Category Archives: Jews

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.

The core vocabulary was already there:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”

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

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

The imbalance was not accidental.

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

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

But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.

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

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

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

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

He Said, She Said, Rover Said

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A satire.

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

New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff

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

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

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

This is only the tip of the canine iceberg.

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

The animal cruelty knows no bounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AP’s linguistic stacking is relentless:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One reports misconduct. The other assigns collective identity.

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

Jewish events rarely receive the same interpretive charity.

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

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

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

The Torah Refused to Erase the Tribes

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Parshat Bamidbar appears to focus on logistics: censuses, military formations, camp arrangements. Yet beneath the counting sits a striking idea. The Jewish people are becoming a nation, while still preserving tribes.

That is extraordinary.

The descendants of Jacob had spent centuries in Egypt. They suffered together, left Egypt together, received one Torah together, and followed one prophet toward one land. Most nations formed through such an experience would emerge flattened into a single identity.

Yet Bamidbar carefully restores the tribes as though the years in Egypt had barely interrupted the original family structure.

Judah remains Judah. Ephraim remains Ephraim. Dan remains Dan.

The land itself will eventually be divided according to those ancient tribal lines, rooted in the original sons of Jacob. Time passed. Generations died. Slavery reshaped the people. Yet the inheritance map waiting in Canaan hundreds of years earlier remained intact.

The Torah is preserving continuity.

Modern states often try to weaken regional, familial, or tribal identities in favor of a single centralized national identity. Bamidbar moves differently. The tribes each have their own banner, leader, place in the camp, and future territory. Later Jewish history associates distinct characteristics with them: Judah and kingship, Levi and spiritual service, Issachar and scholarship, Zebulun and commerce.

The camp around the Mishkan reflects this structure beautifully. At the center stands the shared spiritual core. Around it stand distinct tribes in ordered formation. Difference remains visible, yet everything faces the same center.

Closeup of tribes around mishkan from Jan Jansson (1588-1664) map of the Holy Land, 1630

That may be one of Bamidbar’s deepest teachings about nationhood. A healthy nation leaves room for distinct identities, histories, and roles while binding them to a larger shared mission.

The census itself reinforces this idea. People are counted through families and ancestral houses. The Torah is reconnecting the wilderness generation to the covenantal family that entered Egypt centuries earlier. Egypt could enslave the Israelites, but the deeper inheritance endured.

Jewish history would repeat this pattern again and again. Jews entered foreign civilizations across thousands of years while carrying older identities beneath the surface. Languages changed. Governments changed. Geography changed. The continuity remained.

Bamidbar therefore reads as far more than a census. It is a declaration that covenant survives exile, and that unity becomes strongest when rooted in enduring memory, shared purpose, and distinct communities gathered around a sacred center.

Abraham’s Tests and the Covenantal Land

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In the Hebrew Bible, Abraham, the father of monotheism, is tested ten times. The biblical commentator Rashi (1040-1105) lists them out, and it is curious to line them against the ten nations that inhabit the land that God promises to Abraham.

10 Tests according to Rashi10 Nations in the promised land
Abraham hid underground for 13 years from King Nimrod, who wanted to kill him.Kenites
Nimrod flung Abraham into a burning furnace.Kenizzites
Abraham was commanded to leave his family and homeland.Kadmonites
As soon as he arrived in Canaan, he was forced to leave to escape famine to Egypt.Hittites
Sarah was kidnapped by Pharaoh’s officials.Perizzites
The 4 kings captured Lot, and Abraham went out to war to rescue him.Rephaites
God told Abraham that his offspring would suffer exile and slavery for 400 years initially four monarchies.Amorites
At 99, Abraham was commanded to circumcise himself and his household.Canaanites
Abraham was instructed to drive away Ishmael and Hagar.Girgashites
He was commanded to sacrifice Isaac.Jebusites

The Torah never tells us to match them one by one, but two of Abraham’s tests align so precisely with two of those nations that they reveal the architecture of the covenant itself: one in the flesh, one on the mountain.

The first is brit milah and Canaan, what we know of today as the bulk of the land of Israel.

When God first expands Abraham’s promise of land in Book of Genesis 13, He tells him to rise and walk it: Arise, walk through the land, its length and breadth, for I will give it to you.

Abraham walks the land before he owns it.

But in Genesis 17, when the covenant is deepened through circumcision, the order changes. God commands Abraham to mark the covenant into his own body and then immediately ties that mark to the promise of land: I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan.

The sequence is striking.

First Abraham walks the land. Then Abraham marks the flesh. The lesson is deeper than ownership. You cannot carry covenantal land unless the covenant is carried within you.

Before borders, there is obligation. Before sovereignty, there is submission.

The modern world treats land as politics—lines, armies, treaties. The Torah treats land as moral space. Canaan is not merely inherited geography. It is covenantal geography. And covenantal geography requires covenantal people.

Brit milah is the title deed, not written on parchment, but on the body itself.

The land of Canaan is not inherited simply because it was promised. It is inherited because Abraham accepted what the promise demanded.

Then comes the Akedah and the Jebusites, which takes place in Jerusalem.

If brit milah secures the land broadly, the Akedah secures its heart.

Abraham’s greatest trial takes place on Mount Moriah, where he binds Isaac and prepares to surrender the son through whom every promise was meant to continue. Jewish tradition identifies that mountain with the future Temple Mount, the site held by the Jebusites until King David captures it and makes it the spiritual center of Israel, 3,000 years ago.

That means Abraham’s greatest and final test takes place at the future center of Jewish history. That is not incidental.

Long before David purchases it, long before King Solomon builds the Temple, long before priests serve and pilgrims ascend, Abraham stands there and confronts the deepest truth of covenant: even the future belongs to God.

Canaan is the inheritance of the body. Its covenant is sealed in flesh.

Jerusalem is the inheritance of the soul. Its covenant is sealed in surrender.

One is broad territory. The other is concentrated holiness.

The land of the Canaanites – the land of Israel – is the essence of the covenant between God and the Jews; the land of the Jebusites – Jerusalem – is the center of that faith. These are lessons that God imparted to Abraham in the year 2023 of the Jewish calendar that anchors Judaism to this day.

Names and Narrative: Violence

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Even a word as straightforward as “violence” can no longer be exchanged among people who strongly disagree.

On October 7, while Israeli families were still being burned alive in their homes, while women were being brutalized and dragged into Gaza, while children and grandparents were being taken hostage, the Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians and calling for an end to violence.

Read that sentence again.

Solidarity with the side carrying out the massacre whicle simultaneously being opposed to violence.

Under any normal understanding of language, those two positions cannot coexist. Even if one sides with Palestinian Arabs doing the slaughter, one cannot deny that killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 people hostage is anything but violence.

Yet for much of today’s activist left, there is no inconsistency because violence has been redefined.

Violence is no longer judged by the act itself. It is judged by the political identity of the actor and the victim. Violence against the oppressed is evil. Violence by the oppressed is resistance.

That single inversion explains nearly everything.

It explains why people can chant “globalize the intifada” and insist it is not a call for violence. Because intifada, in their lexicon, is not violence. It is justice.

But words have histories. And intifada has a very specific one.

The fact is that the Second Intifada was not a symbolic protest. It was suicide bombings on buses, massacres in cafés, shootings in markets, families murdered at holiday tables. The later “stabbing intifada” turned sidewalks and bus stops into hunting grounds. The “car intifada” transformed vehicles into weapons aimed at civilians.

So when Jews hear “globalize the intifada,” they do not hear an abstract call for liberation. They hear a political tradition with a body count. They hear the globalization of a tactic that has repeatedly targeted Jewish civilians.

That is why the argument over this slogan so often goes nowhere.

Congressional committee on the phrase “Globalize the intifada” on June 24, 2025

One side hears history. The other hears ideology. One side sees violence in the act itself. The other sees violence only when the “wrong” people commit it.

The socialist-jihadi moral framework launders murder into resistance and terror into liberation, because the victims are placed on the wrong side of the political hierarchy.

October 7 exposed with horrifying clarity that while the massacre itself was monstrous, the reaction to it revealed something even deeper: a political culture that could look directly at burned families, raped women, butchered children, and kidnapped grandparents and still speak of “ending violence” while standing in solidarity with those who had just committed it.

And when Jews and decent people watch those same people – in the same breadth – call for following the charge of a young aspiring politician named Zohran Mamdani to redefine both violence and “peace” in the cause of annihilating the oppressor class, they have reason to fear.

The sanitation of violence against certain undesirable groups – Zionists for example – was voted into power in New York City. With easy smiles that come from people who have long internalized that eradicating “oppressors” is a noble cause in which bloody hands do not stain the oppressed.

Mamdani’s False Charge And the Echo of the Soviet Union

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New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.

The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.

Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.

That distinction is the legal center of the argument.

The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.

That is not what is happening here.

Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.

Brochure from Great Real Estate Event at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in May 2026

The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.

Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.

Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.

Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.

This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.

That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.

Mamdani Is Coming For Yeshivas

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When New Yorkers hear “private schools,” many still picture the old stereotype: elite Manhattan prep schools, hedge-fund families, sprawling campuses, and tuition bills that rival college.

That image is politically useful for progressives. It makes any fight over “private school funding” sound like a fight over privilege.

But in New York City, that is no longer the reality.

The largest private-school system in the city is not Dalton, Horace Mann, or Trinity School. It is the yeshiva system.

More than 100,000 students in New York City attend Jewish day schools and yeshivas (45% of the total in private schools), making them the largest single bloc in the city’s private education sector. Catholic schools, once the backbone of private education in the city, now rank second with 29% of the total. The political image of private education has not caught up with the demographic reality.

Buses in front of yeshivas in Brooklyn

And that reality matters.

Because when politicians like Zohran Mamdani talk about cutting back the flow of public money into private education, yeshivas are not a side issue. They are the center of the story.

The latest battleground is special education reimbursement.

These are not subsidies for luxury education. They are legal remedies for families of children with disabilities whose needs the public-school system failed to meet. Under federal law, when the city cannot provide an appropriate education, parents can seek private placement and reimbursement.

That system has grown dramatically in cost. Critics argue it disproportionately benefits families with the resources to hire lawyers, navigate hearings, and front tuition costs. And White families in particular.

The rising cost is a legitimate policy concern.

But the answer cannot be to jump to the conclusion that yeshiva kids are taking too much; it must be to evaluate the various needs of children and figure out how to provide for them.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time and with a mayor in New York City who prefers class and racial warfare and is portraying this as a matter of “equity” and confronting “private-school privilege.” It is not. It would primarily target students with special needs at Jewish and Catholic schools.

The charts are misleading because the demographics of public and private schools are dramatically different; There are 940,000 children in public school of which 43% are Hispanic and 23% are Black – generally in line with the disability figures above

It would hit communities that already shoulder the cost of religious education while also paying taxes into a public system they largely do not use.

It would hit families with children who need specialized services.

And it would hit institutions that serve as the backbone of Jewish continuity in New York.

Because yeshivas are not just schools. They are where tradition is transmitted, where Hebrew is spoken, where Torah is learned, where identity is formed, and where Jewish continuity is secured across generations. It is civilizational infrastructure.

And once government begins treating private educational alternatives as a fiscal problem rather than a parental right, the pressure rarely stops with one category. First special education reimbursements. Then transportation. Then security funding. Then textbooks. The pattern is familiar: reduce the supports, increase the burden, narrow the choice.

Zohran Mamdani built his politics around redistribution and expanding public provision. His next target seems to be thousands of Jewish children with special educational needs.

When the Status Quo Becomes the Threat

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For decades the argument over the Jewish Temple Mount has been framed in one direction only: Jewish prayer must be restricted because Jewish prayer may trigger Muslim violence. The legal scaffolding for that argument is old and sturdy. The British Mandate for Palestine built it directly into Article 13, promising free exercise of worship while “ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum.” Later arrangements, including Oslo, preserved the same operating logic in practical form, with Israel retaining security authority even while leaving day-to-day religious administration to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

That logic has governed the Mount for a century.

Israeli police block a Jew from ascending steps to the Temple Mount at the Cotton Gate in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

But what happens when the status quo itself becomes the source of disorder?

This is the question no one wants to ask.

Every few weeks, Palestinian media like WAFA warns that “the Al Aqsa Mosque is in danger” from “radical settlers.” The phrase has become ritualized, almost liturgical in Palestinian political culture. A Jew walking quietly on the Mount becomes a provocation. A Jew moving his lips in silent prayer becomes an assault. A Jew bowing his head becomes a threat to Islam itself.

That rhetoric has had a practical effect. It has transformed Jewish prayer into a public order problem.

But there is another side to this equation.

What if the continued suppression of Jewish prayer is itself becoming a generator of instability? What if the status quo, designed to contain conflict, has begun producing it?

A legal order built to preserve peace cannot become a machine for preserving grievance.

Under the British Mandate, the answer is surprisingly clear. Article 13 protects “existing rights,” but only while ensuring public order. That means the status quo is protected only insofar as it serves order. If preserving inherited arrangements creates recurring confrontation, the law and history allows recalibration.

That was the hidden flexibility in the Mandate and ongoing governing principle. Status quo is presumptive; order is mandatory.

Oslo is even more direct, though in a different way. Oslo does not sanctify the Temple Mount arrangement. It simply leaves it in place while preserving Israeli security. That means if Israeli authorities conclude that the present arrangement itself is a long term security risk, they possess the legal architecture to modify access, prayer rules, and crowd management.

The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound. Thousands of Jews can be sound in the Western Wall Plaza, unable to ascend onto the Temple Mount.

The irony is brutal.

For decades the legal doctrine has been used to suppress Jewish prayer because Muslim violence was threatened. But if that suppression itself produces radicalization, frustration, and growing confrontation, the same legal doctrine could justify expanding Jewish prayer in order to restore order.

The law cuts both ways.

“The status quo” sounds ancient and immovable. In truth it is neither. It is a management system. And management systems are judged by outcomes.

If a system preserves peace, it earns its legitimacy. If a system preserves resentment and recurrent crisis, its legal rationale weakens.

The day may soon be arriving that structured, regulated Jewish prayer may become the stabilizing mechanism rather than the destabilizing one.

A designated time. A designated place. A formalized right.

The central legal truth of the Temple Mount has always been misunderstood. The governing principle was never the status quo itself. The governing principle was order.

Normalized Violence

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This was the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He survived but the deeper story lies elsewhere. By the third attempt, the country barely pauses. The first attack should have shaken a nation to its core; the second should have deepened the sense of alarm. By the third, something more dangerous has taken hold: familiarity. Political violence begins to feel woven into the atmosphere, another storm system passing through.

That is the shift in American life. Political violence has moved from rupture to expectation. The country has grown accustomed to the possibility that power will be contested through force.

The evidence stretches across the last several years. There was the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer, where executive authority itself became the target. There was the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, where proximity to political authority was enough to invite violence. There was the arson attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro. There was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Each attack carried its own political coloration. Different grievances, different ideologies, different enemies.

Yet they share the same underlying grammar. The human being is transformed into an idea.

The governor becomes the state. The executive becomes capital. The politician becomes the regime.

That transformation is the hinge upon which violence swings. A person who stands as an abstraction for a hated system becomes easier to strike. Violence acquires moral clothing. The blow feels righteous because the target has already been converted into a symbol.

That is why the public reaction to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killing mattered so much. The killing itself was one event. The social response revealed the deeper current. The alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, became a hero in corners of the internet. Memes spread. Fundraisers appeared. Admiration followed. A killer became an instrument of vengeance against a hated system.

It felt like the movie Joker come to life. In Joker, an unstable man carries the plot forward, but the real engine is the crowd waiting to celebrate him. The mob grants moral legitimacy to the violence. The killer becomes a vessel for collective resentment.

That is the deeper American drift. Violence increasingly invites sympathy, reinterpretation, and applause. The act becomes secondary to the story society tells itself about why the victim represented something worth destroying.

This can be seen in the Middle East as well.

Palestinian political culture offers a longer and starker example of how this process unfolds. For roughly twenty-five years, polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has repeatedly shown majority support for violence against Jewish civilians inside Israel. This stretches back before the Gaza blockade and before the present war. The permission structure came first.

PCPSR poll from October 2003 asking whether Palestinian Arabs supported armed attacks against civilians in Israel

Then politics followed.

In 2006, Palestinians elected Hamas to a parliamentary majority, fully aware of its openly antisemitic and eliminationist charter. October 7 emerged from that political soil. The massacre fit within a culture that had long accepted the killing of Jewish civilians as part of political struggle.

That is why it was celebrated.

And the celebration reached far beyond Gaza. American campuses, Western cities, and activist spaces erupted with demonstrations that folded the massacre into broader narratives of liberation. The same reduction had already taken place. Jews had been recast as symbols of systems: colonialism, finance, whiteness, Western power, institutional dominance.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) goes on antisemitic rant at Democratic Socialists of America conference, invoking Nazi imagery of Jews “operating behind the curtain… to make money off of racism.”

This is the ancient machinery of antisemitism. Jews become the human face of structural resentment.

The FBI hate-crime statistics show the physical consequences of that social logic. Americans often picture hate crime through property damage: a swastika painted on a synagogue, a church defaced, a mosque vandalized. Yet for more than a decade, the majority of hate crimes in America have been crimes against persons.

In 2019, 62.6 percent of hate-crime offenses targeted people. In 2020, the FBI recorded 7,750 crimes against persons, with nearly half involving direct physical assault. The figures jumped to over 11,000 in 2023 and 2024, with Jewish accounting for the vast majority of hate crimes by religion.

The reason sits in plain sight. Jews occupy a permanent place in political imagination as concentrated power: finance, media, institutions, influence. Even when stated softly, the accusation remains the same: too much influence, too much reach, too much control.

Once power itself is treated as morally suspect, violence against those imagined to embody it starts to feel cleansing. Society begins teaching itself that rage against elites is a form of justice. Institutions become enemies. Authority becomes corruption. Violence becomes political purification.

That moral structure echoes the French Revolution. The crowd gathers. The elite are marched into the square. Their status dissolves. Their destruction becomes public theater.

That is the destination of normalized violence.

The warning sign is larger than the incident. The warning lies in the crowd, in the cultural ecosystem that grants permission, supplies applause, and tells itself that the target stood for something hateful enough to justify blood.

Society has normalized violence as the media and school systems falsely rebranded America as a deeply unfair caste system. In the masses attempt for a complete redistribution of power and wealth, those with or with perceived power – politicians and Jews – will be open game for the angry mob.

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The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)