HDiam

[HDiam @larche_bleue]

@avidseries It’s also entirely made up as far as I know (or point us to a quote my a cabinet minister please)

[Yossi Amar - יוסי עמר @YossiAmar_]

Donald Trump Fell Into Iran’s Trap

I say this as someone who supported @realDonaldTrump from the beginning in 2015, when the political class, the media and many Republicans considered him a joke. I did so because I believed he understood something others did not: that strength matters, that weakness invites aggression, and that peace is achieved by making your enemies fear the consequences of attacking you.

That is why it is so painful to watch him completely misread the Iranian regime.

DJT is one of the world’s greatest negotiators. He built an empire, won an election everyone said was impossible, reshaped American politics and succeeded where generations of diplomats failed by bringing several Arab countries closer to Israel. But there is a fundamental difference between negotiating with rational actors seeking prosperity and negotiating with a revolutionary regime whose identity is built around hatred.

Iran is not the UAE, Morocco or Bahrain.

Tehran’s rulers are not trying to maximize shareholder value or improve economic growth. They have spent four decades funding terrorism, destabilizing the M-East, threatening Israel, spreading anti-Americanism and building a network of proxies stretching from Gaza and Lebanon to Yemen. The idea that such a regime can abandon its objectives through negotiations has always been based on a misunderstanding of what it is.

Most frustrating is that the Iranians achieved exactly what they wanted. They could not destroy Israel through Hezbollah. They could not break Israeli society after October 7. So they pursued another objective: creating friction between Jerusalem and Washington.

Instead of helping @POTUS understand that Iran remains the source of the problem, they convinced him that Israel’s determination to defend itself was somehow the obstacle to peace. From Tehran’s perspective, that is an extraordinary strategic success.

Most shocking of all is watching President Trump publicly lecture Benjamin Netanyahu as if he were speaking to a reckless politician who does not understand the consequences of war. With respect, Donald Trump is speaking to a man who has spent decades carrying responsibility for his country’s survival. He is speaking to a leader who served his nation, led Israel through wars and understands the Middle East better than any Western leaders ever will.

More importantly, he is speaking to a nation that survived exile, persecution, pogroms, the gas chambers and countless attempts at annihilation. He is speaking to a people that rebuilt a sovereign state after two thousand years, defeated invading armies after declaring independence and once again stood up after October 7 with resilience any nation on earth could have demonstrated.

Israelis do not see existential threats as theoretical debates. We do not have the luxury of making mistakes when people openly promise our destruction. History taught us that when enemies tell us what they intend to do, we must believe them.

I remain grateful for everything Donald Trump has done for Israel, and history will remember many of his decisions as courageous. But gratitude does not require silence. No American president would accept missiles being launched at American civilians from Mexico or Canada while being told to exercise restraint and trust those responsible. Israel should not be expected to accept a standard the United States would reject immediately.

The reality is simple: Israel is not for sale, Israel’s security is not negotiable, and Israel’s independence will never depend on the approval of any foreign leader, however friendly he may be. We appreciate our allies and welcome their support, but ultimately remain responsible for our own future.

As PM @netanyahu said, if Israel must stand alone, it will; if it must fight with its fingernails, it will. Thank God, today we have far more than fingernails.

CC :
@jaredkushner
@GovMikeHuckabee
@SecRubio
@PeteHegseth
@DavidM_Friedman
@marklevinshow
@USAmbFrance

[HDiam @larche_bleue]

@FischerKing64 Nevertheless, it’s a better place than most, where things work better than in most places.

[HDiam @larche_bleue]

@JeffBezos Bezos’ plan kills fiscal citizenship. A healthy democracy requires everyone to have skin in the game. If 50% of voters pay no tax, their incentive become demanding infinite government and endless spending, with zero reason to police waste. They become dependents, not stakeholders

[Yaacov Behrman @ChabadLubavitch]

I have largely remained silent in public since January 1 because I believe criticism should be constructive and focused. But this post about the Nakba is deeply disturbing, not only because of its one sided and dishonest characterization of history, but also because it attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state even before 1967.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot argue that the “settlements”, which began after 1967 following Israel’s victory in a war against neighboring states, are the root cause of the conflict, condemn them relentlessly, and justify marches through Jewish neighborhoods in New York over so called “illegal” land sales in the West Bank, while simultaneously condemning the very founding of the State of Israel itself through a one sided narrative built on distortion and falsehoods.

It is also worth noting that while thousands of Arabs lived within Israel between 1948 and 1967, Jews were expelled from areas captured by invading Arab armies from neighboring countries. Those expelled included Jews whose families had legally owned and purchased land for hundreds of years.

Take, for example, the Tzemach synagogue in Jerusalem. In 1847, more than a hundred years earlier, followers of Chabad Lubavitch established and purchased the synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City. During the 1948 war, the Old City fell under Jordanian control. The Jewish population was expelled, and Jews were denied access to Jerusalem, including the Tzemach Tzedek synagogue.

I really do not want to get too deep into the history because that is not my main point here. There can be disagreements and different perspectives about what happened and to whom, but the focus should be on achieving a long term peace in Israel and the region.

The tweet’s one sided narrative deepens division instead of advancing peace, coexistence, and understanding, and it should never have been posted by the mayor of New York City.

[Mike Coté @ratlpolicy]

This whole Virginia redistricting brouhaha is one of the most nakedly cynical partisan moves I've ever seen.

Deliberately & obviously violate process rules, run an insanely loaded ballot question, argue to the VA court that it can't rule before the election, criticize it for ruling after the election, & then use this all to declare our judiciary illegitimate.

Bravo.

[Adam Fisher @AdamRFisher]

This is a devious rhetorical trick. Labeling someone a “Nakba survivor” is designed to evoke instant sympathy and a false sense of moral clarity, but it is little more than taxpayer-funded propaganda.

Consider the absurdity: roughly 99% of Palestinian Arabs alive in 1949 survived the war and its displacements. Calling the displaced a “survivor” stretches the word beyond recognition. It is a newly coined term, crafted in academia and activist circles long after the events.

Its real genius lies in creating false equivalence. It places ordinary Palestinian civilians who were displaced amid a war their own leaders launched on the same moral plane as Holocaust survivors (of whom only about one-third emerged alive).

It airbrushes away the ~6,000 Jews killed in 1948, elevates the ~12,000 Arab deaths, and erases the thousands of Jews forcibly expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem and other areas.

By anointing the displaced as sacred “survivors,” the term invites us to forget that the Nazi-aligned Palestinian leadership rejected the UN partition plan, chose war to prevent any Jewish state, and promised quick victory while urging Arabs to flee.

It glosses over Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which explicitly invited Arab inhabitants to “participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” And it conveniently overlooks the ~150,000 Arabs who stayed put, accepted Israeli citizenship, and whose descendants now form over 20% of Israel’s population.

This is international grievance politics pushed by the Mayor of New York City, who genuinely believes that Palestinians should be able to “return to their homes” – a nonsensical idea designed to justify perpetual victimhood and violence.

The move weaponizes real civilian hardship while inverting roles: turning a war of choice and rejectionism into an unprovoked “catastrophe” inflicted by the intended victims. It sustain grievance and does not nothing to advance peace.

[Moshe Emilio Lavi @MosheELavi]

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion.

The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else.

The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject.

This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X.

Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility.

The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting.

This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier.

Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price.

It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence.

Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters.

The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record.

Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously.

It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

“Conversely, the documentation of sexual violence by Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023—the total number of infiltrators was several thousand that day—took years, even though we all watched videos of Palestinians dragging the unclothed bodies of Israeli women through the streets of Gaza, and even though Hamas documented many of their crimes, and even though Hamas members admitted to raping women that day. All of that is what is known as evidence—apologies to Kristof and his readers for using such technical, obscure SAT words—and evidence needs to be compiled, examined, analyzed, and used as the jumping-off point for additional investigation.
That is what Israeli officials did, and that is what those who support the Jewish state’s existence did, and what they called for others to do, because that is what is done when the goal is to obtain the truth. To the anti-Zionist collective, the truth is to be avoided like the plague, and therefore what is rewarded is not evidence but creativity and imagination.”
@SethAMandel
https://t.co/eunOzqtJD4

[Daniel S. Loeb @DanielSLoeb1]

The editor of the NYT opinion section was forced to resign for allowing @TomCottonAR to merely write an editorial that triggered the NYT snowflake millennial staff. Surely a head should roll for this journalistic travesty.

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

A reporter from The New York Times was surrounded and harassed by pro-Hamas rioters.

His response was to write “Did you read Kristof” on a notepad as a peace offering.

Incredible.

[David Collier @mishtal]

Dear @nytimes

Remember when you put a sick child with Cerebral Palsy on your front page - and falsely claimed he was a healthy child deliberately starved by Israel?

I was the one who uncovered the truth.

So excuse me if I don't believe a word you write.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

Hi @NickKristof,

You cited EuroMed in the article and they were the original promoter of the dog rape story.

How many of the witnesses you spoke to did they/Ramy Abdul put you in touch with?

Were you aware that there was a report coming out about Hamas’ systemic rapes and did you discuss the timing of your article with Ramy Abdul?

Does it give you pause that one of your main sources for the article was someone who consistently engages in rape denial and spreads blatant conspiratorial falsehoods?

Do you agree with Ramy Abdul that the 296 page report with extensive evidence and documentation is worthless and how do you think it compares with the evidence for your article?

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The @NickKristof maxim:

Don’t believe your lying eyes when seeing the video footage of Noble Gaza terrorists gang raping Jewish women.

Believe your uncle when he tells you that Jew-trained dogs are raping Palestinians.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

This New York Times "article" about Israel is such a journalistic atrocity that I actually feel stupid reading it out loud.

If everyone at the NYT who is responsible for this is not fired, then the publication will lose whatever shred of credibility it has left.

[Mossad Commentary @MOSSADil]

🚨 SILENCED NO MORE: THE REPORT THE WORLD CAN NO LONGER IGNORE

A new 300-page report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children documents what so many tried to deny.
@theCC07
After a two-year independent investigation, the Commission reviewed more than 10,000 photos and video segments, over 1,800 hours of visual material, and conducted more than 430 interviews, testimonies, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages, experts, and families.

Its conclusion is clear:
It was systematic.
It was widespread.
It was part of the terror strategy.

The victims were never silent.
The world was.

Now the evidence is on record.
Share this. Amplify it.
REPORT IN COMMENTS

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

@NickKristof This is false propaganda, citing known lying orgs, and a culture that’s taught to lie to smear Jews.

That NYT is putting out this trash is insane.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

I cannot believe we have to do this.

The New York Times, the paper of record, just published an op-ed accusing the State of Israel of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, including the claim that Israel is training dogs to rape prisoners.

One of their sources is a man who left his job after multiple people, including minors, accused him of sending them threatening and sexual messages.

The other is Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a group whose chairman was sanctioned by Israel as a Hamas operative and who publicly called the testimonies of Israeli women raped on October 7th “fabricated lies.”

The Times is using the words of a man credibly accused of sexually harassing children, and an organization led by a man who denies the rape of Jewish women, to build a case that Israelis are sexual predators.

This is the most serious accusation you can level at a country. It demands the most serious sourcing. The Times decided the opinion section was good enough.

It is not good enough.

And spare me the crocodile tears. The same people who spent two years calling the rape victims of October 7th liars, who told us “believe women” had an asterisk when the women were Jewish, are about to share this op-ed with tears in their eyes. They never cared about sexual violence. They cared about who they could pin it on.

I do not want to spend my day writing about this. But when the largest newspaper in the world launders this against my people, silence is complicity.

@nytimes owes our community, and its readers, an apology.

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

1/
The @nytimes just published one of the most serious sets of allegations imaginable against Israel – claims of systematic sexual violence, including a bizarre story about carrots and trained rape dogs. We checked the sources.

What we found is journalistic malpractice. 🧵

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

The "editor's note" retracting much of Nick Kristof's NYTimes column today is almost certain. But it will be insufficient.

Kristof needs to be fired for embarrassing the paper like this.