How Democrats Lost Their Way on Gaza

By Ludovic Hood

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

There has been much public handwringing in the Democratic foreign policy establishment in recent months over Gaza policy. The party’s establishment and progressive factions were engaging in vicious finger-pointing about the Gaza war and America’s relationship with Israel even before the release of Biden adviser Brett McGurk’s new book about the October 7 hostages.

 

Biden confidants such as former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan strike me as decent and principled men. While in office, both evinced frustration, publicly and privately, about the twisted discourse in Washington policy circles and the prejudiced media coverage of the Gaza war — and how that affected Hamas’s strategic calculus at critical junctures.

 

While party leaders now seem content allowing far-left voices to come to the fore, the Democratic foreign policy establishment needs an honest accounting of why and how the administration’s deliberations and messaging on Gaza lost their way — including muddying moral clarity about what happened on October 7, the ideology underpinning the atrocities, and how a sovereign nation-state should respond.

 

In the days following the Hamas-led October 7 onslaught, President Biden made clear his revulsion at the scale of the barbarity and his solidarity with the government and people of Israel — including his visit to Tel Aviv eleven days after the attack. That deeply felt outrage and sincere support for the Israeli people should have been the guiding light in the two years that followed.

 

Instead, narrow political considerations, biased media coverage, and far-left, anti-Israel activists’ demands were allowed to shape policy deliberations and official messaging, including the president’s. This miscalculation prolonged the conflict, increased Palestinian suffering, and fueled anti-Israel discourse in American society that nurtured antisemitism.

 

Israelis and Palestinians alike would be better off had the United States proceeded with strategic and moral clarity about the October 7 attacks and the responsibility of nations to respond. Israel was right to exercise military force against Hamas and its army of over 25,000 militants. Any other government, tasked with the primary responsibility of defending its people, would have done the same — and should be expected to do so.

 

Like the U.S. military, the Israel Defense Forces operate under legal frameworks requiring distinction, precaution, and proportionality in military action. But those laws were never designed to guarantee zero civilian harm when fighting an enemy deeply and intentionally embedded in civilian infrastructure. Credible allegations of operational misconduct demand transparent investigation and accountability within the Israeli military justice system.

 

Rather than helping the public understand these legal standards and Hamas’s practice of operating from high-density civilian locations, the Biden administration too often allowed the grim realities of urban warfare to be reframed as inherently unlawful — by failing to speak up about heavily biased media coverage and about Hamas’s use of human shields.

 

Americans are right to care about Palestinian suffering, and because Israel is an American ally using U.S. weapons, its conduct deserves scrutiny. But that scrutiny was not applied evenly. Hundreds of thousands have died in Syria and Sudan with a fraction of the outrage. Mosul and Raqqa were reduced to rubble at the cost of thousands of civilian lives during U.S.-led counter-ISIS operations, yet no comparable moral outcry followed. Demanding of Israel a standard that no army has met and no other conflict has faced is not accountability; Biden administration officials should have rejected that double standard and selective outrage early and repeatedly.

 

The Biden administration was right to press Israel on humanitarian access at certain junctures. Aid restrictions and the collapse of public order inside Gaza produced real hardship. The mistake was letting that pressure be heard as a verdict on the war itself, while saying far too little about Hamas’s systematic looting and diversion of aid.

 

There never was, and there is not, a “genocide” in Gaza. The administration should have been forthright about this from the start, including repudiating rhetoric from discredited UN officials. The misuse of this term is a grave disservice to the millions of Armenians, Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, Cambodians, and Rwandans murdered en masse in the 20th century.

 

Washington also failed to challenge the figures released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Officials should have consistently noted that the published statistics included deaths of Hamas and other militants, as well as those who died of causes unrelated to the conflict. Despite the terrible destruction of parts of Gaza, Israeli procedures ensured that the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths among Gazans remained historically low for dense urban combat.

 

Furthermore, the administration should have pushed back on slanted media coverage, reminding U.S. outlets to be thorough and judicious in their reporting — especially given that news organizations around the world look to American media to validate sensational claims. U.S. officials should have regularly reminded the world that Hamas conducted the vast majority of its military operations from homes, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques, putting Palestinian women, children, and men in harm’s way every hour of every day.

 

Hamas had every opportunity to surrender. Israel even signaled a willingness to consider exile for its leaders. Hamas chose instead to keep fighting, using innocent Palestinians as human shields. The responsibility for Palestinian deaths lies overwhelmingly with Hamas and its enablers, including the regime in Tehran.

 

The Netanyahu government’s mistake was not the decision to fight Hamas, but the refusal to plan for “the day after.” The Biden administration’s mistake was failing to prioritize this. That left a campaign with no agreed political exit, allowing critics to brand the war aimless. A clearer American position would not have ended the war on Washington’s schedule, but it would have forced Hamas and Western critics to argue with an explicit postwar plan rather than a political vacuum.

 

America and Israel need one another: The strategic and economic partnership is too deep to squander in a political food fight. Future administrations must bring mutual respect and long-term stability back to the relationship.

 

Too many Democratic foreign policy figures currently defending their records on Gaza are reluctant to acknowledge these truths. But Democrats who want to govern again must face them. Biden flew to Tel Aviv in October 2023 and embraced Israel’s cause, and the Democratic Party has spent the past three years arguing over whether to disown that instinct. Ambivalence in American leadership was read by Hamas as a reason to keep fighting, by Tehran as proof of American fatigue, and by allies as a reason to hedge.

 

A party that wants to govern again must be able to say three things at once: that Israel’s war against Hamas was just; that its conduct, like U.S. operations in wartime, deserves scrutiny; and that the singular, selective condemnation applied to Israel but no other ally or adversary is wrong. Until Democrats can say all three, they will keep arguing about the last war while their adversaries prepare for the next one. A party that presided over the war and still cannot describe it with moral clarity will not be trusted to shape the one that follows.

The U.N. Is Making Trump’s Case on the Human Rights Council

By Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Few events as poignantly underscored the lamentable record of the United Nations on human rights as the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. And yet, Pillay, a dedicated antisemite whose Nobel was celebrated by Hamas, is an apt avatar for the U.N. Human Rights Council, an organization whose mission and work are regularly at odds.

 

No surprise, then, that a 2025 Trump executive order once again ended U.S. participation with the HRC, criticizing it for protecting “human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny.” This echoes more detailed criticism in 2018 when the U.S. similarly ceased its participation, citing anti-Israel bias, human rights violators regularly winning seats on the council, and willful inattention to “the misery inflicted by regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and China.”

 

Strangely, however, the European governments and U.N. bureaucrats that predictably condemned the American withdrawal have done precisely nothing to address U.S. criticisms, nor adopted any reforms to entice the U.S. to reconsider. Instead, they have chosen to tolerate and continue its dysfunction, ignoring some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises to focus disproportionately on one country: Israel.

 

The record of bias is plain. According to a database compiled by U.N. Watch, since it was founded in 2006, the Council has adopted 346 resolutions containing language condemning a country for human rights violations. Israel was the focus of 116 (34 percent) of those resolutions.

 

Alone among the world’s countries, Israel is subject to a separate human rights item: Agenda Item 7, titled “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every other country is examined under Agenda Item 4, titled “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention.”

 

In addition, the council currently has twelve “country mandates” that focus on human rights situations in individual countries, such as North Korea and Iran. All are subject to periodic renewal except for the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” that remains in place “until the end of the Israeli occupation.”

 

Instead of taking U.S. criticism to heart, since the U.S. disengaged, the council has adopted eight new resolutions condemning Israel, and its human rights experts and an “independent” Commission of Inquiry have accused it of genocide despite lacking evidence of intent and in the face of contravening evidence.

 

Meanwhile, countries with human rights records beside which Israel pales continue to be elected to the council. The current membership includes China, Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Vietnam, and other countries considered “not free” by Freedom House. Just this past week, Burundi and Kuwait, which are also considered “not free,” were elected to three-year terms starting in January.

 

How do they get elected? They game the system, making sure that only as many countries run for election as there are openings, thereby guaranteeing victory. Last year and this year, every election for a council seat was one of these “clean slate” elections. As Human Rights Watch accurately noted, “This uncompetitive vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election.’”

 

Historically, “not free” and “partly free” countries have jointly comprised a majority on the 47-member Human Rights Council. They have worked together to water down or block criticism of their abuses. This coordination explains why China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and others have never been condemned in a Human Rights Council resolution.

 

These problems are not new. The U.S. has consistently voiced concerns about these problems under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

 

As we argued several years ago, there is no way to make the council perfect. No reform can overcome or eliminate the hostility of many U.N. member states to Israel. If the council reflects the U.N. membership, disproportionate — and biased — attention will be focused on Israel.

 

But steps can be taken to address the most obvious flaws.

 

First, the U.N. General Assembly should ensure that Israel is treated like other nations institutionally and procedurally by eliminating Agenda Item 7 so that Israel’s human rights practices are examined under Agenda Item 4 as is the case for every other nation. It should also require country mandates and commissions of inquiry focused on Israel to be subject to periodic renewal, as is the case for other “special procedures” and investigations.

 

To address non-competitive “clean slate” elections, the General Assembly should amend the process to automatically list as candidates every state that is not currently serving on the council or is otherwise prohibited from running (such as having served two consecutive terms) and hold successive ballots eliminating the lowest half of vote recipients in each region until all the open seats are filled. The General Assembly could go further and increase the threshold for election to two-thirds (129 votes) of the General Assembly, as originally proposed, instead of a simple majority (97 votes).

 

Together, these changes would ensure that council elections are genuinely competitive and, by giving governments a wider pool of options, increase the odds for free countries to win seats on the council, which should make it more capable of fulfilling its claim as the premier human rights body in the U.N. system.

 

The Trump administration has been criticized for disengaging with the Human Rights Council. But Democratic and Republican administrations have both condemned council practices, although Democrats have been more willing to try and fix things from within. But U.S. reengagement alone will not fix things, as fundamental changes require support from most U.N. member states. So once again, the question presses: Do human rights really matter to the “international community”? Or is no incentive great enough to abandon the bias and omission that make the likes of Pillay proud?

Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

By Seth Mandel

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

Now she’s really gone and done it. Francesca Albanese, the U.S.-sanctioned unofficial Hamas mouthpiece with a UN badge, has finally crossed J Street’s line.

 

Yes, it turns out, even J Street has a line for anti-Semitism.

 

This week Albanese, the globetrotting intifada groupie who has said every horrific thing imaginable about Jews, joined yet another social media incitement campaign. In response to an Al Jazeera post criticizing Jews for buying homes outside of Israel, Albanese wrote: “Watch carefully. Cyprus, Greece, Serbia, south of Italy. Globalizing apartheid one brick at the time. One gated community at the time.”

 

In a surprising move, the left-wing pressure group J Street couldn’t even stay silent—although its critique was amusingly gentle:

 

Israelis buying property in other countries is not apartheid. Words have meaning, and we have a responsibility to use them wisely. Francesca Albanese’s now-deleted post grossly feeds the kind of collective blame that can spill over into hostility towards Jews. The UN does important work. It deserves representatives who strengthen its credibility, not undermine it.

 

You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

 

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

 

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

 

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

 

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

 

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

 

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

 

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

 

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

 

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

 

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

The Pogrom Inside the Riots

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

They called them disaffected students — mere schoolchildren who wanted nothing more than livable conditions in their schools. It was a refrain that wore thinner as the weeks of violence in France persisted, as those so-called “students” festooned themselves with revolutionary accouterments and tore at the fabric of French society.

 

All the while, the French political class internalized a critique of themselves that the rioters were not making. What is wrong with us, they seemed to ask, that these young people would take a hatchet to their own heritage? Are the efforts by French police to subdue the violence only inspiring more of it? Are they really just angry over fuel prices?

 

The scale of the rioting this weekend seems to have disabused some in France of their affection for political street violence as a formative youthful experience. Police made thousands of arrests as over half a million people took to French streets across the country over the weekend. Almost 1,000 police were reportedly injured in the violence, the evidence of which is sobering.

 

French streets are littered with broken glass and debris in what were once posh shopping districts. The ancient spires that graced France’s  charming provincial skylines collapsed in on themselves as they burned. The rioters attacked tourism offices, city halls, and statues that embody the French Republic. Shopkeepers were assaulted by balaclava- and keffiyeh-clad assailants. Some pleaded tearfully with their tormentors, lecturing them on how their actions betray the “cause,” only to be pushed to the side so they might watch the destruction of their life’s work.

 

Perhaps the rioters understand their “cause” perfectly well.

 

The devastation was so widespread, the suffering so acute, that French authorities have shed some of their conspicuous tolerance for the weeks-long campaign of violence. Their reluctance to blur the distinctions between peaceful protesters and violent looters persists, but those with whom New York Times reporters spoke now note the degree to which the violent hordes take refuge within and lash out from those supposedly peaceful swarms.

 

Deservedly so. Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated a civilizational cancer.

 

“They came prepared,” said the French journalist Paul Amar. “They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners.” His account has circulated widely, though it has not yet been independently confirmed. Yet Amar’s sense of things aligns with the conclusions that other observers drew.

 

The rioters ransacked a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents. “It can’t be a coincidence that they chose to target a Jewish place of worship,” said one of its congregants. “They must have thought that since they are Jewish, there must be money there.” Likewise, Jewish shops in places like Paris and Marseille were pillaged.

 

Who could have seen it coming? Anyone who was paying attention to the rioters’ actions. They burned down their schools while insisting that all they sought were better ones. They scrawled “Al Aqsa Flood” and “Free Palestine” on building facades and monuments. They attacked civilians, police officers, and firefighters. Their vanguards dragged Palestinian, Algerian, and Soviet flags with them to the front lines of their fight with police. “Kill that b****!” they screamed, “By Allah kill her!” as they descended on their victims.

 

These are only the most violent expressions of a familiar sort of  vicious radicalism that those who understand its contours have warned was back in vogue. An outbreak of anti-Jewish violence across Europe in the years since the October 7 massacre has been particularly acute in France and Belgium. There, the visibly Jewish are stabbed and assaulted. Those with funny-sounding Jewish names are mocked by figures as prominent as far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The French Jews who weren’t ordered by authorities to remove the mezuzahs from their doors have done so as a prophylactic.

 

France’s Jews have gotten the message. The emigration of French Jews to Israel declined over the last decade, but it is now on the rise again. “It peaked at around 8,000 between 2012 and 2015, fell to about 1,000 in 2023, climbed back above 2,000 in 2024 and reached 3,500 in 2025,” Le Diplomate reported. “The Jewish Agency expects some 4,000 departures in 2026.”

 

“The desecration of the synagogue in Paris is a clear warning sign: What begins against Jews never stops there,” said the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Sacha Roytman. Today, the political class in France is awakening — albeit lazily and in protest — to the horrors that have metastasized on their watch. In a televised address to the French people, French President Emmanuel Macron couldn’t help but fawn over the noble protester and his abstracted “anguish and concern.” And yet, that rhetorical genuflection was hard to hear over Macron’s threat to suspend some civil liberties if the rioting continues.

 

Yet, if France’s politicians are finally getting the message, America’s aren’t.

 

“From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in,” California Representative Ro Khanna wrote Sunday. “In America, let us listen to our young. We need an economic and political transformation.”

 

The “transformation” that the Black Bloc agitators on France’s streets are attempting to engineer could not be more obvious or less desirable.

 

This summer, the Brussels-based rabbi Menachem Margolin warned Americans that what had already come to Europe was slouching toward America. “In Europe, antisemitism did not come back wearing a swastika,” he wrote. “It came back wrapped in slogans. It marched under the banner of justice. It called itself activism, and it dared anyone to object.”

 

In America, too, Jews are attacked in the streets. Their synagogues are the site of menacing and sometimes violent protests. They are excluded from civic events because of their suspected loyalty. They disguise their identities on America’s college campuses. Together, they spend north of $1 billion per year on their own security.

 

All this happened while America slept. We should not have to endure the French experience before we wake up to the West’s peril.

 

Seeing what has become of Europe, “knowing the guards, the fortress synagogues, the families who have already packed and gone,” Margolin asked Americans, “how could you possibly choose to let it happen” to you?

 

“Choose” is the right word. Europe chose to import and cater to the violent paranoia that has for so long typified the tribal dynamics in the Middle East. America can make a different choice. Indeed, it must.

Why Hamas Cheered Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize

By Hillel C. Neuer

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

It’s not every day that an Islamist death cult celebrates the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, but that is exactly what happened on Friday evening when Hamas welcomed the selection of Navi Pillay as “an important step toward international justice.” Why is Oslo’s humanitarian hero winning applause from an Iranian-backed terror proxy that massacred families and kidnapped children?

 

I have dealt with Pillay in Geneva since she arrived here in 2008 as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. Over 18 years, I watched her turn the language of universal rights into a weapon aimed relentlessly at the Jewish state.

 

It began with a welcome. In September 2008, my team at U.N. Watch publicly saluted her struggle against South African apartheid. Her story deserved respect. But already then, her first act as U.N. human rights chief was to champion Durban II, the planned Geneva follow-up to the notorious 2001 conference in South Africa, where an ostensible campaign against racism became a festival of antisemitism.

 

At Durban I, thousands of radical activists marched against Israel and Jews, some carrying signs praising Adolf Hitler. Jewish students were threatened. The Arab Lawyers Union handed out cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious antisemitic forgery, were openly distributed. At the NGO Forum, Israel was declared a “racist apartheid state” and accused of “genocide.” In the Durban outcome document, the Jewish state alone was singled out as a perpetrator of racism. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, called it “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” he had witnessed since the Nazi era.

 

Pillay wanted to rehabilitate Durban. We wanted to prevent a repeat. Alarm bells started ringing when Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was appointed chair of the preparatory committee, and Iran the vice chair.

 

Months before the April 2009 conference, Pillay was already rebuking the U.S., Canada, and Israel for threatening to boycott, dismissing their “all or nothing” approach, and warning against “pretexts for inaction.” In the end, Canada, Italy, the U.S., Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands were among 10 countries that boycotted.

 

When Durban II finally opened, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, was the first head of state to speak. He used the Geneva podium to denounce Israel’s existence. France, along with many other European delegations, walked out of the room in protest. Pillay defended Ahmadinejad’s right to speak, and urged against more countries pulling out of the conference.

 

That same year, after Hamas and Israel fought a three-week war, the U.N. Human Rights Council condemned Israel and created a commission of inquiry. Pillay recruited Richard Goldstone to serve as chair, with her staff doing most of the work. The inquiry’s September 2009 report was a bombshell, accusing Israel’s political and military leaders of a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” It called for action by the International Criminal Court, and for criminal proceedings in foreign courts under universal jurisdiction.

 

The report was a travesty of justice. A year and a half later, in a Washington Post op-ed, Goldstone himself retracted the core charge.

 

It later emerged that Pillay’s office had hired Grietje Baars, a radical Marxist law professor, to write key sections of the report. Before joining the investigation, Baars had already described Israel’s operation as a “massacre.” While working on it, Baars signed a declaration denouncing Israel’s “apartheid regime.” The next year, in 2010, Baars joined the Hamas-backed Gaza flotilla campaign as a European spokesman.

 

Under Pillay’s leadership, this is what passed for fact-finding at the U.N. I later submitted a legal complaint to the secretary-general about Pillay’s hiring of Baars. I received no reply.

 

Pillay herself “strongly condemned” Israel’s use of force as “disproportionate” as soon as the fighting began. Her verdict preceded the examination. By contrast, joining the U.S. and Canada, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Israel had a right to self-defense and that responsibility for the conflict lay “clearly and exclusively” with Hamas. Even U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes spoke out against “the reckless and cynical use of civilian installations by Hamas.” Not Pillay.

 

In January 2009, after years of rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel imposed a naval blockade to prevent weapons reaching Hamas by sea. In May 2010, Turkey’s terrorist-linked IHH organized a flotilla which set out to breach it. When Israeli commandos boarded its lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, they were attacked by militants wielding iron bars, clubs, chains, and slingshots.

 

Within hours, Pillay declared that Israel treated international law with “perpetual disdain,” denouncing the blockade as “inhumane and illegal.” Yet the subsequent Palmer inquiry appointed by the U.N. secretary-general concluded that the naval blockade was lawful—a legitimate security measure to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea. Again, Pillay’s verdict came before she examined the facts—or the law.

 

By 2014, Pillay had endorsed the charge that when Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault. “Women with husbands explained that the dire economic situation and the pressures of the occupation have made men more violent because they have lost their ability to provide and protect — two essential elements of manhood in a traditional patriarchal society,” Special Rapporteur Yakin Ertürk wrote in 2005, following her visit to Palestinian territories. “As men become stripped of their manhood, women become the shock absorbers of the crises as targets of domestic violence.” Nine years later, Pillay reported to the U.N. that this analysis “remains valid.”

 

After leaving the U.N. human rights office in 2014, Pillay dropped any pretense of distance. In 2020, she signed a campaign titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!” In June 2021, she joined a letter blaming Israeli “domination and oppression” for the previous month’s war, which began with Hamas firing rockets at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities.

 

A month later, the president of the Human Rights Council—Nazhat Shameem Khan, now a deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court—appointed Pillay to chair an inquiry into the very conflict for which she had already blamed Israel. But its mandate went even further: a permanent investigation of alleged violations before and after the 2021 clash, reaching into the conflict’s “underlying root causes,” with no end date. The campaigner became the investigator, and Pillay’s verdict came with her appointment.

 

In February 2022, U.N. Watch submitted a detailed legal brief requesting Pillay’s recusal. We cited her statements and the U.N.’s own impartiality standards. We received no reply.

 

That June, I walked up to Pillay at the Human Rights Council and handed her a copy. She acknowledged having seen our motion.

 

“We never received a reply,” I said.

 

“We can’t respond to everything,” she answered.

 

Everything? This was a core challenge to her fitness to preside. A few days ago, Pillay claimed that her inquiry “essentially worked like a court.” Yet a judge cannot dismiss a recusal motion as unwanted correspondence.

 

Later, in July 2022, her fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari railed against “the Jewish lobby” and questioned Israel’s U.N. membership. Pillay defended him, claiming his remarks had been taken out of context. In the end, Kothari retracted his comments after numerous democracies condemned him for antisemitism, as did the Human Rights Council chair himself. Pillay never recanted.

 

In September 2025, the Pillay inquiry fulfilled its purpose: It accused Israel of genocide. The report was built on selective quotations used to infer genocidal intent, and a complete sidelining of Hamas’ military infrastructure and use of civilian sites. According to the Pillay report’s chronology, it was Israel that attacked on October 7.

 

Pillay’s accusation of genocide against Israel appears to be what prompted the Nobel. Her earlier achievements—as a judge in South Africa and on the U.N.’s Rwanda tribunal—were known for decades. That record deserves recognition. But it also makes her disregard for impartiality harder to excuse.

 

She knew the standards. A reputation earned in one courtroom cannot exempt its owner from scrutiny in another. Nor can past courage transform a partisan investigation into justice simply because its findings carry the United Nations seal.

 

Pillay was named to the inquiry for her authority as a judge, but she acted on the commitments of a campaigner. The Nobel Committee is now seeking to magnify her imprimatur.

 

Hamas understands the benefit perfectly. Its war against Israel gains a prestigious legal vocabulary, and its victims recede behind an indictment of the state that defended them. That is why Hamas cheered. The Nobel Committee should now tell the world whether this is its desired outcome.

Anti-Zionism Is an Old Soviet Plot

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 8, 2026

 

You have to think that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had a grudging admiration for the mob of braying lunatics who heckled him during his appearance at an event memorializing the October 7 massacre.

 

The masked and keffiyeh-clad activists who hurled epithets and slogans at Mamdani — “coward,” “shame on you,” “Zohran, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” — evinced the uncompromising ideological conviction toward which the mayor himself strove not long ago. Like Mamdani and his wife, they are true believers in the anti-Zionist cause. Why would Mamdani resent their activism? By attacking him, the crowd was doing precisely what their philosophy prescribes: targeting the symbols of Western authority in whatever form they take.

 

After all, anti-Zionism isn’t just about Israel. It began as a Soviet conspiracy designed to undermine the West. And if the American humanities professoriate had any interest in educating their charges, the hordes that have glutted America’s city streets and campuses since October 8, 2023, would know it.

 

I outline anti-Zionism’s underexplored history in my latest book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America:

 

After Israel’s founding, when the Jewish State was little more than an archipelago of communitarian Kibbutzim populated by a significant number of Russian expatriates, Moscow was not hostile toward Jerusalem. Indeed, the Soviets were among the first countries to grant Israel legal recognition in 1948. But throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites cultivated military and diplomatic relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

 

Those investments did not yield returns.

 

In 1967 and again in 1973, the Israelis defeated a coalition of Soviet-backed Arab states, a challenge to Moscow’s geopolitical position that could not go unanswered. So, the instruments of Soviet statecraft were applied to a propagandistic campaign to brand Israel an enemy of proletarian civilization. The author Izabella Tabarovsky was not shocked by the objectively shocking displays of violent antisemitic animus that erupted across the country after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since 1945. She had seen it all before.

 

“With antisemitic conspiracy theory firmly part of KGB’s thinking, the agency’s head, Yuri Andropov, elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,” Tabarovsky wrote. In Soviet publications and communiqués, Israel was portrayed as a mesmeric force—both an instrument of international socialism’s enemies in the West and, somehow, also a puppeteer hypnotizing Westerners into doing Israel’s bidding.

 

In Soviet academe, such as it was, “Zionology” became the subject of study. Zionism was declared a “world threat” typified by “militant chauvinism, racism,” and “anti-communism,” Soviet researchers maintained. It was an “anti-human reactionary” movement, an exporter of the evils of “colonialism and neo-colonialism.” The KGB took its new mandate and ran with it. Soviet spy residencies were instructed to collect information on “the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion” and work to “weaken and divide the Zionist movement.”

 

Tabarovsky continues,

 

Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of Arab missions in New York. Believing that “virtually no major negative incidents” happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the U.N., it helped engineer the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution.

 

“They cast Israel as a white imperial outpost in the brown global south,” Tabarovsky observed. “It was a lie, but it worked.” The degree to which the multigenerational grievances that animate Israel’s critics owe their origins to Soviet innovation is astonishing. Moscow’s assets concocted lies about Israelis forcibly sterilizing Arab women, engineering famines to starve Palestinian populations, and even planning to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque in advance of Israel’s reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Soviet media harped endlessly about Israel’s “criminal plan of liquidating the Palestinian people” and circulated false narratives surrounding the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberate slaughter of women and children.

 

All those Soviet narratives — Israel the genocidaire, the neo-colonialist project that uses famine and rape as weapons of war — have been with us for a half century, and they’re with us still. Mamdani himself cannot help but accuse Israel of an “ongoing genocide” even today, a year after combat operations in Gaza ceased, with Hamas in control of 40 percent of the Gaza Strip and where a supposed famine has been replaced by an outbreak of childhood obesity and the population increased last year by a rate that rivals almost every other country on earth.

 

The cause exists independent of the facts that supposedly support it. That’s because the cause is much broader than Israel. Its activists are devoted to bringing down the West, including those who would work within its structures to seek incremental change — even radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and, yes, Zohran Mamdani.

 

The mayor knows this. Until very recently, at least, he was a fellow-traveler. So, perhaps, behind the stony expression he maintained throughout his heckling, Mamdani repressed a sly smile. These are his people, after all, and they’re doing the work.

October 7 Revived Ancient Hatred, in the Middle East and on U.S. College Campuses

By Leonard Saxe

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

Three years ago, early in the morning on October 7, 2023, I spoke with a close friend in Israel who told me that his daughter and son-in-law, Deborah and Shlomi Mathias, had been murdered in their home at Kibbutz Holit. Deborah and Shlomi were peace-loving musicians who helped to found a bilingual Jewish-Arab school where they also taught. They were the parents of a teenager and two young adults. Their 16-year-old son, at home with Deborah and Shlomi during the assault, survived only because his mother shielded him with her body. His older sisters lived elsewhere on the kibbutz and were able to hide from the Hamas terrorists.

 

By profession, I am a social psychologist. I try to understand complex human behavior and develop research to address social problems. What happened on October 7 and in its wake is horrific. My heart breaks for the Israeli and Palestinian lives cut short and the families left to grieve for them. My head is puzzled by the resurgence of antisemitism and the hatred that has erupted in the shadow of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.   

 

The expressions of antisemitism that have become so prevalent are often framed as part of a critique of Israel. But for many of us who study anti-Jewish attitudes, it appears to be a new variant of the historical hatred and persecution of Jews. While criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, justifying Hamas’ violence and calling for the elimination of Israel crosses a line for many—Jews and non-Jews alike. But where is that line exactly, and how extensive was the antisemitic fallout for U.S. Jews and others?

 

Beginning shortly after October 7, my colleagues at Brandeis University and I set out to answer these questions as they related to antisemitism and prejudice in higher education. Campuses were, unfortunately, near-perfect laboratories. Anti-Israel protests broke out on campuses the day after Hamas launched its attack on Israel, and their impact reverberated across schools and other social institutions.

 

Initially, our focus was on studying the war’s impact on Jewish students. The research evolved to include faculty and non-Jewish students. Our goal was to create an evidentiary base that could serve as a resource when trying to design more effective policies and programs to combat antisemitism and other forms of hatred.

 

A fundamental question has been how to identify antisemitic speech and behavior. Formal definitions are informative but often unhelpful. Hostility toward Jews, like other forms of hatred, is expressed in multiple ways that change over time. Antisemitism has been expressed as a religious hatred, as racism, and as a conspiracy about world domination. Context matters.

 

Not surprisingly, antisemitism is seen differently by non-Jews and Jews. A non-Jewish student may not recognize parallels between October 7 and the history of discrimination and violence directed at Jews, while Jewish students’ knowledge of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere may inform many of these students’ reactions. Jewish students are more likely to perceive antisemitism than non-Jews, even though they also recognize that not all critical words or acts represent anti-Jewish hatred.

 

But the broader context is also important. Our most recent student survey suggests that members of other minority groups perceive more hostility to their group than do non-members. Just as Jewish students often feel that their campus environment is hostile to Jews and Israel, non-Jewish students who identify with other groups (Asian, black, Muslim) also feel targeted by prejudice and hostility.

 

Today, larger forces are making antisemitism and other forms of hatred even more difficult to address. The fractious political debate that has disrupted many societal institutions has left young adults particularly affected.

 

That hostility is “in the air” helps to explain some of what has happened on campuses but does not entirely unravel the dynamics underlying hatred expressed either toward Jews or Israel. In many cases, Jews faced hostility even as the violence that began on October 7 was still unfolding. What triggered the immediate turn to anti-Israel protests, sometimes laced with anti-Jewish rhetoric, rather than expressions of empathy?

 

A key question, along with the evidentiary issue, is whether the charges of genocide and expansionism against Israel are driven by antisemitism. As many scholars, historians, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have argued, the charge that there is a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination is one that has been around for hundreds of years.   

 

When my colleagues and I survey young adults, one of the attitudes that separates those who are anti-Israel from those who are not is a belief that Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state. It is difficult to reconcile the acceptance of that view separate from the history of false claims about Jewish power and desire to control other people.  

 

Rekindling age-old hatred of Jews is not just a problem for the Jewish people and Israel. In the modern world, where weapons of war have become more lethal than ever before, hatred-fueled violence risks ever-widening wars and expanded risk not only for Jews, but for all peoples.

 

I fervently hope for peace and the end of bloodshed in conflicts around the world. A step forward on this path would be to cease blaming the victims. Deborah and Shlomi Mathias did not deserve to be killed simply for living in the world’s lone Jewish state. Honoring Deborah and Shlomi also means remembering them for what they tried to do to enable Arabs and Jews to live together. Despite the challenges, the tragedy and failures of October 7 must move us closer to a standpoint of empathy for the suffering of all people.

The War at Home, Three Years After October 7

By Shabbos Kestenbaum

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

On the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel, perpetrated by Hamas, it would be easy to think that the conflict has passed and that Jewish life, both in Israel and America, is returning to its pre-war state of calm and normality. The news coming out of Gaza has slowed considerably as tensions have eased since the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Yet the memory of October 7 has lingered, opening a fissure that appears increasingly impossible to close.

 

On September 24, Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with 3.1 million followers, spoke at Cornell University’s Sage Chapel, where he was hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Young Democratic Socialists. Six days later, he was invited to the University of Texas at Austin by the school’s University Democrats. More than 2,500 students signed up for the event.

 

It’s clear to those of us who are paying attention: These are radical activists who have chosen the DSA over the USA.

 

In April, Piker said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” He has “no issue” with Hezbollah, and in August, he warned that if American Jews keep identifying with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” One week before he took the stage in Ithaca, he told Axios that the United States is worse than al-Qaeda “pound for pound as far as the number of deaths.” Two of America’s most prestigious universities gave him a stage, a microphone, and a line out the door.

 

For two years, university presidents insisted that the hostility toward Israel on their campuses was about Gaza. But with the war in Gaza paused and the Israeli hostages returned, the hottest ticket on campus this fall was a man who calls Hamas the lesser evil. Three years after October 7, the war is not over — not in the Middle East, and not on American campuses, where protesters’ tents are gone but the ideology behind them has moved into chapels and lecture halls, with the blessing of universities.

 

In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the third-highest total in its history, including a record 32 assaults with deadly weapons and three homicides. The Gaza cease-fire was declared that fall, but antisemitism in America continued unabated.

 

During the 2023–24 academic year, anti-Israel encampments were established on more than 160 campuses. Last year, only around a dozen remained because the anti-Israel movement shifted from tent encampments to other forms of activism, which the ADL describes as “internal pressure and disciplinary evasion.”

 

Suspended SJP chapters at universities such as Tufts and George Washington simply disaffiliated from their schools and kept organizing independently. The University of Michigan student government attempted to freeze funding for every campus club unless the university divested from Israel. In 2024, activists vandalized the home of a Michigan regent three times. The next year, activists defaced the homes of four Wisconsin regents over one July weekend. Weeks later, National SJP published a manifesto branding university trustees the “Board of Butchers” and the university system “a keystone of empire” to be dismantled.

 

The targeting has extended beyond “Zionist” figures and organizations to purely religious institutions. Between October 2023 and October 2025, Jewish campus organizations, including Hillel and Chabad, were targeted in nearly 200 incidents of harassment and vandalism. An ADL survey found that, during the same period, more than half of Jewish faculty saw shadow boycotts on their campuses, and a majority of those respondents said that departments avoided co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents, meanwhile, had witnessed anti-Jewish activity from fellow faculty, staff, or administrators.

 

Recently, Columbia student Noah Lederman, who was shoved against a wall in 2024 for wearing an Israeli flag shirt, aptly summarized the state of campuses today when he told Jewish Insider: “Campus is not better, it’s just different.”

 

For years, university administrators told American Jewish students and parents that the hostility they faced was a regrettable byproduct of a faraway war and that it would recede when the fighting did. The fighting in Gaza has receded. But American Jewish students returned to campus this semester to find the same student senates, the same faculty, and the same whispered exclusions.

 

Cornell gave Hasan Piker a chapel, and UT Austin gave him a crowd, but neither school has ever given its Jewish students an honest answer about why a man who believes America deserved 9/11 should be given either. It’s been three years since October 7, and we will no longer wait for one. We know what the war on campus is, we know who is fighting it, and we know that it will not end simply because the shooting in Gaza did.

The People Who Celebrate October 7 and Their Enablers

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

There appear to be a fair number of celebratory October 7 rallies planned for today, in which pro-Hamas groups will reiterate their dedication to finishing what Yahya Sinwar started. It’s creepy and stalkerish and unfortunately par for the course, especially in the West at present. But it also highlights an important point: Such ghoulishness is being normalized.

 

You’ll remember how New York Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier came under some criticism when images surfaced of her at a rally to celebrate the attacks the day after they began, three years ago. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor but at the time a state legislator, condemned the rally. But this year he backed Chevalier anyway and lifted her to victory in her primary.

 

Fast-forward to last week. The mayor released a plan he said would combat anti-Semitism while its real aim was to encourage the spreading of anti-Zionism, a subset of anti-Semitism the mayor enjoys stoking. The plan sets aside millions in taxpayer dollars for a coalition that goes by the name Partners Against the Hate (PATH), reports the New York Post.

 

In that coalition is the Arab American Association of New York, a group formerly led by anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour. It’s curious enough that an anti-Israel group is part of the mayor’s apparent anti-Semitism plan, but the story gets curiouser. As Hen Mazzig notes, the AAANY likes to partner with Within Our Lifetime, among the most vehemently anti-Semitic organizations in America.

 

And to bring it full circle, what’s WOL up to today? You guessed it: a celebratory October 7 rally.

 

Coincidentally, the Hamasnik rally will be held outside City Hall to protest Mamdani’s not-quite-anti-Semitic-enough tenure in office so far. “Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement. He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality,” WOL’s X account announces.

 

WOL also complains about the city spending money on an anti-Semitism plan, money that WOL may actually see benefit from since it presumably will continue working with AAANY. It’s like watching the pretend “feuds” of professional wrestling.

 

None of this is new for WOL or its position in the progressive ecosystem: Its leader got a kid-gloves profile in the New York Times on the eve of the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks.

 

But what was supposed to be new—what was supposed to be a bright red line that even progressive officials insisted could not be crossed—is the koshering of rallies celebrating the Hamas slaughter.

 

When Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, denounced the October 8 rally attended by Chevalier, it was not exactly earth-shattering even if it was nice to see. But the anti-Zionist advocacy of those very same, highly influential Democratic Party figures over the course of the war put that denunciation in a different light. It turned out there was very little these electeds would object to. Celebrating the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust would at least mean these figures were capable of doing the absolute minimum.

 

That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. We should pay close attention to all of these politicians’ statements—or lack thereof—on the celebratory October 7 rallies today. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I anticipate comments defending the rallygoers’ free speech or some other irrelevant dodge, rather than what AOC and all the others really ought to say: These people are hijacking a day of Jewish mourning to root for Hamas. Because if that’s not over the line for progressives, then there is no line at all.

The Media Must Correct the Record on Terrorist-Journalists

By Shay Khatiri

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

 

The Israel Defense Forces this month released evidence tying 170 individuals often described as “journalists” to the armed wing of Palestinian terrorist groups. The evidence is difficult to dispute, including photographic evidence, military ID numbers, and unit names for the terrorist-journalists, who were all killed by Israel.

 

Now, the media have a moral duty to undo the damage they have inflicted on the Jewish state.

 

In January 2024, the Washington Post reported that an Israeli strike had killed Mustafa Thuraya and Hamza al-Dahdouh, identifying both as journalists. Thuraya was a contributor for Agence France-Presse (AFP), and al-Dahdouh worked for Al Jazeera, where his father used to be a bureau chief. The Post’s report on al-Dahdouh’s death is designed to pull at the heartstrings: “As veteran Palestinian reporter Wael al-Dahdouh lost his wife, several children, and his closest colleague to Israeli airstrikes and shelling, each blow was watched by an audience of millions — in Gaza today, there is little privacy to mourn the dead.” Then–Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to back the Post’s narrative, telling Al Jazeera, “I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague, Wael Dahdouh. I am a parent myself, I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he has experienced, not once, but now twice.”

 

But perhaps journalism does not pay enough to make a living anymore, because both Thuraya and Dahdouh had side hustles as military operatives for designated terrorist organizations.

 

Or take Ahmed Abu Mutair, who contributed to the German ZDF through the German company’s contact with Palestinian Media Production, as well as Hamas’s Production Headquarters. ZDF suspended its contract with the Palestinian media company last year after it became clear that the latter employed militants.

 

The examples are plenty — 170, to be precise. And the media’s failure to report on these terrorist-journalists has inflicted a twofold damage to Israel’s reputation.

 

First, by being contributors to prominent and smaller outlets, they helped shape — or manipulate — global opinion against Israel even before October 7, 2023. They further turned their audiences against Israel while “reporting” — if you can call it that — on the Gaza war. One must wonder how many such “journalists” still remain under contract by media outlets around the world to this day.

 

Second, the false accusation that Israel targets and kills journalists — who act solely in the capacity of a journalist — persists. The headline of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual report from February 2026 reads, “Record 129 press members killed in 2025; Israel responsible for 2/3 of deaths.” Mainstream media rely on these numbers, leading everyday citizens to think that, at best, Israel is careless about press freedom and, at worst, an enemy of it. The Guardian covered the report with a nearly word-for-word headline.

 

Bogus as these slanders are, people believe them and judge Israel based on them.

 

Digital technology encourages immediate reporting. In war, the first reports are often wrong, and so mistakes are inevitable. But correcting them is an ethical imperative for journalists. The Radio Television Digital News Association’s (RTNDA) code of ethics acknowledges this problem. “Facts change over time,” it pronounces. “Responsible reporting includes updating stories and amending archival versions to make them more accurate and to avoid misinforming those who, through search, stumble upon outdated material.” It adds that ethical journalists should own their errors, “correcting them promptly and giving corrections as much prominence as the error itself had.” Simply put, as political journalism at its best is about holding people accountable for misconduct, that should begin with the journalists themselves.

 

Media outlets that falsely reported that Israel had killed journalists should both report on the new revelation and update their past reporting. More broadly, media outlets in the free world should cautiously reconsider their reliance on local entities. RTNDA declares, “Deception in newsgathering . . . conflicts with journalism’s commitment to truth,” and it is evident that terrorist groups in Gaza successfully deceived foreign audiences through masquerading as journalists. It is necessary that media outlets take new measures to avoid repeating this mistake.

 

Those journalists and media outlets that erred by identifying terrorists as journalists should demonstrate professionalism by correcting their archives, explaining the editorial process that led to these mistakes, and adopting new measures to avoid doing the same in the future.

Tucker Carlson Receives a World War II Education

By Brittany Bernstein

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Since leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s talents as a debater have atrophied, likely due to a lack of exercise.

 

As an independent journalist, Carlson tends to interview people who share his conspiratorial worldview. In these lengthy conversations, Carlson will nod along as his guests proffer bizarre theories about how things really work, interjecting to amplify, but rarely to contradict, the latest conspiracy theory du jour.

 

All those friendly interviews with like-minded guests have left Carlson unprepared to deal with serious pushback from someone who knows his subject and is constitutionally incapable of being riled up by the veteran broadcaster’s routine.

 

Carlson met such a person in his most recent guest, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former member of Parliament who advocates building up the British military as a means of deterring further Russian aggression.

 

What began as a conversation about whether Britain should prepare for a possible conflict with Russia ultimately devolved into Carlson arguing that he “never understood” why Britain fought in World War II in the first place. Rees-Mogg’s country is worse off culturally and economically for having fought the war, Carlson asserts, refusing to alter course when confronted with Rees-Mogg’s evidence to the contrary.

 

Carlson lays out a theory of WWII that relies on the false premise that war with Hitler could easily have been avoided had allied leaders wished to do so. He implies that Hitler was simply correcting the wrongs done to Germany at the conclusion of World War I and had no design to occupy Great Britain.

 

“I’m certainly not here defending Hitler,” Carlson said before going on to argue that “the idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie.”

 

“The truth is that Germany had big parts carved out of it, including parts of Prussia.” He further argues that the U.K. had “nothing to do with” the Treaty of Versailles, which assigned the previously German provinces of Posen and Western Prussia to Poland. However, the U.K. played a key role in convening and negotiating the treaty. And despite Carlson’s suggestion that Hitler was interested only in overturning the Versailles Treaty, Hitler did not stop at Posen and the Danzig Corridor, but went on to occupy the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939.

 

Pressed on what would have become of the U.K. had it not to gone to war with Germany, Rees-Mogg points out that his country’s entire cultural inheritance, including its language, would have been trampled.

 

“We’d be speaking German,” Rees-Mogg says.

 

That outcome, Carlson suggests, occurred anyway by other means, namely mass migration.

 

“Who cares?” Carlson said. “There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.”

 

Educated in a milieu that prizes debate, Rees-Mogg ably deconstructs Carlson’s arguments and lays down a marker to show his audience where Carlson’s rhetorical moves were leading him.

 

“You’re verging on defending Hitler,” Rees-Mogg says. “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.”

 

Carlson replies: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi. I’m actually not a secret Nazi . . . and hardly a public Nazi.”

 

“I’m reassured,” Rees-Mogg deadpans in a subtly devastating blow.

 

The U.K. has its problems, as Rees-Mogg conceded, but hosting U.S. troops is not one of them. Carlson, however, seemed convinced that the U.S. posed a great threat to British sovereignty. Rees-Mogg responded by making the simple point that the U.K. and the U.S. have shared security interests, which are secured by having American troops on British soil.

 

But the arguments over WWII and its legacy were really a proxy for the debate over whether and to what degree the West should be supporting Ukraine in defending itself from Russian aggression.

 

Carlson, who has interviewed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and spoken favorably about Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, told Rees-Mogg he “never cared” that Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world.”

 

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Carlson’s latest interview shows he “needs help. Serious help.”

 

“When it seemed impossible for Toxic Tucker to descend deeper into the sewer here he goes opining that U.K. should have let Nazis take over,” he posted on X. “Forget that Hitler murdered 11 million people? I thought Tucker was against killing?”

 

Last year, National Review published a lengthy essay on Carlson’s “dark turn.”

 

After his firing from Fox News in 2023, Carlson established his self-named podcast and later hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper.

 

When Cooper appeared on the show, he argued that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

 

Weeks later, Carlson invited on Fuentes, who has called Hitler “awesome,” “right,” and “f***ing cool.”

 

Carlson behaved so deferentially in his interview with Putin in 2024 that the Russian dictator himself said he “did not get full satisfaction” from the interview.

 

“To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions,” Putin said. “I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way.”

‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.