The Embarrassment and Lies of the Palestinian Authority in Trump’s Peace Plan

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has perfected the art of self-deception — and the spectacle has become an embarrassment to watch. Its leaders trade in fantasies while their people – and the entire region – suffer the consequences of their delusions.

When President Donald Trump released his 20-point Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, it was explicit: the focus was on fixing Gaza and the PA would have no role. The document said in plain language that the PA would need to be overhauled and reformed before it could ever be trusted as a partner for peace. It deliberately withheld any credit or recognition for the current leadership, recognizing its corruption, incitement, and support for terror. “A technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” headed by Trump himself would be the day-after plan for Gaza. Only “qualified Palestinians” would get to sit on such committee, not the UN-lauded PA.

President Trump’s peace plan specifically did not hand control of Gaza to the PA and said the group had to “complete its reform program.”

The plan’s very structure was layered with conditionality — each potential step toward a Palestinian state contingent on verifiable reforms, renunciation of violence and demilitarization. Even then, the most it offered was that maybe one day, post-reform, there could be a pathway to a two-state solution.

The Trump plan layered conditions of “when,” “may” and “pathway” to Palestinian “statehood”

And yet, in a surreal twist, the official PA news agency WAFA ran an article in which Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Trump stood ready to endorse a Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as its capital. It was an astonishing fabrication — a complete lie, meant to mask Abbas’s very public humiliation and preserve his illusion of relevance.

Official PA media lied that Trump’s peace plan would establish a new Palestinian State which would follow the “June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital”

This distortion was not a misunderstanding; it was intentional misrepresentation, propaganda designed to convince Palestinian Arabs that Abbas still holds the key to their future. But everyone can see through the act. All Abbas and Hamas have delivered is destruction, division, and hatred.

The PA’s falsehoods no longer even convince its own people. Each new lie only underscores its impotence — a government in name only, ruling by inertia and deceit. The tragedy – like the lies – has layers of corruption, hatred, murder and deceit.

The Palestinian people, too, bear responsibility for their choices. They voted for Hamas, a genocidal terrorist movement to 58% of the parliamentary seats which brought death and destruction not only to Israelis but to Palestinians themselves – which the vast majority supported. They elected Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier and an ineffective president, and now watch him recycle lies and propaganda instead of leadership and reform. The Palestinians voted for failure — and the region has paid the price.

WAFA called the Israeli government an “occupation government”, clearly showing the PA was upset by being sidelined because it sorely needs reform

The Trump plan recognized that hard truth. It was not a welcome mat for Fatah or Hamas, nor a reward for decades of violence and corruption. The plan envisioned a different future entirely. The “day after” will not be another PA regime or HAMAS ruling Gaza, but the first step in a new chapter of deradicalization, where education replaces indoctrination, coexistence replaces hate, and peace is no longer a slogan but a shared reality.

Trump’s plan – as endorsed by Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – states clearly that a possible Palestinian State will come as a BYPRODUCT of deradicalization and peace, not in order to CREATE the forum for coexistence as offered by France and the United Kingdom. All of which may or may not happen, and most likely after Abbas is long gone.

From Hostage Posters to Charlie Kirk

“What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
We are watching that adage unfold in real time.

Seven hundred days ago, way too many people in western cities took to the streets and shredded the faces of Israeli hostages taped to lampposts.
Those faces were voices, each one a witness, a story, a plea — and that is precisely why some felt they had to be destroyed.
It wasn’t enough to ignore them; they had to be erased, obliterated, so that the public would never be confronted by their humanity.

So it was with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
They didn’t just want his opinions silenced — they wanted his existence blotted out.
His death was a warning to anyone who shared his worldview: you will not be allowed to speak, and if you persist, you will suffer.

This is not merely a campaign against perceived bad ideas — it is a maximal campaign against the people who hold them.
They want Israel destroyed, and they want those who support Israel to feel pain.
They want conservatives destroyed, and those who think like them to live in fear.

This is not free speech but a purge.
It is a revolution that calls itself “good trouble” but wields the club, the knife, and the guns to bring the “intifada” to the west.

The secular left has adopted an “Islamonormative” framework.
It treats the faces of Jewish hostages like drawings of Mohammed, punishable by erasure, and treats conservative talking points as blasphemy, punishable by death.
This is not debate — it is jihad.

I’m Offended, You’re Dead.

America is not just losing empathy for hostages nor tolerance for opposing ideas — it is learning to enjoy their destruction.
The mob laughs as the faces are ripped down, cheers as the dissenter is silenced.
America’s youth are being groomed to take pleasure in erasing the unwanted.
Once that appetite is formed, it will not stay confined.

The spectacle of the auto de fe is slowly coming to America as society moves from speech to speakers. To infidels.

Jews have long been the most persecuted and hunted people in the world. Now, religious conservatives are becoming new Jews as the secular crusade vilifies their beliefs.

Ten years ago they came for blasphemers at Charlie Hebdo in France, and expanded their jihad to nearby Jews (read “random folks” by US President Obama). World leaders marched arm in arm that they would not be silenced. Now they offer to lie Charlie Kirk’s body at the U.S. Capitol building, in a sign of respect and a nation that remained unbowed. Gestures.

But the voice of the Jew, the face of the Jew, and the Jew himself are one and the same. People believe The Jew is targeted in isolation; that his situation is unique. A dynamic that will not pierce the majority. Until they realize that it has.

The drip of antisemitism infiltrates society and corrodes it from within, an insidious jihad. Stealthily, it kills morality and sanity. Alas, it is too subtle to recognize as a macro threat until it is a stage four tumor that has ransacked the body politic, then unable to proffer basic protection for the masses.

What They Said About The Assassination of Rashida Tlaib

Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated today while he spoke with college students in Utah. The killing was yet another sad marker on the collapse of American society. The comments about his murder were much the same.

The left-wing media at MSNBC essentially said that he deserved it with Matthew Dodd saying “He has been one of the most divisive figures … who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions, and I think that’s the environment we’re in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then just saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.” His colleague Katy Tur also called Kirk “a divisive figure. Polarizing. Lightning rod. Whatever term you want to use.”

Left-wing politicians including AOC and Ilhan Omar condemned the killing and denounced… gun violence.

What if antisemitic Congressperson Rashida Tlaib were assassinated. Would AOC and Omar issue a statement about gun violence or denounce the killers and the vitriol that surrounded such shooting? Would MSNBC say she deserved to be taken out because of her rants about Jews? Would the right issue statements like the left-wing is doing today?

Tlaib is an active voice in conferences which call to destabilize the United States and to destroy Israel. She whips up the violent jihadi and Democratic Socialists of America mob to tear down western society and the Jewish State.

But that only means she’s evil. It means she should be arrested if found to incite violence. But it doesn’t mean she should be killed or her murder celebrated or excused.

Charlie Kirk had lots of opinions but he took the time to calmly debate and have a discussion with anyone. He did not call for the destruction of America or American allies. So why the obnoxious comments from the far left?

The issue before us is not only the violence itself but the selective outrage that follows. Political violence is corrosive to democracy. To our humanity. If Americans respond to it with partisanship — excusing it when the victim is an opponent, or diminishing it when the rhetoric seems uncomfortable — then the nation is already fractured beyond recognition.

The true test of a society’s moral health is whether it can condemn violence against its enemies with the same clarity as against its friends. Those people who cannot, are likely the ones whose goal is the destruction of our society.

Advancing Religion In America

On October 28, 2011, Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, came to New York City and sat with Rabbi Meir Soloviechik at Yeshiva University. Their hour long talk touched on Lord Sacks’ book The Home We Build Together, and the role of religion in society, focusing on the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular.

Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Speaks at Yeshiva University with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, October 2011

In the opening remarks (3:10), Rabbi Soloveichik shared a story about Senator Joseph Lieberman, who once observed that on Simchat Torah, Jews dance with the Torah in the streets with joy, yet often fail to carry that Torah into the world during the rest of the year. It was a reminder that religion cannot remain confined to ritual but must be brought into society.

Lord Sacks followed with a story of his own. Prime Minister Tony Blair once teased him that he had reached the “boring part” of the Hebrew Bible—the lengthy passages about the building of the Mishkan (Tabernacle). Why, Blair asked, does the Torah devote hundreds of verses to it, compared to just 34 for the creation of the universe?

Lord Sacks replied:

Prime Minister, it is not difficult for an omniscient, omnipotent, infinite God to create a home for human beings. But for finite, fallible human beings to create a home for the infinite God, that is difficult.

The Mishkan, Sacks explained, was not just architecture—it was a project that united the people. More than what God does for us, it is what we do for God that transforms and binds us together. “If you want to take this diverse, fractured culture of Britain and turn it into a united nation,” Sacks said, “you have to get them to build something together.”

Rabbi Soloveichik and Lord Sacks went on to describe that the decline of religious life and secularization of Europe was tied to fewer children being born. A self-centered focus weakens families, weakens faith, and weakens society. In contrast, raising children—caring for someone more than oneself—provides both the foundation of belief and the roots of charity: “having somebody whose life you care about more than yourself, that could actually be the foundation of faith for many of us.”

Washington (D.C.) and Rembrandt

Nearly fourteen years later, on September 8, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump held an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He invited members of the newly established (May 1, 2025) Religious Liberty Commission to hear how he was advancing the centrality of religion in American public life. He said “When faith gets weaker, our country seems to get weaker. When faith gets stronger… good things happen for our country…. To have a great nation, you have to have religion.”

President Trump remarks at the Museum of the Bible, September 8, 2025

One of the members of the Presidential Committee on Religious Liberty is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. He was unable to attend the speech by the president in Washington because he was giving a day long-lecture in New York City at the home of Mem and Zalman Bernstein and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Tikvah Fund about art, religion and western society.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik discussing Rembrandt’s 1635 painting “The Sacrifice of Isaac” for Tikvah

Rabbi Solveichik focused on Rembrandt’s two versions of the Sacrifice of Isaac. He contrasted Abraham’s devotion to God’s command to offer his son Isaac, to the investment of love and devotion he had made in his son. The angel broke the conflict, and with it, the end of human sacrifice which was prevalent in the world at that time. From this point onward, belief in a higher power could be accompanied by protecting and investing in our children.

Religion, Children and Western Democracy

It made for an interesting sermon triptych connecting religion, children and western values: Lord Sachs, Rabbi Soloveichik and President Trump all emphasized that religion has the power to strengthen ourselves, our families, our communities and our nation.

In Lord Sacks book, The Great Partnership, published in June 2011, right before his talk at YU, he wrote:

My argument has been that contrary to the received narrative, freedom has been better served in the modern world by a religious vision rather than a secular one. The Abrahamic vision, with its insistence on the non-negotiable dignity of the human person and the importance of protected space – the families and communities that make up civil society – where relationships are not based on power, saved England and America from the worst excesses of the revolutionary politics that cost tens of thousands of lives in France and tens of millions in Russia….

Abrahamic politics, by contrast, is politics with a human face, the politics that knows the limits of power, as well as the transformative effect of free persons freely joining together to make social institutions worthy of being a home for the divine presence. Abraham politics never forgets that there are things more important than politics, and that is what makes it the best defense of liberty.”

That is the motion before Western democracies: can humble faith as embodied in “Abraham politics” lead our different faiths to help build a cohesive society of respect and growth.

Concluding Circle

The discussion of religion and democracy is being advanced passionately today because it feels abandoned.

According to Lord Sacks, democracy under secularism preached intersectionality which yielded segregation and isolationism. Rabbi Solveichik responded that “a Mayflower of persecuted religions might leave England and Europe to come to safer shores [like America].” For his part, President Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission to deal with such matters, with the first group’s term ending on July 4, 2026, on the nation’s 250th anniversary.

So it was fitting that Rabbi Soloveichik should end his talk to the Tikvah Fund, a group whose motto is “Advancing Jewish Excellence and Western Civilization through Education & Ideas,” before Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, while President Trump was concluding his remarks in Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Soloveichik at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 2025

In the 1851 painting, the future president of the United States stood aboard a boat filled with a diverse crew, readying to end the rule of England and break with the British monarchy and Church of England, to establish a new democratic state in 1776. Nearly 250 years later, the Chief Rabbi of England, the president of the United States, and the rabbi leading the oldest synagogue in the United States were championing the importance of religion in strengthening democracies everywhere. A quiet revolution to return to the foundations of faith to help build a more perfect union.

Judging the Judges of Psychopaths

A suicidal antisemite walked into a church school in Minnesota and opened fire. He left behind rants of depression and hate. He idolized the mass murderers who came before him — Hitler, Columbine, Christchurch, Pittsburgh — and fantasized about joining their ranks in death.

It is a sad story. Sad for the victims, whose lives were cut short. Sad for the shooter’s family, who must live with the legacy of his murders. Sad for society, which must add another notch to the ledger of preventable carnage.

But I pause on the judges. Not the judges in robes who preside over courts of law — this menace took his own life and will only face a real judge in the afterlife, if you believe in one. The judges I mean are the self-appointed arbiters of truth on social media, the pundits with millions of followers who rush to craft a narrative before the blood on the church floor has dried.

Narratives Over Facts

Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks, quickly posted on X that the killer “hates Israel and Muslims.” Two deliberate misdirections.

First misdirection: He didn’t hate Israel in the abstract. He hated Jews — which is precisely why he hated Israel. On his weapon magazine he scrawled, “6 million wasn’t enough.” That wasn’t about Israel. That was about Jews. In his journal he wrote “If I carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” before calling Jewish people “entitled” and “penny-sniffing” and adding “FREE PALESTINE!”

writings on the Minneapolis killer’s weaponry

He even called for destroying HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that helps resettle refugees in the U.S. His antisemitism and anti-Israel animus were inseparable. He loved Nazis and he loved Palestinian Arabs who killed Jews. Cenk only loves the latter, because it allows him to hang his “anti-Zionist, not antisemitic” credentials where he cannot with the former.

Second misdirection: The shooter never expressed hatred of Muslims. He praised mass murderers — including some who targeted mosques — but not because he despised Islam. His adoration was for the act of mass killing as a pathway to glory. He wanted to die a martyr in the suicide-mass murder cult, to etch his name in the pantheon of psychopaths and inspire the next one, just as he inscribed their names on his gun, as well as “mashallah,” meaning “Gd has willed it” in Arabic.

The Sanitizers

So why did Cenk say what he said? To refit the crime into his own comfortable narrative. To launder the reality that this shooter’s rants — about Jews, Israel, HIAS — were fueled by the same demonization that Cenk himself mainstreams daily.

Cenk published this rant about Israel controlling the US government around the same time as misdirecting people about the Minnesota killer

This is how today’s judges operate. They aren’t rendering justice to take the wicked off the streets. They are sanitizing their own crimes by placing their incitement onto a scapegoat and pushing it off a cliff. They hope you will move on, and not notice their bloody handprints on the crime scene of young children dead on a church floor.

But be clear, Cenk and others like him are inciting the next mass shooter. They just hope the murderers come for Israel supporters.

Conclusion

There are no winners in these tragedies. The dead are buried, the families are broken, the shooter is gone.

But the lies linger. The venom feels less poisonous once imbibed and cleansed by the antisemitic judges.

When influencers and media stars twist a killer’s words into their preferred stories, they are not exposing truth — they are covering their own complicity.

The Minneapolis shooter’s manifesto was clear enough. It will likely be on the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) book-of-the-month club reading. The world is sad and unjust and we must burn it down. Ideally, start with the Jews. If you can’t, make sure your manifesto reads like a modern day Mein Kampf that would make Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) proud.

The killer’s sphere of desecration was relatively small. Tragic, but limited. But the shrill antisemitic rants atop social media and infiltrating politics grossly widen the diameter of the damage.

The lingering tragedy is that the loudest voices have become the judges, and that will mark our entire society for collapse.

New Jersey’s Double Standard: Protecting Sunday Rest While Promoting Abortion

New Jersey prides itself on being “progressive,” but its legal framework reveals a hypocrisy that should make any thinking citizen bristle. On one hand, the state enforces Blue Laws in Bergen County — a set of regulations rooted in 17th-century Christian Sabbath observance that still ban most retail sales on Sundays. On the other hand, it boasts some of the most radical abortion laws in the country, permitting the ending of a pregnancy at virtually any stage.

If New Jersey is going to use the force of law to protect Christian values, then be consistent and protect life. If not, stop pretending by maintaining antiquated religious impositions like the Blue Laws.

The Blue Laws: Christian Morality Enforced by Penalty

Bergen County’s Blue Laws are codified in N.J.S.A. 40A:64-1 et seq., prohibiting the sale of clothing, furniture, appliances, and most retail goods on Sundays. Violators face fines up to $1,000 and potential jail time of up to 90 days (N.J.S.A. 40A:64-6). The intent? To preserve Sunday as a day of rest, explicitly tied to the Christian Sabbath.

Supporters of the laws admit their religious roots. Bergen County County Executive James Tedesco “has been a steadfast supporter of the Bergen County blue laws, long recognizing their vital role in enhancing residents’ quality of life and guaranteeing retail employees at least one day off each week,” echoing the original moral intent of honoring Sunday as a sacred day.

Abortion: Unfettered Access, Zero Protection for the Unborn

Contrast this with New Jersey’s abortion statutes. In 2022, Governor Phil Murphy signed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act (P.L.2021, c.375), enshrining the right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy with no parental notification for minors, no mandatory waiting periods, and no limits on late-term procedures. Clinics openly advertise this reality: “No gestational limit” (Planned Parenthood of New Jersey, 2023).

For Christians and countless others who believe life begins before birth, this isn’t neutrality — it’s the state actively rejecting Christian morality in the most profound area imaginable: the protection of human life.

Bergen County abortion clinic – closed Sundays

A Call for Coherence

New Jersey cannot have it both ways. Either the state should abandon religiously grounded laws like the Blue Laws — which literally fine people for shopping on Sunday in deference to Christian tradition — and let people lead the lives they choose, or it should acknowledge that Christian moral values still have a legitimate place in public law and extend them consistently, particularly to protect the unborn.

It’s time for New Jersey legislators to stop hiding behind selective morality. If the state truly believes in secular governance, repeal the Blue Laws and let commerce run seven days a week. If it still believes Christian moral heritage has value, then apply it where it matters most — to the defense of life itself.

Van Hollen’s Mainstreaming War on Israel

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) has become one of Israel’s fiercest critics in the U.S. Senate. Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, he has pursued a campaign that reframes Israel not as a besieged ally but as a war criminal state, worthy of sanction and censure. His playbook has five coordinated elements: a starvation narrative, a focus on Christian persecution, a drive to restrict U.S. arms, an effort to criminalize Israeli “settlers,” and to demonize the Israeli government while legitimizing the Palestinian Authority.

What began as fringe rhetoric has steadily migrated into the Democratic mainstream. In Washington’s political war over Israel, Van Hollen has positioned himself as the lead general, and he is increasingly turning to enact laws to enforce his worldview.

The Starvation Narrative

The turning point came in February 2024, when Van Hollen escalated from criticism to criminalization.

On February 13, 2024, he declared on the Senate floor:

“Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.”

Just two weeks later, his office issued a statement reinforcing the charge:

“People are starving in Gaza. And civilians are dying every day. There is no excuse for this situation.”

At the time – just weeks into Gaza’s war on Israel – few international observers had made such claims. By labeling Israel’s blockade as “deliberate starvation,” Van Hollen provided the framework for others to follow. Within months, humanitarian agencies, U.N. officials, and fellow senators adopted the same language.

Christian Persecution: Expanding the Field of Victims

On trips to the region in June 2024 and August 2025, Van Hollen, joined by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) made highly publicized visits with Christian patriarchs in Jerusalem. They highlighted declining Christian communities and implied Israeli responsibility for their plight.

The narrative was selective: minimizing Hamas’s role and Palestinian Authority corruption while amplifying claims that Israel’s policies drove Christians from the Holy Land. Slowly, this angle began echoing in European diplomacy and American church politics. Van Hollen helped mainstream it.

Restricting U.S. Arms

Beyond rhetoric, Van Hollen has worked to curtail U.S. arms transfers to Israel. He joined resolutions to block certain sales, pushed for GAO investigations into Israel’s use of U.S. weapons, and demanded conditioning assistance on humanitarian compliance.

By mid-2025, other Democrats had joined him, showing his success in normalizing the once-fringe notion that America should starve Israel of weapons in the midst of its war for survival.

Criminalizing Settlers: From Rhetoric to Sanctions

Van Hollen has also targeted Israeli settlers, pressing for visa bans, sanctions, and financial restrictions.

In November 2024, nearly 90 Democrats, led by Van Hollen, urged Biden to impose sanctions on Israeli ministers tied to settler violence. In August 2025, he worked with Senator Peter Welch on a sanctions bill, declaring:

“The Netanyahu Government – driven by racist extremists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir – continues to fuel settler violence and support the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. The United States must not turn a blind eye to these acts.”

The progression from criticisms to sanctions is becoming a hallmark of his activities.

Boycotting Netanyahu, Embracing Abbas

The hypocrisy of Van Hollen’s diplomacy was laid bare in July 2024, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress. Van Hollen loudly boycotted the speech, denouncing Netanyahu’s government as extremist and refusing to “be a rubber stamp” for what he called a “political prop.”

Yet, just weeks earlier in Ramallah, Van Hollen had gladly sat down with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—a man who: wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial; maintains laws banning the sale of land to Jews, punishable by imprisonment or death; and funds stipends to terrorists’ families under the “Pay for Slay” program.

This willingness to shun Israel’s elected leader while legitimizing Abbas exposes Van Hollen’s double standard. The boycott was staged as a moral stand, yet his embrace of Abbas—authoritarian, corrupt, and antisemitic—revealed a deeper hostility directed not at extremism but at Israel itself.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen meets Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on a August 2025 trip to the region in which he does not meet any Israeli officials (photo from WAFA)

The Legal Framework: Turning Criticism into Punishment

Van Hollen’s strategy is deeper than speeches. He has worked to institutionalize anti-Israel positions into binding U.S. law:

  • Leahy Laws & Foreign Assistance Act: He invoked these statutes in May 2025 to argue that Israel’s restrictions on aid are a “commission of gross violations of human rights” which would trigger U.S. legal violations.
  • GAO Investigations: He formally requested audits to prove U.S. complicity, aiming to tie Israel’s actions to American liability.
  • Codifying Executive Orders: By reintroducing sanctions legislation in 2025, Van Hollen sought to ensure that settler bans would not depend on a future president’s discretion but become permanent U.S. law.

This layering of legal levers shows the depth of his campaign. Van Hollen is not merely criticizing Israel. He is trying to build the legal scaffolding that forces America to punish it.

Summary

Van Hollen as a multi-front war on Israel:

  1. Starvation narrative → turned humanitarian debates into accusations of Israeli war crimes.
  2. Christian persecution → expanded moral indictments beyond Palestinian Arabs.
  3. Arms restrictions → reframed U.S. support as conditional.
  4. Settler criminalization → sought to enshrine punitive measures into U.S. law.
  5. Boycott of Netanyahu, embrace of Abbas → pivot America’s ally from Israel to the Palestinians.

Each step has nudged Democrats further away from the historic bipartisan consensus supporting Israel, tarring the Jewish State as racist and criminal, and unworthy of support.

Mark Mellman of Democratic Majority for Israel – a longtime Van Hollen fan – bemoaned and warned about the “deleterious consequences of his [Van Hollen’s] actions,” as he watched the Democratic party follow Van Hollen’s lead. It has not slowed the senator down.

Chris Van Hollen has become the lead general in mainstreaming anti-Israel narratives and a Democratic political war against Israel—a campaign whose consequences extend from Washington to Jerusalem, and into the very legitimacy of Jewish life in the Holy Land.

Villains Of Preference

In 2001, a Palestinian Arab jihadist blew up 21 Jewish teens and young adults at Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium disco. In 2016, a radical Muslim pledging allegiance to ISIS massacred 49 young people at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. Both killers declared why they killed: Jews and gays had no right to live.

But read today’s news, and the stories have been rewritten. The jihadists are airbrushed out. In their place, new villains are supplied: Israel, Republicans, conservatives. Hamas’s October 7 slaughter becomes “anti-colonial resistance.” The Pulse massacre becomes proof of “alt-right bigotry.” The killers vanish; scapegoats stand in their stead.

The New York Times article on August 24, 2025 essentially blaming Republican anti-gay attitudes surrounding the Orlando nightclub killings. Nowhere does it say that the murderer was a radical Islamist who was interviewed several times by the FBI for involvement with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

This is the age of villains of preference.

A Hamas gunman disappears, Netanyahu is written in.

An ISIS bomber is scrubbed out, Trump takes his place.

Jihad becomes invisible, conservatives become the menace.

This isn’t sloppy reporting—it’s deliberate redirection. Our society, already awash in the viral toxicity of social media, is being pushed to focus obsessively on politics and demonizing your neighbors. It’s red vs. blue, right vs. left. The situation courses with the ultimate stakes: life and death. The reframing empowers a radical socialist agenda that uses a domestic enemy to mobilize its base. Jihadists don’t fit the script, but Republicans and Zionists do.

The real clash—radical Islam against democracy and freedom—is inconvenient to acknowledge. So it’s erased. In its place we’re told the true battle is internal: conservatives are dismantling democracy; Israel is committing genocide with American support; capitalism is the ultimate evil that threatens the world. The foreign killers who target Jews, Christians, and gays are excused, while the West turns on itself.

Anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist politicians-in-waiting, Jamaal Bowman and Zohran Mamdani

The creed is simple: protect the victims of preference, attack the villains of preference—Jews, conservatives, capitalists. They are being lined up for your bilestorm. Your retweets. Your ire. Your protest. Your vote.

It is a purposeful rerouting of outrage, weaponized by radicals who despise capitalism and democracy, and cheered on by regimes like Qatar and China that profit from the West’s collapse.

The jihadists told us why they killed. Our media tells us to look away. Because in the new faith, truth is expendable while villains of preference are eternal.

There is a subtle subtitle to mainstream news articles today. It is a chorus that is growing louder and closer, lifted from killers’ manifestos: “There is only one solution: Intifada Revolution.”

A Million for Gaza While Jewish Life In America Burns

The United States is experiencing the worst wave of antisemitism in modern memory. Jews are attacked in the streets of New York, vilified on college campuses, and shunned in social circles simply for being Jewish or supporting Israel. Synagogues and community centers are fortifying themselves like military outposts, while families weigh whether their children are safe wearing a Star of David in public.

In the middle of this siege on Jewish life, the UJA-Federation of New York proudly announced it would send $1 million in aid to Gaza as a “Jewish imperative.” The money will be funneled through an Israeli rescue nonprofit, ostensibly to provide humanitarian relief.

The federation’s leadership points to precedent: they’ve sent funds abroad before—to Turkey after an earthquake, to Ukraine after the Russian invasion. But this is not Turkey. It is not Ukraine. It’s also not Canada and Australia undergoing horrible antisemitism.

Gaza is not a neutral disaster zone. Its people have elected and support leaders who openly call for the murder of Israeli Jews. Its ruling terror group, Hamas, slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023, and still holds hostages. Polling has long shown majority support among Gazans for killing Jewish Israeli civilians and to destroy Israel. This is not a passive bystander to tragedy; it is a society that has gone to war against the Jewish state again and again.

The difference matters. When the federation sends aid to a country struck by natural disaster, it’s an act of humanity. When it sends aid to a population whose political and militant factions seek Jewish extermination – while in the middle of a war – it’s an act freighted with moral confusion.

The leadership may believe that giving to Gazans proves Jewish compassion “even to our enemies,” or helps with global optics. But for Jews watching their own safety erode daily in the United States and in other communities around the world, it looks like a failure to stand with their own community. It risks alienating the very donors who built the federation in the first place.

Charity is not limitless. Every dollar has an opportunity cost. And while Jewish students are harassed on campus, Jewish businesses vandalized, and Jewish institutions desperate for security funding, this million-dollar gesture to Gaza sends a clear message: in our hour of greatest vulnerability, the suffering of those sworn to kill us will be prioritized alongside, or even above, our own survival.

The empathy swamp is drowning us, blessed by community leaders.

American Jewry had managed with peacetime leadership for decades but it is time to replace them as the environment has shifted, and leaders have proven that they are not up to the moment.

Lanternflies and the Spread of Antisemitism

From nowhere they came — and now they’re everywhere. The spotted lanternfly, with its colorful delicate wings and destructive path, has infested the American landscape. It’s believed to have originated from China and, in just a few years, has spread across states, devastating crops and trees like the “tree of heaven,” its favorite host. The government seems incapable of containing it. Few natural predators exist. The infestation has become a symbol of bureaucratic failure and public resignation.

Spotted lanternfly

But some wonder: does this pestilence reflect something deeper, more corrosive — a cultural infestation?

In the wake of October 7, when thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel in a massacre they proudly broadcast around the world, antisemitism in America, Canada and Australia exploded. Synagogues were vandalized. Jewish cars were firebombed. Campus protests called for a “global intifada.” And the institutions tasked with standing guard — universities, governments, media — offered excuses, silence, or, worse, justifications.

Many point again to China, not just for the lanternfly, but for feeding antisemitism into western culture, especially through TikTok — a powerful delivery system for ideological poison. Others blame Qatar, which has poured billions into American universities that now shelter hatred under the guise of “free speech.” The Gaza war may have triggered the firestorm, but the kindling was laid long ago — through foreign influence, academic corruption, legal systems reluctant to confront hate when it wears the right colors and intersectional culture intent on vanishing Jews.

The response has been toothless. Protesters shut down airports and bridges with impunity. Cities release vandals hours after they’re arrested. Politicians decry antisemitism in speeches while voting to defund the very police tasked with protecting vulnerable communities. Universities who once claimed to be safe spaces now protect the mob instead of the beleaguered minority.

Like the lanternfly, antisemitism has become endemic. And just as officials tell us to stomp on the bugs as a civic duty, people now post videos taking down “protest” signs and washing off graffiti — not to eradicate the hate, but to vent helplessness.

We’ve reached a tipping point. Many have chosen to watch the wave rather than swim against it.

But Jews are not trees. Unlike the “tree of heaven,” the Jews have a history of moving, surviving, rebuilding. As America shrugs at the firebombs and broken windows, and as elected leaders dismiss Jewish fear as overreaction, a quiet migration begins. New York, Toronto, and Melbourne may look the same in ten years — but they will feel different. Not because the skyline will change, but because of the absence. The absence of a people whose presence once animated these places with faith, culture, and conscience.

Vienna was no longer Vienna after the Jews were rounded up and slaughtered, and French leaders know that France will no longer really be French if Jewish frustration and fear makes them move. But America has no such institutional memory. And as Americans elect younger and more inexperienced radical politicians, the destruction will accelerate.

Jews were forced to wear distinctive clothing in the Middle Ages and in Nazi Germany, and were tattooed in concentration camps before the annihilation was manifest. But it’s the moral corruption of the cities themselves that marks Jews for extinction; black sooty mold as the lanternflies feast and kill.

The last Jews will be those who see fellow Jews’ fears as fantasies, constellations drawn from a few distinct points like ancient mariners and pagans lost in heavenly thoughts. Perhaps those survivors will be the only Jews the West wants anyway: hearty crops which withstood the plague may have more in common with the new natural order.