Dead and Dying: Joe Lieberman, Ben Sasse, and the Politics We Are Losing

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Three people sat beneath words that Jews have been reading for more than three thousand years.

Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Hadassah Lieberman and Rep. Ritchie Torres at SAR High School on May 26, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) held a microphone. Beside him sat Hadassah Lieberman, widow of Senator Joe Lieberman. Next to her sat Rabbi Ethan Tucker, her son and Joe’s stepson. Behind them rose towering Hebrew letters from the Torah, framing a conversation about faith, citizenship, and public life.

The audience at the SAR High School had just watched Centered, a documentary chronicling the remarkable political career of Joe Lieberman. Yet as the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the evening was about something larger than one senator.

It was about a style of politics that increasingly feels as though it belongs to another country.

The film recounts the milestones most Americans remember. Lieberman became the first Jew nominated to a major party national ticket when Al Gore selected him as his running mate in 2000. He served decades in the Senate. Forty years in public office. He championed causes that frequently crossed ideological lines. He possessed a rare ability to frustrate Democrats and Republicans in equal measure.

But Centered is not ultimately a story about elections, legislation, or political strategy.

It is a story about a worldview.

Joe Lieberman belonged to a generation that regarded compromise as a civic achievement. In today’s politics, compromise often carries the stigma of surrender. Politicians fear being labeled weak. Activists reward purity. Social media celebrates confrontation.

Lieberman viewed compromise differently.

For him, compromise was almost a sacred act: imperfect people finding enough common ground to govern a free society. The goal of politics was not personal victory. The goal was preserving a country in which millions of people with competing interests and beliefs could continue living together.

That conviction repeatedly led him down unusual paths. In 2006, after losing the Democratic primary, he successfully ran for reelection as an Independent. In 2008, he endorsed Republican John McCain for president despite decades of Democratic affiliation. These decisions angered former allies and delighted opponents.

Yet they were never acts of political opportunism. They reflected a deeper conviction that principle mattered more than party and that loyalty to country could occasionally require disappointing one’s own side.

As Hadassah Lieberman and Rabbi Tucker reflected on his life, another theme emerged. Joe Lieberman never viewed Judaism and America as competing loyalties.

To him, they were inseparable. Orthodox Judaism did not pull him away from American life. It pushed him deeper into it.

The covenant at Sinai teaches obligations. It teaches that freedom carries responsibilities. It teaches that human beings answer to standards beyond personal preference or political convenience. Lieberman carried those lessons into public service. Citizenship was never merely a collection of rights. It was a series of duties owed to neighbors, institutions, and future generations.

At a moment when religion is often portrayed as a force that divides citizens into competing tribes, Lieberman embodied a different possibility. His faith expanded his sense of responsibility. It compelled him to engage people who disagreed with him. Religious conviction gave him confidence in his beliefs without requiring contempt for those who held different ones.

The discussion in Riverdale felt less like a political event than a remembrance of a disappearing civic culture.

A few weeks earlier, another screen had presented a similarly painful reflection.

On 60 Minutes, former Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) discussed the devastating illness that has transformed his life. Viewers could see the physical toll. The interview was heartbreaking.

Yet there was another loss visible beneath the medical diagnosis.

Sasse spent much of his public career defending a style of politics that increasingly feels endangered. A committed Christian, a constitutional conservative, and an intellectual by temperament, he repeatedly challenged members of his own party when he believed they were wrong. He valued debate. He welcomed disagreement. He seemed genuinely interested in understanding opposing arguments rather than simply defeating them.

Watching Sasse confront mortality was difficult.

Watching the worldview he represents fade from public life may be even more painful.

Joe Lieberman and Ben Sasse.

One was an Orthodox Jew from Connecticut. The other an evangelical Christian from Nebraska. One progressive frequently frustrated progressives. One conservative frequently frustrated conservatives.

Both believed faith should make a person more secure, more curious, and more capable of engaging opponents with dignity. Both understood politics as a means rather than an identity. Both believed citizenship imposed obligations. Both sought to persuade rather than humiliate. Neither confused cruelty with strength nor public shaming with moral courage.

Most importantly, both loved America in a way that transcended election results.

That form of patriotism increasingly feels like an endangered species.

The disappearance of politicians like Lieberman and Sasse did not happen by accident.

The institutions that helped produce them have weakened. Religious participation among America’s youth has declined significantly. Americans increasingly inhabit separate informational universes. Politicians answer national activist audiences rather than neighbors gathered in town halls, churches, synagogues, and community organizations.

Every one of these changes rewards performance over persuasion.

The result is a politics rich in outrage and poor in trust.

Compromise becomes betrayal. Nuance becomes weakness. Certainty becomes a substitute for wisdom. Political identity expands until it consumes every other identity.

And yet the deepest irony is that many of the figures who shaped America’s democratic traditions understood politics very differently.

They believed vigorous disagreement strengthened democracy. They expected conflict. They accepted that free citizens would hold competing visions of the good society. What mattered was preserving enough mutual respect to continue sharing a common future.

Lieberman and Sasse more than understood this; they lived it.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

As America approaches its 250th birthday, the nation will spend the coming year celebrating constitutional structures, founding documents, and historical achievements. Those accomplishments deserve celebration.

But republics survive on more than institutions.

They depend on habits of character.

They require leaders willing to lose arguments without losing respect for opponents. They require citizens capable of disagreement without hatred. They require people whose religious convictions deepen their sense of obligation to their country rather than narrowing it. They require men and women who view compromise as an honorable necessity in a diverse democracy.

Joe Lieberman spent his life trying to embody those virtues. Ben Sasse has spent his public career defending them.

One man is gone. The other is fighting for his life.

Watching them forces an uncomfortable question upon the rest of us.

Perhaps what is dead and dying is not merely a generation of public servants.

Perhaps it is the civic faith they carried with them: the belief that America is strongest when principled people of different convictions sit together, argue honestly, listen carefully, and leave the room still recognizing one another as fellow citizens.

As the audience filed out into the night in Riverdale, the Torah verses still stood behind the empty chairs. The conversation had ended and the questions remained.

The country that will celebrate its 250th birthday next year must decide whether those virtues are merely aging – or whether we are preparing to bury them alongside the generation that practiced them.

Podcast Episode: The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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Pip: There is something clarifying about discovering that a political vocabulary you assumed was spontaneous had a drafting committee — and a host country.

Mara: Today we are following First.One.Through into the history of how anti-Israel rhetoric was systematically constructed, tracing the ideological architecture back to a 2001 conference in Tehran. Let's start with where that script came from.

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

Mara: The central question here is whether the language of "apartheid," "settler colonialism," and "genocide" applied to Israel emerged organically from events on the ground — or whether it was a pre-built ideological framework deployed strategically.

Pip: The post answers that directly. Here is the setup: this was February 2001 — Hamas had not yet seized Gaza, Israel had not disengaged, October 7 was over two decades away — and yet the declaration from Iran's UN preparatory conference already described Israeli policy as "a new kind of apartheid," "a crime against humanity," and "a form of genocide."

Mara: The upshot is that the vocabulary was not a reaction to events. The moral categories were assigned before the events now routinely cited to justify them existed.

Pip: And the post walks through exactly what that vocabulary contained: apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, racial supremacy, alien domination, decolonization. The full lexicon, complete, in 2001.

Mara: What the post argues is that Iran understood something many Western governments did not — that narratives outlast battlefields. The framing is precise: "Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations."

Pip: The mechanism described is a kind of moral laundering. Traditional antisemitism had been discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was repackaged in the language of anti-racism and liberation. The old demand that Jews disappear became "decolonization."

Mara: The post traces how that vocabulary migrated — from the Tehran declaration into NGO reports, university syllabi, newsroom style guides, and eventually street protests. Students repeating those phrases today are, as the post puts it, echoing a script written by regimes that openly sought Israel's destruction.

Pip: The inversion the post identifies is the sharpest part: a regime animated by eliminationist antisemitism repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority, while recasting the Jewish state as the great racist evil of the modern era.

Mara: And the asymmetry in the Tehran document itself is telling — exhaustive attention to portraying Israel as racist, and nothing on antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, or the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries. That imbalance was not accidental.

Pip: The post's conclusion is blunt: October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.

Mara: Which raises the harder question — what it means to engage with that vocabulary now, knowing where it was built.

Pip: When the moral framework precedes the facts it claims to describe, the facts stop doing the work.

Mara: That is the thread worth pulling — how political language gets built, distributed, and eventually treated as self-evident. More on that next time.

The Great Return to Sender

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For years, the world was told the “Great March of Return” was peaceful theater. Demonstration. Symbolism. Political performance staged at Israel’s border fence. The real outrage, activists insisted, was not thousands of Gazans converging on a sovereign frontier controlled by a terrorist regime openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The outrage was that Israel refused to let them through.

Every breach attempt became a morality play. The fence itself was cast as villainous. Hamas was downgraded from genocidal jihadist organization to stage manager for a humanitarian spectacle. Foreign correspondents photographed smoke, flags, and crowds surging toward the barrier while carefully avoiding the central question: what exactly did “return” mean in practice?

A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows tear gas grenades falling during a Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground.
(Photo credit JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

October 7 answered it.

The world spent years romanticizing the idea of border penetration into Israel. Then Hamas finally achieved it. The infiltrators entered and what followed was not symbolic “resistance,” not coexistence, not liberation theology with subtitles for Western consumption. It was slaughter. Torture. Kidnapping. Burning families alive. Mass rape. Entire communities transformed into killing fields within hours.

The “Great March of Return” was not a protest but a rehearsal for an invasion.

The flotilla theatrics now replay the same script at sea.

Once again, activists sail toward a Hamas-controlled enclave insisting their mission is humanitarian symbolism. Once again, cameras arrive before facts. Once again, Israel is expected to participate in a choreographed morality play where interception itself becomes the crime. The activists want confrontation because confrontation produces images, and images produce headlines, and headlines produce another cycle in which Israel defending its borders is treated as inherently suspicious.

But after October 7, Israel no longer has the luxury of indulging symbolic breaches.

A blockade around a terrorist enclave is not abstract political philosophy. It is a security perimeter. Every intercepted vessel is being measured against the memory of what happened when infiltrators were not stopped. The Israeli Navy does not have the privilege enjoyed by European activists thousands of miles away who can romanticize “breaking barriers” while knowing they will never personally absorb the consequences if those barriers collapse.

That is why the flotilla activists are ultimately engaged in theater. They know they will be intercepted. Israel knows it must intercept them. The performance depends on the interception itself. Their goal is not to deliver aid more efficiently than established channels. Their goal is to create imagery in which Israeli enforcement appears oppressive by definition.

Sumud flotilla

The irony is impossible to miss. For years, activists treated Israel’s insistence on secure borders as paranoia. Then October 7 became the bloodiest validation imaginable of exactly why those borders existed.

And so the boats are seized and returned to port. The activists call it repression. Israel calls it survival.

Perhaps the flotillas deserve a more honest name: the Great Return to Sender.

How Maureen Galindo Became Someone Else’s Story

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Imagine a congressional candidate proposing detention camps for members of another minority group.

Imagine accusing that group of criminality, depravity, and collective guilt. Imagine that candidate finishing first in a major-party primary and having a realistic path to Congress.

What would journalists focus on? The candidate? Or everyone around her?

“turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

That question hovered over the New York Times coverage of Texas congressional candidate Maureen Galindo. Readers learned about Republican efforts to boost her candidacy. They learned that Democratic leaders denounced her. They learned of fears that she could become a liability for her party.

What they largely did not receive was a full accounting of Galindo herself.

accused her opponent of being “paid by Zionist terrorism and trafficking.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

The article informed readers that Galindo had made inflammatory remarks. It offered a glimpse of the controversy. Yet it spent remarkably little time exposing the breadth and character of the rhetoric that made her candidacy so extraordinary. Galindo’s own words appeared only in fragments. Her worldview remained mostly offstage.

The effect was subtle but significant. Readers were encouraged to view Galindo as a political problem rather than as a political phenomenon.

Jews run Hollywood and worship at the “synagogue of Satan.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

The frame became Republican meddling.

The story should have been why thousands of Democratic voters found her acceptable.

Republican spending may have increased Galindo’s visibility. Democratic leaders may have condemned her. Neither explains why a candidate whose rhetoric would once have ended a political career finished first in a Democratic primary.

“All politicians who have taken Israeli money should be tried for treason” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

That is the question the article never seriously explored.

The answer may lie in a reality that many journalists remain reluctant to confront that antisemitism is increasingly treated differently from other forms of prejudice.

When politicians target most minority groups, journalists lead with the offensive remarks themselves. Readers see the words and judge them accordingly.

When Jews or Zionists are the target, the instinct often shifts toward explanation. The discussion moves to grievances, movements, funding, coalitions, and historical forces. The prejudice becomes something to interpret rather than confront.

I don’t care “what any Zionist-owned politician thinks. They’re exposing themselves as Zionists which will backfire on them.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

This pattern has become particularly visible in discussions surrounding Zionism. For years, much of the political and academic world insisted that anti-Zionism and antisemitism occupy entirely separate categories. One concerns a state. The other concerns a people.

Galindo’s rhetoric collapses that distinction.

Her remarks are not primarily arguments about settlements, borders, military policy, or diplomatic arrangements. They concern Zionists in the United States. They assign collective characteristics to an enormous population. They transform a political identity into a moral category. They depict entire groups as uniquely dangerous and deserving of extraordinary treatment.

That is why her candidacy matters.

Not because she is representative of all progressives. She clearly is not.

Not because every critic of Israel shares her views. They plainly do not.

She matters because she demonstrates how rhetoric that would be instantly recognized as bigotry in almost any other context can find an audience when directed at Zionists and Jews.

And that audience is no longer hypothetical.

Galindo finished first because real voters chose her. That fact should have been the center of the story.

Instead, the NY Times coverage drifted toward a more comfortable explanation: Republicans boosted her campaign because they wanted to embarrass Democrats.

Perhaps they did.

Political parties routinely try to elevate weak or extreme opponents. There is nothing novel about the tactic.

What is novel is the assumption that the tactic itself explains the outcome. It does not.

A campaign contribution can buy advertising. It cannot manufacture belief. A mailer can increase awareness. It cannot create enthusiasm where none exists. Electoral manipulation may shape margins, but it does not explain why a message resonates.

To understand Galindo’s success requires examining the movement that produced her supporters rather than the operatives who noticed them.

That inquiry would lead into uncomfortable territory. It would require asking why anti-Israel activism increasingly attracts rhetoric that once belonged on the fringes of political life. It would require examining how language once considered antisemitic is repackaged as moral virtue. It would require acknowledging that hatred can emerge from the left no less than from the right.

Instead, the Times watered down the belief system of Galindo’s voters. It argued that the bile had “significantly less attention in Texas’s 35th congressional district.” It claimed that “most were unaware of the controversy,” and “knew little about the specifics.” It quoted a progressive who heard about Galindo’s smears “but brushed them as a political attacks.”

In other words, the Times deliberately sought to portray the progressive voters for Galindo as NOT antisemitic nor anti-Israel, just unaware.

This is journalistic malfeasance. It would never happen for any other minority group, and certainly not one experiencing a wave of hate crimes.

Journalists are trained to recognize certain forms of extremism instantly and warn readers about their implications.

The danger is not only the prejudice they recognize. It is also the prejudice they explain until it begins to sound normal.

Maureen Galindo may or may not win her race. What matters is that a candidate who trafficked in rhetoric that would have dominated headlines if directed at almost any other minority group finished first in a Democratic primary.

Yet the discussion focused elsewhere: Republican strategy, Democratic embarrassment, campaign spending, electoral tactics.

Everything surrounding the candidate became the story.

The candidate – and her supporters – became someone else’s story.

The Covenant and the Constitution

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As America approaches its 250th birthday and Jews prepare to celebrate Shavuot, two anniversaries separated by more than three thousand years arrive together.

One commemorates the acceptance of a covenant at Sinai. The other celebrates the creation of a constitutional republic in Philadelphia.

Different eras, different peoples, different purposes. Yet both rank among history’s most successful experiments in ordered liberty. Each rests upon the belief that freedom flourishes when people willingly bind themselves to enduring principles.

Shavuot marks the giving of the Torah. According to Jewish tradition, an entire nation accepted a shared framework of law, responsibility, and purpose. The defining moment of Jewish history centered on a covenant that applied equally to shepherds, merchants, judges, priests, and kings. Every Jew inherited both privileges and obligations. Every Jew stood beneath the same law.

America’s Founders pursued a similar aspiration. They sought to create a republic governed by laws rather than personalities, sustained by citizens willing to shoulder responsibility for the common good. The Constitution would provide the framework. The character of the people would determine whether it endured.

For American Jews, those two traditions have complemented one another for nearly two and a half centuries.

A Nation Built on Obligations

The Torah places responsibility at the center of communal life.

Parents teach children. Judges pursue justice. Business owners conduct themselves honestly. Communities support widows, orphans, and the poor. Neighbors help one another. Citizens participate in communal affairs. The Hebrew word mitzvah means commandment, reflecting a worldview in which obligation occupies a central place.

Jewish life developed around institutions that required participation and commitment. Synagogues, schools, charitable organizations, burial societies, study groups, courts, and community councils depended upon ordinary people investing time, resources, and energy into a shared enterprise.

Across centuries and continents, Jewish communities learned how to govern themselves, educate their children, care for vulnerable members, settle disputes, raise funds, preserve traditions, and maintain communal cohesion across generations. Those habits became deeply ingrained. They traveled wherever Jews traveled.

A constitutional republic depends upon many of the same qualities. Elections require voters. Courts require jurors. Communities require volunteers. Public institutions require trust. Civil society depends upon citizens who contribute more than they consume.

The connection between liberty and responsibility appears throughout Jewish tradition. The Exodus brought physical freedom. Seven weeks later, the Israelites arrived at Sinai and accepted the responsibilities that would transform a collection of former slaves into a nation. Freedom acquired meaning through purpose, discipline, and commitment.

That lesson remains profoundly relevant in every generation.

Why America Worked

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities navigated a recurring dilemma. Security often required accommodation. Opportunity frequently depended upon the goodwill of rulers. Rights expanded and contracted according to the decisions of monarchs, church authorities, political parties, and shifting public sentiment.

The American republic introduced a different model.

Rights flowed from citizenship.

The promise appeared almost immediately.

In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, home of Touro Synagogue, offering a vision unlike anything Jews had encountered in centuries of Diaspora life. The government of the United States, Washington wrote, gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” More importantly, he described Jews as possessing “alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

Those words represented far more than tolerance. Tolerance implies permission granted by those in power. Washington described Jews as citizens whose rights derived from the principles of the republic itself.

The distinction proved historic.

America offered Jews something extraordinary: equal citizenship while allowing them to remain fully Jewish.

By the early twentieth century, American Jews had produced judges, industrialists, labor leaders, scholars, entrepreneurs, military officers, and public servants. No figure better embodied the synthesis of Jewish identity and American citizenship than Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

At a time when some questioned whether Jews could maintain a distinct identity while remaining devoted Americans, Brandeis dismissed the concern entirely.

“To be good Americans, we must be better Jews.” – Louis Brandeis

Brandeis understood that Judaism and American citizenship drew strength from many of the same sources. Both relied upon educated citizens. Both depended upon moral self-restraint. Both valued participation over passivity. Both asked individuals to contribute to a larger community.

He also celebrated America’s ability to unite diverse communities while preserving their distinct identities.

“America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.” – Louis Brandeis

That insight echoes one of the Torah’s earliest political arrangements. The tribes of Israel maintained distinct identities, histories, and responsibilities while participating in a common covenant. Judah remained Judah. Levi remained Levi. Ephraim remained Ephraim. Diversity existed within a framework of shared purpose.

America has often operated in much the same way. Citizens arrive from every corner of the globe carrying different languages, traditions, and family histories. They become Americans through allegiance to constitutional principles and civic participation. Unity emerges through commitment to a common enterprise.

America’s Founders understood the importance of civic character as well. John Adams famously observed that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People.”

The statement reflected a practical reality. Institutions matter. Laws matter. Their effectiveness ultimately depends upon citizens capable of exercising self-restraint, accepting responsibility, and participating in public life.

Those qualities occupy a central place in Jewish tradition.

The Miracle of Compatibility

The story of American Jewry reflects something deeper than economic opportunity or social mobility.

America and Judaism developed complementary understandings of freedom.

Both traditions place law above rulers. Both value education. Both encourage active participation in communal affairs. Both rely upon citizens capable of governing themselves. Both recognize that liberty carries responsibilities.

The partnership has been extraordinarily successful.

American Jews have served in every war, sat on the Supreme Court, led major corporations, founded universities, advanced scientific discovery, built charitable institutions, served in elected office, and contributed to nearly every aspect of national life. At the same time, Jewish communities have built thousands of synagogues, schools, charities, cultural institutions, and communal organizations across the country.

The result has been one of the most successful relationships between a religious minority and a democratic republic in modern history.

As Shavuot approaches and America prepares to celebrate a quarter millennium of independence, the convergence feels especially meaningful.

At Sinai, freedom became joined to responsibility. In Philadelphia, liberty became joined to constitutional government.

Both moments reflected the same enduring insight: freedom survives when citizens willingly accept obligations to something larger than themselves.

Three millennia later, Jews celebrating Shavuot and Americans celebrating 250 years of independence continue to draw from that same well. A covenant and a Constitution, each in its own way, call upon free people to govern themselves, serve a higher purpose, and build a society worthy of being passed to the next generation.

Doctors Without Borders Is Coming For Israel

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Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.

Then the annual reports arrive.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.

The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”

The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.

And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.

MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.

The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.

The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.

Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.

Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.

And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.

MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.

So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.

Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.

Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”

The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.

Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.

The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.”  It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy. 

This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.

Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.

The core vocabulary was already there:

  • apartheid
  • settler colonialism
  • genocide
  • racial supremacy
  • alien domination
  • decolonization

The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.

Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.

The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.

Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.

The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.

The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.

Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:

  • The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
  • Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
  • Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.

And Israel had to be recast as uniquely illegitimate despite being the most liberal, democratic and pluralistic society for a thousand miles in any direction.

The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.

The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity.  Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.

Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.

NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.

The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.

Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.

The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”

And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.

The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The imbalance was not accidental.

The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.

The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.

But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.

Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.

Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.

For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.

October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.

Jews Ask for Protection. America Responds With Skepticism

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For most Americans, armed guards outside synagogues still look unsettling. For Jews, they have become background scenery. And increasingly, so has something else: being mocked for wanting the guards there in the first place.

Security cameras and hardened doors. Police details and lockdown drills. Volunteers scanning crowds during services. This is now ordinary Jewish life in America.

Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, scene of a mass shooting attack

And yet, at the very moment Jews are hardening schools and synagogues because they are under threat, influential voices across media, activist circles, and politics increasingly frame Jewish fear itself as manufactured.

Federal authorities recently uncovered what prosecutors describe as an Iran-linked terror network targeting Jews and synagogues across the United States and Europe. According to the allegations, operatives connected to Kata’ib Hezbollah coordinated surveillance and attack planning against Jewish institutions in New York, California, Arizona, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

The response from much of the cultural left was not moral clarity about why Jewish institutions feel endangered. Instead, the familiar machinery of minimization immediately activated.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a lengthy segment mocking undercover counterterror operations and emphasizing cases where authorities supposedly manufactured extremists through entrapment. The timing could hardly have been more revealing. Jews hear about Iranian proxy terror targeting synagogues while elite comedy television reassures audiences that perhaps the greater danger is excessive concern about terrorism.

At the same time, activist organizations like CAIR and civil-liberties groups fought efforts to create limited buffer zones around synagogues facing aggressive intimidation and harassment. Senators questioning Jewish witnesses during campus antisemitism hearings increasingly sounded less interested in confronting hatred than in interrogating whether Jews were exaggerating it.

The pattern repeats constantly. Jews are under attack and ask for protection. Influential institutions respond by interrogating whether Jews are too afraid and therefore undeserving of any support.

No other minority group is treated this way. If Black churches increased security after racist attacks, nobody would accuse them of hysteria. If mosques hardened entrances after terror threats, commentators would call it prudent. If Asian community centers hired guards after targeted violence, politicians would praise vigilance.

Only Jews are routinely told their fear may itself be socially dangerous.

That is what makes this moment so disturbing. Jews are not simply confronting rising antisemitism. They are confronting a cultural elite increasingly uncomfortable acknowledging why Jewish security measures became necessary in the first place.

So instead of confronting the ideology threatening Jews, many commentators, activists, and politicians redirect attention toward the people trying to protect them. The synagogue barrier becomes controversial. The undercover operation becomes suspicious. The frightened Jewish parent becomes the problem – a Chaya/Karen – to deconstruct. Much as Israel’s security barrier built to stop West Bank terrorists has been labeled by the alt-left an “apartheid wall,” they are broadly inverting Jewish defensive measures into offensive ones.

Let’s be clear: a society that grows more skeptical of synagogue security than synagogue attackers has lost its moral bearings.

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When Jews Are Attacked, The New York Times Worries About Jihadists (March 2026)

He Said, She Said, Rover Said

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A satire.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff caused a stir when he reported on the daily rape of Palestinian Arabs by Israeli dogs while incarcerated. Pro-Palestinians were appalled and pro-Israelis were shocked at the charge – what kind of inanity? How is this even possible?

New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff

Let me tell everyone about the ugly reality. I have been investigating this for years. I have a mole (an actual one) as well as a source inside the Zionist security apparatus. Let me just call him Colonel Klink to protect his identity, and I will fully expose what Kristoff only touched upon.

The Israeli prisons have vast storehouses of Bamba that they crumble and smear all over their Arab captives for interrogations. The peanut butter smell drives the dogs wild as they sexually maul the exposed Gazans and West Bank Arabs. The Israeli guards allow the abuse to go on until the Arab prisoners reveal the sordid plans they have for Israeli Jews, which the guards write down and then sell to Lior Raz for plots for the next season of Fauda.

Lior Raz of Fauda during a fundraiser for the Zionist ambulance service

This is only the tip of the canine iceberg.

Israeli border collies have been herding Palestinian sheep into “open air prisons” for years. The Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind offers the yellow Labradors and Golden Retrievers to Jews, while reserving the black Labradors for Israeli Arabs because of the deep racism embedded in Israeli society – even for blind people.

The animal cruelty knows no bounds.

ASPCA locations around the United States have been used as Mossad safe houses since the founding of the Zionist state. Dogs that people adopt have chips in them which the Israeli government uses to track millions of Americans.

The colonialists have even established an elite cat unit trained in pickpocketing, emotional manipulation, and knocking over glasses of water during hostage negotiations. One tabby roaming tourist cafes allegedly stole three passports, two vapes, and an unopened yogurt from a Scandinavian journalist.

In New York, Israeli units have dispatched Portuguese Water Dogs in Times Square where they operate Thee Card Monte tables to rob tourists. The same unit uses Standard Poodles to sell knock-off Gucci handbags while they gather intel on Muslim Halal food cart vendors, who are in turn, casing American streets for easy targets.

In the Holy Land, Palestinian Authority President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of “weaponizing pigeons” to deliberately defecate across public spaces in Palestinian cities. “This is organized biological warfare,” Abbas reportedly declared. “The pigeons target only Palestinian vehicles, Palestinian balconies, and Palestinian laundry.”

The humanitarian crisis expanded into the political sphere this week after activists accused Israel of operating what one NGO called “a sophisticated interspecies apartheid system” stretching across land, sea, air, and now apparently pollination networks, as Israeli bees are chemically treated to be unable to approach plants in Arab fields.

Speaking emotionally before reporters, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) condemned what she described as “the ongoing Animal Nakba. Not only are Palestinians suffering under the imperialist Zionist regime,” she declared, “the indigenous animals and insects are suffering too.”

One Gazan who was set free in a prisoner exchange told me that he witnessed parrots repeatedly curse prisoners in multiple languages to degrade the Palestinian spirit. Worst of all, the parrots deliberately spoke in Arabic with a lisp, which made several Palestinians admit to raping Israelis.

Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard, having heard of this, set up in the center of the campus with placards “Polly want a ceasefire!” Brown University faculty followed launching a new course “Decolonizing Veterinary Power Structures.” Col. Klink has been drafted to be one of the lecturers. The university is seemingly unaware that he is a double agent, trashing the Jewish State to progressive audiences while simultaneously surveilling them.

Brown University online lecture about decolonizing Palestine, seeking to replicate Hamas around the world

Francesca Albanese of the United Nations said the latest findings are deeply upsetting and more evidence regarding the “occupation of bees, apartheid Labradors, militant parrots, and psychologically traumatized hamsters,” although no reports of hamsters being involved in Zionist oppression have emerged. Yet.

Anti-Israel members of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team have urged the mayor to stop the Celebrate Israel Parade, which the mayor is reportedly considering. He has also suggested banning all Jews from adopting pets in the city, but his lawyers said that crossed the line into antisemitism. Zohran reportedly just shrugged and said “so what?”

In Washington, DC, President Trump has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about deploying the specially trained animal units in the Islamic Republic of Iran and against various anti-American groups inside the United States. “Bibi” is expected to not only comply, but share data from the sleeper pet cells in millions of American homes.

A new front in the Zionist war has been exposed which runs much deeper than even the most virulently anti-Israel groups ever imagined. It’s inter-species, which Candace Owens claimed further proved that Jews aren’t even 100 percent human. (Her agent continues to state that she is not antisemitic).

AP: Have I Told You Lately That Israel Is Racist?

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The Associated Press did not cover Jerusalem Day as a story about Jews returning joyfully to the holiest city in Judaism after nineteen years of exclusion under illegal Jordanian occupation. It covered it as a story about Jewish menace.

That framing decision is visible before readers even reach the second sentence.

“Ultranationalist Jews chant racist slogans during annual march into Jerusalem’s Old City.”

The rare racist chants reported at the march were ugly and deserve condemnation. But AP transformed the fringe into the essence of the event itself. Tens of thousands of Jews marched peacefully, sang, danced and celebrated Jerusalem Day. Yet readers encountering the article for the first time would assume the defining feature of the event was racist hooliganism when in fact it was joyous celebration.

AP’s linguistic stacking is relentless:

“ultranationalist Jews.”
“racist slogans.”
“violent confrontations.”
“hard-line government.”
“provocative visit.”
“inflame tensions.”

Every descriptor pushes readers toward the same emotional conclusion: Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem is dangerous, aggressive and destabilizing. Palestinians are the natural residents and Jews are interlopers who threaten violence.

The false narrative erases the actual historical meaning of the day.

Jerusalem Day marks the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 after Jordan’s nineteen-year occupation of the eastern part of the city. During those years Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter, synagogues were destroyed, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall despite explicit guarantees of access under the armistice agreements.

Without that context, Jewish celebration is transformed into something alien and sinister. Readers are shown Jews marching through Jerusalem, but never fully told why entering the Old City carries such emotional and historical weight in the first place.

Erased from the narrative is the uncomfortable fact that Jews were once the excluded population in the very places now described almost exclusively through Palestinian identity.

The asymmetry in labeling is impossible to miss. Arabs in Jerusalem are described as “Palestinians” or “Palestinian residents,” language that subtly implies an already-existing Palestinian sovereignty over the city. Jews, meanwhile, are repeatedly subdivided into ideological categories: “ultranationalists,” “hard-line,” “settlers.”

One side receives an organic national identity. The other receives political suspicion.

AP even refers to “Palestinian areas” of Jerusalem while never acknowledging the basic legal and political reality that these residents are primarily Israeli citizens or permanent residents under Israeli administration. There is no Palestinian state governing Jerusalem. Yet the article’s language continuously nudges readers toward imagining Jews as intruding into someone else’s sovereign national space.

Even the treatment of the Temple Mount follows the same pattern. AP describes MK Itamar Ben Gvir’s visit as “provocative” before readers are even reminded that the site is the holiest place in Judaism, where the biblical temples once stood.

Imagine covering Muslims praying in Mecca or Catholics gathering in the Vatican first through the lens of how upsetting their presence might be to others.

Buried later in the article is a participant explaining that the racist chants came from “a small minority” of marchers. But by then the framing work is complete. The reader has already absorbed the article’s core emotional message: Jewish nationalism itself is the problem.

There is a profound difference between reporting that some participants at a massive public gathering behaved disgracefully and presenting those fringe elements as representative of the gathering’s essential character.

One reports misconduct. The other assigns collective identity.

And the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore when comparing coverage standards. When participants at a pro-Palestinian rally praised terrorism or chanted genocidal slogans, major international outlets avoid headlines assigning those slogans to Palestinians collectively. Readers would receive sociological context, political nuance and careful distinctions between extremists and the broader movement.

Jewish events rarely receive the same interpretive charity.

The deeper issue exposed by the article is not merely media bias. It is discomfort with Jewish sovereignty itself.

Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is welcomed when it is passive and distant. The moment it expresses sovereignty, history or power, the vocabulary changes. Then Jews become “ultranationalists.”

The article unintentionally reveals a larger truth about modern international discourse surrounding Israel. Jewish history is acceptable. Jewish prayer is acceptable. Jewish suffering is acceptable. What remains difficult for much of the international press is Jewish power: Jews governing Jerusalem, policing Jerusalem, marching through Jerusalem and refusing to behave like temporary guests in their own civilizational center.