(((Bennett Ruda)))

Freelance Journalist for Jewish Press; Blog at Elder of Ziyon; Blog as Daled Amos; On Eretz Yisrael, Medinat Yisrael & Am Yisrael. Retweets≠Endorsements.

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Finally, after nearly three years, the UN admits what Israel was warning:

Hamas is hijacking aid.

[andrew mark bennett @acandidworld]

Has Rahm lost touch with reality? Since when has America stood blindly and silently behind the Israeli government without conditions, without demands, and without consequences?

[Sean Durns @SeanDurns]

It takes a stunning lack of self-awareness to be an American and lecture about “failing to convert military wins into strategic advantages” and having “no day-after plan” in the Middle East.

[Arnold Roth @arnoldroth]

The horror of the Battle of Sbarro, whose 25th anniversary is almost here, has morphed. As the father of one of its child victims, I hope for greater awareness of the sickeningly generous treatment given to the Hamas side as the disaster recedes into the past. The reality, that its central figure is a celebrity today in Jordan because of the lives she extinguished and that US law enforcement has still not managed to take her into custody despite the long-standing extradition treaty with the Jordan, ought to lead the lessons learned.

[Kosher Chutzpah @KosherChutzpah]

On August 9, 2001, the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem was busy with families and children eating pizza on a summer afternoon. A Hamas suicide bomber entered with a guitar case and detonated a device packed with nails.

The blast killed 15 people, including 7 children and a pregnant woman, and injured 130. Witnesses reported children thrown through windows onto the blood-covered street and a mother discovering her baby dead in a stroller.

Hamas had chosen this crowded civilian restaurant to maximize deaths among innocent Jews, especially children. They still honor the bomber as a hero.

This is the evil of Hamas. It didn't start on Oct 7.

[Jonathan Eric Lewis @LewisJonathanE]

Years ago, I used to write about ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East for numerous publications

Two things stuck with me from that experience:

(1) Left-of-center and liberal publications had next to no interest in the topic. I remember having a working lunch with an editor at the New York Times Magazine and he clearly had zero interest in the topic. He probably knew his readership all too well

(2) There is absolutely no real money to be made in writing about Assyrians, Copts, and Zoroastrians. The fact that this is the case is deeply shameful and demonstrates why so many craven academics gravitate toward Palestinianism. There is a lot of $$$ there. And yet the critics will maintain it's supporters of Israel who are doing it for money

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

You see, even when legacy media outlets cover Hamas' oppression of Palestinians, they always find a way to ultimately blame Israel

[dan linnaeus @DanLinnaeus]

Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, just responded to the New York Times’ ‘defense’ of Kristof’s piece, and it is only less scalding than it is cogently argued.

Full thread reprinted for convenience below:

<<
Enough with the evasion. The criticism was never that sexual abuse allegations should be ignored. The criticism is that you published grotesque, incendiary claims while leaning on sources and allegations that demanded extraordinary scrutiny, not sanctimonious hand-waving.

Kristof interviewed 14 people. He says that in each case, he corroborated the account through either a witness, a family member, a lawyer, a social worker, or a prior public statement by the same person. Those are not all the same thing.

In his original piece he admits that finding witnesses was hard; “more commonly” he spoke to people victims had confided in. “In other cases, it was not possible.”

So his new defense, i.e. they were all independently corroborated, does not hold up for 2 reasons:
1. it contradicts the process that he himself described last week; and
2. the things he describes (a prior statement for example) is not independent corroboration at all.

Note that he very carefully omits just how many actual witnesses he spoke to, or for which claims. And note that he never actually uses the words independent corroboration, because he can’t. He just lets you assume that is what he means because of course that should be the line.

“Deeply reported” is a made up phrase. “Corroborated when possible” is not corroborated enough to support claims of a “pattern of widespread” sexual violence.

Then there is the Euro-Med problem, and the deeper sourcing problem it represents. Kristof acknowledges the organization made statements in support of the October 7 attacks. His response is that he did not rely on Euro-Med alone. That is a dodge.

The question was not whether Euro-Med was his only source. The question was whether, knowing those statements, the Times found it appropriate to cite the organization’s data at all and whether the column disclosed that context to readers. It did not.

What readers weren’t told is that Euro-Med’s chairman has publicly called for “a million October 7ths,” is affiliated with Hamas, and has peddled claims that Israel harvests organs, allegations so discredited they serve as the old benchmark for anti-Israel fabrication.

Hold my beer, says Kristof. I have a dog-shaped bridge to sell you.

Nor were readers told that when Euro-Med itself, in 2024, pushed the claim about Israel training dogs to rape prisoners, the organization did not independently corroborate the allegation. It made it up.

Kristof cites the org that manufactured the claim as evidence for the claim itself. That is not independent sourcing. That is circular.

How is he a reporter?

But Euro-Med is not even the worst of it. Sami al-Sai, one of Kristof’s named sources and a central witness in the piece, celebrated October 7 the day after it happened, praising “heroic fighters” operating under the Hamas banner while Israelis were still identifying their dead.

He admitted to compiling lists of Palestinian prisoners for Hamas, work that Palestinian intelligence characterized as recruitment for a terrorist organization, and defended himself by arguing there was “no law that forbids journalists from working with political organizations.”

The Israeli Supreme Court, reviewing his detention petition, found credible evidence of his affiliation with Palestinian terror groups and denied his release. The Times presented him to readers as an independent freelance journalist. None of his background appeared in the column.

There is also the small matter of what al-Sai’s testimony actually said — and when. Shortly after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court. He complained about the quality of the food. He did not mention sexual assault. Not once.

By the time he spoke to B’Tselem months later, the account had grown to include guards inserting “something hard” into his body. By the time he spoke to Kristof, it had become dramatically more elaborate still — vivid, cinematic details entirely absent from every prior telling.

The pathetic defense piece acknowledges that its central sources “provided additional details over time” and offers this as reassurance. It should not be.

Details that emerge later, after a source has had time to develop a narrative and acquire an audience, are a reason for heightened scrutiny, not reduced scrutiny. AT THE VERY LEAST, address the issue.

And yet:

The Times never explains the discrepancies, or asks why the most extreme details appear only in their version, or why al-Sai never mentioned the assault to the court deciding whether to free him, the one forum where such an allegation would have been immediately consequential.

The same applies to Issa Amro. In a February 2024 Washington Post interview, Amro described being threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention. In the Times column, he appears as an established victim of sexual assault, part of a documented pattern of Israeli abuse.

That is not elaboration. That is a categorical shift — from threat to act — and the Times offers no explanation for it. No new evidence cited. No independent verification described. No acknowledgment that the two accounts differ.

Kristof never asks. Because Krisof doesn’t care.
The Olmert citation deserves its own treatment. Kristof quotes the former Israeli prime minister saying “Do I believe it happens? Definitely” and “There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”

What Kristof did not tell readers is that Olmert told Kristof himself that he had no specific knowledge of the abuses alleged.

After publication, Olmert issued a public statement:
“Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”

When a columnist’s own quoted source publicly accuses him of misrepresentation after publication, that is not a detail the Times can wave away by noting that editors found no errors. That is an error. That is the error. How the hell do you claim there was no error?

The dog rape allegation receives the most careful non-answer in the Times’ non-defense.

Kristof says the source confided his account to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel before speaking to him, that the Pinochet regime allegedly used dogs this way, and that peer-reviewed medical literature documents rectal injuries from canine penetration.

None of these things constitute corroboration. First and once again, an advocacy organization receiving an allegation is not independent verification of it.
Second, the existence of analogous atrocities in Chile does not establish that this atrocity occurred in Israel.

Third, the medical literature Kristof cites describes injuries resulting from human-initiated bestiality — not trained assault animals deployed as instruments of state policy.

These are non sequiturs dressed as sourcing. The Times calls this rigorous. It is, in fact, bullshit.

The timing question also has no real answer. The Times denies knowing in advance about the Civil Commission’s report documenting Hamas’s systematic sexual violence on October 7. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says otherwise.

Reporters I have spoken with at other news sites have shown me the embargoed copies and the timeline they were given. It boggles the mind to believe that every news outlet except the NY Times had this info.

The defense never addresses the most basic asymmetry. Kristof advanced a claim not that some Israeli guards sometimes behave illegally, which is true of every prison system, but that sexual violence is standard operating procedure, a systemic state policy.

That is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence.

Instead, the Times offers anonymous sources with no dates, no locations, no named perpetrators, and no footage reviewed despite the fact that Israeli prisons are extensively surveilled.

It offers named sources whose testimony evolved dramatically over time, whose prior accounts contradict the versions told to Kristof, and whose backgrounds the Times concealed from readers.

It offers an organization whose chairman advocates for Hamas and whose prior output includes claims the Times would never publish about any other country.

When asked to defend this, the Times answers a bunch of charges nobody made.

The criticism is not: “Never investigate abuse allegations against Palestinians.” It is: you published an explosive claim of widespread Israeli sexual violence, including unbelievable allegations, and you have not shown the evidentiary basis for making that claim at that scale.

Not: do Palestinians deserve dignity? Of course they do. Not: should abuse claims be investigated? Obviously. Not: can Israeli officials ever be criticized? Please.

The question is whether the Times had the evidence to tell millions of readers that Israel engaged in a pattern of widespread sexual violence, including some of the most lurid allegations imaginable. If it is “deeply reported” then show the work.

“Believe victims” is not a substitute for journalism. “Human rights groups say” is not a substitute for corroboration. “This is painful to discuss” is not a substitute for evidence.

And “Israel is trying to silence me” is not a response to the charge that you published a modern blood libel without meeting the burden that such an accusation requires.

The dodge is obvious. Kristof wants to move the conversation from “Did you prove this?” to “Why are you so upset that I asked?” Well that trick is over.

When you accuse a democratic state and its soldiers of systematic rape, you do not get credit for moral courage merely because the accusation is ugly. The uglier the allegation, the higher the obligation is to verify it.

Especially when the accusation lands in a world where Jews are already being demonized, and every unverified atrocity claim is instantly weaponized against Jewish students, businesses, synagogues, and communities.

The false symmetry with October 7 is perhaps the most morally obscene part. The obvious subtext is: if we report Hamas sexual violence, we must also report Israeli sexual violence with comparable force, otherwise we are hypocrites. No. That is not how evidence works.

The question is not whether every side can be accused of something awful, it is whether the evidence supports the charge.

Oct 7 sexual violence was tied to a mass invasion, murdered bodies, eyewitness accounts, forensic and investigative materials, and a terror organization that took videos and published them. The Times should really read that whole report.

Bottom line, Kristof’s answer is no answer at all. Nobody asked whether sexual abuse allegations should be investigated. Of course they should. The question is whether he had the evidence to accuse Israel of a widespread campaign of rape and sexual violence.

“Deeply reported” is not proof. “Corroborated when possible” is not proof. Advocacy-group claims are not proof. And moral throat-clearing is not proof. The uglier the accusation, the higher the burden.

Kristof keeps trying to turn a demand for evidence into a lack of empathy. That is the dodge, and it should not work. You do not get to publish a blood libel in the language of human rights and then call it courage when people ask for the evidence.

Kristof did not answer the criticism. He changed the subject. And when the accusation is this grave, changing the subject is not journalism, it is a confession that you are not really a journalist.
>>

[Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 @elderofziyon]

1/@Amnesty just proved it is antisemitic.
@AmnestyUK just promoted Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos because he calls Gaza a "genocide." The implication: Holocaust survivors know genocide better than anyone, so we should listen to them.
Fine. Let's follow that logic.

[Dexter Van Zile @dextervanzile]

https://t.co/69Ao8rRYNE

[Arnold Roth @arnoldroth]

Louise, whom I don't know, witnessed the massacre of Jewish children at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001. Among the murdered: my 15 year old daughter Malki. It's 100 days to the 25th anniversary. Time to recall that the Hamas woman who engineered the atrocity lives free and famous in Jordan today. She needs to be extradited to Washington where federal terror charges have waited for her since they were unsealed in 2017.

[Arnold Roth @arnoldroth]

A respectful suggestion to President @AlexStubb of Finland who is paying a visit to the kingdom that for years illicitly keeps my child’s killer, the @Sbarro bomber, obscenely safe from US justice.

Feel free to add your backing.
THREAD ➡

[Daniel Schatz @drdanielschatz]

On the streets of Stockholm, pro-Palestinian activists stage an obscene theatre: a man depicted as a Jew, wearing a kippah and drenched in blood, slits the throat of a Palestinian while the crowd chants “Crush Zionism.”

This is Europe, 2026.

[Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons]

Weird how she doesn’t mention the numerous Hezbollah flags at the funeral of this “journalist”

[Arnold Roth @arnoldroth]

As the father of Malki Roth, I know this case well. In a humiliating failure of American justice, Hamas icon #AhlamTamimi lives free and famous in Jordan, a one-woman terror incitement enterprise. Political asylum has nothing to do with it. It’s much worse.
Since 2017, Jordan simply asserts the extradition treaty of 1995, which binds Jordan, is invalid. The US govt disagrees but no one meaningfully pushes back. It’s that ongoing, demeaning failure alone that explains how Tamimi stays free.

[David Hazony @davidhazony]

Simply put: the regime is now a chicken with its head cut off

[Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 @elderofziyon]

@megynkelly @GoldsteinBrooke Explanatory note.
@megynkelly @GoldsteinBrooke

[Omri Ceren @omriceren]

The two brothers were Hezbollah terrorists. The story should be that the U.S. allowed a foreigner from a Hezbollah family to enter the country and eventually be naturalized, and he launched a terrorist attack against a synagogue.

[Joel Mowbray @joelmowbray]

🚨 EXCLUSIVE — Tucker Carlson claims that a sect of Judaism called Chabad is ultimately behind the military strikes on Iran.

This might be Tucker's most absurd claim to date.

And it's yet another shot at Trump.

Why? Well, @jaredkushner & @IvankaTrump have belonged to Chabad in DC, and Kushner helped lead the U.S. negotiations before the strike began last week.

As for Tucker's rant about Chabad — which he helpfully spelled for his viewers — it is beyond preposterous.

It's also dangerous — Chabad buildings and events have repeatedly been targeted by terrorists.

For example, the horrific massacre last December at Bondi Beach in Australia, where 15 were murdered, including Rabbi Eli Schlanger, was a Chabad event.

Tucker explained in tonight's monologue that the "real" reason for the strikes on Iran — meaning why Israel, in his telling, is forcing the U.S. to help topple the Mullahs — is to launch a "holy war" for the purpose of destroying the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem, in order to rebuild the Third Temple at the same site.

And who does Tucker claim is behind this insidious plot — and thus the military campaign he called "evil"?

Chabad.

As anyone active in Jewish life knows, Chabad focuses on outreach to its own local Jewish community, particularly to more secular Jews who don't feel connected to a standing synagogue.

But because Chabad is not known to almost anyone outside of the Jewish community, it makes for an easy target of dark conspiracy theories.

That's why Candace Owens has made Chabad into a villain in her increasingly unhinged rants.

But here is why this theory is as crazy as it is dangerous.

Chabad is a loosely-knit collection of synagogues (and related community/educational centers), each run by a Rabbi and his wife, who stay in a given community or neighborhood typically for life.

Far from being structured like, say, the Catholic Church, each Chabad House raises its own funds.

Tucker's "logic" for his outrageous allegations is that Chabad wants to bring about the building of the Third Temple, known in Hebrew as the beit hamikdash.

But... how does Chabad actually to bring about the building of the beit hamikdash?

Through acts of kindness. Truly by doing good deeds in order to "merit" God rebuilding the Jewish holy site.

In fact, Jews have for prayed for the rebuilding of the beit hamikdash — every single day — since shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple almost two thousand years ago.

It is literally part of Jews' daily prayers.

But it has nothing to do with tearing down an Islamic holy site, let alone starting a holy war.

It's a prayer asking God to return us to the elevated state of spirituality that existed during the time of the Temple, and more importantly, for Him to send "Moshiac," or the Messiah.

That Tucker would turn ancient Jewish prayers into some kind of sinister plot that is responsible for a very real and ongoing military campaign should be shocking.

Sadly, though, it's not.

But that doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous.

Real people and actual families go to Chabad synagogues, and little kids across the U.S. and in other countries attend Chabad schools and preschools.

It takes just one person already on the fringes to use this kind of rhetoric as justification for violence.

That's not speculation. It has happened again and again — just in recent years.

Yet Tucker is so blinded by his desire to take a swipe at Jared and Ivanka — because he knows he can't attack Trump directly — that he simply doesn't care.

[Arnold Roth @arnoldroth]

My wife and I wonder what it is about the stark failure of justice in the case of our American Jewish child Malki’s murder in a Hamas atrocity that arouses such cold indifference among advocates for Jewish causes like those we address below. Any suggestions?