees. She also urged other researchers in the lab to shun Laps,” the Brandeis Center stated. (According to the suit, Lin also tried to “frustrate, delay or inhibit” Laps’s requests for research materials and equipment, at one point referring him to a colleague recovering in the hospital from a major car accident.)

According to the Brandeis Center, she tampered with Laps’s research, “producing fraudulent results behind his back that could have ruined his career and encouraging him to discard all evidence of her tampering.” It added that when Laps found out about such sabotage, the lab’s leader and his mentor “refused to address the issue.”

The following month, Chou told Laps that Stanford would launch a Title IX investigation against him over a complaint of sexual harassment from an undergraduate student, urging him to leave the lab to avoid the investigation and to save his reputation.

Laps, who had never been accused of anything before, was shocked, Lerman told JNS.

When the Israeli researcher contacted the school’s Title IX office, he was told that no formal complaint had been filed against him; thus, there was no investigation. The office had received an email stating that Laps violated university rules, but told him it couldn’t confirm the author.

Given that Chou told Laps about the report, the lab leader “was apparently involved with the scheme,” the lawsuit states. “The Title IX office saw it for what it was, baseless, and closed the matter.”

Laps filed a discrimination complaint with the university about his treatment in Chou’s lab, prompting the university to open an investigation. In response, Chou terminated Laps, deactivated his badge and locked him out of the lab, according to the lawsuit. His access was later restored when Stanford intervened.

Stanford concluded that Laps, who has since resigned from Stanford and left the country, did not face discrimination, nor did Chou retaliate against him. The lawsuit alleges that those conclusions were “predetermined.” 

It further alleges that the university retaliated against Laps by rescinding two of the three years it had promised for his postdoctoral research, causing him to lose out on a prestigious grant that had been awarded to him.

“Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously. In this instance, and based on all the allegations that Dr. Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated,” Dee Mostofi, assistant vice president of external communications at Stanford, told JNS.

Lerman told JNS that the Brandeis Center sees “it as part of a trend that we’re seeing lately with universities very badly treating Israeli students and postdocs.”

The center opted to file in federal court, rather than a complaint to the U.S. Education Department, due to the severity of the damage to Laps’s reputation, the financial losses he sustained and a lack of clarity from the Education Department about the timeframe for complaints, Lerman said.

Stanford must compensate Laps and “take steps to address antisemitism on their campus, which their own internal investigation shows is pretty rampant, and yet things like this are going on,” Lerman told JNS.

“We also include facts about some of what undergraduates have experienced, and I can imagine as we learn more, we might amend our complaint to add things,” she said.

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  • Words count:
    1365 words
  • Type of content:
    COLUMN
  • Byline:
  • Publication Date:
    July 10, 2025
  • Media:
    1 file

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Nazism had broken out of its wartime German-dominated confines and had become the creed of millions throughout the West.

Let’s imagine that, for the past 21 months, the streets of London, New York and other Western cities had become forests of Nazi flags as hundreds of thousands of people marched for the ethnic cleansing of Jews—mob events justified as exercising the “right to free speech.”

Imagine that thousands of young people waving the Nazi flag at a rally in England had chanted “Death, death to the Jews!” while a demagogue leapt around the stage whipping the crowd up to a delirium.

Imagine that the only way to gain social or professional acceptance was to agree that the Jews deliberately killed babies and starved people to death, that they were destroying society and that they must be treated accordingly as pariahs.

Imagine that trade unions representing teachers, doctors and public-sector workers supporting the Nazi party all passed resolutions calling for Jews to be boycotted. Imagine that shops in Britain displayed signs on their doors saying “No Jews welcome.”

Imagine that the swastika had become a fashion accessory, printed onto casual clothing or painted onto people’s faces—or that when turning up for a hospital appointment, you saw that the nurse was wearing on her uniform a swastika pin.

Imagine that the United Nations had become an arm of the Nazi party, and that its Special Rapporteur on the Jewish Question had stated that Jews who had been slaughtered had brought this upon themselves, that the Nazis had a right to murder them, and that the Jews were running the U.S. Congress, the media and the universities.

All these things have happened, with one obvious difference—that instead of the Nazi party, they have been in support of the Palestinian cause and against Zionism, the State of Israel and the Jews who are assumed to support it.

For most Diaspora Jews, this onslaught has been felt as an existential threat. They don’t view what’s been happening as support for a Palestine state or even as merely hatred of Israel. They see the Palestine flag as a banner rallying calls for the extermination of the Jews.

That’s because the Palestinian Arabs don’t merely aim to destroy the State of Israel. They also aim to steal the Jews’ own history in the land by appropriating it for themselves. This is therefore an attempt to destroy Judaism itself, demonstrated by the fact that, day in, day out, Palestinian society preaches “death to the Jews.”

That’s why the Palestine flag—now so ubiquitous throughout the West as a grotesque statement of idealism—causes so many Jews to shudder at it as a latter-day swastika, while the even more ubiquitous keffiyeh is viewed as the equivalent of the lightning flash on SS uniforms.

This analogy with Nazism is not a far-fetched flight of fancy. The Palestinian Arabs are the literal heirs to the Nazi party.

They were first incited to the genocide of the Jews by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who entered into an alliance with Adolf Hitler and pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctorate was in Holocaust denial, has publicly hailed al-Husseini as his role model. Sermons, pamphlets and cartoons pumped out by the P.A. are riddled with deranged and paranoid images straight out of the Nazi play-book demonizing Jews as blood-suckers, parasites, vermin or octopuses trapping the world in their tentacles.

These images, which have indoctrinated generations of Palestinian Arabs into a hysterical and murderous hatred of Jews, seem just like Nazi propaganda because they are.

As Pierre Rehov has documented in his important film “Palestine: Invention of a Nation,” it was the Nazis who taught the Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine the language of Jewish demonization. He states that, although the virus of antisemitism was already widespread in the Islamic world, it was given rocket fuel after the war by the massive conversion of former Nazis to Islam and the flight of various high-ranking Nazis to Arab countries, particularly Syria and Egypt.

These former Nazi officers trained the Arabs to become terrorists and also put into widespread practice the strategy of the Nazis’ propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, who reportedly said: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

Palestinian terrorist armies, as well as their fellow travelers on the streets of Western cities, have been repeatedly seen giving the Nazi salute. Israeli soldiers in Gaza report finding copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in house after house. Yet while the West ignores or dismisses the Nazi roots of the Palestinian agenda to exterminate Israel, in an Orwellian inversion it accuses Israel itself of Nazi-style crimes.

It accuses it of committing genocide against Palestinian Arabs and claims that there are concentration camps in Gaza. In Britain, Adnan Hussein, an independent “pro-Palestine” member of parliament, suggested this week that Israel might be planning “gas chambers” for Gazans.

Many of the young people who parrot these obscenities in such huge numbers are so profoundly ignorant and with so little capacity to think that they have no idea what they are saying. Throughout the West, Hitler and the Nazis have long been reduced to all-purpose cartoon villains.

At a deeper level, however, falsely accusing Israel and the Jews of committing the monstrous crimes of which they have been the victims taps into far darker cultural currents. For some, painting Jews as Nazis is a way of cleansing themselves of the unbearable stain of cultural complicity in the Holocaust.

If the Jews are committing genocide, goes this thinking, the Nazi genocide of the Jews was obviously not such a big deal. And so the rest of the West—whose policies of appeasement enabled the Holocaust to happen, which shut its doors against the victims and whose own culture gave rise to that horror in the first place—is off the hook.

With the Palestinian cause having become the default position of the liberal mind, millions in the West are parroting its propaganda. And alongside the Nazi-derived tropes of Jewish demonization, Palestinian Arabs themselves repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide and other Nazi behavior.

This is clearly a tactic to deflect any scrutiny of their own Nazi links. It also derives from the Muslim belief that everything in the Islamic world is good while everything in the non-Islamic world is bad, which results in the routine Muslim inversion of victim and victimizer, justice and injustice, truth and lies.

This inversion draws in turn upon the Palestinian Arabs’ appropriation for themselves of all the perceived advantages of the Jews’ historic identity, including the supreme victimization of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which the Palestinians leverage by claiming that victim status for themselves at the hands of the Jews.

The current frenzy over Israel and the Jews doesn’t just have baleful historic echoes. It can justifiably be seen as the last remaining and hitherto unrecognized front of the Second World War.

The heirs to the Nazi-Arab alliance for the extermination of the Jews are marching shoulder to shoulder alongside the so-called progressives of the Western left. This poses a deadly threat to the Jews of the Diaspora and to the West itself.

Alas, the country that led the fight to defeat the Nazis has now capitulated to their heirs. In London this week, French President Emmanuel Macron told the British parliament that an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “without any conditions” was vital to end the “dehumanization” of the Gazans and that recognizing a State of Palestine was “the only path to peace.”

Such moves would empower Hamas and leave their Israeli victims at the mercy of the Palestinian agenda of extermination, ripping up international law to do so. At this sickening abandonment of civilization for barbarism, Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, enthusiastically applauded.

Not only have these two leaders refused to call out in terms the murderous lunacy that’s gripped the West, but they are fueling it. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave.

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