Monthly Archives: January 2026

The Critical and Ignored Lessons From the Most Important Poll in the Middle East 

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The near-term ramifications of Hamas’s war against Israel are being crystalized. Hamas’s leadership is decimated and Gaza is in ruins. The political-terrorist group’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen have been dealt severe blows, perhaps fatal for some. Hamas’s cheerleaders in the Global North are the only ones to have gathered momentum, particularly in Australia and the United States where hunting season for Jews has a seemingly open permit.

To gain insight for the next tactical steps, world leaders are looking at the current situation and polls since October 7, 2023 and have drafted proposals and taken initial actions: The United Kingdom and Canada recognized a Palestinian State. The U.S.’s Trump administration put forward a plan for Gaza which would include a new governing entity. The West hopes that the targeted assaults and murder of Jews will peter out along with the end of war. And the United Nations keeps playing the same tune about supporting UNRWA.

These are bad decisions and conclusions, made on faulty assumptions.

There is an organization that has been polling Palestinian Arabs for decades, called the Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH (PCPSR). It conducted a poll of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, just before the Hamas-led war, from September 28 to October 8, 2023. Because of the war, the results did not get published until June 26, 2024, and the world was too focused on the war to pay it any attention. It is deeply unfortunate, and it is required reading to help chart a better future for the region.

To start with the poll’s conclusions:

  • A large percentage of Palestinian Arabs have wanted to leave Gaza and the West Bank for years, not from the current destruction
  • Arabs are fed up with their own government – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – much more than Israeli “occupation”
  • Canada is viewed much like Qatar for Gazans, a sympathetic haven

Palestinian Arabs Wanted to Emigrate Before the War

According to PCPSR, whether in October 2023 or November 2021, roughly 33% of Gazans and 20% of West Bank Arabs wanted to leave the region.

Men below age 30 make up the vast majority of those seeking to emigrate. As opposed to Gaza where both educated and uneducated people want to leave, it is the educated West Bank population that wants to move away. Among those wishing to leave, many would not vote in Palestinian elections, or if they would, they would sooner vote for third parties over Fatah or Hamas.

Palestinian Leadership is the Curse, More than Israel

The number one reason for wanting to leave was economic conditions by a far margin. Reasons two and three were political reasons and educational opportunities. “Security reasons” came in fourth, with only 7% of Gazans focused on security; 12% overall. Corruption, religious reasons and to reunite with family rounded out the poll.

Canada as a Beacon

Turkey and Germany were the two most favorite destinations, especially for Gazans. Very few Gazans (3%) considered the United States, while West Bank Arabs put it as the number one choice (17%), likely seeking advanced degrees at left-wing universities. What is remarkable, is more of the Stateless Arabs (SAPs) would prefer going to Canada (11%) than Qatar (9%), the wealthy Muslim Arab nation that is a main sponsor of Hamas.

Honest Takeaways

These pre-war results leads to some basic and critical conclusions.

  • Complete Overhaul of Palestinian leadership, not just in Gaza

The desire of Arabs to leave was evident across both Gaza and the West Bank for many years. This was not a reaction to bombing or siege; it was a verdict on governance.

Hamas in Gaza rules through repression, diversion of aid, and religious militarism. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank offers corruption, authoritarianism, and political stagnation. Together they have produced a society with no credible economic horizon, no accountable leadership, and no peaceful mechanism for change.

While a new entity is needed to administer Gaza, that role should be akin to a Chief Operating Officer overseeing construction. The Palestinian Authority itself needs to be gutted and rebuilt as it is a corrupt, unpopular and ineffective entity.

  • The United Nations Must Withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank

In its desire to create a Palestinian state, the U.N. has stripped the titular heads of Palestine of any responsibility. The UN protects Hamas despite its savagery. It props up the Palestinian Authority despite its rampant corruption. Palestinian leadership is a bed of paper scorpions.

The UN must withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank and allow local authorities to build a functioning leadership team.

  • The West Should Rescind Recognition of Palestine

There is no functioning Palestinian government and therefore no basic standard to recognize a Palestinian State. The United Kingdom, Australia and others should withdraw their recognition and make it conditional on building governing institutions that can lead and make peace with the Jewish State next door.

  • Reeducation in the West

The massacre did not arise from a sudden spike in pressure. It emerged from long-standing internal failure. Hamas chose atrocity because it couldn’t commit a complete genocide of Jews so exploited its own population to be fodder for Israel.

Western audiences were then handed a familiar script, complete with pictures. But the data taken just before the massacre tells a different story—one far more consequential. What is being taught in western public schools is divorced from reality and feeds global and local antisemitism.

  • Oh No, Canada

While the fears of antisemitism are focused on the United States and Australia because of recent attacks on Jews, Canada is in the hearts and minds of Palestinian Arabs seeking a warm diaspora community. Perhaps it started a decade ago under Justin Trudeau who followed U.S.’s President Barack Obama to embrace the Palestinian cause and Iranian regime over Israel. Perhaps it is because of the welcome mat for extremists groups like Samidoun. Or perhaps it is the perception that the heckler’s veto is fair game, and can run Jewish families off Canadian streets.

Whatever the inspiration, Canada is widely perceived as permissive, ideologically indulgent, and administratively porous—an attractive environment for “political activism” untethered from civic responsibility. It is a ticking time bomb.

The poll of Palestinian Arabs on the eve of the October 7 war reveals deeper truths than surface shots of leveled homes. The PCPSR findings point to a single truth: the Palestinian problem is fundamentally internal.

Ending Israeli control over territory without dismantling corrupt and extremist institutions will not deliver prosperity or peace. Statehood layered on top of dysfunction will harden it. And exporting populations shaped by jihadist rule into permissive Western societies without serious screening and integration, risks importing instability rather than relieving it.

Archaeology of Daily Life: Mikva’ot and Jewish Indigeneity in the Land the UN Calls “Occupied”

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Modern political language compresses history into slogans. The United Nations speaks of “occupied Palestinian territory,” which it insists be Jew-free. The “pro-Palestinian” movements echo false claims of Jewish colonialism, as if Jews are newcomers.

Archaeology answers differently—through the infrastructure of everyday life.

Across Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, ancient mikva’ot—Jewish ritual immersion baths—appear in homes, villages, farms, and neighborhoods. They date from the First Temple and Second Temple periods and into the Mishnaic era. Their construction follows strict Jewish law. Their distribution tracks permanent settlement. Their purpose is singular: Jews lived here as a rooted society, organizing life around inherited religious practice.

This is not an argument from ideology. It is a statement of fact.

Jerusalem—Including the East: A City Immersed

Jerusalem contains the highest concentration of ancient mikva’ot anywhere in the world, with hundreds surrounding the Jewish Temple Mount as people immersed themselves before entering. In the City of David—today known as Silwan, a village established by Yementite Jews in the 19th century—dozens of ritual baths are embedded in residential quarters dated from the 1st century BCE to 70 CE. North and east of the later city walls, mikva’ot appear in neighborhoods now called Shuafat and Sheikh Jarrah, including the Shimon HaTzadik complex. The ancient mikvahs are also found to the west and south.

Mikvah under the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem

Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, summarizing decades of excavation, write:

“The widespread distribution of ritual baths in and around Jerusalem reflects strict observance of Jewish purity laws as part of everyday life.”

These installations predate Islam by centuries. They show a city whose rhythm followed Jewish law across its full geographic footprint—west and east alike.

Judea: Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron, and the Southern Hills

South of Jerusalem, the Judean Hills—now routinely labeled “occupied”—were a Jewish heartland in antiquity. Around Bethlehem, archaeological surveys identify rock-hewn mikva’ot associated with agricultural estates and villages from the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. Comparable installations appear near Hebron and Tekoa.

Mikvah in Jericho

Boaz Zissu’s regional studies conclude:

“Ritual baths, agricultural installations, and burial caves indicate dense Jewish settlement throughout the Judean Hills during the Second Temple period.”

These were family communities organized around Jewish practice, embedded in the land over generations.

Samaria: Villages of Law and Land

In Samaria—today’s northern “West Bank”—mikva’ot appear in rural villages and estates tied to farming and household life. Near Shiloh, stepped pools carved into limestone meet halakhic requirements and date to the late Second Temple period.

These finds demonstrate continuity between biblical Israelite centers and later Jewish communities. They record a population living according to inherited law, rooted to fields and seasons, long before later demographic changes.

What Mikva’ot Prove

Mikva’ot appear only where Jewish law structured daily behavior. They require permanence, planning, and communal norms. They cluster where families lived and expected their children to live.

Plotted together, they form a map that predates:

  • Arabic language in the region
  • Creation of Islam
  • Medieval and modern political boundaries

They belong to a Jewish civilization indigenous to the land for centuries before the Arab conquests of the seventh century.

Conclusion

International bodies can rename the land and activists can repeat slander but archaeology restores history to human scale. Mikva’ot record where Jews prepared for worship, marriage, birth, and community life. They mark neighborhoods, not narratives.

Across all of Jerusalem and through Judea and Samaria, these ritual baths establish a simple historical truth: Jews are indigenous to this land, and their daily life shaped it long before later conquests and long before modern politics.

Does Civilization Deserve A Robust Moderate Defense

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The world likes to pretend it is debating policy. In many ways, it is actually debating whether civilization itself deserves defense—whether restraint remains a virtue or has become a liability.

That choice is one individuals are weighing, and on a macro scale, it now runs through the United Nations, through the rhetoric of reform and revolution, and through a relentless fixation on one small country—Israel—which has been made the moral test case for the survival of a rules-based order.

An Ancient Conflict, Restated

In 1944 as World War II raged, Reinhold Niebuhr described the permanent struggle of politics in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. The children of light believe in higher law, institutions, and restraint and try to build a just civilization. The children of darkness believe power is the only reality. They understand fear, pride, resentment—and how to use them.

Niebuhr’s delivered an unsentimental warning: civilization fails not because darkness appears, but because light refuses to learn how aggressively darkness operates.

As Portrayed Today in the Arts

That moral tension is dramatized—accidentally, but perfectly—in Game of Thrones.

Petyr Baelish (“Littlefinger”) believes nothing is sacred. Institutions are illusions; morality is theater. When order breaks, the ambitious climb. His worldview that “Chaos is a ladder” is not poetry—it is strategy. He does not want to fix the system. He wants to use its collapse to gain power.

Opposite him stands Varys, who believes in “the realm”—stability, continuity, restraint. Varys is not innocent. He lies and plots as much as Littlefinger. But he does so defensively, to preserve something larger than himself. Chaos, to him, is not liberation; it is mass suffering.

“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them.
And some are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”- Littlefinger

This is the argument now playing out on the world stage.

The United Nations and the “Age of Chaos”

In September 2025, Antonio Guterres warned that the world had entered an “Age of Chaos,” where multilateralism failed repeatedly. His message was neither complacent nor revolutionary. The post-1945 order, he acknowledged, was built by Western powers and often abused. It needs reform and broader inclusion. But it must be preserved.

Guterres is a modern Varys: clear-eyed about corruption, fearful of what replaces restraint. The tragedy is that he delivers this warning while presiding over an institution that enables the very chaos he names, and where lies and bias are systemic.

The UN’s Open Hostility to Israel

No clearer example exists than the United Nations open hostility to Israel.

One empirical anchor suffices: the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have passed more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined, including regimes responsible for mass atrocities. The Human Rights Council even maintains a permanent agenda item singling out Israel alone.

The most damaging legal symbol of this hostility is UN Security Council Resolution 2334. Its failures are distinct—and profound:

  • Moral failure: It erases Jewish indigeneity and recasts Jewish self-determination as a moral crime.
  • Legal failure: It treats 1949 armistice lines as borders, declares “flagrant violation” absent negotiations, and invents a categorical illegality applied nowhere else.
  • Institutional failure: It weaponizes international law through selective enforcement, degrading the credibility of law itself.

UNSC 2334 is not merely flawed. It is structurally antisemitic, legally incoherent, and corrosive to the rules it claims to uphold. Any serious effort to defend and remake the UN must begin by rejecting and discarding UNSC 2334—not as a political concession, but as a moral necessity. No legitimate order can be rebuilt on a prominent pernicious lie.

The Global South’s Demand—and the Line It Cannot Cross

The Global South is right about one thing: the UN reflects a Global North power structure frozen in time. Representation must change. Influence must broaden. That reckoning is overdue.

But reform cannot be purchased by sacrificing the most vulnerable and attacked minority on earth.

Using Israel as the symbol of colonial evil is not reform; it is delegitimization by fiction. It turns history upside down, rebrands violence as virtue, and tells Jews that their survival is negotiable. Israel is targeted not because it is uniquely guilty, but because it is symbolically central.

Israel has become the ladder.

Modern Littlefingers

This logic spans ideologies.

On the left, movements such as the Democratic Socialists of America argue that markets, property, and liberal institutions are inherently illegitimate—delegitimize first, rebuild later. On the right, Donald Trump treats international norms as inconveniences, speaking casually about seizing Venezuelan oil and replacing rules with deals.

They oppose each other rhetorically, but share a premise: restraint is weakness; destruction is honesty. Chaos creates leverage.

They are modern Littlefingers.

The Failure of Passive Moderation

Between these forces stand moderates who see hypocrisy, feel exhaustion, and withdraw in disgust. That retreat feels virtuous. It is not.

As David Brooks argues by drawing on Niebuhr, moderation without courage becomes complicity. When decent people refuse to defend flawed institutions, they leave the field to those who understand power best.

Niebuhr’s answer was not extremism, but what he called “a sublime madness in the soul”—a fierce commitment to liberal institutions precisely because they restrain human savagery. The children of light must learn the wisdom of the serpent without inheriting its malice.

An Ancient Return—and a Choice

Modern politics, which prides itself on being post-religious, has returned to the oldest moral frame: absolute light versus absolute darkness. One side is pure; the other illegitimate. Violence becomes cleansing; institutions corrupt by definition. This language was written two thousand years ago in the land of Israel and discovered in caves as the Jewish State was being reestablished. And now that rebirthed country is being falsely accused of embodying the darkness.

The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness

The choice before us is not between justice and injustice. It is between reform and rupture.

  • Children of light today defend law and restraint aggressively while reforming them honestly.
  • Children of darkness weaponize grievance and moral absolutism to climb amid collapse.

Defending and remaking the UN must start with basic truths: reject antisemitic falsehoods, discard UNSC 2334, and pursue inclusion without scapegoats. Multipolarity cannot be built on moral nihilism. Reform cannot be purchased with lies.

The reckoning Niebuhr warned of is here. The ladder is already standing and it is being climbed by both right and left. Civilization survives only if those who believe in it act—clearly, courageously, and now.

It’s Not You, It’s UN

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Of the many classic lines from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, “it’s not you, it’s me,” is a great one, used as an excuse to get out of a relationship. It’s a phrase familiar to anyone who has ever been in a relationship which one party simply does not enjoy and wants to terminate gently.

There is no relationship so poorly constructed and toxic today as between Israel and the United Nations, harmonious at the start but broken bit by bit since that time. In an effort to complete it’s desire of completing the creation of two states, a Jewish one and Arab one as conceived in the General Assembly vote of partition in November 1947, the institution has fabricated lies and noxious resolutions against Israel and Jewish dignity everywhere.

Follow what the UN does, and what it says, and a stark pattern emerges: Palestinian Arabs are granted surplus political rights across the entire map, while Israel is denied the basic attributes of sovereignty. This is not mediation. It is architecture, scaffolding producing a permanent conflict.

1) Start with the most basic injustice: where Jews may live and pray

Begin where ideology becomes lived reality.

Across territory, the UN labels Palestinian Arab non-Jewish residence as inherently legitimate everywhere, while Jewish residence is declared subject in advance, legal where a Jewish State was once allotted but illegal everywhere else. Through instruments like United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, Jewish civilians are criminalized simply for living beyond armistice lines—before borders are agreed, before negotiations conclude, before sovereignty is determined.

This is unprecedented. In every other territorial dispute on earth, civilian life is separated from sovereignty. Here, it is collapsed—selectively.

Then comes the religious core.

At Judaism’s holiest site—the Temple Mount / Al-Haram al-Sharif—the UN endorses a so-called “status quo” that allows Muslim prayer as a matter of course while forbidding Jewish prayer outright. Jews may visit in finite numbers. They may not worship.

No neutral body sanctifies a regime where one faith’s prayer is normal and another’s is treated as provocation. That is not stability. It is hierarchy—polished with diplomatic language.

2) Escalate to sovereignty itself: borders without control

Every sovereign state controls who enters and who becomes a citizen. Israel is uniquely told this right is negotiable.

Through endless reaffirmations of a mass “right of return,” the UN demands that Israel absorb millions of Palestinian Arabs who never lived there—descendants of a war launched to destroy the state—thereby erasing Jewish self-determination by arithmetic rather than war.

No other UN member is ordered to commit demographic self-nullification as a condition of legitimacy. Only Israel is told that survival itself is subject to international approval. International demand.

A state that cannot control entry is not sovereign. A state treated this way is not being mediated in a peace process—it is being managed.

3) Why this only happens here: permanent UN wardship

The cause is clear.

The UN did not simply sympathize with Palestinian Arabs; it adopted them as permanent wards, institutionalized most clearly through UNRWA—a bespoke agency unlike anything else in the world.

Refugee status became hereditary. Dependency became intergenerational. There is no sunset, no graduation, no expectation of resolution. Failure carries no cost because accountability is externalized.

A guardian cannot be an honest broker. An institution whose relevance depends on a client’s grievance cannot afford peace. This isn’t humanitarianism anymore. It’s custodianship—and custodianship is the enemy of compromise.

4) The doctrinal rupture: inventing a “right to a state”

Only after the machinery is in place does the UN supply its legal fiction.

International law recognizes self-determination, not an inherent entitlement to sovereign statehood. Statehood is an outcome—earned through borders, reciprocity, and mutual recognition.

The UN rewrote this rule only and specifically for Palestinian Arabs, treating sovereignty as a pre-awarded verdict because of a partition plan it voted upon in 1947 that the party refused to accept. Once the destination is guaranteed, compromise becomes optional. Negotiations become theater. Pressure flows in only one direction.

No other people receive this upgrade. Only here does the UN convert aspiration into entitlement—and then insist it is merely being neutral.

5) The smoking gun: December 1990 recasting the conflict and the legitimation of violence

Then the mask slips.

In December 1990, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 45/130, reaffirming “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples … for liberation from colonial and foreign domination by all available means.” The resolution was designed to close the chapter of apartheid in South Africa, but took a heavy detour into the Israel-Palestine conflict, recasting the entire partition plan of 1947. It referenced “colonial” entities fifteen times, “Palestinians” twenty-five times, and made the establishment of an Arab state a matter of freedom from racist and external oppression, not a discussion about self-determination.

In UN practice, this language cast Israel as a colonial entity and Palestinian Arabs as a people entitled to armed struggle to dismantle it.

From that moment on, terror could be reframed as resistance, and compromise as collaboration. The UN crossed the line from mediator to moral endorser of one side’s maximalist narrative.

6) The arithmetic of the fraud

Add it up and the numbers don’t lie.

Under the UN framework, Palestinian Arabs receive:

  • A guaranteed future state
  • Political rights inside Israel
  • A trans-sovereign right of return into Israel
  • Permanent UN patronage and advocacy
  • International legitimation of “armed struggle” against Israel

Israel, meanwhile, is left with:

  • Provisional borders
  • Conditional legitimacy
  • Criminalized civilian residence in disputed territory
  • Restricted religious freedom
  • Denied control over immigration
  • Violence against it rhetorically excused

In this jaundiced framework, Jerusalem, which was NEVER designated to be a Palestinian city even under the 1947 partition plan, can be called “occupied Palestinian territory,” a complete fabrication even according to the  UN itself.

This is not a formula for two states. It is one-and-a-half states for Arabs and half a state for Israel—and the imbalance is enforced, not accidental.

The conclusion the UN avoids

The United Nations is not an honest broker; it is an interested architect whose rules ensure the conflict cannot end, and Jewish dignity remains conditional around the world.

By sanctifying exclusion, denying sovereignty, adopting one side as a permanent ward, inventing rights it had no authority to grant, and legitimizing violence as “anti-colonial,” the UN has guaranteed perpetual war—then blamed one of the parties for refusing peace.

In Seinfeld, one party is afforded the opportunity to end the relationship; one party has the option of providing a face-saving excuse to part ways quickly and smoothly. Not so for Israel and the United Nations, where the UN continues to manufacture obstacles and then gaslight the Jewish State that it is the root of the problem.

The UN speaks as if it is a “moral compass” in an “age of chaos.” Perhaps it once was, at least directionally. It is definitely not in the Middle East today, where its votes and actions have led to the death and misery of millions.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York in September 2025

Stop Running. Stop Defending.

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The Torah’s first image of Moses is of a man split against himself. Born a Hebrew and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he lives between worlds. When he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, the act is instinctive. Yet when another Hebrew confronts him—“Who made you ruler and judge over us?” (Exodus 2:14)—Moses has no answer. He cannot say who he is or why he has the right to act.

So he runs.

The flight is explained as fear of Pharaoh because the attack was discovered. A deeper cause is identity fracture. Moses is caught between Egyptian and Jew, insider and outsider. When identity is unsettled, even a disgraceful question feels existential. Retreat becomes the reflex.

That pattern did not end in Egypt.

Today, for much of the diaspora, Jewish life has carried a similar split. Jews learned to survive by blending, qualifying, and softening. Identity became situational. Answers changed with the room. When questioned—about history, belonging, or the land of Israel—the instinct has often been Moses’ instinct: explain carefully, hedge, or leave the room. Running becomes habit when the self feels divided.

Israel changes that equation.

Israeli Jews do not experience Jewishness as a negotiation. It is civic, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once. There is no internal argument to resolve before answering an external challenge. Questions that unsettle diaspora Jews rarely destabilize Israelis because the identity beneath them is settled.

Kotel Plaza with Israeli flag (photo: First One Through)

The philosophical approach even applies to non-Jews in Israel. Consider Quentin Tarantino, who married an Israeli, lives in Israel, and raises his children there without explanation or apology. His life models something diaspora Jews are rarely encouraged to try: resolve the split by living a whole integrated self rather than defending it. Belonging practiced instinctually requires no justification.

That clarity was shown clearly in Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Vol. 1. In the film, O-Ren Ishii responds to an attack on her heritage immediately and violently. She recognizes the move as an attempt to diminish her and rejects the premise entirely. The table turns the instant she stops answering the charge and starts judging the judge.

For diaspora Jews—and for anyone of mixed heritage—the lesson is continuity. Identity settled internally removes the need for fleeing externally. When the self is whole, interrogation loses its force. Disgraceful questions do not deserve better answers; they deserve exposure and repudiation.

Moses ran because his identity was divided while modern Israelis do not.
O-Ren stands because she knows exactly who she is and will not entertain accusers.

Diaspora Jews today should not need to relive Moses’ uncertainty of self. The work now is not to run, but firmer clarity. Better education and rootedness. Firmer responses.

Stop running.
Stop defending.
Condemn the question—and the room will follow.

Coming This Fall: “ICE” — From the Network That Brought You Cops, Firefighters, and Suddenly… Deportations

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A satire.

Television executives are simple people. Show them a uniform that polls well, give it a badge or a helmet, add flashing lights and a gravel-voiced commander, and they will green-light twelve seasons before the pilot airs.

Police dramas? A civic religion. Firefighters? Basically saints with abs. Doctors? Gods in scrubs.

So it was only a matter of time.

This fall, after decades of training America to reflexively trust anyone wearing navy blue with a shoulder radio, Fox Broadcasting Company proudly unveils its boldest procedural yet:

ICE.

Hollywood already cracked the code.

Law & Order taught us crime is endless but solvable in exactly 44 minutes.
Chicago Fire proved every blaze requires both heroism and unresolved childhood trauma.
NCIS confirmed that investigations are best handled by quirky geniuses with unlimited jurisdiction.

The lesson was clear:
If America will emotionally invest in fictional cops chasing fictional criminals, surely it’s ready to fall in love with fictional immigration enforcement agents chasing fictional paperwork.

Meet the Heroes

ICE follows a ragtag team of elite agents who don’t just enforce the law — they wrestle with it.

  • Agent Jack Pitt — By-the-book, square jaw, conflicted soul. His father immigrated legally in 1983 and he mentions it in every episode.
  • Agent Angela Reyes — Fluent in four languages, morally complicated, always reminding Jack that “it’s not black and white.”
  • Deputy Director Hank Robinson — A grizzled veteran who growls, “We don’t make the laws — we just dramatically stare at them.”

Every episode opens with a breathless reminder: “These stories are fictional… but the feelings are real.”

The Cases

The crimes are designed to pull at heartstrings.

  • A man with an expired visa… who volunteers at a soup kitchen.
  • A family missing a single document… somewhere.
  • A tense raid interrupted by a heartfelt monologue about the American Dream.

Sirens blare. Agents run. Someone yells “NOW!” even though no one explains why now is different from the last commercial break.

The Emotional Arc

Like all great procedurals, ICE isn’t really about enforcement.

It’s about family.

Every season features:

  • A wedding postponed due to a border emergency
  • A custody battle mirroring a deportation case
  • At least one episode where an agent asks, “Are we the bad guys?” before being reassured by swelling music that, no, they are not

By episode nine, viewers are crying over Form I-130 like it’s a fallen firefighter.

The Crossover Event

Mid-season, Fox delivers the event television America didn’t ask for but will absolutely watch:

Chicago Fire × ICE

A warehouse blaze. Undocumented workers trapped inside. Firefighters rescue everyone. ICE shows up. Everyone exchanges tense but respectful nods.

No one mentions politics.
Everyone agrees the real villain is bureaucracy.
Ratings explode.

Merchandising Opportunities

Fox executives are already salivating:

  • ICE hoodies (“Protecting the Dream”)
  • Limited-edition badges (plastic, for children)
  • A companion podcast hosted by a former agent turned consultant turned influencer

There’s even talk of a spinoff: ICE: Special Paperwork Unit

The Moral of the Story

Television has always been America’s civics class — just with better lighting and fewer consequences.

For decades, cops were heroes.
Firefighters were angels.
Federal agents were misunderstood geniuses.

Now, immigration enforcement gets the same glow-up: dramatic music, noble intentions, and just enough personal doubt to make everyone feel good by the closing credits.

Because if you put it on TV long enough, in prime time, with the right soundtrack…

Eventually, it’s not controversial or even politics.
It’s just another show you binge on a Sunday night.

And somewhere in a Fox boardroom, someone is already pitching an ‘R’ rated version for direct to streaming.

Venezuela in NYC, Twice

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Venezuela has arrived in New York City in two forms.

One arrives carrying the wreckage of a socialist system that hollowed out a country by redefining private property as moral corruption and state control as virtue. That experiment ended in scarcity, corruption, and mass flight. Its leaders now face judgment far from home, a coda to a long collapse.

The other arrival is quieter, bureaucratic, and far more consequential. It moves through City Hall.

Words That Become Policy

“Private property — especially homeownership — is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy.”

Those words were written by Cea Weaver, who now holds authority inside New York City government over housing regulation, landlord enforcement, and real estate policy.

This is a moral judgment about ownership itself. Homeownership is framed as harm. Property is recast as a moral hazard. The implication is straightforward: what has long been treated as legitimate must be dismantled.

Knowing full well her position about private real estate and home ownership, Weaver was elevated into a role designed to shape housing outcomes by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Real Estate as the Lever

Because housing is where ideology becomes operational.

Weaver’s portfolio centers on real estate because real estate concentrates independence, savings, and permanence. It is immobile, heavily regulated, and politically sensitive. Those traits make housing the easiest sector in which to normalize forced redistribution through regulation rather than spectacle.

Within Democratic Socialist thought, housing functions as the primary front for structural change. The stated objective is “decommodification” — removing housing from private markets through eminent domain and insulating it permanently from profit. Achieving that objective requires stripping ownership of legitimacy and transferring control to the state or state-backed collectives.

Jacobin Makes the Case Explicit

That program is reinforced repeatedly in Jacobin, the flagship publication of democratic socialism. Its housing coverage goes well beyond expanding public housing or strengthening tenant protections. It openly endorses removing homes from private ownership.

Jacobin has praised campaigns such as Berlin’s Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, which was approved by voters in 2021, calling for the expropriation of privately owned residential housing and its transfer to public control. It regularly argues that landlord property rights must yield to collective ownership if housing justice is to be achieved.

The logic is consistent: justice requires taking housing out of private hands.

Venezuela’s Sequence Is Familiar

Venezuela followed this same sequence.

Ownership was recast as exploitation.
Returns were constrained.
Controls expanded.
Maintenance collapsed.
Scarcity spread.

By the time property was openly seized, the groundwork had already been laid. Confiscation felt justified because ownership had already been condemned. Language prepared the public long before policy completed the transfer.

History records this pattern with grim consistency.

Ideological Alignment at City Hall

Zohran Mamdani placed Weaver precisely where her beliefs carry consequence.

“Impoverish the “white” middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” – Cea Weaver

Democratic Socialists today debate pace and scope more than premise. Housing is the testing ground because it touches wealth, stability, and autonomy simultaneously. Alter the rules of ownership there, and broader economic control becomes easier to assert.

Donald Trump Begins to Align with Democratic Socialists on housing

And it seems that President Donald Trump is getting on board.

Trump just announced that he will ban institutional investors from buying single family homes. The goal is to keep the housing market acting rationally based on normal individual demand, rather than bowing to the force of massive realtors controlling rent prices.

It is not stripping individuals of their homes the way Weaver desires, but a first step in meeting the mission part way.

Naming the Mechanism

When government redefines private assets as illegitimate and reallocates them through enforcement, penalties, and regulatory attrition, the economic effect remains consistent regardless of branding.

Control shifts away from owners.
Value erodes.
Decision-making migrates to the state.

“As landlords exit the market, using state action to acquire properties and leverage divestment to convert thousands of homes into publicly and democratically controlled land/housing.” – Cea Weaver

“The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal [of seizing Greenland], and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.” – Trump’s White House

Language about equity or justice does not change outcomes for families whose homes become conditional assets rather than protected property. Redistribution through regulation or seizure is theft.

People think of Donald Trump as a true Conservative; he is not. He spent years as a Democratic real estate developer in New York City. Owning, controlling and licensing property is in his bloodstream.

We are entering a dangerous moment when government leaders of the right and left are converging on the thesis that the state is the arbiter of private property, including your house.

The Question That Matters

A society either treats private property as legitimate or places it at the discretion of the state.

Once ownership depends on ideological approval, it no longer functions as a right. Capital withdraws. Investment slows. Stability erodes. Liberty disappears.

Venezuela already supplied the answer.

History rarely announces itself as collapse. It usually arrives disguised as compassion, long before the consequences become unavoidable.

Radical Arab “Settlers”

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Palestinian terrorism has names when it is organized. Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There is a long list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups under the Palestinian banner. Yet the most persistent form of Palestinian terrorism over the last two decades carries no collective name at all.

More than a thousand Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) have carried out individual fatal terrorist attacks—stabbings, shootings, vehicle rammings, ambushes at bus stops and junctions. The numbers recur year after year. The pattern holds. The vast majority originate in the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) / “West Bank”.

Monthly tally of attacks by SAPs and Jews in the first four months of 2022, according to the biased United Nations

Calling these attackers “Palestinian lone wolves” obscures reality. Calling them Palestinian residents either creates a country of Palestine or integrates them into a historic landscape. The term “lone wolves” suggests isolation, desperation, a last act. The record shows the opposite. These young attackers are recognized, rewarded, and revered. Their names and faces appear on posters. Schools and streets carry their memory. Their families receive honor and money. The murderers are beatified as “martyrs.”

Civil societies do not ritualize acts they consider shameful or marginal.

Now consider how language works in parallel. Jewish civilians beyond the Green Line are routinely grouped under a single brand: “settlers.” The word does not describe residence; it passes judgment. It frames their presence as inherently illegitimate before any act occurs. When they are attacked, their civilian identity is eclipsed by a political label.

Branding does the moral work in advance.

The empirical comparison is stark. Jewish extremist violence exists and must be prosecuted. Its character is overwhelmingly vandalism and property damage—graffiti, burned fields, slashed tires. Criminal acts that generate repairs, arrests, and charges.

By contrast, the murders committed by individual SAPs, dwarf Jewish extremist killings by orders of magnitude. Funerals versus invoices. Deaths versus damage. Yet language reverses scale: property crimes are collectivized and politicized, while a long ledger of killings is broken into nameless “incidents.”

People killed in West Bank according to United Nations report, over end of 2022 and start of 2023 in which Tor Wennesland vilified Israel and the “settlements”

The cultural backdrop makes this impossible to dismiss as fringe behavior. Polling by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) consistently shows that SAPs in the West Bank express higher levels of support for violent attacks—including October 7—than Arabs in Gaza.

Polls by PCPSR show West Bank Arabs more in favor than Gazans of killing Jews, the October 7 massacre, and destroying the Jewish State

Repetition is evidence.
Veneration is evidence.
Polling is evidence.
Together they point to a culture of violent jihad in the West Bank, sustained socially even when it is executed individually.

Terror does not require a logo to qualify. It requires intent, repetition, and outcome. What persists in the West Bank is a durable campaign of individual terrorism, encouraged by culture and rewarded by society, while its victims are linguistically transformed into abstractions called “settlers,” not innocent Jewish civilians.

This is absolution via euphemism. Turning Jewish civilians into perpetrators for existing, while shielding Arab murderers under a cloak of topography.

It is plainly wrong. It is evil. It persists.

A Divide in Aid and Perception Between Ukraine and Israel

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Since 2022, the United States has funded two wars at historic scale.

  • ~$65–70 billion in direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine
  • ~$21–22 billion in U.S. wartime military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023

Ukraine’s funding is more than three times larger, delivered faster and sustained longer.
Israel’s is smaller, largely defensive, and focused on interception and resupply.

Yet only one of these aid streams has been treated as morally illegitimate.

The Moral Divergence

Aid to Ukraine is framed as defending democracy.
Aid to Israel is framed as complicity.

Both wars involve urban combat.
Both involve civilian casualties.
Both rely on U.S. weapons.

But only Israel’s aid is placed under moral indictment.

The Political Record

Progressive politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America have been consistent in drawing this distinction.

Bernie Sanders voted for massive Ukraine aid packages while introducing resolutions to block or condition arms transfers to Israel.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported Ukraine military assistance as solidarity, while opposing emergency funding for Israel as morally disqualifying.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining cause—calling for halts and embargoes—without mounting a comparable campaign against the much larger Ukraine funding stream.

“This is not only the Israeli government’s genocide, Mr. Speaker. this is our government’s genocide.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib

No similar moral test was applied to Ukraine.

The erosion of support in long wars

As the wars in Ukraine and Israel dragged on, Americans began to tire of spending so much money abroad in both wars. In September 2025, a Pew Research poll found that one-third of Americans thought that the US was providing too much military aid to Israel, while 23% thought the figure was about right and only 8% said it was not enough.

The figures were about the same for Ukraine in a February 2025 poll – 30% said too much aid, 23% about the right amount, but a significantly different figure – 22% (versus 8%) said there was not enough aid going to Ukraine. The gap is likely due to the visuals of a totally devasted Gaza and the elimination of most of the Hamas leadership.

A deeper dive shows a significant divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially over time. Republicans moved from 9% feeling there was too much aid and 49% not enough aid in 2022, to 47% feeling there was too much aid and 10% not enough aid in 2025. While Democrats did change their views over time, it was not as dramatic as the Republican shift.

At least for Ukraine.

The Ideology Behind the Distinction

This asymmetry between Ukraine and Israel is not about budgets or battlefield conduct. It is ideological.

Within DSA thinking, Israel is not merely a state that acts wrongly; it is framed as an illegal colonial project. The claim rests on a core assertion: that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and therefore have no legitimate sovereign claim to it.

That assertion is historically false — and morally bankrupt.

It denies Jewish history, identity, and continuity in their ancestral homeland. It treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. And it transforms Israeli self-defense from a security question into a moral offense.

Ukraine, by contrast, is granted full legitimacy. Its sovereignty is assumed. Its right to fight is unquestioned.

Further, the far left is trapped in an empathy swamp, with the destroyed pictures of Gaza trumping the immorality of the Hamas death cult.

The Conclusion

A war funded at $70 billion is treated as a cause.
A war funded at $22 billion is treated as a crime.

That gap has nothing to do with the weapons. It has everything to do with an ideology that denies Jewish indigeneity — and therefore Jewish legitimacy, and a perverted view of right and wrong seen through the lens of empathy rather than morality.

This is not a debate about military aid. Ukraine gets much more than Israel. As does NATO. This about the Jewish State overwinning and the depravity of antisemites who want to end the Jewish State.

When the UN Handed the Gavel to Failure

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A funny thing happened as Somalia assumed the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council in January 2026: Israel recognized a breakaway republic, Somaliland. The timing was rich.

Somalia’s presidency of the most powerful UN body exposed rank hypocrisy: formal recognition divorced from reality. Somalia is treated as a sovereign authority – one given prestige – while it has spent nearly twenty years losing a war to Al-Shabab, an Al-Qaeda–aligned movement that taxes civilians, runs courts, controls territory, and carries out mass-casualty attacks with impunity. International troops prop the state up while Somalia’s sovereignty is tenuous.

The failure is not abstract. Somalia’s collapse has repeatedly spilled beyond its borders—most visibly through maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden, which for years threatened global shipping lanes, energy supply chains, and food security. Still, a state unable to police its own coastline now presides over the world’s security council. That alone tells you how hollow the United Nations has become.

Somaliland, by contrast, has done the unglamorous work of statehood since 1991: defined borders, elections, peaceful transfers of power, its own currency, police, and a monopoly on force. It meets the Montevideo criteria in substance, not just in name. Yet it remains unrecognized—because recognition at the UN is political, not factual.

Now layer “Palestine” onto this picture—and the farce deepens.

Somalia is a failed state struggling against jihadists. Gaza is a jihadist state in its own right. Since 2007, Hamas has governed Gaza fully and openly. Hamas controls schools, mosques, courts, welfare, media, police, and an army fused into one ideological machine. International aid does not shore up weakness; it subsidizes jihadist rule—tunnels instead of homes, rockets instead of infrastructure, civilians embedded into military doctrine.

Here is the moral inversion the UN refuses to confront:

  • Somalia fails to defeat Al-Shabab and is pitied. Gaza chooses Hamas and is excused.
  • Somaliland governs itself responsibly and is ignored. Israel defends itself against a jihadist regime and is condemned.

The recognition asymmetry makes this starker still. In September 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia moved decisively toward recognizing “Palestine”—despite the absence of defined borders, unified governance, or a monopoly on violence, and despite Gaza being ruled by a designated terrorist organization. Meanwhile, Somaliland—stable, democratic, and self-policing for more than three decades—remains outside the diplomatic club. The message is unmistakable: symbolism is rewarded; governance is not.

When that contradiction became too visible to ignore, the talking points shift. Accusations – by Somalia, amplified by Qatar (Hamas’s principle sponsor) – are being made that Israel intends to “relocate Gazans to Somaliland.” The claim is complete fabrication, an attempt at damage control—a smear designed to redirect attention away from the exposed hypocrisy. By turning Somaliland into a prop in an imaginary Israeli scheme, critics attempt to avoid the harder question: why a functioning African democracy is denied recognition while jihadist-run entities are indulged.

That reality was never lost on U.S. President Donald Trump. His view of Somalia is blunt: a failed state exporting instability, relevant to the United States only as a counter-terrorism battlefield. His administration treats Somalia as territory unable to govern itself or suppress Al-Shabab. In that sense, Trump is more honest than the UN: he acknowledges failure, while the UN performs credibility rituals by handing Somalia the gavel of global security.

No one claims Al-Shabab represents Somali aspirations. Yet Hamas—whose antisemitic charter sanctifies genocide and whose strategy relies on civilian death—is routinely separated from the consequences of its rule and reframed as “resistance.” Somalia’s inability to secure a monopoly on violence is acknowledged as a defect. Gaza’s total jihadist capture is rebranded as national self-determination.

This is why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland at this time matters. It is not merely diplomatic; it is diagnostic. It forces a comparison the UN would rather avoid:

  • What actually constitutes a state?
  • Who governs responsibly?
  • Who controls violence—and who glorifies it?

The Security Council gavel in Somalia’s hand reveals the emptiness of UN moral authority. Gaza’s treatment—shielded from accountability despite being run by a designated terrorist organization—exposes complicity. Somaliland’s exclusion, despite three decades of stability, exposes cowardice.

Israel’s move did not break international norms. It exposed the rot.

Recognition, the episode made clear, is not about peace, governance, or security. It is about politics—and the willingness to look away when jihadist rule is useful to the narrative.