Monthly Archives: December 2025

Democratic Socialist Banana Republic

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There is a familiar script in the American imagination: the banana republic. A place where public money leaks into private pockets, where cronies get rich, and where the state exists less to serve citizens than to lubricate loyalty. We usually imagine this as something foreign—dictatorships, juntas, autocrats with offshore accounts.

But Minnesota has offered a more modern, democratic variant.

The Somali community fraud cases that emerged from COVID relief funds, child-nutrition programs, and early-learning initiatives were not small-time scams. Tens of millions—eventually billions— of dollars flowed through nonprofit fronts. Programs meant to feed hungry children and support families became vehicles for enrichment. People inside the community became millionaires. Luxury homes, cars, and cash replaced the language of charity.

It didn’t stop with pandemic money. The same networks appeared again in other state and federal programs. Kickbacks were alleged. In some cases, parents were implicated. Oversight mechanisms failed repeatedly. Red flags were raised and ignored.

Which leads to the uncomfortable question that hovers over every such scandal: how much of this was invisible, and how much was merely inconvenient?

Because money of that scale does not move without institutional permission—explicit or implicit. If government officials knew and looked away, if warnings were buried to keep a constituency satisfied, if enforcement was delayed because elections loomed, then the fraud begins to blur into something murkier. Not theft from the shadows, but theft tolerated in the light.

And once it is tolerated, the line between crime and policy becomes disturbingly thin.

This is not uniquely American.

In Israel, a parallel story has unfolded for decades in a more formalized way. When the state was founded, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community was granted exemptions from military service. They were few in number, devastated by the Holocaust, and the exemption was framed as a temporary measure to rebuild a shattered world of Torah learning.

That world rebuilt itself—spectacularly. Today the Haredi population approaches 15% of Israel’s citizens and an even larger share – approaching 60% – of its youth. Their exemption from military service has become one of the most volatile fault lines in Israeli society, especially over the last two years of war, when reserve soldiers have been called up again and again while entire neighborhoods remain exempt.

The state pays. Child allowances, stipends, subsidies. And despite mounting public anger, the government—under Benjamin Netanyahu—continues to send checks. The reason is not hidden. Haredi parties vote as disciplined blocs. Their support keeps coalitions alive. The transaction is transparent.

It is deeply unfair. It corrodes social trust. But it is not a crime, because it is legislated, budgeted, and justified in public.

This is the key distinction that matters less than we pretend.

Governments control trillions of dollars. Politicians direct those flows—sometimes explicitly, sometimes through euphemism—to keep voters happy. In plainer language, they buy loyalty. Niche communities that vote as a bloc have disproportionate leverage. When challenged, they retreat behind the language of discrimination, marginalization, or historical injustice. The whistleblower becomes the villain.

Movements that openly favor redistribution, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, are at least honest about the direction of travel. They believe the treasury should be used to shift wealth and power to favored or protected groups. They don’t pretend the redistribution is an element of corruption—it is the point of government.

Contrast this with the classic banana republic. There, a dictator steals for himself and his inner circle. The corruption is crude, centralized, and personal.

In a democracy, the corruption is softer and more dangerous. The state funnels money to preferred constituencies under moral banners: equity, justice, relief, rebuilding. The beneficiaries vote. The politicians win. Accountability dissolves.

No villas on the Riviera are required. No coup is needed.

What emerges instead is a democratic socialist banana republic: not ruled by a single strongman, but by a web of incentives where public funds are traded for political survival. Fraud becomes harder to prosecute, because it nests inside policy. Waste becomes invisible, because it wears the language of virtue.

And when someone finally asks whether this is really a crime, the most honest answer may be the most unsettling one of all:

No. It’s worse.

The Dry Tree

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Jewish tradition returns again and again to the image of the tree. Sometimes it appears strong and fruit-bearing. At other moments it is reduced, cut back, or left without water. The image endures because it carries history within it—growth shaped by interruption, life that continues through constraint.

The prophets reached for this language when ordinary description failed them.

“They shall be like a tree planted in the desert, that does not sense the coming of good.” – Jeremiah 17:6

“Let not the barren one say: ‘I am a dry tree.’” – Isaiah 56:3

The statement reframes the moment. What looks final and foreboding is often incomplete. The future has not yet spoken.

That tension—between appearance and essence—finds a physical echo in the hills west of Jerusalem, where Yad Kennedy rises from the forest. The memorial marks a life interrupted mid-growth. John F. Kennedy’s presidency and life ended before its natural arc could unfold, and the monument holds that sense of unrealized promise. Surrounded by trees planted in rocky soil, it resembles a tree stump, and invites reflection on lives cut short and on continuity carried forward by those who remain.

Yad Kennedy in Jerusalem Forest

Jewish history has unfolded along similar lines. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism reorganized itself without sovereignty or familiar institutions. Across centuries of dispersion, it adapted under pressure, preserving learning and community in constrained forms. Growth did not disappear; it compressed, waiting for conditions that would allow it to expand again.

This persistence appears vividly in the work of Dr. Mark Podwal (1945-2024). His drawings return repeatedly to the Jewish tree—scarred, truncated, shaped by time. The branches rise unevenly, carrying memory in their grain. Life continues without erasing what came before. Growth is real precisely because it bears the marks of history.

That image resonated deeply with Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924-2010), founding Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Gush Etzion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Rav Amital rebuilt his world through Torah that could hold rupture and responsibility together. His leadership reflected patience, moral seriousness, and a belief that renewal emerges gradually from damaged ground.

Podwal once gave Rav Amital a drawing of a truncated Jewish tree—reduced in form, yet unmistakably alive, blooming with the promise of a renewed Judaism. The rabbi transformed the image into a small sticker and placed it inside the books of his personal library. Every volume bore the same mark.

Drawing by Mark Podwal about Jewish life springing forth from Jewish texts, used as a sticker in the library of Rav Yehuda Amital (photo: First One Through)

The image spoke directly to his life’s work. Rav Amital played a central role in rebuilding the Gush Etzion community after it was destroyed in the 1948–49 War of Independence, a war in which he fought shortly after moving to the land of Israel after his family was slaughtered in Auschwitz. In the hills south of Jerusalem, homes had been razed, residents killed or expelled, and the area left barren. The return after the 1967 Six Day War was careful and deliberate, rooted in learning, faith, and responsibility. A community grew again where one had been cut down.

Each time Rav Amital opened a book, the image reinforced that lesson. Torah study itself became an act of regrowth.

Rav Amital had the original Podwal drawing framed and placed on the wall of his home. (photo: First One Through)

That insight extends far beyond one community.

In the Land of Israel, Jewish roots run beneath history itself—through exile and return, ruin and rebuilding. Torah and Jewish presence were never uprooted from this land. They were compressed, covered, narrowed to fragments. Learning continued in small circles, in whispered prayers, in constrained spaces. At times the surface appeared barren. Beneath it, roots remained alive.

This is why Jewish life and learning in Israel carry a distinctive quality of reemergence. Yeshivot rise where silence once prevailed. Communities form on ground that held ruins. Torah is studied again in places where the chain of learning was abruptly broken. To the unobservant eye, it can appear improbable—as though life has emerged from wood long dried. To those who understand the depth of Jewish connection to this land, to the Jewish texts which form the basis of Judaism, it is recognition rather than surprise.

The dry tree was never dead. It was waiting.

Jewish continuity does not require ideal conditions. Where roots reach deep enough, water is eventually found. Growth resumes in forms shaped by everything that came before.

The Golem of New York City

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In the legends of Prague, the Golem came into being when civic order failed Jews in predictable ways. Blood libels circulated, crowds gathered, and authorities hesitated at the decisive moment. Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (c.1512-1609), recognized the pattern. He shaped a human form from the mud of the Vltava River—from the city itself—and animated it with sacred words. The choice of material mattered. The defender of Jews was made from the ground beneath their feet. Even if the city’s leaders would not protect Jews, the city itself would.

The Golem patrolled the Jewish quarter, broke the rhythm of violence, and restored deterrence. When the danger passed, it was deactivated and laid to rest in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the Altneuschul. The legend recorded a hard truth: when the state falters, protection is improvised; when the state recovers, emergency power sleeps.

Altneuschul in Prague (photo: First One Through)

That memory traveled.

The melody of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish State of Israel, traces back through the musical world of that same Prague river Vltava, famously shaped by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Exile and return share a river. The Golem embodies survival within exile; Zionism embodies the resolve to end exile. One guards a community where it stands, the other builds sovereignty so guarding becomes policy.

Yet the Golem never disappears. It waits for the moment when trust in authority thins again.

New York, Upper East Side

New York City holds one of the world’s largest and most visible Jewish populations. Jewish life here is open and proud. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions operate in public view, anchored by the assumption that their protection is a foundational duty of government.

That assumption has been tested.

On the Upper East Side in November 2025, an anti-Israel crowd swarmed a synagogue hosting a pro–Land of Israel event. The scene echoed an old shape: shouting at the doors of a Jewish house of worship, intimidation in a public park, the expectation that Jews would need to justify gathering openly as Jews. Instead of drawing a clear perimeter around the synagogue and condemning the mob, Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, scolded the shul for holding a Zionist event, shifting the burden of restraint onto the Jewish institution.

For Jews who carry history close, the signal was unmistakable. Cities fail their minorities first through language, then through hesitation, and only later through force. When the synagogue itself surrounded by an angry crowd is framed as the problem, safety has become conditional.

Conditional safety never endures.

How the Modern Golem Forms

The Golem of New York does not rise from clay. It forms from memory.

Private guards appear where confidence once lived. Volunteer patrols lengthen into the evening. Parents coordinate entrances and exits. Institutions harden quietly, without ceremony.

These are the incremental steps of adaptation. Communities organize when clarity blurs. Parallel systems take shape when weak reassurance yields to experience.

Other minority groups get municipal funding and public declarations of support while Jews are only lumped into a general “other” category, as in White Plains, the capital of Westchester County just north of New York City. Jews learn that they must fend for themselves, because their basic protection offends many. Frighteningly, even for local politicians.

On the Upper East Side, a growing and proudly Zionist congregation bears a name heavy with inheritance: Altneu Synagogue. Old–New. It is a spin-off of the Park East Synagogue where the anti-Israel mob harassed and intimidated Jews. The echo of Prague’s Altneuschul may also prove prescient. Old dangers return wearing contemporary language. Rivers change. Cities change. But the logic persists.

Natan Sharansky, a famous Russian “refusenik” who was jailed for years before being allowed to leave to Israel, knows the dangers of antisemitic regimes. He came to Washington, D.C. in November 2023 to address 300,000 people about the need to fight back: “We, together, will fight against those who try to give legitimacy to Hamas. We will fight for Israel. We will fight for every Jew. We will fight against antisemitism. We will fight for the values and against corruption of those values which are at the center of our Jewish identity and American identity.”

Sharansky is coming to New York in January, soon after Mamdani takes office. He should come to the Altneu Synagogue and help shape and awaken a modern Golem as Jewish security appears vulnerable, and the current leaders of Jewish institutions appear unable to rise to the moment. New, unconventional defenders need to assume roles.

For the moment, things may be OK. Mamdani appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a role she has had for several years. She is Jewish and no-nonsense leader, widely supported by the city’s Jewish community. If she can do her job without anti-Zionist and antisemitic politicians limiting her mandate, Jews will be fine. Otherwise, a new golem will rise in the New World, hundreds of years after the Golem of Prague went to sleep in the attic of the Altneuschul.

Hamas and ISIS

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The headlines are the same. Another plot uncovered. Another attacker radicalized online. Another manifesto stitched together from familiar phrases about vengeance, purity, and divine obligation.

Was it ISIS-inspired?
Was it Hamas-aligned?

In practice, the distinction is collapsing.

From Manchester to Sydney and across Europe and North America, security services increasingly encounter the same ideological core animating different actors. Antisemitism framed as righteousness. Violence framed as duty. Death framed as meaning. The slogans vary, the flags change, but the belief system underneath remains remarkably consistent.

ISIS flag on the car of murderers in Sydney, Australia

These movements are not converging by accident. They are aligned by doctrine. They are the banners of jihad.

When stripped of geography, branding, and media strategy, Hamas and the Islamic State reveal the same worldview: a sanctified war against Jews, against pluralism, and against life itself.

They are branches of the same antisemitic death cult.

God Alone Rules

Both movements begin with a totalizing claim: sovereignty belongs exclusively to God. Political authority, democratic choice, civil law—all are illegitimate intrusions into divine rule. Religion is not guidance; it is command.

This theology leaves no room for coexistence. Difference becomes defiance. Dissent becomes apostasy. Submission is the only acceptable outcome.

Violence as Obedience

Violence is not an unfortunate consequence of struggle. It is the struggle. Jihad is framed as obligation, killing as faithfulness, death as fulfillment.

This is why attacks around the world feel interchangeable. Civilian targets are central because civilians matter symbolically. Children are drawn into the story because innocence amplifies impact. Suicide becomes virtue because it collapses the distance between belief and action.

When ideology outranks life, mass killing is not excess. It is alignment.

Jews as a Theological Obstacle

The conflict is often described in political or territorial terms, but the animating hostility is theological. Jews are cast as an enduring enemy embedded in sacred narrative, not as a community with whom disagreement might be resolved.

That framing explains the permanence of the war. Agreements become pauses. Ceasefires mere tactics. The goal is not compromise but eradication.

Scripture, once weaponized, does not negotiate.

Death as Currency

In societies shaped by this ideology, death is elevated and life is instrumentalized. Martyrdom replaces mourning. Sacrifice replaces survival. Civilian neighborhoods are folded deliberately into military design.

Homes, schools, mosques, hospitals become launchpads and shields. Suffering is curated for export. Images of devastation are not collateral damage; they are strategic output.

What the outside world experiences as tragedy, the ideology treats as leverage.

Power Without Freedom

The end state is always the same. Total control enforced by fear and sanctified by religion. No speech outside doctrine. No faith outside orthodoxy. No dignity outside obedience.

ISIS ruled this way openly. Hamas learned to cloak the same destination in the language of resistance and grievance. The structure beneath remains unchanged.

The Lesson Already Learned

When ISIS surged across Iraq and Syria, the West recognized the threat clearly. It did not argue for partial containment. It did not imagine ideological evolution. It organized, committed resources, and dismantled the movement.

And it succeeded. For a while.

Israel has carried that same burden. By Israel’s own assessments, roughly 95 percent of Hamas’s fighting capacity—its leadership, battalions, tunnels, and command infrastructure—has been destroyed.

Stopping here would not stabilize anything. Allowing the group to maintain its weapons – the way the majority of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want – would preserve the conditions for revival. Ideologies built on sanctified violence do not soften when wounded. They metastasize.

The remaining fragments are not a political movement in transition. They are an ideology waiting to rearm, re-export, and re-infect—far beyond Gaza.

Yet the world is rearming and financing ISIS and Hamas. It is allowing the jihadi groups to gain strength.

The world once understood this when ISIS was the name on the banner. The jihadist doctrine of Hamas is the same and has not changed. Only the branding has.

Hamas leadership promises to continue war against Israel forever

ISIS in Africa in Somalia, recruiting from around the world

Reparations Is Not About the Past. It Is About Power.

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For years, reparations has been framed as moral accounting — a long-overdue reckoning with colonial crimes, slavery, and historical trauma. That framing no longer captures what is actually unfolding. The modern reparations movement has evolved into something far more consequential: a Global South demand on the Global North to rebalance power, wealth, and legitimacy, amplified by a coalition that blends post-colonial nationalism, socialism, and jihadist anti-Western ideology.

This is not accidental. It is strategic.

Across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and parts of Asia, governments are no longer asking quietly for acknowledgment or symbolic regret. They are issuing demands. Reparations, apologies, restitution, debt relief, technology transfer, and capital flows are increasingly bundled into a single argument: the prosperity of the Global North is illegitimate and must be paid back.

From Memory to Leverage

Consider Algeria, where colonial grievance is not episodic but foundational. French violence, nuclear testing, and cultural erasure are not invoked merely to heal wounds. They are reasserted whenever diplomacy stalls or domestic legitimacy frays.

Demonstration in Marseille, France against antisemitism, much coming from Muslim immigrants from former French colonies including Algeria

Or Namibia, which rejected Germany’s €1.1 billion offer precisely because it was labeled “development aid” rather than “reparations.” Aid preserves hierarchy. Reparations invert it. Reparations place the former colonizer in the position of debtor — morally, legally, and politically.

Across the Caribbean, reparations has become collective bargaining. Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti are not asking for apologies alone. Haiti’s claim that France repay the 1825 “independence ransom” reframes national birth itself as extortion requiring reversal.

In India, reparations rhetoric fits neatly into civilizational nationalism — extracting moral and economic concessions from Britain while rejecting Western liberal tutelage.

This is not nostalgia. It is leverage. And it is gaining momentum.

The Socialist–Jihadi Convergence

What gives this movement its new force is the coalition that amplifies it.

On one flank are socialist movements that treat capitalism itself as a colonial crime. On the other are Islamist and jihadist ideologies that frame Western dominance as a civilizational sin. Their vocabularies differ, but their conclusions align.

Both see the Global North as illegitimate, wealth accumulation as theft, liberal democracy as camouflage for domination, and historical grievance as a renewable political resource. Reparations becomes the bridge — translating resentment into claims and memory into entitlement. It offers redistribution without admitting failure, a bloodless substitute where revolution stalled.

That is why reparations rhetoric now travels alongside calls to dismantle Western institutions, forgive sovereign debt, nationalize industries, and replace a rules-based order with “multipolar justice.”

From States to Peoples

Once nations inherit grievance, groups of people inevitably follow.

In the United States, descendants of enslaved Africans argue that wealth extracted centuries ago still compounds today — in land, capital, education, and political power. The logic mirrors the international model: systematic harm, identifiable beneficiaries, ongoing effects, and a moral requirement for redistribution.

In the Middle East, Arab claims against Israel for homes and land lost in the 1948 war are framed not as consequences of war initiated, but as perpetual moral debts transferable across generations and insulated from counter-claims.

Here reparations is not merely compensation. It is recognition, reversal, and re-legitimation of identity.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

For individuals without a banner to rally around, reparations is the escape hatch, and there’s little selfish downside in crushing the Global North.

The Question No One Wants to Ask

If reparations reach back to slavery, empire, and war — how far back do they go?

Will Jews demand reparations from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states for Islamic conquest, dhimmi subjugation, and the twentieth-century expulsion of ancient Jewish communities from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco? If Arabs displaced in 1948 may claim restitution, Jews dispossessed from Arab lands must be able to claim the same (and why doesn’t the United Nations say as much?)

If slavery justifies restitution, does conquest?
If conquest counts, does ancient conquest count less than modern conquest?
And who decides?

These questions expose the framework’s central fault line: there is no principled stopping point.

Reparations as a Substitute for the Meritocracy Debate

Before reparations becomes the closing argument, it must be understood as something else as well: a way to bypass the hardest debate of all — meritocracy, accountability, and performance.

Reparations offers a sweeping explanatory shortcut. Systems that may be inefficient, corrupt, poorly governed, or badly executed are recast as inevitable products of historical oppression. Failure ceases to reflect choices or incentives. It becomes proof of theft.

Once inequality is framed entirely as inherited structural injustice, there are no consequences for present-day decisions. Policy failure is absolved. Cronyism becomes resistance. Capital flight becomes colonial residue. Authoritarianism becomes post-colonial trauma.

Meritocracy itself becomes suspect. Success is not earned; it is inherited privilege. Competence is irrelevant; power imbalance is decisive. Agency dissolves — and with it, responsibility.

Why This Is Gaining Power Now — and Who It Alienates

This framework has surged as the wealth gap widens and upward mobility weakens. When capital compounds faster than wages and education no longer guarantees security, reparations offers a clean explanation: inequality is not complex or contingent — it is an unpaid historical debt.

That logic now collides with social reality in the West, especially for young men. College has become exorbitantly expensive. Returns feel uncertain. Many feel pressure to earn now rather than invest years in institutions that increasingly tell them they are part of the problem. If reparations is the moral language of the moment, some will try to join it. Those who cannot — particularly young white men — are cast as beneficiaries of a corrupt system, criticized for underperforming despite “privilege,” and then asked to atone anyway.

The result is a triple bind: vilified for advantage, shamed for underperformance, and burdened with inherited guilt — despite having done nothing other than be born where and how they were. This convergence helps explain male dropout from universities, the turn toward trades and online hustle, and the simmering anger of those who feel targeted by a moral framework that offers neither dignity nor exit.

The End State

If reparations becomes the dominant moral currency of global politics, the result will not be justice. It will be permanent contestation — a world where every border is provisional, every inheritance suspect, every success morally contingent.

Reparations promises closure. In practice, it offers none.

It turns history into an endless claims process, civilization into a courtroom, and the future into a hostage of the past.

Goshen and the Myth of Security

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When famine made Canaan (the land of Israel today) unlivable, Jacob’s family went down to Egypt. What began as a temporary refuge became something else entirely. Goshen (Genesis 45:9) was fertile, welcoming, and safe. The Jews prospered there. They built families, livelihoods, and a future. And for a time, it worked.

That is what makes Goshen so instructive. Unlike earlier famine detours in Genesis, this was not a brief excursion. Goshen was a one-way trip. It felt secure enough to settle into—and that comfort lasted generations. Until it didn’t.

Jews talk about it today as they ponder antisemitism’s historic trajectory. It has moved millions of Jews around the world for thousands of years, marking them as the “wandering Jew.” In 1900, most Jews spoke Russian, German, Polish and Arabic. In 2025, they almost all speak Hebrew and English, with French and Spanish covering virtually everyone else.

The land of Israel itself was not without Jewish migration. The land flourished, kingdoms rose, institutions formed. Then came division, exile, and destruction. First the northern tribes disappeared into history. Later Judah followed. The Jews did not just lose modern incarnations of Goshen; they lost their homeland for nearly two thousand years.

Parshat Vayigash is often used as the Torah’s first meditation on long-term diaspora. It offers no illusion that comfort guarantees permanence. Goshen was pleasant until a Pharaoh arose who no longer remembered Joseph. But the Jewish homeland was also strong until it fractured from within and fell to external powers. Neither place offered permanent security.

The lesson is not that exile is doomed or that the Jewish Promised Land is automatically safe. It is that where Jews live is often situational, not absolute. Prosperity can mask vulnerability. Stability can decay quietly. The obligation is vigilance—reading the environment honestly, assessing quality of life soberly, and understanding that history turns even when life feels settled.

Israel’s Security Barrier as seen from Jerusalem, built to stop terrorism during the “Second Intifada”

Goshen teaches that success today is not a promise for tomorrow. But Israel teaches the same. Awareness, not geography, is what determines whether a place remains livable.

Every Picture Tells a Story: The War Gazans Didn’t Start—and Aren’t Ending

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The headline asked why hundreds of Gazans have been killed. The article never answered.

In its December 24 piece, The New York Times assembled an inventory of grief—names, faces, photographs, shattered families—documenting civilian death in Gaza with intimate precision. What it did not assemble was an explanation. The question at the top functioned as decoration; the answer was assumed. Israel hovered everywhere as implication, never as argument.

What the article omitted is not marginal. It is decisive.

It did not say that Hamas still holds an Israeli hostage, in violation of the ceasefire framework. As long as that person remains captive, the war has not ended and the terms of the ceasefire have not been met.

It did not say that Hamas has refused to disarm—flatly, publicly—even though disarmament is a core requirement of the multi-point plan meant to end the fighting. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs in both Gaza and the West bank agree. This is not procedural quibbling. A movement that keeps its weapons is declaring its intention to keep killing. Leaving that fact out does not clarify the story; it inverts it.

“a core, cross-regional [Gaza and West bank] red line remains: overwhelming opposition to disarming Hamas, complicating any post-war arrangement.” – PCPSR poll of October 28, 2025

It did not say that Hamas continues to state openly that it will pursue the war until the Jewish state is destroyed. These are not coded remarks. They are repeated commitments. When a belligerent announces genocidal intent and retains its arsenal, civilian deaths are not mysterious. They are the predictable outcome of strategy.

“The resistance is capable of continuing, and I am confident that the outcome of this conflict will be the demise of this entity [Israel].” – Senior member of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Osama Hamdan on December 23, 2025

Instead, The Times presented Gaza as a place acted upon—its people rendered passive, its leadership reduced to background noise. The governing reality was blurred, that the popular, armed movement that began the war – with overwhelming local support – insists on continuing it. Palestinian Arabs appeared as if history were happening to them, rather than through institutions that still mobilize society for conflict.

The photographs – eleven in all, a remarkable number for an article, mostly featuring children – did their work. They always do. Images narrow the moral aperture. They locate causality at the edge of the frame. What lies outside—tunnels, refusals, threats, the last hostage—falls away. Repetition turns absence into innocence.

This is not empathy. It is evasion.

Civilian death is tragic and deserves coverage. But tragedy without agency becomes accusation by implication. When Arab suffering is anatomized down to the last tear while their popular elected leadership’s war-making is erased, journalism is no longer news but advocacy.

The Times did not lie. It curated. It acted as the political-terrorist group’s propaganda arm.

Readers are left asking why Israel is still fighting, when the honest question is why Hamas is still waging war—still holding the last hostage, still refusing disarmament, still promising destruction.

Every picture tells a story. This one tells a story about the author.

Ben Shapiro, the Biblical Joseph, and Lessons on Where to Aim

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The conservative group Turning Point USA held its four day AmericaFest conference this week with a lineup of political commentators – and Nicki Minaj (1:13:00). Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire sent the conference in a new direction, coming to speak early and attacking several of the speakers due to come on – including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly – for trafficking in antisemitism and platforming wild conspiracy theories and theorists.

The media lit up that there is a rupture inside the conservative movement. Vice President JD Vance said at the conference, seemingly in response to Shapiro’s line of attacks, that “we have far more important work to do than cancelling each other.”

While the majority of people at Turning Point agree with Shapiro about Israel according to polls, the question of how to engage with people with whom you strongly disagree or want to persuade is an important question about tactics.

Consider the biblical figure Joseph.

When he first dreamed, Joseph placed himself at the center of the story and delivered the message directly to those who would one day bow before him. His brothers did not merely hear a vision of the future; they heard a declaration of hierarchy. The dream named winners and losers, elevation and humiliation.

Truthful or not, it was combustible.

Joseph learned—at extraordinary cost—that telling people they will submit to you does not hasten destiny. It creates enemies who delay it. Fate may be fixed, but its route is not.

Years later, standing before Pharaoh, Joseph applies that hard lesson with precision.

Joseph tells Pharaoh that his dream came in two forms because God has decided to do it—and to do it soon (Genesis 41:25-32). This is a striking claim, because Joseph himself had two dreams many years earlier, and nothing happened quickly.

Joseph is not contradicting himself. He is revealing what he has learned.

As a boy, Joseph assumed repetition meant imminence. Life taught him otherwise. His dreams were doubled, yet delayed for decades. They passed through betrayal, silence, and obscurity before fulfillment.

So why does Joseph now speak with certainty?

Because he ultimately understood something he did not then: the meaning of repetition depends on where the dream is aimed and who holds agency.

Joseph’s youthful dreams were aimed directly at people—at his brothers, at his parents, at their submission to him. They provoked resistance. Those who felt targeted fought the message, and history slowed.

Pharaoh’s dreams are different—not because they are truer, but because Joseph presents them differently.

Joseph does not tell Pharaoh that HIS reign will collapse or that HIS legacy will be erased. He does not aim the dream at Pharaoh’s ego. He does not place Pharaoh at the center of decline and does not elevate himself as the savior.

Instead, Joseph shifts the focus outward—to the land, to the people, to the coming conditions. Egypt will suffer. The famine will devastate the country. The threat is environmental and collective, not personal.

By doing so, Joseph removes both himself and Pharaoh from the line of fire.

Joseph learned an important lesson: when a dream threatens reality rather than pride, it accelerates history.

His own dreams were delayed because they challenged people directly. Pharaoh’s dreams moved quickly because they challenge circumstances instead.

Joseph’s greatness is not merely interpretive; it is strategic. He transforms a divine warning into a solvable problem.

He gives Pharaoh a way forward—storage, planning, delegation, foresight. Pharaoh is no longer defending his status; he is protecting his people.

Joseph learned the difference between telling people what will happen to them and showing them what will happen around them.

The first creates enemies. The second creates leaders.

Truth, But Approach

Joseph did not abandon truth. He learned how to deliver it. Ben Shapiro also spoke about serious matters honestly, but perhaps poorly. He imagined himself as the true shepherd of the conservative movement and sought to de-platform others.

When you aim at people, they shield themselves. When you aim at conditions, people mobilize.

If you want history to move, do not take aim at the audience.
Give them the map—and let them walk into the future themselves.

You Can’t Launder Murder

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In October 2002, in a case before the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia did something characteristically disarming. In the middle of a commercial case—a dispute about representations, intent, and liability—he reached for an example so blunt that no one in the courtroom could miss the point.

“let’s assume that there is a Federal statute that makes discrimination because of, or failure to hire someone, or let’s say, let’s say killing someone solely because of his race a crime, a separate crime. And someone, let’s assume he kills someone who is Jewish, and he said, well, I didn’t kill him solely because he was Jewish; I killed him because I disagree with the policies of Israel. Does that get him out of the statute?” – Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia on October 8, 2002

The question was not theatrical. It was instructional.

Scalia was making a narrow, lawyerly point about intent laundering—the habit of rebranding a harmful act with a more palatable explanation after the fact. In commercial law, courts reject that move every day. You cannot sell a defective product and escape responsibility by calling the defect innovation. You cannot mislead customers and then claim a higher purpose. Labels don’t change outcomes; explanations don’t erase harm.

He chose that example because everyone understood it immediately. Not because it was exotic, but because it was familiar. People do, in fact, come for Jews with reasons. They always have. The reasons change; the target does not. That is why the hypothetical worked even in a commercial case. It required no ideological scaffolding, no speech doctrine, no moral hedging. The room got it.

Scalia wasn’t talking about protest or expression. He was reminding the Court that post-hoc justification does not transform reality. A Jew selected as a Jew remains a Jew, regardless of the banner the attacker waves. You cannot launder murder through geopolitics any more than you can launder fraud through branding.

What makes the moment unsettling two decades later is not that Scalia saw this clearly in 2002. It’s that today, society now pretends not to.

Today, the very maneuver Scalia identified is routinely indulged. Violence against Jews is reframed as politics. Targeting Jews is explained as resistance. The word “Israel” is treated as a solvent capable of dissolving antisemitism on contact. The act is dissected until the victim disappears into the explanation.

Scalia understood that this maneuver was not new. In the Middle Ages, it was radical preachers who performed the laundering. On Easter, from pulpits across Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christ, poisoning wells, murdering Christian babies. The charge was always moral, never personal. The violence that followed—pogroms, expulsions, massacres—was framed not as hatred, but as righteous response. The excuse sanctified the act. The victim was still Jewish.

“The crimes you are committing in Palestine by desecrating the sanctity of the holy sites – foremost among them the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque – you should expect reactions, not only from the Muslims, but rather from the entire world.” – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash on December 15, 2025 about the massacre of Jews in Sydney, Australia

The vocabulary has changed. The mechanism has not.

Today the laundering is done in different robes—through left-wing media narratives, academic language, teacher-union resolutions, and activist slogans. The Jewish state is branded unholy, colonial, imperial. Zionism is recast as original sin. Once that premise is accepted, Jews everywhere become legitimate stand-ins—symbols of something larger, targets by proxy. “Globalize the intifada” is not poetry. It is a call that travels, and it always knows where to land.

The laundering does not stop on the left. Figures like Candace Owens have vilified Jews across time itself—casting them as architects of the slave trade two centuries ago, as hidden hands behind modern social decay, as a people uniquely responsible for nearly every ill that can be stitched into a narrative. The effect is not historical inquiry; it is moral conditioning. When Jews are blamed for everything, they become appropriate targets for anything. The excuse differs. The permission is the same.

Candace Owens antisemitism reel by Canary Mission

This is why Scalia’s example mattered—and why he chose it so plainly. He knew that people come for Jews with reasons. He knew those reasons are never the point. And he assumed, reasonably at the time, that everyone else could still see the difference between explanation and absolution.

Decades later, that clarity is treated as controversial. Motives are said to cleanse acts. Ideology is said to transform targets. Murder is said to become discourse if the language is fashionable enough.

You can change the sermon.
You can update the slogans.
You can trade Easter blood libels for postcolonial theory.

But you cannot launder murder.

The Ghosts of Jihadi Christmas

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Before Christmas arrives in Europe, the barricades do.

Markets are designed around security corridors. Choirs rehearse behind concrete blocks. Armed patrols take their positions weeks in advance. In some cities, officials quietly shrink routes, replace gatherings with broadcasts, or advise citizens to celebrate privately. These decisions are made before a single hymn is sung, before a single candle is lit.

The season now begins with anticipation—not of joy, but of danger.

Europe carries this fear because Christmas has already been marked in blood. In Berlin in 2016, families shopping for ornaments were crushed beneath a truck driven by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Strasbourg in 2018, a gunman stalked a Christmas market, shouting Islamic slogans as he killed. An attack was foiled the following year in Vienna, Austria. Just days ago, five Muslim men were arrested for planning a Christmas attack in Germany. Another attack in Poland was foiled.

13 people killed in Berlin Christmas attack in 2016

These attacks were not misdirected rage or incidental violence. Christmas itself was the target. Its visibility, its symbolism, its unapologetic presence in public space made it irresistible to jihadist ideology.

Time has passed, but the lesson lingers. Terror no longer needs to strike every year to be effective. Memory enforces compliance. The terrifying ghosts return on schedule, and cities respond accordingly.

The ideology behind this fear is explicit. Radical Islamism divides the world into rulers and the ruled, believers and infidels. Christians and Jews are permitted only when diminished, tolerated only when silent. Public faith is defiance. Celebration is rebellion. Holidays are moments when submission is tested.

People mourn five people killed by jihadist in Strasbourg, France in 2018

That worldview does not stop at Europe’s borders.

In Nigeria, Christmas approaches without illusions. In the northeast, churches shorten services or cancel them outright. Caroling routes remain undrawn. Families calculate risk before prayer. Islamist insurgents have repeatedly attacked Christian villages and churches on Christmas and Easter, murdering worshippers and burning sanctuaries. The timing is intentional. The theology is clear. Christmas is treated as an offense that must be punished.
Here, fear is not inherited memory. It is lived experience.

Radical Islamists kill 295 Christians in Nigeria on Christmas 2023, mostly women and children, burned alive

Jews have been bearing this burden for decades, their calendar similarly weaponized against them. Jewish holidays are chosen for attack because they gather families, because they proclaim continuity, because they announce survival in the open.

On Simchat Torah in Israel in 2023, 1,200 Jews celebrating the renewal of the Torah were slaughtered in their homes and at festivals. The date was chosen carefully. In Sydney, Australia, Jews gathering during Chanukah were met with terror and violence. A holiday of light confronted an ideology that demands darkness, enforced not metaphorically but operationally.

Across continents and faiths, the pattern holds. Jihadist terror does not only murder people. It seeks to reorder time. It teaches Christians and Jews that their holidays are liabilities, that joy invites punishment, that visibility must be negotiated. It aims to train infidels to bend the knee before violence is even required.

This is why the danger is most acute before Christmas, before Chanukah, before any non-Islamic holy day arrives. When celebrations are diminished in advance, when silence is praised as responsibility, when absence is framed as wisdom, terror has already achieved governance. Fear begins to regulate behavior.

A society that learns to cancel joy preemptively will eventually learn to cancel belief, then speech, then presence itself. When communities retreat before threats are issued, coercion has become ambient. Submission has become routine.

For the past decade, Islamic radicals have been chanting in Arabic in the West, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” which means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”. That Army of Mohammed is the ghost of jihadi Christmas coming to slaughter infidels near you.