Jonathan

What did I miss?

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

With regard to "Judeo Christian":

The 10 Commandments are Jewish.

The great stories of the Old Testament are Jewish.

The Jews developed the idea of subsidiarity as the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

The Jews established the cultural preconditions for the rise of universal literacy.

The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.

This rising tide of anti-semitism sickens me. Those of you engaging in it for your oh-so-moral reasons—you're despicable.

And remember, you proud "Christians" objecting in all your purity to the term:

Christ Himself was a Jew.

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

I deeply resent that AI has forced me to eliminate em dashes from my writing for fear of signaling slop

[Upstate Federalist @upstatefederlst]

This basically describes the air conditioner debate as well. Americans are like "just fix it" and Europeans see some sort of dignity in being miserable for no reason when a solution exists.

[Israelite in Exile (surviving the Galut) @anexiledjew]

The brilliant Howard Jacobson on 'The Big Lie'.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

A new analysis reveals that Qatar has poured more than $400 BILLION into the United States since 2010, from universities and public schools to Boeing, Goldman Sachs, lobbying firms, think tanks, sports teams, gas pipelines, and even disaster relief.

The report says Qatar spent:
- $148.5B on Boeing deals
- $56B on U.S. arms sales
- $18B on the Al Udeid Air Base
- $240M on lobbying & PR firms
- Millions funding American schools and Arabic-language programs

Qatar backs Hamas leadership and Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks in the West.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

This 2005 Gaza clip says it all.

Palestinians saw Israel’s complete withdrawal as proof that terrorism works — and vowed to keep fighting until the entire Land, from the river to the sea including Jerusalem, was free of Jews just like Gaza now was.

Every Jew, soldier, and “settlement” was gone by Sept 12 — for the first time in history, Palestinians held total control over any territory.

The Palestinian response:

Looted greenhouses.
Burned synagogues.
Fired rockets at Israeli civilians almost immediately.

Then:

2006 — Palestinians elected Hamas.
2007 — Hamas butchered Fatah and seized total control of Gaza.

Result:

Hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, tens of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians, and October 7.

They never wanted a state next to Israel.
They want all of the Land without Jews.

[Mark Zlochin - מארק זלוצ'ין༝ @MarkZlochin]

¹ Thanks to the work of @bandlersbanter, @AshleyRindsberg, @EllaTravelsLove and @shlomitlir, there's growing awareness of coordinated ideological takeover of Wikipedia's Israel/Palestine coverage after Oct. 7

So I decided to measure its extent and the results are extraordinary🧵

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

They keep circulating the same old clips of Bibi Netanyahu warning that Iran is “months away” from a nuclear bomb, 1992, 2002, 2009, 2012, over and over.

The useful idiots laugh: “See? He’s been lying for 40 years!”

No. Bibi didn’t lie.

Iran was close every single time, and every single time, Israel stopped them.

• 2010: Israel and the US unleash Stuxnet, the first cyber weapon in history. It destroys over 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz and sets Iran’s program back years.

• 2010–2020: Mossad systematically assassinates Iran’s top nuclear scientists, one after another, in the heart of Tehran.

• 2018: Netanyahu reveals the secret “nuclear archive” Mossad stole straight out of a Tehran warehouse, proving Iran lied and never stopped its weapons program.

• 2020–2021: Multiple sabotage operations blow up Natanz, explosions, blackouts, entire centrifuge halls wiped out.

• 2021: Israeli drones hit the Karaj centrifuge manufacturing facility.

• 2024–2025: Direct Israeli strikes hammer Iran’s nuclear and military sites, assassinating key commanders and scientists.

Every warning Bibi gave was a call to action, and Israel answered it.

If it wasn’t for Bibi's voice, Israel’s intelligence, and Israel’s willingness to act when the world refused, Iran would have had the bomb a decade ago.

The people mocking the old clips are exposing how much they hate the one country that actually stopped the world’s most dangerous regime from going nuclear.

Without Bibi, and without Israel, we’d already be living in a world where the Islamic Republic has nukes.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

A genocide is happening in Gaza, they tell us. Then scroll your feed:

Comma Cafee, just opened in Gaza City. Espresso machines, plated desserts, dim lighting.

Vanilla Café. Upscale, glass facade.

Nova Restaurant in Khan Younis: sleek wood interior, beachfront seating. Named, apparently without irony, after the music festival where 364 Israelis were slaughtered on October 7.

O2 Restaurant. pizza, ice cream, milkshakes, TikTok food porn.

Open-air markets in Gaza City with apples, avocados, oranges, bananas.

Supermarkets stocked for Ramadan with imported goods.

A "Gaza Coffee" brand selling 100% Arabica premium beans, taking online orders, with five-star reviews dated this year.

Even Al Jazeera's writer concedes the cafes "were built with expensive materials, carefully painted, furnished with tables, sofas, and elegant chairs, with glass facades and shining lights."

Now hold that next to actual genocide.

Rwanda, 1994. 800,000 Tutsi murdered in 100 days. ~8,000 per day. Hutu radio read names of neighbors to be hacked apart by morning. No one opened a café.

Cambodia, 1975–79. Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh at gunpoint in 72 hours. Currency abolished. Markets abolished. Eyeglasses got you killed. Two million dead.

The Holocaust. Warsaw Ghetto: 92,000 dead of starvation and disease before the deportations even began. Auschwitz processed 6,000 people a day into smoke. There were no glass-facade espresso bars in Łódź in 1943.

Srebrenica, July 1995. 8,372 men and boys executed in days. No restaurants reopened. They were in mass graves.

Armenia, 1915. Death marches into the Syrian desert. No imported avocados.

The common thread of genocide is that the targeted population is not allowed to exist. Not in cafes, not in markets, not in their homes, not anywhere. The perpetrator's entire project is their absence.

Gaza in 2026, by every honest description, is something else: a brutal war zone, partially destroyed, with a population suffering real hardship and simultaneously a place where new businesses open, beachfront restaurants serve customers, and a post war economy is being written about in business pages. Both things are true.

That is what war looks like. Lebanon 2006. Mosul 2017. Mariupol 2022. Aleppo 2016. Civilians die and life adapts around the destruction.

It is not what genocide looks like.

So why the word?

Because "genocide" is the most powerful word in the post-WWII moral vocabulary. It triggers automatic legal obligations, suspends normal debate, and short-circuits proportionality analysis. Apply it successfully and your adversary loses the right to defend itself before the argument even begins. That is exactly why it is being deployed by a side that started a war on October 7, took hostages, embedded itself in hospitals and schools, and now needs the West to force a ceasefire it could not win on the battlefield.

It is asymmetric warfare with a thesaurus. The rockets failed. The tunnels failed. The word might not.

Coffee in Gaza doesn't prove there is no suffering. It proves there is no genocide. Those are not the same claim and the people conflating them are counting on you not to notice.

[The Moderate Case @TheModerateCase]

The “Israel has a right to exist” argument has always bothered me because it accepts a weak premise.

Nations do not have some abstract, inherent, metaphysical “right to exist.” Not Israel, America, France, Pakistan, you name the country. States exist because they establish sovereignty, build institutions, control their territory, defend their borders, gain recognition, and survive.

That is the realist and only true, logical argument.

When someone says “Israel has no right to exist,” the strongest response is not to beg them to recognize Israel’s “right.” This is weak and defensive. That already puts Israel on trial in a way no other country is. The stronger response is to say simply: Israel DOES exist. It achieved sovereignty, built a state, and defended itself through repeated wars. It has borders, institutions, a military, a legal system, international recognition, and a people who are not going anywhere.

There is definitely a double standard, though. People do not demand France, Pakistan, Jordan, Turkey, or Egypt justify their “right to exist.” That standard is almost always applied uniquely to Israel, and yes, a lot of the time it is rooted in antisemitism or anti-Jewish hostility.

That is exactly why Israel’s defenders should stop making the weakest version of the argument.

Israel does not need to defend its existence as if its sovereignty depends on the moral permission of people who hate it. Israel’s case is much stronger than that.

Israel DOES exist because the Jewish people returned to political sovereignty in their historic homeland, built functioning institutions, accepted partition, declared independence, survived invasion, defended itself, absorbed refugees, developed a modern state, and maintained that sovereignty for over 75 years.

Stop playing into the emotional arguments and get real.

[Peter Baum @baum_p]

In 1977, the head of the PLO's military department gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper and said something that should have changed everything.

He said Palestinian identity is emphasized for political reasons only. That a separate Palestinian identity exists for tactical reasons. That there are no real differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese.

His name was Zuher Mohsin. He wasn't a dissident. He wasn't breaking ranks. He was one of the architects of the movement and he said the quiet part out loud.

Eight years earlier, Golda Meir had said the same thing and been destroyed for it.

But that's not even the beginning of the story.

The PLO was founded in 1964. Three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. Whatever it was built to liberate, it wasn't land Israel acquired in 1967.

Before Arafat, there was no Palestinian national identity. Not because the people weren't real. Because the identity hadn't been built yet. And Arafat built it the same way you build a city — founding story first, then institutions, symbols, a flag, a claim of ancient dispossession, and enough foreign funding to make it stick.

The full piece is up on Substack (Link in comments). It starts with a fable. It ends with the only question that actually matters.

( Credit Melissa Steinberg Brodsky )

[Z Riboua @zriboua]

A Syrian artist living in Berlin posted a video now trending across Germany.

Germany welcomed Syrian refugees during and after the civil war and have no colonial past in Syria to atone for. What do they get in return? Resentment, a Third-Worldist rant basically about Western colonizers as eternal oppressors.

The contrast with Syria itself is what makes this interesting. Syrians inside Syria today want the West. They want a peaceful Damascus, a functioning banking system, trade, integration into the global economy. The loudest anticolonial voices and movements now sit in Western capitals advocating for things their own people aren’t aligned with.

[Bahar Akhavan @AkhavanBahar]

This week was tough. I had dinner with my intelligent friends from European countries, people who have spent half their lives working within the United Nations. We were having a good time until the conversation turned to Donald Trump and Iran. Everyone, without exception, spoke badly of Trump: that he causes problems for everyone, that war is terrible, that it is illegal, and so on.

I stayed silent. When everyone finally became quiet, I asked only one question: who is actually going to collect and remove those more than 400 kilograms of uranium?

My French friend said: Trump is no better than the regime. On top of that, he has started an illegal war, and many countries have nuclear power plants why shouldn’t Iran have them too?

I exploded inside, but I remained silent at first. When I finally broke my silence, I said: was it illegal when the United States helped the French during the Second World War? Was it unnecessary?

Then silence returned.

I kept thinking about how to express everything happening inside me; how to explain the regime to a European-someone surrounded by left-wing ideology, enclosed within indirect forms of censorship, and always ready to say that war is terrible, yet surprised when I say many Iranians wanted it.

How do you explain to people who live in safety that some nations sometimes see outside pressure as the only remaining path when every internal path has been closed? How do you explain that they do not even speak in geopolitical terms, but judge only from a position of moral comfort, while others are speaking about survival?

Europeans who, despite democracy and free internet, still do not know what happened in Iran on January 8–9. Europeans who believe every conflict can be understood through the same moral template. Europeans who condemn all violence in theory, but have never had to live under a Islamic system where violence is part of everyday life.

And I sat there with the feeling that the distance between our realities was greater than the table around which we were sitting…

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

They keep circulating the same old clips of Bibi Netanyahu warning that Iran is “months away” from a nuclear bomb, 1992, 2002, 2009, 2012, over and over.

The useful idiots laugh: “See? He’s been lying for 40 years!”

No. Bibi didn’t lie.

Iran was close every single time, and every single time, Israel stopped them.

• 2010: Israel and the US unleash Stuxnet, the first cyber weapon in history. It destroys over 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz and sets Iran’s program back years.

• 2010–2020: Mossad systematically assassinates Iran’s top nuclear scientists, one after another, in the heart of Tehran.

• 2018: Netanyahu reveals the secret “nuclear archive” Mossad stole straight out of a Tehran warehouse, proving Iran lied and never stopped its weapons program.

• 2020–2021: Multiple sabotage operations blow up Natanz, explosions, blackouts, entire centrifuge halls wiped out.

• 2021: Israeli drones hit the Karaj centrifuge manufacturing facility.

• 2024–2025: Direct Israeli strikes hammer Iran’s nuclear and military sites, assassinating key commanders and scientists.

Every warning Bibi gave was a call to action, and Israel answered it.

If it wasn’t for Bibi's voice, Israel’s intelligence, and Israel’s willingness to act when the world refused, Iran would have had the bomb a decade ago.

The people mocking the old clips are exposing how much they hate the one country that actually stopped the world’s most dangerous regime from going nuclear.

Without Bibi, and without Israel, we’d already be living in a world where the Islamic Republic has nukes.

[Michael O'Fallon - Sovereign Nations @SovMichael]

Some of us tried to warn you for years and you didn't listen.

Tucker Carlson isn't crazy, he is strategic. He is operating on trust borrowed from his earlier years on Fox News but is now "accelerating the contradictions"(Lenin, Mao). And now some of you are beginning realize that Tucker is manipulating the conservative base, just as he has attempted to manipulate the administration.

The vast majority of guests on Tucker's show are pushing the following transitional messaging:

a. Israel and America are bad
b. Russia & China are better nations that the U.S.
c. "Christian Nationalism" (Integralism) needs to be our new system of governance
d. Multipolarity and the fall of the United States is a good thing
e. The Allies in WWII were the bad guys
f. Capitalism is bad, distributism or Stakeholder Capitalism is better
g. Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy are authentic Christianity and the Prots are heretics
h. @ConceptualJames is a problem
i. @SethDillon is a problem
j. Islamic nations are awesome
k. Any nation that is a member of China's Belt and Road Initiative is better than the United States
l. Trump is great unless he is doing things that will disrupt China and Russia's multipolarity BRICS plan - and then he is the antichrist
m. Alexander Dugin is wise sage
n. Jeffrey Sachs is brilliant and has your best interests in mind
o. Nick Fuentes is asking interesting questions
p. A little bit of fascism is quite possibly a good thing
q. A little bit of Marxism is quite possibly a good thing
r. Jesus was a revolutionary communist

And all along this journey he has contributed to the framing of the current administration, fed angry groypers, encouraged the development of NazBol (Nazi-Bolshevism) in our nation, and elevated obvious bad actors on social media.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Look, I get it, Dems.

You think buying Greenland is dumb.

You think trash-talking NATO is dumb.

You think Hegseth firing generals is dumb.

You think bombing Iran is dumb.

Fine. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. I’ll buy you a beer and we can argue about it.

But that’s not the point.

Every administration in American history has done dumb things.

Jefferson had an embargo that tanked his own economy.

LBJ had Vietnam.

Carter sold the Panama Canal for $1.

W. had “Mission Accomplished.”

Obama had…. where do I even begin?

Dumb is bipartisan. Dumb is American. Dumb is fine. DC runs on dumb decisions.

What NONE of them ever did, what is truly, mind-melting, pants-on-head, clown-car-fire, galaxy-brained, lead-paint-chip-eating, 50-IQ-Neanderthal-ripping-a-bong dumb, was pay NGOs by the busload to smuggle tens of millions of people, including actual convicted criminals, across a border we spent trillions pretending to defend, then hand them free four-star hotels, free cell phones, free ATM cards, and a court date in 2031 they were never going to show up for.

That is not a policy. That is a SNL cold open someone forgot to write a punchline for.

A five-year-old with a juice box could tell you that was Bozo-the-Clown-on-crack, Weekend-at-Bernie’s-running-DHS, “hold-my-beer-I’m-gonna-try-something” levels of stupid. My golden retriever could have run a tighter border. A Magic 8-Ball would have outperformed the entire Biden interagency.

That’s the new threshold, Democrats.
That’s the low-water mark. That’s the floor. That is the Mariana Trench of public policy and you personally rented the Titan submersible.

Argue all you want about the Strait of Hormuz. Write your op-eds. Go on cable TV with Tom Nichols. Clutch your pearls about Greenland.

But until Trump proposes something even half as mind-bendingly, bone-crushingly, civilization-forfeitingly brain-dead as what Biden and Kamala did with our borders, I genuinely do not care.

Zero F’s given by me.

[Mike @Doranimated]

The world is truly upside down! The Washington Post has published a brilliant article, written by, get this, a professor! To give you some flavor, here are a few choice lines by @jmurtazashvili:

1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe."

2) "What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests."

3) "Two weeks into the war, I watch otherwise reasonable analysts sprint to catastrophe. Former officials, thinktank scholars, credentialed professionals who are supposed to know how to read a conflict. Within days they had written the obituary: quagmire, overreach, disaster."

4) "The liberal internationalist left and the isolationist right — two camps that have agreed on almost nothing for decades — have suddenly found themselves in lockstep, racing to declare the war a failure before it had barely begun. This is the new blob: not the old foreign-policy establishment that the term originally described but a new amalgamation that has arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions. Together they are the most powerful engine of the alt-war."

The truth. In the mainstream media. By a professor. And written well. Four things I thought I'd never see again in my lifetime.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

You might not remember it, but when Woke Left was rising back in the late 2010s, the Woke Left journalists, mouthpieces, surrogates, and grifters would push the lines and somehow, mysteriously do crazy numbers on here every time. They were manufacturing the image of consensus.

Now we're seeing exactly the same thing but from the Woke Right op. People are falling for it almost the same in some sectors but less. Some of us learned to spot propaganda and social media manipulation and don't fall for that crap now. Lots of us also have actual principles and don't get swayed by the faked appearance of popularity.

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐨𝐬 (Golden Age Arc) @myth_pilot]

“Then they came for the theater kids, and I said ‘make sure you get all the theater kids’”