The Iran War Reveals The Two Jihadi Wars On America

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When Iran offered condolences after the death of former Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the gesture appeared incongruous. Iran had recently been firing missiles and drones at Qatar and across the Gulf. So why the words of consolation?

Iran was not primarily attacking Qatar as a Muslim or Arab society. It was targeting the American military presence on Qatari soil. The same pattern has extended across the region: U.S. facilities and assets in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, as well as American positions in Iraq and Syria, have come under Iranian attack. Recent strikes included an early-warning installation in Qatar, Patriot systems in Kuwait, a U.S. fuel depot in Bahrain and military facilities in Jordan.

That reveals the real fault line in the Middle East.

It is not simply Sunni against Shia, Arab against Persian or even Muslim country against Muslim country. It is increasingly a divide over how to handle the United States: between governments and movements determined to expel American power and those that invite it in and then seek to shape it.

Iran represents the first model. Since 1979, its hostility has been explicit. It calls America the enemy, demands the removal of U.S. forces and uses missiles, drones and proxies against American military positions. Its war is visible. It announces its contempt and fires at the flag.

Qatar perfected a more nuanced model.

Under Sheikh Hamad, Qatar financed and expanded Al Udeid Air Base, which became central to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the region. At the same time, Doha built influence inside the United States, financing American university campuses, purchased entry into American television distribution, invested in think tanks and businesses, hired lobbyists and cultivated political relationships. It also hosted anti-Western terrorist groups including Hamas leaders and Muslim Brotherhood figures, and used Al Jazeera to broadcast narratives often deeply hostile to the West and its allies.

Iran attacks American power from the outside. Qatar embraces it corrodes it from within.

anti-American Iranians

Iran seeks direct confrontation; Qatar seeks leverage.Iran’s weapons are missiles and militias. Qatar’s are money, access, prestige and indispensability.

The West is naturally more alarmed by Iran’s model. And Qatar’s model is harder to confront because it arrives as partnership.

The military base protects American interests. The university campus carries a prestigious name. The investment creates jobs. Each relationship is defensible in isolation. Together, however, they create influence on a scale no tiny monarchy could achieve through military power alone.

The broader contest is therefore not between countries that love America and countries that hate it. Iran and Qatar represent different tactics of genocidal jihadists. One strategy attacks the fortress. The other purchases rooms inside it.

Iran’s war is louder. Qatar’s may prove more insidious and enduring.

The Emir Who Changed the Battlefield

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The death of Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani on July 12 marks the passing of one of the most consequential – and controversial – strategists of the modern Middle East.

Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

When he took power in Qatar in 1995, he inherited a tiny Gulf monarchy with enormous natural-gas reserves but limited international influence. By the time he abdicated in 2013 in favor of his son, Qatar had become a global financial center, media power, diplomatic broker and investor deeply embedded in the institutions of the West.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres mourned him as a “visionary and transformative leader.” The question is what he transformed and toward what end.

For most Americans, the War on Terror was fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. The enemy was imagined as something external: terrorists hiding in caves, regimes sheltering them and armies that could be defeated on a battlefield.

Sheikh Hamad developed a different model. Qatar did not physically confront the West. It enmeshed itself.

That strategy began with security. The United States and Qatar signed a defense cooperation agreement in 1992, but the relationship expanded dramatically after Sheikh Hamad took power. Qatar financed the development of Al Udeid Air Base beginning in the 1990s. After September 11, the base became central to American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2003 the United States moved its regional air-operations command center there from Saudi Arabia.

Qatari military base

Thus, during Sheikh Hamad’s reign, Qatar became essential to America’s military posture even as Doha cultivated relationships with Hamas, the Taliban and leading Muslim Brotherhood figures. That contradiction was core to the strategy: become so useful to Washington that Qatar’s other alliances would be tolerated.

Qatar is Hamas’s largest and principal sponsor

At the same time, Sheikh Hamad built Qatar’s machinery of influence.

In 1996, he launched Al Jazeera, which transformed Arabic-language media and gave Qatar a powerful instrument for shaping political narratives across the region.

Beginning in 1998, Qatar also imported elite American universities into Education City: Virginia Commonwealth in 1998, Weill Cornell in 2001, Texas A&M in 2003, Carnegie Mellon in 2004, Georgetown in 2005 and Northwestern in 2008. Qatar was not merely sending students to America. It was paying prestigious American institutions to plant their flags in Doha and bind their faculty, administrators and reputations to the Qatari national project. Simultaneously, it began pouring billions of dollars into American schools and think tanks in America.

Then came direct entry into the American media market. In January 2013, Al Jazeera purchased Current TV from former Vice President Al Gore and his partners in a deal reportedly valued at $500 million. The real asset was distribution: the purchase offered access to approximately 40 million American homes, compared with fewer than five million previously.

This was not a collection of unrelated investments. It was a coherent doctrine.

Qatar hosted America’s military command structure, funded American universities, purchased Western media distribution, invested in landmark properties, supported think tanks and lobbyists, and cultivated Western political relationships. At the same time, it provided sanctuary and legitimacy to movements hostile to the West.

In 2012, Sheikh Hamad became the first head of state to visit Hamas-led Gaza and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to the terrorist enclave. Qatar also became a home for Hamas political leaders and a major platform for Muslim Brotherhood figures.

Saudi Arabia’s role in the rise of jihadism was more direct and more visible, as fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. The West responded with armies, invasions, intelligence operations and trillions of dollars in military spending.

Qatar’s jihadism arrived differently. Not as a bare bomb but wrapped in prestige, access and partnership.

It was a velvet bomb.

Its instruments were television studios rather than training camps, endowed programs rather than militias, lobbying firms rather than armies, and investment funds rather than explosives. Qatar learned that it did not need to defeat Western institutions. It could finance them, partner with them and make them dependent, while corroding their values from the inside.

That is why Guterres’s tribute is so revealing. To the United Nations, Sheikh Hamad was the visionary builder of a modern state. To his critics, he helped perfect a model in which a small authoritarian monarchy could use money, military protection and institutional legitimacy to amplify movements fundamentally hostile to the West’s own political order.

During Guterres’s tenure, the United Nations itself has increasingly appeared less like the guardian of the postwar liberal system and more like an arena in which the grievances and ideological priorities of the Global South are directed against the countries that built and financed that system.

Sheikh Hamad set that groundwork. He understood that changing the world did not require conquering it.

It required gaining access to its command centers, universities, media platforms, political networks and international institutions—and persuading the West to welcome the process as partnership.

That is his most consequential and controversial legacy.

The Conspiracy They Somehow Missed

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A satire.

Every era has its favorite conspiracy.

Today, one corner of the internet insists Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t merely a criminal but part of a vast Mossad operation. It emerged in the mainstream as recently parroted by Vice President JD Vance.

Another conspiracy theory surrounds UFOs visiting Earth for decades, governments hiding crashed spacecraft, and ordinary Americans being routinely abducted in the middle of the night.

Oddly enough, these two groups have spent years talking past one another.

Until now.

Because once you’ve accepted both theories, there is only one remaining conclusion: Jews are from outer space, just as Mel Brooks told you years ago.

The conspiracy theorists spent years saying Epstein worked for Mossad and that aliens walk among us. Maybe Epstein wasn’t working for the Mossad as much as the Mossad was working for the aliens.

You think it’s a coincidence that Israel – a country smaller than New Jersey – has more technology startups per capita than almost anywhere else on Earth? Back on their home planet, Israeli cybersecurity is considered an eighth-grade science project. Artificial intelligence? Homework.

Israeli entrepreneurs don’t invent technology. They import it.

Because Israel isn’t merely a country. It’s the portal.

Jerusalem became holy because that’s where the first extraterrestrials landed. Long before Abraham, the Galactic Federation designated the site as Landing Zone One.

Humans eventually built temples there because they mistook the landing pad for sacred architecture.

The Western Wall? The only surviving section of the original intergalactic arrival terminal after the Romans demolished the rest during an unfortunate urban renewal project.

The Dead Sea Scrolls? Maintenance manuals.

The menorah? A seven-port charging station.

Moses didn’t part the Red Sea. He accidentally activated the anti-gravity system.

Today, the signals are in plain sight:

  • Cholent isn’t food. It’s fusion-reactor fuel. It cooks overnight because spacecraft recharge slowly.
  • Challah is braided because that’s the optimal shape for stabilizing wormholes.
  • The shofar isn’t a ram’s horn. It’s an beacon transmitting, “Landing corridor clear.”
  • Payot—the long curls worn by some Hasidim—aren’t a religious custom. They’re simply this season’s fashion on Planet Zion-7.
  • Hebrew reads from right to left because that’s how navigation displays work in the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • The “Chosen People” weren’t chosen by God. They were selected for the Interstellar Exchange Program.
  • “Next year in Jerusalem” isn’t a prayer. It’s the annual shuttle schedule.
  • Matzah is actually 3,500-year old space snacks.
  • Tzizit aren’t really ritual fringes. They are the remnants of the original interstellar safety harnesses.
  • Mobileye was originally invented to avoid comets.

Sounds too hard to believe? Jews introduced the world to staring up to the skies in prayer when everyone else looked straight ahead at idols.

Jeffrey Epstein and a space alien

Roswell is actually an Israeli startup incubator that experienced an unfortunate product launch.

NASA? Quietly run by rabbis since 1969.

University professors aren’t so much anti-Israel as they are frustrated that their grant proposal to study the portal was rejected.

The United Nations doesn’t pass so many resolutions about Israel because of geopolitics. It’s desperately trying to establish jurisdiction over extraterrestrial affairs.

As to Epstein being involved with underage girls: in space, it has long been legalized because of the time-gravity equation that someone that presents young on earth might in fact be quite a bit older.

Naturally, skeptics ask the same tiresome question. “If this is true, where’s the evidence?”

Exactly.

If archaeologists don’t find alien technology, that’s proof the cover-up is working. If they do find something unusual, it proves the aliens slipped up.

If experts disagree, they’ve been compromised. If experts agree, they’re coordinating.

If there is no evidence, that’s the strongest evidence of all.

As the theories converge, someone will release a multi-part podcast revealing these findings under a header “I’m just asking questions.” There will be a chart with forty-three arrows, twelve highlighted Bible verses, three satellite images, and a blurry photograph of a pigeon in Jerusalem.

Millions of people will solemnly connect the dots. They will call themselves the “idiots.”

Another voice from the void will likely ask a more subtle question: if Jews are really from space, why do the wait for the Messiah in coach in the back of the plane?

Every Generation Has a Jordan River

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Every graduation marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

Parshat Devarim, read each year during the Nine Days before Tisha B’Av, opens at precisely such a moment. The Jewish people stand on the banks of the Jordan River. After forty years in the wilderness, they are finally ready to enter the Land of Israel. Moses is delivering his final address. One might expect him to unveil a military strategy, an economic vision, or a blueprint for nation-building.

Instead, he teaches history.

For three chapters, Moses reviews the defining moments of the previous forty years: the appointment of judges, the sin of the spies, the years of wandering, and the victories over Sihon and Og. This is not nostalgia but preparation. Before Israel can build its future, it must first understand its past.

Moses sees the promised land from afar, 1902 by James Tissot (1836-1902)

That lesson feels especially relevant for this year’s Jewish college graduates.

Like the Israelites, they are crossing into a new world. They are leaving the structured environment of school and entering workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities where they will make their own decisions and assume new responsibilities.

The past few years have given many Jewish students an education that extended far beyond the classroom. They witnessed campuses wrestle with antisemitism. They watched administrators make revealing choices. They saw professors, classmates, elected officials, employers, and civic leaders respond in different ways when Jewish students felt threatened or isolated.

Whether those responses inspired confidence or disappointment, they were lessons.

Moses understood that the moments just before entering a new chapter are precisely when history matters most. The question is not simply, What happened? It is, What have you learned that should shape the future you are about to build?

For today’s graduates, those lessons should inform more than career decisions. They should influence how they participate in civic and Jewish life.

  • Who has earned your trust through actions rather than slogans?
  • Which institutions proved resilient under pressure?
  • How will you respond if antisemitism appears in your workplace?
  • What kind of community do you want to help build?

Graduation should also mark the beginning of Jewish adulthood. That means becoming more than an occasional participant. Join a synagogue by becoming a dues-paying member. Vote in local, state, and national elections. Volunteer and mentor younger students. Strengthen the institutions that strengthened you, and build the ones you wished had existed.

The Jewish calendar reinforces this idea. Before we reach the season of renewal – before Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur – we pause for the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av. Before looking ahead, we look back. Before rebuilding, we reflect.

That is exactly what Moses was doing on the edge of the Jordan.

Every generation has its own Jordan River.

Before crossing into tomorrow, Moses offers one final piece of advice: study yesterday. Not to dwell on it, but to be equipped by it. History is not simply something to remember. It is something to carry forward as you begin writing the next chapter of your own story – and of the Jewish people.

The Jewish Ghosts in the World Cup Stands

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The World Cup’s final stages are being played in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the diaspora. Jews fill stadiums and gather in homes, bars, and public squares to cheer for their favorite teams. Many of the Jewish fans are descendants of families who fled persecution in the final four team countries, who found refuge in America.

By a remarkable twist of history, three of the four semifinalists are themselves home to three of the five largest Jewish communities in the diaspora: France (#2), the United Kingdom (#4), and Argentina (#5). Spain, whose once-great Jewish civilization was destroyed by the expulsion of 1492, today has only a small Jewish community.

The four teams were not traveling to America alone. Each arrived with ghosts.

England’s ghosts date to 1290, when King Edward I expelled all Jews from his kingdom. A Jewish community that had lived there for generations was driven out and would not officially return for more than three and a half centuries.

Spain’s ghosts carry the keys of 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews to convert or leave. One of the world’s great Jewish civilizations disappeared almost overnight, scattering Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas.

France’s ghosts stretch from repeated medieval expulsions to the Vichy regime, when French authorities enacted antisemitic laws and helped arrest and deport tens of thousands of Jews. They include the children rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv before being sent east.

Argentina’s ghosts are more recent. After World War II, the country became a refuge for Nazi fugitives, including Adolf Eichmann. Then, in 1994, the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. More than three decades later, those accused of orchestrating the attack have never stood trial in Argentina.

Now these four nations compete for soccer’s greatest prize before enormous crowds in the very country where so many descendants of those earlier Jewish communities ultimately built new lives.

Jewish fans cheer for England, Spain, France, and Argentina. They wear the jerseys, sing the anthems, and celebrate spectacular goals like everyone else.

But perhaps there are other spectators in the stands. Quietly observing.

The rabbi who clutched Torah scrolls as England closed its gates. A Sephardic mother who had cried as she locked the door of her home in Toledo for the last time. A Jewish child wearing a yellow star in Paris. Families standing outside the shattered AMIA building praying for loved ones.

Those ghosts would see something they could scarcely have imagined: not only the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community hosting the World Cup, but thriving Jewish communities once again in England, France, and Argentina. Against every expectation, Jewish life somehow endured.

ABBI ELI CHITRIK watches a World Cup match, wearing a traditional Orthodox Jewish hat, even as a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh is among the other fans sitting nearby.(photo credit: Rabbi Mendy Chitrik)

Then, they would whisper.

They would remind us that England, Spain, France, and Argentina were all, in their own time, places where Jews believed they belonged until history proved otherwise.

Their warning would not be that America is destined to follow the same path. History never repeats itself so neatly. Their warning would be simpler: antisemitism rarely arrives all at once. It begins with words, exclusion, indifference, and the comforting belief that it cannot happen here.

As the Jewish descendants cheer from the stands, they wonder if they are hearing voices directed at them above the roar. The whispering ghosts watch too, not only the game, but today’s generation of Jews feeling both at home and increasingly distinct from their home countries.

The soccer tournament will end on Sunday. And Jews will consider their jerseys in a very different way than every other fan, in the days and weeks after they take theirs off and have to consider life beyond the game.

Related:

Watching Jewish Ghosts (March 2018)

Is It Finally Time To Evict J Street?

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J Street has long described itself as “pro-Israel.”

This week, after the House vote on military aid to Israel, it celebrated what it called the end of the old Washington consensus.

It welcomed House Democratic leaders for taking “a stronger stance” by using American leverage to pressure Israel’s government. It called for ending the “blank check” of military support. It declared that the debate was no longer whether U.S. policy toward Israel should change, but “how it must change.” [bold in original]

Those are remarkable statements.

They are not expressions of disagreement with a particular Israeli policy. They are a lobbying agenda urging the United States to use its military and financial support to compel Israel’s democratically elected government to change course while Israel is fighting the most complex, multi-front war in its history.

That is no longer simply criticism. It is an organized effort to change Israeli policy through pressure from a foreign government.

Every organization has the right to advocate for the policies it believes are best. But organizations should also be honestly described by what they do.

If an organization’s central mission is persuading Washington to pressure Israel, reduce military support, and override the strategic decisions of Israel’s elected government during wartime as its enemies desire, it is fair to ask whether “pro-Israel” remains the most accurate description.

And that question should extend to the institutions that continue to grant it the legitimacy of the broader organized Jewish community, such as those which represent the pro-Israel consensus within umbrella organizations.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations excluded J Street. As has the American Zionist Movement. But what of local Jewish community relations councils that also house organizations like Israel Bonds?

Westchester Jewish Council member organizations

These umbrella organizations exist to build Jewish consensus and strengthen support for Israel.

If one member organization is actively lobbying the United States to use military aid as leverage against Israel during wartime, then the question is no longer merely one of ideological diversity. It is whether the organization’s mission remains compatible with the mission of the coalition itself.

Pluralism is an important Jewish value but so is intellectual honesty.

The organized Jewish community has a right—and perhaps an obligation—to decide whether an organization dedicated to lobbying against the policies of Israel’s elected government during war should continue to be presented as part of the mainstream pro-Israel tent.

As these pages wrote back in 2017, “the Jewish State and pro-Israel groups will never have uniformity of opinions, but it should have unity of purpose,” especially within umbrella organizations. J Street has affirmed that its mission is more akin to Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Israel Fund, who occupy a very different tent.

And it knows this, which is why it created its own umbrella group, Progressive Israel Network. It is why they banded together to boycott a major pro-Israel event in Washington, D.C. in 2024, sponsored by the other mainstream groups.

It was one thing for the Conference of Presidents and AZM to not admit J Street. Will Jewish groups which have J Street as a member organization, now finally ask it to leave?

The Leadership Democrats Didn’t Provide

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This week’s House debate over Israel’s $3.3 billion in annual military assistance was more than a vote. It was a test of leadership.

Many Democratic members of Congress allowed the debate to become one of competing sympathies: Israel versus American families, Israel versus veterans, Israel versus schools and health care. Some even embraced that framing themselves.

But leadership is not about amplifying the loudest voices in your coalition. It is about explaining difficult truths.

Over the past months, I wrote two essays that made straightforward strategic arguments.

In “Nobody Protests the Military Bases in Germany,” I argued that Americans have long understood military commitments abroad not as charity, but as investments in American security. We maintain troops, aircraft, and bases around the world because we believe confronting threats abroad is less costly than confronting them at home. It runs around $75 billion annually.

In “America’s Greatest and Quietest Military Victory in Nearly a Century,“ I argued that the wars in Israel and Ukraine should be viewed together, not separately. Two American allies have spent the last several years severely weakening two of America’s principal adversaries—Iran and Russia—while requiring virtually no American combat casualties and only a fraction of the cost of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.

One can disagree with either argument. What is remarkable is how rarely Democratic leaders even attempted to make it.

  • Instead of explaining that military aid is part of a broader American strategy, they allowed it to be portrayed as a gift to a foreign country. And to only one country – Israel.
  • Instead of explaining that weakening Russia and Iran advances American interests, they permitted the conversation to revolve almost entirely around domestic tradeoffs. Only relative to Israel.
  • Instead of educating their constituents about seventy-five years of American global defense strategy, they surrendered the debate to slogans about “blank checks.” Specifically to the Jewish State.

Leadership requires more than counting votes. It requires helping citizens understand why America stations forces overseas, why it supports allies under attack, why it spends money beyond its borders, and why deterrence is almost always less expensive than war.

That conversation becomes even more important when the facts are uncomfortable.

  • The United States has committed far more aid to Ukraine than to Israel. Over eight times as much.
  • The wars involving Ukraine and Russia have produced far greater casualties than the war in Gaza. As much as eight times as much.
  • It spends vastly more each year defending allies through bases and military deployments across Europe and Asia. About 18 times as much.

Yet Israel alone has become the symbol of America’s supposedly misplaced priorities.

Statesmanship is not measured by how well elected officials echo the passions of the moment. It is measured by whether they are willing to explain complex realities even when doing so is politically difficult.

This week’s vote exposed more than a divide over Israel.

It exposed a failure to teach. A failure to lead. And a willingness to lean into vile antisemitic tropes.

We Are Now Post Fact-Check

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Politics has entered a new era.

The old model was simple: make a claim, defend it with evidence, and persuade people.

The new model is different: create an unforgettable image. Whether it survives careful scrutiny is almost beside the point.

Attention and truth now operate on different clocks. Attention is immediate and verification is slow. By the time the facts arrive, the emotional conclusion has often hardened.

Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent visit to the West Bank illustrates the phenomenon. He described armed settlers and Israeli soldiers detaining his delegation and suggested U.S. Embassy involvement was needed to secure their release. Israeli and American officials have disputed key elements of that account. The details remain contested.

Politically, however, the outcome may already be settled.

Millions will remember one thing: an American congressman confronting violent Israelis.

This is why fact-checks so often fail. They assume the original purpose was to establish the truth. Increasingly, the purpose is to create a narrative that people remember. Every indignant rebuttal, every television debate and every social media thread extends the life of that narrative. Even proving the story exaggerated may simply give it another news cycle.

This is not unique to Ro Khanna. It is how much of modern politics now works. Viral videos replace investigations. Emotion outruns evidence. Politicians compete less to be correct than to become impossible to ignore.

Qatar-funded Hamas propaganda outlet Al Jazeera knows it. They’re good at it, mocking Israel even when they pretend to make the country look good.

Facts still matter. Every false or misleading claim deserves a documented response. Public officials should be held accountable for accuracy. But the correction should be concise, supported by evidence and then left to stand.

The real battle is over what people picture when they think about an issue.

If opponents reduce Judea and Samaria to images of violence, the answer is NOT weeks of arguing over a single disputed incident. It is to show a different reality: positive, possibly confrontational, and above all, memorable. Perhaps ancient Jewish history, thriving communities, vineyards, archaeology, entrepreneurship, shared workplaces, families and landscapes that tell a far richer story than Khanna’s video.

The same principle applies elsewhere. When anti-Israel extremists celebrate terrorism, intimidate Jewish students or glorify those who murder civilians, expose it. Not as a legal brief but show the human story. Show the victims. Show the consequences. Show the moral contrast.

Israeli Arab Nuseir Yassin known as Nas, has a big social media following

For too long, those who value accuracy have assumed that the best response to a misleading story is a better fact-check. Increasingly, the better response is a better story—one that is equally compelling because it is true.

The choice is not between truth and attention. It is to make the attention focused on the stories you want.

Checkpoint in California and Checkpoint in the West Bank. Only One Sparked Outrage.

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There are many ways to measure whether politicians are guided by principle or politics. One is to compare what provokes their outrage and what does not.

In April 2024, a Jewish student at UCLA tried to walk across his own campus.

Pro-Palestinian protesters physically blocked his path and decided, on their own authority, who could and could not pass. UCLA security officers stood by and did nothing. A federal judge later ruled that UCLA could not permit Jewish students to be excluded from parts of campus because of their identity or beliefs, calling such exclusion “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”

Where were California’s Democratic members of Congress about the incident? Other “progressive” members of Congress? Where were the press conferences, the demands for investigations and the flood of social media condemnations?

Their silence was striking.

Then came Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent 7,500-mile trip to the West Bank in July 2026.

Khanna claimed that armed settlers and Israeli soldiers prevented his delegation from proceeding and that U.S. Embassy involvement helped resolve the situation. Israeli officials, the U.S. embassy, and various parties dispute key parts of that account, saying the delegation entered a restricted security area without proper coordination and denying Khanna’s characterization of the encounter.

Yet progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar quickly rallied behind Khanna, condemning Israel and amplifying his account around the world.

The comparison is not between two people who were blocked. It is between two very different reasons for being blocked and the reactions that followed.

At UCLA, private protesters established their own checkpoint and allegedly decided which Americans could pass based on who they were or what they believed. A federal court concluded that a public university could not allow that to happen.

In the West Bank, the issue was about security. The area was subject to access restrictions because it was an active conflict zone. The dispute is over whether those security measures were properly applied not whether Ro Khanna had a right to unrestricted entry.

One concerns equal treatment under American law, the other concerns the exercise of security authority in a foreign conflict zone. Yet the louder political outrage came in response to the latter.

If elected officials cannot summon the same moral urgency when a Jewish American student is excluded from his own campus as they do when a colleague encounters a disputed security checkpoint overseas, the question is no longer whether they oppose injustice. It is what kinds of injustice – and for whom – they choose to notice.

We are witnessing more and more of the elected progressive wing marking American and Israeli Jews as “absolutely vile” people unworthy of basic protections and rights who “must be stopped.”

Non Pareils and the Patriarchy

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A Satire.

Emma had never intended to start a revolution. She had only come to the University of Greater Brooklyn’s annual Confectionery Justice Week because there was free candy.

As the bowl of Non Pareils reached her table, she froze.

A roomful of students kept eating while she stared in horror.

“Don’t you see it?” she whispered. Silence.

“The chocolate has been completely covered by thousands of tiny white spheres.”

Someone shrugged. “They’re sprinkles.”

Emma slowly stood. “They’re not sprinkles. They’re a visual representation of structural oppression.”

Within hours, her video – The Hidden Violence of Non Pareils – had accumulated two million views.

Her thesis was simple. The chocolate did all the work while an elite class of tiny white spheres occupied every visible position.

Then she discovered that nonpareil is French for “without equal.” Emma gasped. “So the elite didn’t just create the system,” she declared. “They named it after themselves.”

The university immediately established the Center for Inclusive Confectionery Studies. Professors from sociology, gender studies, and food anthropology praised Emma’s groundbreaking analysis.

The chemistry department quietly suggested that the sugar beads simply adhered to melted chocolate through basic physical processes. The department was reminded that lived experience outweighs molecular adhesion.

Emma unveiled her solution.

“The beads must no longer dominate the surface,” she explained. “They should be embedded within the chocolate itself.”

A food scientist politely observed that embedding sugar beads throughout chocolate would merely produce crunchy chocolate.

Emma smiled. “Exactly.”

The major candy companies thanked her for her presentation before declining to redesign one of America’s oldest candies.

Corporate resistance only confirmed her theory. Three weeks later, Emma withdrew from the university.

“Institutions cannot reform themselves,” she announced. “Real change requires disrupting the confectionery-industrial complex.”

She rented a converted warehouse in Brooklyn and founded EquiTreat Confections.

Each handcrafted chocolate disk contained precisely the same number of interior sugar beads, certified annually by an independent Equity Auditor. Exterior beads were prohibited.

The candies retailed for $24 each. Every box included a 1,700-word manifesto explaining why.

Food critics praised the company’s moral courage. Customers quietly admitted they preferred the original Non Pareils. Emma regarded this as further proof that society still had much work to do.

The original Non Pareils continued sitting quietly in candy dishes across America.

The candy never changed. Only the story people told about it did.

DISCLAIMER

This story is a work of satire. Any resemblance to actual persons, universities, professors, students, candy companies, Brooklyn startups, confectionery philosophies, academic movements, or desserts is entirely coincidental. No chocolate, sugar beads, sprinkles, or French vocabulary were harmed, marginalized, psychologically evaluated, or denied equal opportunity during the writing of this piece. Readers who experience offense, amusement, intellectual awakening, or an irresistible urge to reorganize the dessert aisle do so at their own risk and without creating any legal, nutritional, fiduciary, or confectionery relationship with the author. Any claim that this satire resembles real events should be directed to the Department of Coincidences, whose existence should not be inferred from this disclaimer.