They accuse Israel of all the things they want to justify doing to Israel and the Jewish community. It’s the same playbook used by Islamists and Nazis in the 30s: stoke hatred through lies and distortions till it spills over into the streets and erupts in violence. This has a name in genocide studies: accusation in a mirror.
Capturing institutions to legitimate this inversion is key for the strategy to work. In the Rwandan genocide Hutu Power media accused Tutsis of planning the extermination the Hutu leadership was itself preparing. The accusation was deliberately designed as a license to exterminate Tutsis.
So who are they today? A convergence of Islamic fundamentalists opportunistically amplified and instrumentalized by Russia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, China and North Korea through anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Western narratives that often traffic in outright dehumanization and hatred.
Why? To counter the West. Yes, it’s a complex tangled web of interests and influence operations, but no, it is not actually complicated. The Jewish community is an easy target, demographically only fifteen and a half million globally, with 7.2 million Jewish Israelis — they are easy to overwhelm and saturate with lies:
The High Level Military Group of former Nato and Western generals submitted an Amicus brief to the International Criminal Court saying they had visited the theater of operations in Gaza and interviewed commanders and soldiers. They found that the precautionary measures the Israel defense forces took set new standards that they believe western militaries are not in a place to meet.
The Chair of Urban Warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point has embedded five times with the IDF since October 7 and issued his findings publicly that the IDF goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid excessive harm to uninvolved civilians. He saw missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby, and Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.
Numerous high-information findings such as these have been buried in the media and overrun by hostile information saturation. Western democracies are vulnerable to these cognitive warfare strategies aimed at effecting alliance and sociopolitical fractures because of free speech and civil rights laws.
Shadow financing networks fund captured or sham non government organizations and political committees across the West, many of them working in alignment with Ikhwanist streams via Qatar and Turkey, Deobandi networks via Pakistan and their transnational Islamist networks.
There may be no conspiracy in the strict analytical sense of coordination and direction at the behest of a group of people, or we may yet uncover deeper layers that indicate just that. Either way the net effect is the same.
These state scale influence operations are stoking hatred as an institutional strategy, sometimes under the veneer of pseudo sophisticated think tank and research output, often amplified through inorganic ‘Grass Roots’ activism and protest movements, and all of it amplified through captured media operations and social media influence networks.
The result is the most intense wave of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment witnessed since the pre-holocaust era. What this portends has historically spelt disaster for much more than the Jewish people.
This is not something that will stop organically. It is also not something that will simply consistently intensify. Rather, these things tend to ebb and flow organically with inorganic amplification campaigns over the course of years before an opportunistic event tips the scale and information war sparks urban anarchy where innocent blood is spilled.
History is littered with warnings. Ignoring them is not an option if we wish to avoid the dark consequences that attach to these historical patterns.
@NYCMayor Why are we dealing with this? How come our tax dollars are supporting this? This man is so wrong he is not even wrong! He is an insult to the word wrong! Wrong implies an attempt to be right and he is not even bothering!
🚨If you’re in American, this should alarm …
Let’s deal in facts…
Let me be very clear…
America is not up for conversion…
not up for replacement…
and not up for negotiation.
This country runs on the Constitution.
Not on foreign ideology…
not on religious law…
not on anything that tries to override what built this nation.
You want to live here?
Then you live under it.
All the way.
No exceptions.
No parallel systems.
No backdoor attempts to reshape this country into something it was never meant to be.
And if anyone… from anywhere… is pushing violence, coercion, or trying to replace American law…
You don’t belong in positions of power.
Period.
This isn’t hate.
This is order.
And Americans are waking up to it.
#SilentMajoritySpeaks #AStoneGroove
The fate of American Jews right now depends on the outcome of the war. If the war goes smoothly—if Iran is quickly defeated and the situation stabilizes—then it could be narrated as a success. But if it turns into a disaster, it may produce the most dangerous situation for American Jews to emerge in decades.
What we are already seeing is the emergence of a “stab-in-the-back” myth—the kind of narrative that figures like Tucker Carlson and others were already promoting in the aftermath of the Iraq War: the claim that American wartime humiliations were the fault of the Jews.
Wars have historically been moments when anti-Jewish violence escalates dramatically: the Holocaust during World War II, the Ukrainian pogroms during the Russian Civil War, the Farhud in Iraq, and many other examples.
For that reason, it is absolutely crucial right now that Jewish organizations launch a full-scale campaign against antizionism, rather than simply affirming the “U.S.–Israel alliance,"which discredits the fight against anti-Jewish hate by turning it into a partisan political position.
New York wants to ban you from asking AI a question
You're sitting on the bathroom floor at 11pm.
Your kid is screaming. The rash is spreading up his arm. You're holding your phone with one hand and holding him with the other.
You don't have insurance. You don't have $400 for a doctor. The urgent care closed an hour ago.
You're Googling symptoms and getting ten different answers from ten sketchy websites.
So you open Claude. You describe the rash. It tells you it's probably contact dermatitis. Try hydrocortisone cream tonight. See a doctor if it spreads or your kid gets a fever.
Your hands stop shaking. You sleep.
Kathy Hochul wants to take that away from you.
You're the dad who works 3 shifts. You come home and there's a paper taped to your door. You read it three times and still don't understand what it means.
You have seven days.
You call a lawyer. $317 an hour. You have $40 in your checking account and two kids asleep inside an apartment you might lose by Friday.
You open AI. In ten seconds you find out the notice isn't even legal. It tells you your rights. It tells you what to file. It tells you what to say.
New York wants to make that illegal.
You're the kid from the small town who left the farm for your first job in the city.
Your employer puts a contract in front of you. Non-compete. Arbitration clause. Words you've never seen before. Your parents never signed anything like this. They worked with their hands.
You ask AI to explain it in plain English. It does. For free. At midnight.
New York wants to make that illegal too.
Senate Bill S7263. Bans AI from giving "substantive responses" about medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, and more.
Not banning AI from pretending to be your doctor.
Not banning AI from writing prescriptions.
Banning AI from answering your questions.
North Korea controls what you can read. New York wants to control what you can ask.
So you have to go back to paying $317 an hour for a lawyer. $400 for a doctor visit. $200 for a therapist.
Money you don't have. Money that goes right back into the pockets of the people who wrote this bill.
Who does this actually hurt?
It's not the guy on Park Avenue. He has a doctor on speed dial. He has a lawyer on retainer. He has a therapist he sees on Tuesdays.
It's the single mom in the Bronx with no insurance and a sick kid at 11pm. It's the grandma who just got served papers she can't read. It's the first-gen college kid signing a contract nobody in his family has ever seen before.
For the first time, a single mom had access to the same information as the guy on Park Avenue. Not better care. Not a free lawyer. Just answers. Just enough to know what questions to ask.
You want to know why? Follow the money.
Any trial lawyer in New York can sue AI companies and collect fees when they win. It's a lawsuit printing press.
$377 million was spent lobbying Albany last year. A record.
The healthcare lobby alone spent $11.5 million. Trial lawyer PACs pumped $4.7 million into New York politicians. Governor Hochul took over $545,000 from them personally.
One company gave her office $300,000 in donations and got $400 million in Medicaid contracts back.
Every $317/hour law firm that doesn't want you getting free answers. Every hospital billing $400 for a ten-minute visit. The entire industry that profits from keeping you confused.
The lobbyists write the bill. The politicians file the bill. The lawyers profit from the bill.
And the single mom in the Bronx loses the only help she could afford.
In the 1800s they called public libraries dangerous because poor people had unsupervised access to books.
In 1910 they shut down Black medical schools to "protect patients."
Every time the gates start to crack open for regular people, someone with a billing rate shows up to weld them shut.
They want you poor and stupid. And they'll call it consumer protection.
And the kid with the rash at 11pm? He goes back to ten sketchy websites and a mom who can't sleep.
New York shouldn't be North Korea.
Here’s how this Super Bowl ad should’ve gone:
We stand tall, we keep building, and we bring light to the world.
Hate against any group is wrong.
Hate against Jews has exploded over the last decade.
Builders channel the hate and resentment from others as FUEL to make us stronger.
We refuse to be Victims.
We are Protagonists in our own lives.
Builders - of all religions, ethnicities, races and nationalities - join to Build a Better World Together.
Builders turn darkness into light
#BeABuilder @BuildersMvt
A friend on X astutely observed, "more Jews agree on this ad being cringe than agree on religious doctrine, Israel, or what type of bagel to order."
Bret Stephens, one of the great minds, orators, and wordsmiths of our time, responded with a brilliantly-worded but foolish approach, imploring Jews to suddenly start "ignoring" antisemitism and focusing on building Jewish communities from within, instead.
Yes, it sounded absolutely beautiful. It was well-articulated and almost poetic in its message of hope.
But it was wrong, dangerous, and foolish.
The Nova attendees were beautifying and celebrating a Jewish holiday in Israel. Those innocent, beautiful young people didn't have the option of going to war. Only one side needs to choose war and hate in order for war and hate to go uncontested and end in catastrophic tragedy.
So, no, Bret Stephens, there is no number of high-quality Jewish Schools, Shuls, or communities that will stop antisemites from trying to blow them up on the extreme end and harassing its people and members on the "peaceful?" end. It cannot simply be "ignored."
The problem obviously isn't that we shouldn't be fighting antisemitism.
We should all agree that it would be imbecilic to say, "you know, in retrospect, we should have built more shuls and schools in 1930s Germany to really counter what Hitler was trying to do."
Of course this is a ludicrous proposition. Hitler should have been fought and opposed. Harder, much smarter, and definitely sooner than he ever was. It was an historic error whose consequences have no parallel.
And it is exactly the strategic problem that we are facing today with people like Tucker Carlson.
It is absurd to say that we should let Carlson push his evil agenda unopposed, as Stephens actually appears to be saying, as if we could casually wipe Tucker off of our shoulders like lint particles.
We are called on to do the very opposite-- oppose, fight, and stop the Tuckers, Fuenteses, Candaces, Mamdanis, Ilhans and others. We must do so in smarter, more deliberate, more aggressive ways. And with more widespread force and conviction than ever before.
We've all heard the famous, brilliant warning: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
We must not just understand it as a concept, but also heed it and act upon it, in whatever way each of us as individuals can.
It is a moral obligation. It’s the true meaning of "never again."
Remember, contrary to popular belief, Hitler didn't take the German Chancellery by force. He did it with guile. Backroom dealings, political maneuvering, and negotiations.
Hitler's extremist views were not taken seriously enough and, more importantly, were not opposed strongly enough because of that.
The problem today --and this nuance is super important-- is knowing how to go on the offensive, to fight and root out antisemitism before it is too late. We must learn from history's greatest mistakes.
Knowing who to target, how to do it, and on what battlefields to fight (i.e., in the courts, on the ground, in legislatures, through the media, and, yes, sometimes in stealth mode or in back-room negotiations) are the keys to our survival.
Most people don't know who or how to effectively fight on offense. It's what I preach and teach every single day.
Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ad is Prevent Defense-- the weakest defense of all defenses in a war we are already badly losing.
Football experts mock this approach, saying, "the only thing the Prevent Defense prevents, is winning." They are right.
So, throw that in the garbage and fight for real.
Bret Stephens’ alternative proposal of refusing to acknowledge that there even exists any meaningful fight at all that requires our full and complete attention right now is based in fantasy, not in reality. And fantasy is a dangerous place for a Jew to live right now.
Go build beautiful things in Judaism, he encourages, all while figurative (and too often real) bullets are being fired upon us.
How can one build, enhance, beautify and grow Judaism while masses of evil are trying to kill us?
We must take out their air defenses first.
Offense.
Then eliminate the threat.
Offense.
Then, yes, focus on enhancing our Jewish community.
The answer to antisemitism is obviously not these pie-in-the-sky silly non-approaches, but something that world Jewry has never effectively adopted: offense.
It's starting to happen, though. Many incredible Jewish organizations are starting to go on offense. Lawsuits. Exposing antisemites. Political pressure. And, yes, back-room negotiations. It is an amazing and hopeful thing to see. These offensive tactics need to be taught and implemented by the masses on our side.
So, yes, Bret Stephens (who I like very much), is wrong on this one. Just as wrong as the equally well-intentioned Robert Kraft.
Very wrong.
Dangerously wrong.
I know that this approach is wrong because I, personally, have been on both sides of this war for over a decade.
I'd been the non-activist shul member, just doing good things for my Jewish Community.
Then, not by choice, I was thrown into becoming a deep insider in the fight against antisemites on college campuses. But I was playing deep in my own defensive territory.
Today, with much more experience, I'm an insider... firmly, aggressively, and permanently on offense.
I’m certain that you can guess which side I prefer. And I’ll bet you can also guess which side has yielded the most success.
Jew-hating bullies with no leg to stand on can get knocked down.
Goliath learned that lesson.
But, even more importantly, Davidlearned the lesson.
And he figured out how to go on offense --and how to win!-- from what was seemingly the weakest and most defensive position imaginable. Israel has done that time and time again. We could all stand to learn a lot from the courage and heroism from those brave souls from 1948 and onward to today.
We all have a little David in us and we can and all must go on offense too. It's the only way to win.
@JohnDoyle Thomas Jefferson had many sins -- first and foremost, he was a Jacobin who corrupted our voting system. He was an excellent draftsman, but the founding fathers who made our country great were Washington, Hamilton and Adams (before he was president).
Biden, Harris, and American Democrats started the war with the false assumption that Israel’s existential defense was inherently wrong and problematic. That was truly shameful. They orchestrated and enabled a boatload of abusive behavior towards Israelis and American Jews. As a lifelong Democrat, it was really disturbing and painful for me to watch.