Tag Archives: Israel

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.

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.

A Less Anti-Israel UN Security Council in 2026?

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The United Nations rarely changes. But sometimes the composition changes just enough that the temperature drops—even if the structure stays broken.

That is what January 1, 2026 quietly delivered at the United Nations Security Council.

Five countries rotated off. Five rotated on. No grand reform. No moral awakening. Just personnel. And yet, for Israel, the difference matters.

The Council Israel Had to Endure

For much of 2024–2025, the Security Council was not merely critical of Israel. It was performative. Ideological. Repetitive. Certain members treated the Council less as a forum for conflict resolution and more as a theater for delegitimization.
None more so than Algeria.

Algeria did not argue policy. Israel, it insisted—again and again—was an illegitimate colonial outpost of Europe, no different from French rule in North Africa. History, geography, and Jewish continuity were irrelevant. This framing was injected into draft resolutions, press statements, and emergency sessions with missionary zeal. The goal was not peace. It was erasure.

Then there was Guyana, a country which bonded with the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1970s, which spoke with confidence and without knowledge—accusing Israel, rather than Arab states, of rejecting partition since 1948. One did not need to agree with Israel to recognize the historical absurdity. But the UN often rewards certainty over accuracy.

And Slovenia—a country with no meaningful role in the conflict—seemed to relish its moment on the moral stage. During Israel’s defensive war, it never called out Hamas. Slovenia repeatedly accused Israel of genocide. The charge was not legal analysis; it was rhetoric. And rhetoric, once introduced, metastasizes.

These countries rotated off quietly. No ceremony. No reckoning. Just gone.

The Council Israel Is Getting Instead

Their replacements are not “pro-Israel.” That bar is too high. But they are something rarer: less ideological.

Bahrain now occupies Algeria’s Arab Muslim chair. Bahrain is a signatory to the Abraham Accords and has diplomatic relations with Israel. It understands that shouting “colonialism” does not feed people, build ports, or stabilize regions. Bahrain may not defend Israel loudly—but it will not poison the well reflexively.

Colombia replaces Guyana in South America. Colombia is a serious country with a serious economy. It trades. It fights insurgencies. It understands security dilemmas. Domestic politics fluctuate, but Colombia does not need Israel as a symbolic enemy to feel virtuous on the world stage.

Latvia replaces Slovenia. Latvia knows what occupation actually looks like. It is cautious with language. It aligns more naturally with Western security frameworks and is unlikely to indulge in genocide rhetoric as a form of diplomatic performance art.

Liberia and Democratic Republic of the Congo round out the new entrants. Neither is a champion of Israel. But neither is an ideological crusader. Silence, at the UN, is often an upgrade.

This is not a transformed Security Council. The structural bias remains intact. Russia and China still exploit Israel as a pressure point. France still oscillates. The General Assembly still manufactures moral majorities untethered from reality.

But something important does change: the agenda-setters.

Algeria’s absence means fewer resolutions laced with colonial mythology. Slovenia’s departure means fewer genocide accusations casually flung like slogans. Guyana’s exit means fewer history-free lectures delivered with confidence.

In their place are countries – hopefully – that calculate before they accuse. That lowers the volume. It slows the cycle and gives diplomacy—especially American diplomacy—more room to maneuver.

Conclusion

Israel does not need the UN to love it. It needs the UN to stop lying about it.
The 2026 Security Council will not be fair. But it may be less dishonest. Less theatrical. Less obsessed with turning a regional war into a morality play with a prewritten villain.

Sometimes history doesn’t turn with a speech or a vote—but with who quietly leaves the room.

Hamas and ISIS

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

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

In practice, the distinction is collapsing.

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

ISIS flag on the car of murderers in Sydney, Australia

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

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

They are branches of the same antisemitic death cult.

God Alone Rules

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

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

Violence as Obedience

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

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

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

Jews as a Theological Obstacle

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

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

Scripture, once weaponized, does not negotiate.

Death as Currency

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

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

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

Power Without Freedom

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

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

The Lesson Already Learned

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

And it succeeded. For a while.

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas leadership promises to continue war against Israel forever

ISIS in Africa in Somalia, recruiting from around the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not empathy. It is evasion.

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

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

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

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

The New York Times’ Year in Pictures and the Architecture of Moral Inversion

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Hamas does not rule Gaza against the will of its people. It rules because large numbers of Gazans want it to. Hamas articulates aims that many in Gaza accept: “armed struggle,” permanent war, and the eradication of Israel. This is not an imposed ideology. It is a shared one.

That reality is the reason the war has not ended.

Hamas refuses to disarm. It promises to fight again. It rejects coexistence as a moral crime. And Palestinian Arabs have not rejected Hamas. There has been no uprising, no mass refusal, no turning inward to say this has destroyed us and must stop. The tunnels remain. The rockets are rebuilt. The hostages were hidden in plain sight and with complicity.

The Arab world understands this. So does the Muslim world and international community, quietly if not publicly. No money will rebuild Gaza while Hamas governs. No state will guarantee security for a territory whose leadership is openly genocidal. Even those who chant Gaza’s cause from afar refuse to absorb the cost of dismantling its rulers. Words are cheap. Responsibility is not.

And so the world fractures.

One side insists Gaza deserves unlimited sympathy—stripped of agency, frozen as a permanent victim, absolved of all consequence. The other side sees a society that has embraced a war of annihilation and asks the world whether moral condemnation is not only justified, but necessary. This divide is not about compassion versus cruelty. It is about whether moral judgment still matters.

What cannot be sustained is the fiction that Gaza is merely trapped between Hamas and Israel. Gaza is trapped— by leaders and parents who have chosen martyrdom over future, ideology over life, and war over their own children’s survival.

That is where sympathy collapses.

Because the only people in Gaza whose moral claim is uncontested are the children—and they are being sacrificed by a society willing to place guns in schools, tunnels under bedrooms, and hostages among families. A society that teaches its children that nothing is nobler than dying for the cause of destroying the Jewish State.

Sympathy cannot be demanded for that choice. It can only be extended—narrowly, painfully—to those who never had one.

That is why the ritualized outrage of the West’s most powerful institutions now feels so hollow. Each year, The New York Times publishes its Year in Pictures, and the selection itself becomes an argument. In 2025, the year with the largest spike in antisemitism including several incidents of mass murder, there were no pictures of Jewish victims. Instead, page after page of Gaza: rubble, smoke, bloodied streets, dust-covered children. Destruction, repeated until it acquires the authority of inevitability. Israel appears only as force. Gaza appears only as suffering. Context is stripped away. Agency is erased. The camera becomes a verdict.

Two-page spread in New York Times’ 2025 year in pictures showing Gaza rubble. The only other 2-page spread was the election of Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel member of the DSA, as mayor of New York City

But the depravity lies not only in what is shown—it lies in what is omitted.

There are no photographs of Jewish life under siege: no police guards posted outside synagogues, no concrete barriers and metal fences erected around schools, no quiet images of fear normalized into daily routine. There are no frames of mourning for Jewish victims abroad, the couple shot in Washington, D.C., the arson at the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania over Passover. No recognition of the global consequences of a war whose ideology has traveled far beyond Gaza. Violence against Jews outside Israel didn’t even make a footnote.

New security fence erected outside synagogue in 2025 (photo: First One Through)

When Israeli hostages appear in the Times, they are reduced to a single visual trope: a large military helicopter, as if their captivity were a logistical problem rather than a crime. Even Jewish victims of Gazan atrocities are set against a large Israeli military. The human cost of hostage-taking is laundered into abstraction.

New York Times only picture of a Jewish victim is a tiny speck in a large Israeli military helicopter

What does receive sympathetic attention are arrests—multiple images of pro-Palestinian demonstrators detained by police, framed as moral courage meeting state power. Advocacy for Israel’s destruction is softened into dissent. The pages preen about resistance while refusing to name what that “resistance” seeks to accomplish.

This is not journalism. It is moral choreography.

The pictures ask only one question—who suffered more?—while carefully avoiding the only one that matters: who chose this war? To launch it? To continue it? They do not show Hamas leaders refusing disarmament. They do not show weapons beneath nurseries. They do not show the ideological choice to sacrifice children for permanence of war.

In this telling, Israel becomes the aggressor by existing, and Gaza becomes sympathetic by persisting in annihilation. The refusal to surrender is recast as resilience. The willingness to sacrifice children is aestheticized as tragedy rather than condemned as crime. Sympathy is manufactured by amputating responsibility. The global anti-Israel advocates are embalmed in the moral light; Jewish victims disappear off the pages.

When the world’s most influential newspaper presents destruction without causation, suffering without choice, and death without ideology, it does not advance peace. It sanctifies perpetual war. It promotes a global blood libel. And it teaches readers that moral clarity is cruelty, while moral confusion is virtue.

The far-left media hopes that history will remember its curated selection of photographs and the modern moment will gather sympathy for the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish horde. Hopefully they are proved very wrong, and this time capsule will forever mark The New York Times for its profound antisemitism and moral depravity.

Related:

Every Picture Tells A Story: There Are No Genocidal Leaders In Iran, Just Fancy Women (November 2024)

Every Picture And Headline Tells A Story: Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Students Are NOT Antisemitic (April 2024)

Every Picture Tells A Story: No Brutal Slaughter Of Israeli Civilians (October 2023)

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims (November 2020)

Every Picture Tells a Story: Anti-Semitism (February 2017)

The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.