Bryan Neft

Native Burgher. Love music. Foodie. Attorney, curmudgeonly parent. Love whistleblowers. Improving the profession of law. Opinions are mine only

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

@billpeduto @ACE_Fitzgerald @JewishFedPGH We need a day in Allegheny County of EVERYONE wearing kippa in support of the Jewish community and opposed to anti-semitism. #loveisstrongerthanhate #memorialday

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

@mollyhartman @jongeeting Congratulations!

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

There’s a long history of trying to destroy the Jewish state with tank columns and air forces. Those efforts failed. And then there were ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons program, and thus far, thankfully, those have failed, too.

But this has much less to do with Israel and the Jews than it has to do with us—with America.

All of the information that we’re getting—or a large part of the information that our young people are getting through TikTok and through Al Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles—comes from information sources whose incentive structures we’re not scrutinizing enough. And these are America’s geostrategic enemies.

This is the Chinese Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are looking around the world and saying to themselves, “Well, America is a very serious enemy. They have the biggest, most powerful army and economy the world has ever known. But who’s going to stand with America in the geostrategic conflict that’s coming?” And when they look across the aisle, I don’t think they’re so afraid of the Belgians, the Spaniards, or the Irish.

Those people have proven themselves to be prior empires with prior histories and pedigrees of glamour. They have shown themselves unwilling to stand up and fight for Western civilization.

But there is one ally that America has that votes with America over 90% of the time on the international stage at the United Nations, that has proven itself not only willing but able to fight and win the wars of the 21st century against enemies that are not just much bigger but supposedly much stronger than it is—and that’s Israel.

So is it any surprise that a huge proportion of the information our young people are getting on social media, on the internet, and through their news sources—information that comes from the Chinese Communist Party on TikTok and through Al Jazeera—is negative about that one ally?

These geostrategic enemies of the United States are desperately trying to peel off America’s fighting allies before the geostrategic conflict comes.

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

“Free Palestine.”

I grew up on those words.

In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.

In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.

Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.

Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.

What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.

Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.

In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?

Palestine is still first.

So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.

So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.

And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?

You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.

Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.

📍#Israel

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

This is a long post responding to the crap the NY Times put out today about supposed sexual abuse in Israeli prisons.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped.

So much has already been said. What more is there to say?

My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes.

I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of.

And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another.

Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?

I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here.

But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten?

So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know.

This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve.

Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies.

Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it.

And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report.

A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment.

But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation.

So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors.

No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?

A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else.

And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews.

Yes, alas, it really is that simple.

But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't.

All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved.

"But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere.

And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.

Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.

And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests.

And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering.

And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.

It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much.

But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real.

It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow.

And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners.

Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them.

And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war.

Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.

No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning.

But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what.

We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow.

And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world.

And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania.

I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this.

Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground.

So what do we do now?

Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown...

And we soldier on.

We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children.

We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves.

Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on.

Because fuck them all.

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

🔥 BEST VIDEO OF THE YEAR
Rare moment of truth at the UN from brave Kuwaiti dissident @JJJuraid, invited by UN Watch:

Mr. Chair,

I heard the term “colonizers.” But who are the real colonizers? A Jewish Kingdom ruled in Judea for a thousand years. We, the Arabs, took this land.

Who Arabized Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians and Amazighs? It was us, the Arabs.

So why does the council enshrine a lie by keeping a permanent agenda item on Palestine, while ignoring the indigenous heart of Israel returning home?

Let us be clear about who is actually defending our sovereignty. Today, Israel is a fighter for peaceful nations, freeing Gaza from Hamas and saving Iranians from the Islamic Republic.

What Israel is doing to the IRGC — stopping a genocidal regime from acquiring nuclear weapons — is a gift to humanity.

There are 57 Islamic countries and only one Jewish state, Israel. Despite the ongoing hateful desire to eliminate it, Israel has not only survived, it has thrived.
I don't believe in miracles, but this is one.

So I ask the UN: when will you end the ritual of condemning Israel?

Is it not time, instead, to learn from Israel? How to defeat terror, defend free societies, and pursue peace.

Thank you.

[Matthew Nouriel @MatthewNouriel]

With South Africa’s sugar daddy out of the picture this whole case is crumbling.

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

My latest:

The Iran Question Is All About China
Why Operation Epic Fury Is the Opening Act of the Indo-Pacific Century

The Iran question was never about Iran. Remove the Islamic Republic from the equation and China loses its pawns for a Taiwan contingency. Leave it in place and the Middle East remains what Beijing designed it to be: a second front that Washington can never afford to leave and can never afford to stay in. Trump's strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran.

https://t.co/sDBKn77CYY

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

Truth.

[Jonah Platt @JonahPlatt]

If you only watch 1 video about Israel, Palestine, and the Jews, it should be this.

PART 1🎙️ Stream the full monologue here:
https://t.co/3D0ZQ5RL5K

[Jonah Platt @JonahPlatt]

If you only watch 1 video about Israel, Palestine, and the Jews, it should be this.

PART 1🎙️ Stream the full monologue here:
https://t.co/3D0ZQ5RL5K

[Philly Sports Sufferer @mccrystal_alex]

Homer Simpson has taken over Philadelphia

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

https://t.co/5qLpXD35UO

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

The Great Hospital Con: Doctors Without Borders (MSF) pulled out of the al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, and just yesterday explained its decision. It has said exactly what I have repeatedly talked about for over a year and shared personal examples of friends of mine being imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured within various facilities inside the hospital from Hamas's intelligence and security services. MSF is two years late to this recognition but it is ultimately confirming what even a child in southern Gaza could have told the organization or the NYT, Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera and countless others had they bothered to ask - which is that Hamas has literally turned Gaza's three main hospitals into headquarters for security, ministerial, and administrative operations.

When I said this time and again, people would yell and scream how I was irresponsibly justifying Israel’s targeting of the hospital, even as the same people would not utter a word about their favorite terrorist fascist organization jeopardizing the safety of medical facilities for two years of the deadly war.

Congratulations “pro-Palestine” activists: you have been conned by your beloved resistance organization which has caused the death of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians by its conduct and behavior.

Get Hamas out of Gaza’s hospitals now!

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

a pre-valentine’s dinner with my QTPi. @usmobile

#hyeholde

[Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון @dannydanon]

The UN Secretary-General @antonioguterres sends a letter extending his “warmest greetings” to the ayatollahs in Tehran as they shoot protesters and execute dissidents.

Instead of standing with the Iranian people who are being brutalized in the streets, Guterres chooses to legitimize a regime built on fear, oppression, and terror.

The UN under Guterres has embraced the ayatollahs and has turned its back on the Iranian people who are fighting for their freedom. Simply shameful.

[David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe]

A desecration and a final proof, were any needed, of fathomless depravity. https://t.co/7QfNVCAB8B

[Bryan Neft @burghlaw]

@RickyReports Dauphin County, too, has both. Sheetz came first and then Wawa.

[David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe]

'Should' or not, this is a terrific, powerful ad-

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

Well that ends the debate on deaths in Gaza.

Hamas itself is admitting that 80% of casualties were combatants.

There was never a genocide.

You have been lied to and manipulated.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

In October 2022, Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh was found murdered and decapitated in Hebron. He was 25. He had fled to Israel earlier because he feared being killed for being gay, and he was trying to rebuild a life while stuck in legal and social limbo. Then he ended up back in the place he feared most, and he was butchered.

This is not “culture” and it is not “complex.” This is a Palestinian society problem. A society that treats honor like a weapon and treats difference like a crime will keep producing bodies. And the most telling detail is not only the murder. It is the cowardice afterward. The refusal to say the motive out loud. The whisper network that everyone knows, and everyone pretends not to know. The message to every LGBT Palestinian is simple. Your life is negotiable.

And here is the western hypocrisy. The loudest LGBTQ organizations on earth can mobilize in hours when Israel is the villain of the week. But when a Palestinian is slaughtered by Palestinians for being gay, suddenly it is quiet. Suddenly it is “we need more context.” Suddenly nobody is demanding names, trials, sentences, and real protection inside Palestinian society. If you claim to fight for LGBT lives, then fight for their lives everywhere, not only where it flatters your politics.

If you want to be taken seriously, stop treating Palestinians like children with no agency. Demand accountability. Demand arrests. Demand convictions. Demand an end to the social incitement that makes this predictable. Or admit the truth. For too many activists, Ahmad was not a cause. He was an inconvenience.

[Henshi @HenshiG]

From the Jewish Insider.

Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, uses the Super Bowl as a platform for his latest 30-second ad addressing antisemitic bullying. With an estimated 100-plus million viewers, the advertisement—titled “Sticky Note”—depicts a Jewish student being bullied in a school hallway. As he removes his backpack, a sticky note reading “dirty Jew” is revealed. A classmate steps in as an ally, placing a blue square sheet over the abusive note and saying, “Do not listen to that.”

“I know how it feels,” a Black student tells his Jewish classmate. The spot ends with a statistic: “2 in 3 Jewish teens have experienced antisemitism.”

Source: Haley Cohen reports at https://t.co/RGiOxL8rUN