Share this message and video so that everybody can applaud the Israelis who once again selflessly stepped forward and saved others. 🇮🇱
Today I am reminded of Danny Lewin, believed to have been the first person killed in the September 11 attacks. 🇺🇸Danny was a former Israeli commando and co-founder of the successful high-tech startup Akamai.
Danny was killed by the hijackers on that fateful day, possibly while trying to stop them and save the people on board.
Today, according to emerging reports, Danny’s spiritual descendants helped subdue a suspected terrorist mid-flight on a flydubai plane from Dubai to Tel Aviv. They subdued the attacker, seemingly saved the pilot, and helped enable the plane to land safely in Saudi Arabia.
This is a message to the Israel haters.
Israelis grow up with agency. When there is danger, they run toward it to save other people.
We love life. The terrorists are a death cult.
We still need to find out exactly who was involved and whether anyone sent them. Any connection to Iran or a terrorist organization remains unconfirmed.
But one thing is clear: the most life-loving people, with the highest sense of agency—people willing to risk their own lives to save other people—are Israelis.
We have now raised generations of high-agency people who make the world a better place.
And so, if you hate Israel or malign Israel, what you are really maligning is high-agency people who love life and one day will likely save your life or civilization.
Am Yisrael Chai.🇮🇱
It is one thing to merely see oneself as a victim. It is another to objectively be a victim.
Israelis were objectively victims of October 7th—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Any suggestion to the contrary is anti-Israel activism camouflaged as journalism.
He also pushed for me to get fired at MSNBC…why? Because he disagreed with me on some topics? #BigBaby By the way, unlike Ruffalo, I have actually done specials on Clean Water, and I have actually GONE to war zones and covered them and, for a living, I don’t just memorize what others write :) Finally, I asked Ruffalo to meet me for coffee and talk and he never responded. #ScaredyCat :) As for great humanitarian…I have yet to see him at an earthquake disaster (I have been to many) or tornados (I have been to many.) BTW, I never say Mark in Israel right after Oct 7 when I was there nor did I see him at a screening of the Hamas 47 minute tape where they brag about killing and raping.
In a new interview, Hamas leader Osama Hamdan poses a grotesque question. He asks whether Israel will survive past its eightieth anniversary in 2028 or collapse under supposed military failures. He claims Israeli thinkers, citizens, and soldiers are “screaming” that they are being bled and cannot win decisively, and he frames this as proof that Hamas is marching toward victory. He then openly glorifies the martyrdom cult of his Islamist fascist organization, declaring that Hamas does not mind if women and children are killed so that others can “live in dignity.” Anyone can run the clip through translation software and see it for themselves.
Then ask a few simple questions: Should these people ever govern Palestinians in Gaza? Ask the pro-resistance students, journalists, activists, leftists, and self-described pro-Palestine voices whether this value system can deliver freedom and prosperity for Palestinians? Who shattered the ceasefire on October 7 and carried out the single worst day of violence against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, triggering the worst catastrophe in modern Palestinian history?
Hamas must be annihilated, destroyed, erased, and never allowed to rebrand or rehabilitate itself. It is astonishing that some policymakers are discussing letting the group run in Palestinian elections this November when every senior figure in this jihadist organization should be tried for crimes against humanity and barred permanently from political or administrative life. Gaza needs full de-Hamasification to eliminate any trace of an ideology that is immune to incentives, immune to reform, and lethal to Palestinian hopes for a future worth living.
Mark Rufallo is joined by his Marvel friends Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Don Cheadle, and many more in a petition to free none other than Marwan Barghouti, former head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.
The signatures keep coming: Ian McKellen, Tilda Swinton, Sting, Annie Lennox, Richard Branson, Margaret Atwood, Javier Bardem, Gary Lineker.
None of them mention what he was convicted of. I do, in the video.
I’ve spent years calling out Ben Gvir and Smotrich for their hateful rhetoric. I don’t give my own side a discount, so I’m not giving one to a man convicted of five murders, including one at a bat mitzvah.
“But he’s the only alternative to Hamas”— a movement offering a choice between a mass murderer and a murderer of five is telling you something. So is every celebrity who signed without reading the verdict.
So let me get this straight….
*Germany* is the biggest donor to a group that employs Hamas terrorists, and teaches Palestinian kids to hate Jews.
Germany??? 😬
Zohran Mamdani: “I can’t support any state that privileges one religion.”
The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Article 2: “Islam shall be the State religion of Pakistan.”
In May 2016, 15-year-old Karinya “Yaya” Chen was in hospice care in Austin, Texas after years of fighting cancer. She had tickets to see Florence The Machine, but by the night of the concert, she was simply too sick to go.
So the people at Hospice Austin reached out to the band.
And Florence Welch came to her.
Florence and guitarist Rob Ackroyd walked into Karinya’s room and gave her the concert she couldn't make it to. They sang “Shake It Out” and “Dog Days Are Over,” with Karinya singing and harmonizing right alongside them.
A few months later, Karinya lost her battle with cancer at just 15 years old.
But for one afternoon, none of that seemed to matter.
There was just a young girl, one of her favorite singers, a guitar, a room full of people who loved her... and music.
Sometimes the smallest act of kindness can become one of the biggest moments of someone's life.
This is what being human is supposed to look like.🙏
Great @jpodhoretz piece in the @nypost “what began ironically as Fun City and is now Habibi City may soon turn into Pogrom City.” https://t.co/SXtlccfWmC
How Zohran Mamdani could legally take privately owned apartment buildings in New York?
The answer is that he does not need to send police officers to confiscate the deeds. That would provoke an immediate constitutional challenge. A more sophisticated socialist strategy is to make private ownership economically impossible - then arrange for the “voluntary” transfer of distressed property to institutions favored by the government.
Look at the sequence already taking shape.
First, freeze the owner’s principal source of revenue.
Mamdani appointed six members of the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, which subsequently imposed a 0% increase on both one- and two-year leases covering approximately one million rent-stabilized apartments. Insurance, utilities, taxes, labor and repair costs may continue rising, but the permitted rent does not.
A rent freeze may sound compassionate when viewed only from the tenant’s side of the ledger. Economically, however, it compresses the owner’s ability to maintain the building - and therefore helps create the very deterioration that the government can later punish.
Second, turn City Hall into a tenant-organizing operation.
Mamdani’s administration is not merely informing tenants of their rights. It has announced that it will legally recognize tenant unions, help tenants organize and bargain collectively, let tenants schedule certain inspections and coordinate “roof-to-cellar” enforcement days with organized buildings. It will also investigate every heat complaint separately instead of consolidating multiple complaints concerning the same condition.
His administration has now launched “Talk to Tenants”, sending city staff and volunteers into selected neighborhoods to encourage organizing. It even produced an official documentary celebrating a tenant union and announced city-sponsored screenings intended to inspire similar campaigns elsewhere.
These are not accusations from conservatives. They appear in City Hall’s own announcements.
Third, identify the property-owning class - and place political targets on its back.
In July, Mamdani’s Department of Finance published a searchable assessment-roll addendum containing nearly 960,000 properties, together with owners’ names, addresses and property values, identifying them as potentially subject to his new pied-à-terre surcharge.
It was doxxing in the practical political sense: City Hall gathered the information into one searchable government list and associated those owners with a politically charged campaign to “tax the rich”.
The list was also extraordinarily overinclusive. The city reportedly sent actual warning notices to approximately 17,000 addresses, while a former city finance commissioner estimated that only about 2.5% of the properties appearing on the published roll met the statutory threshold. Some plaintiffs claimed that their primary residences had been wrongly included, forcing them to prove to the government that their homes were not taxable second residences.
This was not merely an administrative inconvenience. In a political environment where owners are increasingly described as exploiters, speculators and enemies of tenants, publishing their names, addresses and property values paints targets on their backs - for activists, harassment campaigns and coordinated pressure.
A New York judge has now temporarily halted the rollout, ordered the city to remove the list and barred further action on the notices pending an August 31 hearing. Mamdani’s administration says it will appeal. The court intervention followed a lawsuit by homeowners challenging the process.
This episode matters because it reveals the governing mentality: property owners are not treated as citizens entitled to neutral administration and due process. They are treated as a class to be identified, exposed, burdened and compelled to prove their innocence.
Fourth, weaponize enforcement.
Mamdani’s “Rental Ripoff Report” contains 23 actions expanding inspections, litigation and penalties against what the administration calls “repeat-offender” landlords. Some landlords unquestionably deserve enforcement; tenants should never be forced to live without heat, functioning elevators or protection from vermin.
But that is precisely why the mechanism is politically powerful. A system created to punish genuinely negligent owners can also be expanded, selectively enforced or coordinated with activist pressure. The same administration can help organize the complainants, schedule the inspections, define the enforcement priorities, issue the violations and litigate against the owner.
City Hall becomes organizer, investigator, prosecutor and political beneficiary - all at once.
Fifth, deprive the owner of effective control.
New York’s existing 7A program permits a court-appointed administrator to take over the operation of a privately owned building, collect its rent and use that money for repairs. Technically, the landlord may retain the title. Practically, the owner can lose control of the building and its revenue while remaining surrounded by debt, penalties and legal obligations.
That distinction is central to the strategy: the government does not initially need to confiscate the property. It only needs to make the deed increasingly worthless.
Freeze the income. Increase the compliance burden. Encourage rent strikes and collective action. Accumulate violations, legal expenses and penalties. Publicly identify the owners. Remove operational control. Eventually the owner faces foreclosure, bankruptcy or a sale under extraordinary pressure.
Then comes the final stage, which Mamdani has already announced publicly:
“For buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards”.
And who are these “responsible stewards”? According to Mamdani: community land trusts, nonprofit organizations or the tenants themselves. His Block by Block plan explicitly connects intensified enforcement against landlords with transferring distressed buildings out of conventional private ownership.
This is why his appointment of Cea Weaver matters. Weaver has previously described private homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy”, promoted treating property as a “collective good” rather than an individual one and spoken favorably about seizing private property. Although she later expressed regret over some of that rhetoric, Mamdani knew her record and placed her in charge of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
Mamdani himself previously told a Young Democratic Socialists conference that socialists must remember their “end goal of seizing the means of production”. Housing is now one of the largest concentrations of privately owned productive capital within his reach.
The result would not be formal Soviet-style nationalization right away. Modern socialism is often more legally sophisticated. Ownership can be transferred into a network of subsidized nonprofits, community land trusts and “community-controlled” organizations that remain formally independent while depending upon government money, regulatory favor and political alliances.
That creates more than a housing portfolio. It creates permanent institutional power: organizations controlling billions of dollars in real estate, employing organizers, influencing neighborhoods and mobilizing tenants whose homes depend upon the continuation of the same political system.
It has not yet been proven that every targeted violation will be manufactured, or that transferred properties will directly finance DSA campaigns.
But the broader mechanism is no longer hypothetical. Mamdani has delivered the rent freeze, mobilized municipal resources for tenant organizing, expanded coordinated enforcement, published an enormous government list identifying property owners and openly promised to transfer distressed private buildings to nonprofits and collective-ownership structures.
Ccommunism not longer arrives in twenty-first-century New York as “We are confiscating your building.”
It arrives through a sequence of administrative decisions:
“Your rent is frozen”.
“Your tenants have been organized”.
“Your name and address are on our list”.
“Your building has been targeted for inspection”.
“Your violations are accumulating”.
“A court-appointed administrator will collect your rent”.
“You can no longer afford to own this property”.
“Fortunately, we have found a responsible nonprofit willing to take it from you”.
The deed changes hands only at the end.
By then, the seizure has already happened.
America is ultimately a centrist nation. The vast majority of us do not want to be represented by people who were celebrating on September 11, January 6, or October 7.
I try to stay apolitical in my profession of war studies, I really do, but the anti-Israeli grift in American politics is sick. Even if you don't care about Israel. Have no clue about the benefits of the Israel-American relationship (there are many). Hate to hate. To see political candidates make anti-Israel one of their primary political positions, in the United States, and get votes for that, to play on ignorance about Israel, the region, the different fronts rather than real domestic issues like economy, safety, opportunity or foreign policy issues like great power competition, terrorism, energy, national security, waste/fraud/abuse in the international institutions. Rather, to play on clickbait lies rather than hard truths. It is sick and continues to put American jewish citizens, communities in danger.