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Biden’s betrayal at the forefront as he demands ceasefire in Gaza to stoke his re-election campaign
By Michael Goodwin
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Malcolm Hoenlein: Arab states want Israel to destroy Hamas
Vice Chairman Emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations gives a firsthand account of how other Arab countries see the war in Gaza.
Malcolm Hoenlein, the Vice Chairman Emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in an expansive interview, told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News about the organization's visit to Israel this year.
He began by discussing the growing pressure on Israel from the US to recognize a Palestinian state. “I should say that the US-Israel relationship remains very strong. The American people still remain committed to Israel. We have to do more to get them to understand the nuances and sometimes the the choices Israel has to make, but I think that there remains a strong commitment. Regarding proposals about a Palestinian state the day after, and considerations and pressures what Israel must do in Rafah, I think these should be dealt with quietly on both sides."
"I told this to President Obama in our first meeting, that the lesson of history is that there shouldn't be public daylight between the countries. America is under both external pressure and domestic political pressures, but in a war situation especially, you can't dictate to a country that has gone through the trauma of what Israel went through on October 7th and minimize the options that are open to it.”
Malcolm describes support for Israel from a surprising quarter: “Israel obviously made a commitment and remains committed to the destruction of Hamas, but I will tell you that every Arab leader I speak to says to me 'decimate them, don't listen to what we say, because we will pay the price.' If Israel is pressured to do things prematurely, Jordan and Egypt will pay first, and the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, and others will pay next. Israel will pay a price as well, but I think they will pay a greater price.”
“It's a message that we have to communicate, that Hamas is symbolic now in the region. It's Iran's front right now, even though it's not its major investment, but it is taking on symbolic significance. Will terrorism win out in the end? Will international pressure overcome the commitment to standards and values? What would the implications be if the day after they can shoot a rocket, that Sinwar can walk out that they can wave flags and say 'You see? We won!' That cannot happen.”
He focused on one particular phenomenon influencing the US approach: “The images and the public pressure about damage and victims in the media takes a toll. It creates a pressure situation. Even some members of Congress who have been remarkably supportive start expressing some reservations or concerns, even though I think on any bill on Israel you'll still get 90% in favor.”
Malcolm noted that the unity created by the October 7th massacre made its way to the American Jewish community as well: “I think that the unity that emerged after October 7th here in Israel was reflected in America, where from left to right, people rallied and stood with Israel. I think they still continue to stand with Israel. Some of them may express concern about the domestic population in in Gaza, but basically understanding the need not to allow there to be a Hamas victory, understanding that we can't deal with the day after until you deal with the day before, that the needs of Israel have to be met, and you see remarkable numbers of missions of people coming, wealthy people, coming to volunteer, to give money.”
The phenomenon extends beyond just Jews: “There are also many non-Jews - the Evangelical community, for instance stands supportive. Even though people highlight that young people are less supportive, the fact is that they've rallied, they've been extremely generous, they were coming here, as are the leaders of the Jewish community. When you see them working in kitchens, collecting fruit, you see that the physical and spiritual and moral connection to Israel has been strengthened.”
Malcolm highlights one likely effect of that connection: “I will make a prediction for you - immigration will sharply increase after the war, from Europe and from America. I believe Israel should do a crash program of building affordable housing for young couples - they want to come. I think many are looking to Israel as the viable alternative for their future.”
Malcolm relates that he has no need for a special trip to bear witness to the massacre, having been in Israel on October 7th: “I was here for Sukkot with my family. My wife and I stayed afterwards. I got a call to come the next day to Hadassah, because there were some American soldiers serving in the IDF, lone soldiers, and they asked me to come and visit them, which I immediately did. The first three I met, I knew their families They kept saying to me “'f you don't see it, you can't tell it.' I said 'I'm not good at this' but two hours later, I was down south."
"I don't I know whether it was good or not to see it because frankly it haunts you for life. I realized what my grandparents experienced in when they were deported to concentration camps. I've been opposed to comparisons to the Holocaust, but in every generation the enemy is the same.”
He noted an important difference between the Holocaust and the current war: “It's not that we have the state of Israel with the IDF. It’s that endangered communities over the past few decades had somewhere to go and defend themselves. Communities today don't appear prepared or able to defend themselves, but for many communities, large percentages of the budget must be devoted to community defense. It's obligatory. Antisemitism is becoming acceptable, and Israel is looming larger for many people.”
This brings him to an important message to the people of Israel: “Many of those people who loved Israel, cared about Israel, but never thought about living in Israel, today are thinking about it, and young people especially. The future really lies here."
"Our campuses and streets often turn violent and Jews are subjected to physical assault. If you die in the streets of New York through an antisemitic attack, there's no purpose. The people who died here, at least there was a sense of mission, there's a significance to it. It's sad and it's regrettable, and we we don't want to see anybody die, but the message was clear. October 7th reminded people of how central Israel is.”
He referred to the effects the war has had on Israel's negotiations with Arab states: “Many things are on hold. The danger is that if you don't move forward, you move backward, and the Arab states still want the connection to Israel. Many of them are building high-tech cities, and they all have told me that Israel is essential to that goal. I even heard it from the leaders in Saudi Arabia about how critical Israeli technology will be for the goals they hope to achieve there, and I think, ultimately, they know that the connection to Israel is vital to them."
"The question for them is whether they have confidence in the West. They hate Iran, but they're hedging their bets. The Iranian government is hanging by a thread. Even the Iranian people want to see the government change, but they want Israel and America to do the dirty work for them.”
He commented on the Arab states' feelings towards the Palestinians: “Arab leaders tell me that they feel some sympathy for the public, but not for the Hamas regime. They've poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the Palestinians, but the government did not build the infrastructure that could have stabilized the region.”
One country in particular stands out in terms of its investment in the Palestinians: “Qatar is a different case. They have already poured billions into American universities, which correlates directly with rising antisemitism. We have to expose everyone giving money, domestic or foreign, and there have to be real consequences. They have invested $300B in an anti-Israel agenda, which is also an anti-American agenda. Israel may be the first victim, but America will be next.”
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By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.
I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences.
In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that “Hatred comes from ignorance” and “Education is the answer.” But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America’s best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? Our era’s 10-second news cycle is no match for these questions, because the answers are deep and ancient, buried beneath the oldest of assumptions about what we think we know.
The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.
In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.
Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.
This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist. Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a “debate” before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.
In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians’ organs.
The absurdity of these charges is less remarkable than the high intellectual profiles of those making them: people like Apion, a scholar of Homer and Egyptian history, as well as Christian and Muslim scholars who were among the best-read people of their time. Similarly absurd claims of Jewish perfidy were later endorsed by civilizational luminaries such as Martin Luther and Voltaire. “Anti-Judaism,” Nirenberg argues, “should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”
I’ve been thinking about Nirenberg’s thesis in the months since the October 7 massacre in Israel, during which Hamas, an openly genocidal organization whose stated goal is the murder of Jews, lived up to its mission statement by torturing, raping, and murdering more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and taking more than 200 captives, including babies, children, and the elderly. Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity “exhilarating” and “energizing,” while a Columbia professor called it “awesome” and an “achievement.” Comparable praise percolated through America’s top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!”—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)
Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as “Zionism = Genocide,” “New Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.”) On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student’s nose.
It wasn’t just universities. Crowds cheering for “intifada” gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, U.S. rally organizers named their efforts “floods” (“Flood Seattle for Palestine,” “Flood Manhattan for Gaza”) after “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 butchery. The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like “Israel’s only religion is capitalism.” In New York City, a Jewish teacher’s online photo holding a sign that said i stand with israel was enough to prompt a schoolwide protest that devolved into a riot during which students destroyed school property; the teacher had to be moved to another part of the building to avoid the teenage mob screaming “Free Palestine!” In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.” When police arrested him, he shouted, “Free Palestine!”
Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea. The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.
But there are nuances to sadistic barbarity against Jews, we are told, and sometimes gang-raping Jewish women is actually a movement for human rights. It hardly seems fair to call people anti-Semitic if they want only half of the world’s Jews to die. The phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” currently chanted at universities across America, perhaps widens the net a tiny bit—but really, who can say? Even the phrase “Gas the Jews,” chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty, is so very ambiguous. How dare those whiny Jews presume to know what’s in other people’s hearts?
Besides, American Jews had nothing to whine about: Had any of them actually died in the United States from all this exhilaration? That question was answered in November, when a Jewish man died in California after an anti-Israel protester allegedly clubbed him over the head with a bullhorn, the kind used to chant entirely non-anti-Semitic slogans—and of course that question had already been answered repeatedly with other anti-Semitic murders in recent years, some more publicized than others. (One murder even happened on campus: In 2022, an expelled University of Arizona student who repeatedly ranted about Jews and Zionists shot and killed his professor—who wasn’t Jewish, though the student thought he was.) But now the goalposts move again: Those actual murders, along with many other physical attacks against American Jews, are all just one-offs, lone wolves, mental-illness cases, entirely unrelated to the anti-Semitic rhetoric swirling through American life.
It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews’ heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.
One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.
DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.
This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.
The sordid history of the concept of anti-Zionism vividly illustrates this dynamic—and is particularly relevant for its success in scrambling the radar of well-meaning people. Jewish civilization has been centered for thousands of years, in ways large and small, on its homeland in Israel, where Jews have had a continuous presence since ancient times. The modern political idea of Zionism as Jewish self-determination in this homeland emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid many other anticolonial movements around the world, as global power dynamics shifted from empires (Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, British, French, Japanese) toward nation-states. The large and often violent population upheavals following Israel’s creation, including the displacement of most Arabs from what became Israel and the displacement of nearly all Jews from what became Arab states, paralleled similar population upheavals around the world as new states emerged from receding empires. In this, Zionism was typical.
But anti-Zionism as an explicit political concept has a history quite independent of the actions of Jews. In 1918, 30 years before the establishment of the state of Israel, Bolsheviks established Jewish sections of the Communist Party, which they insisted be anti-Zionist. The problem, Bolsheviks argued, was that Jewish particularism (in this case, Zionism) was the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under communism—just as Christians once saw Jewish particularism as the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under Christ. The righteousness of this mission was, as usual, the key: The claim that “anti-Zionism” was unrelated to anti-Semitism, repeated ad nauseam in Soviet propaganda for decades, was essential to the Communist Party’s self-branding as humanity’s liberators. It was also a bald-faced lie.
Bolsheviks quickly demonstrated their supposed lack of anti-Semitism by shutting down every “Zionist” institution under their control, a category that ranged from synagogues to sports clubs; appropriating their assets; taking over their buildings, sometimes physically destroying offices; and arresting and ultimately “purging” Jewish leaders, including those who had endorsed the party line and persecuted their fellow Jews for their “Zionism.” Thousands of Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
Later, the U.S.S.R. exported this messaging to its client states in the developing world and ultimately to social-justice-minded circles in the United States. A thick paper trail shows how the KGB adapted its propaganda by explicitly rebranding Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism,” beginning half a century ago, when those terms gained currency as potent smears—even though Jews are racially diverse and Zionism is one of the world’s premier examples of an indigenous people reclaiming independence. Facts were irrelevant: Soviets labeled Jews as racist colonialist oppressors, just as Nazis had labeled Jews as both capitalist and Communist oppressors, and just as Christians and Muslims had labeled Jews as God-killers and Prophet-defilers. Jews were whatever a given society regarded as evil. To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.
Even naming it—that is, calling out bigotry against Jews—can be classed as yet another sign of assumed evil intent, of Jews attacking beloved principles of justice for all. In an April 2023 lecture, David Nirenberg, the historian, presented the example of an activist with a large following whose boundary-pushing rhetoric met with accusations of anti-Semitism. The activist pointed out, as Nirenberg put it, that anti-Semitism “was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech.” He brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them. It is unfortunate for those making this argument today that this activist was named Adolf Hitler.
Two weeks after the October 7 massacre, I wrote an op-ed for a national newspaper about the intergenerational fears many Jews were feeling, describing a few choice moments from several thousand years of anti-Semitic attacks. A friendly fact-checker followed up, asking me to prove that the Russian Civil War pogroms of 1918–21 involved gang rapes, and appending a judicious reportedly in front of a detail I’d included from the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 about attackers taking Jewish women’s severed breasts as trophies. I dutifully provided additional sources, combing through sickening testimonies about mutilated Jewish girls in 1919 and 1941, while simultaneously avoiding videos of mutilated Jewish girls in 2023.
As I piled up evidence to prove that these things happened, I remembered an oral-history interview my sister once did with our grandfather to share with our family at his 97th-birthday party, in which he described his own grandparents’ decision to leave their town in Ukraine after an aunt was attacked during a pogrom. “They raided her, et cetera, et cetera,” my sister’s notes from the interview say. Et cetera, et cetera, I thought over and over, as I hunted down sources on gang rapes of Jewish women to submit to the fact-checker, my vision going blurry. At the time, I hadn’t wondered what those sanitized et ceteras meant.
The same week I spent emailing documentation to the fact-checker of pogroms long past, the newspaper, like many other news outlets, published a banner headline about Israelis bombing a hospital in Gaza and killing 500 people inside. This was quickly proven to be a lie told by Hamas—a lie similar to the medieval blood libel, about Jews deliberately targeting and murdering innocent non-Jewish babies—and a transparent psychological projection of the crimes that Hamas had actually committed in Israel, where Hamas terrorists had deliberately targeted and murdered hundreds of adults, children, and babies, and also repeatedly fired rockets at a hospital. Israel’s military has indeed killed many innocent people in Gaza during its war to destroy Hamas, and deserves the same scrutiny as any country for its conduct in war. But scrutiny is impossible when lies are substituted for facts. The newspaper later issued a regretful editorial note acknowledging its error. Unfortunately, Hamas’s lie had already inspired mass demonstrations around the world; rioters in Tunisia were so incensed by it that they burned a historic synagogue to the ground. I had been rightfully asked to prove that the Iraqi and Ukrainian pogroms happened. But the spokespeople for Hamas were taken at their word.
Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”
The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”
I was invited to these screenings multiple times, but never went. I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized. Also, I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized while hearing someone behind me screaming, “Show the rapes!”
On my travels around the country in recent months to discuss my work on Jews in non-Jewish societies, I met many Jewish college and high-school students who seem to have accepted the casual denigration of Jews as normal. They are growing up with it. In a Dallas suburb, teenagers told me, shrugging, about how their friends’ Jewish fraternities at Texas colleges have been “chalked.” I had to ask what “chalking” meant: anti-Semitic graffiti made by vandals who lacked spray paint. Synagogues are often chalked too. Another newly common verb among American Jews is swatting: fake bomb or active-shooter threats that force evacuations and instill fear. (The term is a reference to the SWAT teams that sometimes arrive at the scene, not knowing the threat is a hoax, and instill more fear.) These now happen so often at American Jewish institutions that they’re almost boring; nearly 200 were swatted during one December 2023 weekend alone. (When it happened at my own synagogue in November, forcing a girl’s bat-mitzvah service into a parking lot, the synagogue president warned congregants not to post any specific details about it online, in case people were tracking our evacuation procedures.)
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Release The Biden Transcripts Now
Posted By Ruth King
“How in the hell dare he raise that.” — President Joe Biden, Feb. 8, 2024
In an effort to dismiss the claim that he couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died, President Joe Biden claimed he was simply angered because he was asked about it. Turns out, Biden lied.
“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business,” Biden said at a hurriedly arranged press conference early in February.
Immediately, the media sprang into action attacking Special Counsel Robert Hur for bringing up Biden’s son.
“Beyond the pale,” they said. “A setup from the start.” “What does that have to do with the retention of classified documents?” “There is no legitimate answer for why he would do that … unless they were trying to trip him up, rattle him, gain oppo.” Etc., etc., etc.
Jill Biden even sent out a fundraising letter attacking Hur. “I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”
Jill, who was not actually Beau’s mother, said that the day Beau Biden died from brain cancer was “forever etched” on her and Joe’s hearts.
But then last week, NBC News, to its undying credit, did something unusual for a mainstream media outlet. It tried to verify Biden’s account. And what did it find?
Biden lied, and Jill compounded the lie.
Hur didn’t bring up Beau, or ask when he died, NBC News reported. It was Biden who brought up his son – as he almost always does whenever he opens his mouth – and it was Biden who then tried to recall the year he died.
Here’s NBC News’ account of what actually happened:
Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.
Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found ‘classified stuff’ in that home, the report says.
Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau died, the sources said. Biden got the date — May 30 — correct, but not the year.
According to Hur’s report, Biden couldn’t “remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
To make matters worse, when Biden was trying to reassure the public at his press conference that he knew full well when Beau died, he forgot another bit of information that was allegedly etched into his heart.
“I wear, since the day he died, every single day, the rosary he got from our Lady of —,” Biden said, failing to recall the name of the church.
So who cares if Biden lied about the Beau incident?
Well, as George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley points out, it wasn’t just Biden saying something off the cuff. His remarks were almost certainly prepared in advance, and in any case, the White House never issued a correction. In other words, the White House aided and abetted this lie. And that is significant.
“The use of White House staff to carry out an alleged disinformation campaign can raise alleged violations of the public trust and misuse of federal staff and resources. Such allegations have been included in past articles of impeachment,” Turley notes.
Biden can, of course, clear all this up by demanding the release of the complete transcript of his interviews with the special counsel.
Remember when a whistleblower alleged that President Donald Trump had attempted to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the Bidens for bribery? Trump immediately ordered the release of the full transcript of the call. (Despite the ambiguity in the transcript, Democrats went ahead and impeached Trump anyway.)
Biden hasn’t called for the release of the Hur transcripts, and we’d bet our last dime that he never will. And so far, nobody in the press is putting pressure on the White House or the special counsel to do so. We’d bet they never will, either.
That doesn’t mean such pressure can’t be applied. It just takes a concerted effort by the public for it to happen. So start demanding!
The public deserves to know not only who said what about Beau during that interview. It also deserves to know what Hur meant when he said that Biden couldn’t remember, even within several years, when Beau died.
More importantly, the public deserves to know just what Biden did during that interview to convince Hur that he suffered serious mental lapses.
We suspect that, if anything, Hur was being charitable to Biden, and the public would – if allowed to read or hear the full interview – immediately call on Biden’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare him unfit to serve as president.
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The horrifying report on the 7/10 rapes and massacre
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel published a report portraying how Hamas terrorists acted to increase the victims’ suffering.
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel on Wednesday published a horrifying report portraying sexual attacks that were inflicted during the brutal massacre in the Gaza border areas on October 7th and in Hamas captivity.
The report, which was submitted to the UN Special Envoy on Sexual Violence in Conflict Areas, who visited Israel about two weeks ago, shows that the sexual crimes were committed in four types of locations: at the Nova music party, in surrounding villages and kibbutzim, on IDF bases, and in Hamas captivity in Gaza.
According to the report, theNukhba terrorists operated in systematic patterns of group attacks, when in villages and kibbutzim, the sexual attacks were sometimes done in front of relatives and friends. The terrorists targeted both women and men, and the victims were executed during or after they were raped.
The attacks, the report claims, were intended to intensify the suffering and impact on the victims and their environment.
The report was authored by Dr. Carmit Keller-Halamish and Noga Berger, who stated that, "These days, when the scar in our hearts refuses to heal, and the souls of our sisters and brothers are calling out to us from the ground, the majority of those we thought were our partners and colleagues have chosen to remain silent and deny the atrocities. We call on you to speak out, make your voice heard. Do not let the cries of these victims evaporate into thin air."
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Three comments by leaders around the world on Sunday are worth noting as a sign of the global times. Each can help vanquish illusions.
First, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called on Hamas to unite with the PA on the latter’s terms. “Russia has invited all Palestinian factions” to meet, he said, and “We are ready to engage. If Hamas is not, then that’s a different story. We need Palestinian unity.”
Asked about working with the perpetrators of Oct. 7, Mr. Shtayyeh replied, “One should not continue focusing on Oct. 7.” He later clarified on Al Jazeera, “Palestinian suffering did not start on Oct. 7” but with Israel’s creation. “Don’t deal with the cosmetics, you should deal with the roots of the problem.”
“Cosmetics” is a cavalier way to brush off Oct. 7, but why should Mr. Shtayyeh guard his tongue? Even as his PA glorifies Oct. 7 at home and compensates the killers, the Biden Administration insists that a new Palestinian state be created for the PA to rule.
Little wonder that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his centrist chief rival, Benny Gantz, joined on Sunday to oppose unilateral U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state. That isn’t the plan, says U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew. Perhaps he senses how out of step it is while most Palestinians support Oct. 7 and the PA seeks unity with Hamas.
Second, also at Munich, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said that the hostage issue has been “misused by a lot of countries—that in order to get a cease-fire, it’s conditional to have the hostage deal. [A cease-fire] shouldn’t be conditioned.”
Qatar has been mediating Israel-Hamas negotiations. Yet here its Prime Minister argues that Hamas should get what it wants, a cease-fire, without having to give up anything, not even the women it took hostage.
Qatari patronage hasn’t moderated Hamas over the years, despite the hopes even of some Israelis. Qatar’s statement on Oct. 7 held “Israel alone responsible” for Hamas’s atrocities. How’s that for an “honest broker”?
Third, speaking at an African Union summit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva called the Gaza war a “genocide.” Erasing Hamas from the picture, he said, “It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children.”
Mr. da Silva continued, “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened—when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
Though this masquerades as humanitarianism, Mr. da Silva is practicing hard-left politics. He equates Israel to Hitler, but asked at the same summit about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, he was unmoved. “A citizen died in prison, I don’t know if he was ill or had any issues,” Mr. da Silva evaded. “To make an accusation is to trivialize. I hope that a coroner will provide an explanation for why the individual died, that’s all.” A coroner indeed.
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