Robert Lerman

Sports, Mideast, tweets are my own

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.

I believed it. I repeated it. For years.

Then I moved to France. And I met Jews.

Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.

What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.

Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.

I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.

I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.

Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.

That difference is not incidental. It is the point.

The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.

Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.

The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.

When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.

I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.

It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own.

I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition…

Read the rest of the essay on my Facebook page.

[AJ Edelman @realajedelman]

My heart is aching. Genuinely. Not just because I'm Jewish. Because I'm also American.
We have reached the point were the social contract between many elected officials and citizens is now selectively enforceable depending on whether you are Jewish or not.
This week a mob nearly stormed the Jewish daycare and synagogue at Park East in New York. Very simply: there is no excuse for EVER mobbing a daycare. There is no excuse EVER for mobbing a place of worship, regardless of it's affiliation. These are the two places where it has been universally acknowledged that individuals have a right to sanctuary and safety.
The mobs actions are disgusting and abhorrent to the American value system. But what has hit me hard is the response from the mayor of the city and many of his political peers, whose job it is to protect the citizens. He blamed an event at the synagogue.
This is not a "double standards" issue. It is a fundamental rejection of basic American values purely because of political antagonism borne from and contributing to a permission structure of explicit antisemitism. It is not okay. It is destructive to the social fabric.
The response to this mob is not a litmus test of your support for Israel. The response is a litmus test of upholding American values.
And the Mayor, and many of his peers absolutely failed that test. Because it was a Jewish daycare in a Jewish place of worship.

[Saul Sadka @Saul_Sadka]

This is rather to understate the situation, the actual statistics reveal the absurd evil of all the lies about Jews:

"About 1.81 million Muslims live in Israel.

Roughly 27,000 Jews live across all ~50 Muslim-majority countries today (mainly Turkey 14k, Iran 9k, Azerbaijan 7k; all Arab states <5k total).

100 years ago ~800,000-1 million Jews lived in those same MENA Muslim-majority lands." (As per @grok)

So a complete ethnic cleansing then. The Third Reich could only have dreamed.

[Majid 🦁☀️🇮🇱 @Majidx___]

I am still shaking from a soul-crushing Uber ride today in Dublin. It started with "Where are you from?" I said Iran, and the driver's face lit up as he thought he'd found a partner in his hate. He looked at me and said, "It must be crushing what the f***ing Israelis are doing to your country."
​The moment I pushed back, the moment I told him the truth, that I support Israel and want to see the regime in Iran fall, he erupted in pure rage.

​He began screaming about his uncle's high rank in the IRA, glorifying terror as a "success story" to justify the total erasure of Israel. To be trapped in a car with that level of brainwashed vitriol, being shamed and attacked for defending the Jewish people, is a burden I can't describe.

​Being Iranian is so incredibly taxing. You spend your life fighting the regime that destroyed your home, only to have strangers weaponise your identity to justify their antisemitism. To my Jewish friends: I see the hate you face. I will never stop standing with you, no matter how much it costs. 🇮🇱🦁☀️

[Russ Roberts @EconTalker]

Don't give the NYT your money. Don't subscribe. Don't play their puzzles. Don't pay for The Athletic. We can return if they return someday to their purported purpose of informing and not just proselytizing. (And yes I know about Walter Duranty. But what was once occasional is now the mode.)

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

https://t.co/qAeeVIk31m

[Robert Lerman @boblerman]

I assume you are coming to honor Shlomo. Too bad he is not alive to discuss the issues with you. I look forward to seeing you at the conference.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I am 100% against Israel's current policies but the recent events have convinced me more strongly than ever to go to a conference in Jerusalem in May (unless all flights are cancelled). Because the only way to maintain contact is to have a conversation. And boycotts, such as the academic boycott of Israel, produce the opposite effect. People who agree with you--or might agree with you--are excluded and left alone, and people who disagree with you feel empowered because they can brand all opponents with a broad brush of "enemies" (or whatever else is a convenient term).

[Brent Scher @BrentScher]

If you oppose a zero casualty op that takes out a terrorist dictator who a few weeks ago smoked 30k people in the street to keep power, you may be on the wrong side of freedom.

Guarantee the military community supports this. The oppressed Iranians support it. It’s great news.

[Danny Orbach @Mujakura]

A new important study by Mike Kelly, the former director of legal services in the Australian Army and an international lawyer, debunking (yet again) the Gaza genocide blood libel.

https://t.co/SEPU56CPIW

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

"The new standard by which Israel “committed genocide” in Gaza will validate hostage taking, the use of human shields, the engineering of humanitarian crises, and the manipulation of casualty figures as weapons. It will tell future adversaries that the fastest way to defeat a democratic military is not to fight it, but to endanger civilians until the defender is condemned for trying to stop the violence. In that world, urban areas become more lethal, not less. Civilians become more vulnerable, not more protected."

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @SanaELedene]

I waited a day before writing this because I needed clarity not rage:

More than 40,000 people have been killed. Over 200 of them were children.
HRANA documented more than 51,000 arrests. Many of those arrested are now at risk of execution.
People were hanged without real trials.
Wounded protestors were taken from hospital beds and shot at point-blank range.
Children were shot in the face.
Parents were killed in the streets. Infants died afterward from hunger and dehydration.

That is documented reality.

Then February 11 came, the anniversary of the Islamic Republic, and something else happened.
International media rushed in to sanitize it.
Foreign journalists from America, UK and Russia walked the same streets still stained with blood and packaged the regime as stable, legitimate, enduring.
The United Nations congratulated a government that is actively torturing teenagers and arresting high school students.

CONGRATULATED THEM.

You can tell yourself this is just geopolitics. You can tell yourself this is how the world works. But ask a more uncomfortable question:

Why protect a regime that shoots children?

The answer is not “peace.”
It is power politics. They call it “anti-colonialism.”
They frame it as resistance to Western dominance.
They sell it to Western audiences through guilt and moral posturing.
But underneath the slogans, this is about weakening America and the West. Iran is a strategic pillar for Russia and China.

Iran matters to Russia because it destabilizes the Middle East and distracts the West.
Iran matters to China because it weakens U.S. leverage in energy markets and global trade routes.
Keeping the Islamic Republic alive serves both Moscow and Beijing by draining American focus and moral authority.
Keeping that regime alive serves a larger objective: shifting global power away from the United States.

Iranians are expendable in that calculation. We are collateral.

If you care about America as a country, not as an idea on a campus poster, but as a real nation with real interests, this should terrify you.

Because the same networks, the same institutions, the same voices that can normalize mass executions abroad can normalize almost anything at home and convince you that is the reality.

When organizations can look at thousands of murdered civilians and still offer congratulations, you are watching the collapse of moral red lines. And once red lines disappear for others, they will disappear for you too.

Iran is not a distant tragedy. It is a case study in how brutality is reframed, and how power is protected.
History doesn’t repeat itself neatly. It mutates. It adapts. It studies its audience.
The question isn’t whether you feel sorry for Iranians.

The question is why people inside your information and diplomatic system consistently soften the image of regimes aligned with your adversaries?
What does it do to your security long-term?

[Oded Regev @oded_regev]

אי אפשר שלא להתחמק משני סיפורים שממלאים אותי בתחושת גאווה וסיפוק:

3 חודשים לתוך המלחמה של ה7 באוקטובר, @BillAckman החליט להשקיע דווקא בישראל ודווקא בזמן הזה, נטו מתוך מניעים ציוניים ורצון לתמוך בכלכלה הישראלית באחת התקופות הכי קשות שהיו פה, קרוב ל 100 מליון ש״ח בתמורה ל5% אחזקה בבורסה לניירות ערך בת״א.

ההשקעה הזו שווה היום כ 660 מליון ש״ח.

לעומת זאת, קרן העושר הנורווגית, החליטה במהלך 2025 למכור חצי מההחזקות שלה בישראל בזמן המלחמה, משיקולים אתיים (עלאק), וכתוצאה מהמהלך הזה הפסידה רווח הון קרוב למיליארד ש״ח (אילו לא הייתה מוכרת).

🇮🇱 🇮🇱 🇮🇱

[The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome @TheMossadIL]

https://t.co/zwfOC4qY3i

[Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson]

Not long ago I was flying back from Poland after my first visit to Auschwitz, and mulling the horror of what I had seen - the hills of children’s shoes and suitcases, the tonnes of human hair. What struck me was the sheer scale of the operation and the obvious truth that the Nazis had not done this on their own. The rounding up of innocent people and packing them into trains : this greatest ever act of mass murder was committed with the active complicity of huge numbers of European civilians in every occupied country.

On my plane back from Warsaw I happened to meet the daughter of an old colleague who told me that she no longer felt safe to wear a Star of David round her neck in London. I was furious and ashamed at the failures of policing and political leadership that have allowed her to feel so unsafe. Anti semitism is alive again in Britain, Europe and around the world. The old virus is awake. We must never be so arrogant and so conceited as to believe that our civilisation cannot fall again. We must remember the logic of this hateful prejudice and where it leads.

The sad truth is that today’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the most vital for decades.

[In Milei We Trust @InMilei]

President @JMilei on protectionism:
“Why should Argentinians pay more for goods they could get for less? It’s false that this destroys jobs.

When the economy opens up, some products will be cheaper and some jobs will be lost, but people will spend less money.

And what they save, they will spend in other sectors that will generate more jobs in other parts of the economy where people want to work and where they are more productive.” 🎯

[David Keyes @DavidMKeyes]

Live shot of massive protest at Harvard in solidarity with the people of Iran

[Robert Lerman @boblerman]

Important statement by an honest man who cannot be targeted as right wing. May this open the way for others on the left and center left to support the brave Iranian people against the regime.

[Van Jones @VanJones68]

What’s unfolding in Iran may be the most consequential and underreported story in the world. Free elections there won’t just be a human rights victory. The fall of the Ayatollahs will release tens of millions of people, who come from one of the most creative civilizations in history. Iranian culture has shaped art, science and innovation for centuries. Suppressing it hurts not just Iranians, but humanity as a whole.

[Van Jones @VanJones68]

What’s unfolding in Iran may be the most consequential and underreported story in the world. Free elections there won’t just be a human rights victory. The fall of the Ayatollahs will release tens of millions of people, who come from one of the most creative civilizations in history. Iranian culture has shaped art, science and innovation for centuries. Suppressing it hurts not just Iranians, but humanity as a whole.

[Senator Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff]

I stand with the people of Iran speaking out and risking their lives to demand a better life for themselves and their children.

The repressive and dictatorial Iranian regime must end its crackdown on demonstrators.

Nor can it blame the West for its own failures. These massive protests are born of the desire of the Iranian people to live in liberty and peace.

[Robert Lerman @boblerman]

@sc_cath @BrianCAlbrecht Congratulations. I made this point but without detailed data on the PBS News Hour in an interview with Paul Solman about 10 years ago. Thanks for your fine effort to document the point.