A Muslim who visits Mecca is called a Hajji. It is one of the highest honors in Islam, the completion of the Hajj pilgrimage, celebrated by family and community as a sacred accomplishment.
A Catholic who travels to the Vatican is a pilgrim. For centuries, the faithful have journeyed to Rome, walking into St. Peter’s Square with reverence, greeted with blessing and legitimacy.
And a Jew who goes to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — the very place where the First and Second Temples once stood, the holiest site in Judaism? That Jew is branded a provocateur. Not a pilgrim, not a worshiper, not a faithful soul ascending to pray — but an instigator, an agitator, an accused trespasser, a “settler” on their own sacred ground.
The disparity could not be starker. What is celebrated as devotion for others is condemned as incitement for Jews. For Muslims, the Hajj is a right; for Catholics, Vatican pilgrimage is honored; but for Jews, even quiet prayer on the Temple Mount is labeled an offense — by the United Nations, NGOs, and international bodies.
It is not only hypocrisy; it is erasure. To deny Jews the name of pilgrim is to deny Jewish history, Jewish identity, and Jewish legitimacy. It casts the holiest place in Judaism as alien to Jews themselves, a desecration of memory turned into policy.
And why? Because the world has normalized the jihad. It has allowed Islamic Supremacy to dictate permissible behavior, even in the Jewish holy land.
The truth is simple: a Jew ascending the Temple Mount is not incitement. It is the most ancient pilgrimage of them all — the echo of three millennia of devotion, commanded in Torah, rooted in covenant, and carried in every prayer whispered toward Jerusalem, before Islam was even created.
The real provocation is not the Jew who prays on the Temple Mount but a world that dares to tell Jews they don’t belong at the center of their faith.
ACTION ITEM
Come to the United Nations in New York City and demand Jewish rights and freedom of religious assembly in Jerusalem.
Six Jewish civilians were killed simply for being Jews. Surely, a world leader would stand firm, demand justice, and declare solidarity with the victims. Yet UN Secretary-General António Guterres offered only a perfunctory “strong condemnation” via his spokesperson—no mention of justice, no demand for the murderers to be brought to account, no affirmation of solidarity.
Because these murdered Jews were in Israel.
That’s the moral vacuum of the UN.
In Mali, after a terror attack on 17 September 2024, Guterres said he “strongly condemns the terrorist attack,” extended his “sincere condolences” to victims and the government, and—crucially—urged the Malian transitional government “to ensure that those responsible for this despicable attack are held to account.”
In Pakistan, following a deadly blast, he “strongly condemned the ‘abhorrent’ attack” and offering “solidarity” with the “Government and people of Pakistan in their efforts to address terrorism and violent extremism.“
Why does Guterres morph into a fierce defender of victims—and demand justice—when the targets are not Israelis, but merely issue a dry statement when Jews are murdered? Perhaps he is waiting to find out if this Palestinian Arab terrorist was also a UN employee?
This is not nuance. It’s deliberate abandonment. A moral inversion because the villains have long ago been beatified, and Guterres has internalized that 2 billion Muslims are his real clients.
The UN has become a place where Jewish lives are treated as collateral, while other victims are granted full moral and political recognition. Guterres’s pattern isn’t subtle—it’s a glaring indictment of the UN’s moral bankruptcy.
Parshat Shoftim begins with a straightforward command:
“Judges and officers you shall appoint in all your gates … and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.” (Devarim 16:18)
Rashi explains that every town needed both judges to rule fairly and officers to enforce those rulings. Justice could not be a distant idea — it had to be rooted locally, available to every community. That is the Torah’s formula for a moral society: equal justice, applied where people live.
Justice Where You Live
The genius of Shoftim is its insistence that justice must be accessible and equal. Not some imperial tribunal deciding cases in faraway capitals, but local courts where every person could seek fairness and truth.
It is inside the gates where justice takes hold. That’s what builds trust, stability, and morality in a society.
The ICJ’s Distant Spectacle
Contrast this with the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It claims universal authority, yet its judgments fall unevenly. Brutal regimes that slaughter their own citizens often escape its scrutiny. But Israel, a country with one of the most independent and activist judiciaries in the world, is hauled before it repeatedly.
This is an inversion of the Bible’s call for justice: a court far removed from the people, applying rules unevenly, more performance than principle.
Israel hauled before ICJ
Israel’s Local Justice vs. International Bias
Inside Israel, anyone can petition the Supreme Court — Arabs, NGOs, critics of the army. Judges regularly check government policy and military decisions. That is exactly what the Torah envisioned: justice dispensed locally, equally, and consistently.
The ICJ, by contrast, applies law selectively and from a distance. It does not strengthen justice; it hollows it out.
Conclusion
The United Nations had the opportunity for courts in its gates — with its agency UNRWA on the ground in Gaza, running schools, hospital and providing loans. It could have confronted Hamas’ crimes. Instead, it chose silence. It abandoned justice, allowed Hamas to fester, and turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave for Israel to face.
Now the same UN condemns Israel in The Hague. A body that ignored justice locally dares to preach it globally.
But the Torah is clear: a land cannot be moral when evil is allowed to sit at its gates. Hamas must be expelled. And the UN — which empowered terror and continues to undermine justice — has no rightful place in the Holy Land either.
In a bold step to preserve humanity’s “most fragile treasures,” UNESCO voted to add the Hamas Charter to its list of endangered cultural artifacts. The decision came during the organization’s annual heritage summit, which initially convened to safeguard vanishing African oral traditions, disappearing tribal instruments, and lost languages. But the spotlight quickly shifted after the State of Palestine—recognized as a full UNESCO member—submitted the 1988 Hamas Charter as a candidate for protection.
Delegates debated the proposal with solemn reverence, as though they were discussing ancient scrolls or fragile clay tablets. “This is not merely a document,” intoned one UNESCO official, “it is a vibrant example of humanity’s enduring talent for mixing medieval theology, paranoid conspiracy, and genocidal intent into a single cultural artifact.”
Hamas, which currently holds 58% of the Palestinian parliament and continues to govern Gaza with an iron fist wrapped in a prayer shawl, celebrated the recognition. “We thank UNESCO for finally appreciating the poetic quality of our prose,” said one Hamas spokesperson, pointing to passages citing Jews as orchestrators of every global evil, from wars to stock market crashes. “It is art. Dark, sinister art, but art nonetheless.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran, a member of UNESCO with a keen eye for heritage preservation, reportedly helped prepare the submission. Delegates noted the Persian calligraphy used in the cover page of the proposal as “an exquisite touch of cultural diplomacy.”
Critics, however, were less charitable. Human rights groups asked why UNESCO would protect a text calling for the eradication of an entire people while ignoring actual endangered communities being eradicated in real time. UNESCO officials brushed off such concerns. “Our mission is not to judge,” said one diplomat. “If we can safeguard Stonehenge, we can safeguard Stone Age thinking.”
The vote passed overwhelmingly, though with several European countries abstaining in embarrassment. The document will now be digitally preserved and inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, alongside such treasures as the Magna Carta, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
As the session closed, one delegate mused: “Perhaps one day humanity will look back on this charter the way it looks at medieval torture devices—an artifact of cruelty, once revered, now displayed in a museum of shame.”
For now, however, UNESCO has declared the Hamas Charter an endangered cultural jewel which must be preserved. Its continued existence may be a threat to peace, but, as the organization reminded the world, “heritage must be protected, even when it is heritage of hate.”
In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe how women are portrayed on screen. The camera does not simply show reality — it frames women for a heterosexual male viewer. Women become visual objects, defined by how they serve the viewer’s pleasure, not by their own full humanity.
The concept applies far beyond film. A “gaze” is any dominant perspective that controls how another group is seen. The one doing the looking holds power; the one being looked at is flattened, reduced, and judged. The colonial gaze. The white gaze. The antisemitic gaze. In each, the subject is stripped of complexity and placed in a role that makes sense to the audience, not to themselves.
Israel is caught in such a gaze. Call it the “Israel Gaze.”
In the Israel Gaze, the Jewish state is the object, never the subject. It is to be observed, graded, managed — but rarely allowed to speak or act on its own terms. Its security concerns are minimized; its legitimacy treated as conditional.
Like the male gaze that zooms in on a woman’s body while ignoring the rest of her life, the Israel Gaze focuses on narrow, selective snapshots. Cameras linger on a checkpoint — but not the suicide bombings that created the need for it. They magnify airstrikes — but crop out the rockets that triggered them.
The framing serves the outside viewer, often a Western political elite, who want a morality play: powerful oppressor vs. powerless victim. Israel is assigned the role of aggressor. No matter the reality on the ground, the narrative is cast before the curtain rises.
And just as the male gaze reduces women to archetypes — seductress, mother, damsel — the Israel Gaze flattens Israel into “occupier,” “aggressor,” “settler state.” The country’s remarkable complexity — the ultimate decolonization project, a refuge for a persecuted people, a diverse democracy, a hub of innovation, a nation under constant threat — disappears from view.
This gaze is not neutral. It is a tool of power. In film, it props up patriarchy. In global politics, it reinforces the idea that Israel’s right to exist, defend itself, or define its own future depends on approval from outsiders who claim the right to judge.
Typical UN vote condemning Israel – lopsided
Mulvey noted in her analysis that “her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” So it is in global politics, with the viewer solely transfixed on Israel’s supposed evils that the actual storyline – and path to peace – is lost out of sight.
Both the male gaze and the Israel Gaze deny the subject the dignity of being whole. Both reduce identity to an image crafted for someone else’s satisfaction. And both sustain an imbalance in which the viewer’s comfort matters more than the subject’s survival.
Israel faces two battles at once: the immediate fight for security and the deeper fight to be seen truthfully. Until the gaze changes, the story will never be told honestly — and the verdict will be written before the trial even begins.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has once again proven himself to be a reckless ideologue, dangerously detached from reality. In his latest remarks on July 28, 2025 regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Guterres declared that Palestinians have a “right” to a state. This is not only false, but dangerously misleading at a time when thousands of lives hang in the balance.
No group of people has an entitlement to a state. International law does not guarantee statehood to any specific ethnic or religious population. What people have is the right to self-determination, which can be fulfilled through various frameworks — including autonomy, federation, or integration with existing states. The assumption that this must culminate in Palestinian sovereignty from the river to the sea is not a legal imperative; it is a political preference, and a deadly one at that.
Guterres framed the issue as a false binary: either Palestinians get a state, or they will be condemned to expulsion or second-class status. This is a silly strawman, ignoring the obvious alternatives. Palestinians could become citizens of Jordan or Egypt — both of which administered the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, before 1967. Or they could establish a state in Gaza and in Area A of the West Bank, which is already under Palestinian control under the Oslo Accords. But they have no right to demand Israeli land, nor a capital in Jerusalem.
His reference to “East Jerusalem” as if it were a legitimate, independent entity is equally misleading. “East Jerusalem” was never a recognized capital or separate city — it was a temporary result of Transjordan’s illegal occupation between 1949 and 1967. The 1947 UN Partition Plan, which Arabs rejected with violence, never designated it for an Arab state. There is no legal basis to call Israel’s presence there “occupation.”
The most disturbing part of Guterres’ statement is his call for Hamas to be included in a unity government with fantasy notions of “we must support Palestinian unity around a peaceful, democratic and inclusive vision for statehood.” Let’s be clear: these are the same Hamas terrorists who committed mass rape, torture, and murder on October 7. This is a group with the most antisemitic and genocidal foundational charter ever written. To reward their atrocities with political power is not peacebuilding — it is moral depravity. It is the very definition of appeasement, sanitizing evil and encouraging further violence.
What kind of values is Guterres promoting when he elevates genocidal psychopaths into prospective leaders of a future state? It is not peace. It is not justice. It is not coexistence.
UNSG Antonio Guterres
Time and again, Palestinian leadership — whether Fatah or Hamas — has made its goals clear: no Israel, and no Jews. From school curricula to charters to chants in the streets, the obsession is not with borders, but with obliteration. The Secretary-General’s repeated attempts to whitewash this reality reveal either staggering ignorance or something much more nefarious.
Guterres is not a neutral peacemaker. He is actively endangering Israeli lives by proposing that Israel close its eyes to reality and pretend Hamas is a peace partner. He is fueling conflict under the guise of diplomacy and exposing the rot at the heart of the UN system.
They came for the Yazidis. They came for the Druze. They came for the Kurds. We came for the Jews.
Across the Middle East, ethnic and religious minorities have been hunted, uprooted, and erased. Yazidi women were rounded up and sold like cattle. The Druze were betrayed by neighbors and hunted in the streets. The Kurds—called terrorists for seeking sovereignty—were chased by Turkey with Western silence as a shield.
Thousands of Yazidi women sold as sex slaves in Iraq
We watched. We said nothing. We let them disappear, acknowledging—without saying it—that the Islamic Middle East had no place for ethnic and religious minorities. In our United Nations chairs, we shook hands with their butchers and waited for the news cycle to move on.
But not for the Jews.
The one minority whose return to sovereignty we supported—however begrudgingly many decades ago—was the Jews. We recognized their state, and in doing so, we made demands. MAKE demands. Demands no other people are burdened with.
We demand that Israel allow its citizens to be slaughtered and call for restraint. That it accept that others dictate its borders and immigration policy. That Jews be barred from praying at their holiest site. That any territory not clearly within historic armistice lines be judenrein, Jew-free.
And when Israel resists these demands – no, conditions we now apply for its existence – we condemn it. Not just at the UN, but in our schools, in our media, and on our streets—training citizens to treat diaspora Jews the same way: that they are alive only due to our grace. We are not equals; they owe us for everything.
We did not protect the Kurds. We abandoned the Yazidis. The Druze are being rounded up and killed. But we took action to help the Jews defy their extinction after the Holocaust. And for that, we believe they owe us—debtors with no right to complain. We pretend that Israel is a peer at the UN but we know the reality: it’s a vassal state and will be commanded by the order of the day.
Druze hunted in Syria
We don’t ask anything of the Gazans. Their genocidal rage toward Jews is seen as instinct, not ideology. Understandable. Natural. That’s why global protests erupt only when Jews defend themselves—not when they’re killed. Dog bites man, not the other way round.
To help Jews survive, we crafted Israel as a dam. It may shield its people inside from the massive jihadi flood—but only within walls we design.
However, once built, we insist that the floodwaters be let in. Millions of Muslim “refugees” must be allowed to “return” to the spring. The saltwater ocean that surrounds and crashes against the well’s walls, will mix with the spring water inside to become undrinkable.
We know it makes no sense. But we know we can’t contain the ocean, so we poison the well. It will happen eventually anyway, we reason.
The entrance to the United Nations’ Aida Refugee Camp, near Bethlehem, with a key on top showing that the doorway to get into homes inside Israel is via the UN
The world is watching—and learning. There is no future for Druze, Yazidis and Kurds. We silently move our lips, and our streets at home are silent. Yet when Jews retaliate when massacred, we rage and our people echo the screams.
Collectively we wonder whether maintaining the Jewish State is too hard.
Whether under dictatorship or democracy, religious zealotry or secular law, the story repeats: minorities are tolerated in the Global South only as long as they are passive, picturesque, and dying. The moment they survive and carve out self-determination, they are a threat to those with seats in the august UN chambers. Will these little tribes demand rights and sequester land too?
Yet another vote against Israel at the UN General Assembly
“Globalize the intifada” is not just a slogan; it is already in motion. Those floodwaters have breached the shores. The jihad is mowing down non-Muslims in the Middle East. It is teaching the Global North the chorus courtesy of Qatar, and dance moves via TikTok from China.
Marchers in the Global North demand an end to the Jewish State and persecution of Jews everywhere
The Global South – 42% Muslim outside of China and Latin America – will soon control the UN and is preparing to erase the exception of the Jewish state. Once America is convinced to step aside, the protective walls will surely collapse and the Jews will be slaughtered like other minority groups.
Druze mowed down outside hospital in Syria
Jews wonder why the streets are empty of protestors when various nations of the Middle East slaughter ethnic minorities, but are packed when Israel fights terrorists. It’s because Jews have still not internalized that the world views them as a minority which will ultimately be erased by the tide of the Islamic jihad, and it regrets making an exception for the most persecuted people on earth.
There are two wars taking place in Gaza: one is a textbook definition of a genocidal war while the other is a reluctant war of ethnic cleansing.
While critics of the Jewish State hurl the term “genocide” as a weapon, a blood libel designed to strip Israel of its legitimacy, it is an inversion: it is Hamas and only Hamas that is engaged in a genocide.
Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is not a vague political platform. It is an open call to murder Jews. Article 7 quotes an Islamic hadith that urges Muslims to kill Jews wherever they find them. Article 13 states that “initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” Peace is forbidden. Coexistence is a crime.
And the Palestinian people did not reject this vision; they embraced it. In 2005, they elected Mahmoud Abbas as president — a man who wrote his doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust. In 2006, they voted Hamas into power, giving the genocidal group 58% of the parliament. These were not fringe votes. These were popular, democratic choices made in full view of Hamas’s open ideology.
Then came October 7, 2023.
In the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas — the ruling government of Gaza — unleashed its long-promised war of annihilation. They murdered 1,200 people, from babies in cribs to elderly women in wheelchairs. They burned families alive, filmed their atrocities, and broadcast their bloodlust to the world. The Palestinian street erupted in celebration. Polls showed 75% of Palestinian Arabs supporting the massacre of Jews.
This was not a surprise. This was fulfillment. A generation raised on genocidal propaganda in schools, mosques, and television carried out what they had been taught. They were not rebelling against Hamas — they were Hamas. Thousands of Gazans participated in the October 7 slaughter.
Israel, faced with an existential threat, responded. It had tried the diplomatic route. It had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. It had allowed billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to flow into the Strip. It had mostly tolerated rocket fire and bus bombings and flaming kites with modest responses. But after October 7, there was no possibility of a tepid response with a group with an increasing capacity to carry out its genocidal intent.
Israel launched a war of necessity — a war to end the Hamas threat once and for all. The goal was not genocide, but defense. Not extermination, but eradication of a terrorist force.
But the nature of this war is highly complex. Hamas does not engage Israel’s army on an open battlefield but underneath hospitals, mosques and homes. It warehouses missiles in schools and launches them from playgrounds. There is no ability to eliminate the terrorists without severe destruction to dual-use civilian-military infrastructure and significant collateral damage.
And that looks a lot like ethnic cleansing.
Gaza ruins
Ethnic cleansing refers to the forced removal of an ethnic or religious group from a territory. And yes, it is possible that the outcome of Israel’s war will be a Gaza without many Palestinian Arabs. Gaza cannot be rebuilt atop terrorist tunnels and booby traps. The terrorist enclave that Gazans built since 2007 cannot remain nor be replicated.
It has long been a sign of instilled antisemitism that the United Nations has accused Israel of genocide, at least as far back as 2013, as a mask for Palestinian Arabs genocidal intentions. It is a classic form of the adage “the best defense is a good offense,” accusing Israel of the crimes of Palestinian Arabs, forcing Israel into a defensive posture, both militarily and politically.
But it is another level of tragic irony that in this defensive war, Israel is open to the accusation of ethnic cleansing.
No nation on earth has faced the choices Israel faces. No other country is expected to coexist with a neighbor whose elected leaders seek its annihilation. No one wants to see civilian suffering but Israel has tried every alternative — and the price has always been paid in Jewish blood.
The world is watching a premeditated war of genocide – which it enabled and encouraged through the United Nations’ statements and actions – be defeated by a small, determined country. The contours of that victory may appear to the casual viewer as ethnic cleansing, and will certainly be marketed as such by Israel haters, as a cruel collective punishment against civilians and so-called “refugees.”
The Global North will consider “ethnic cleansing” as the lesser charge relative to the smear of “genocide” long advanced by the Global South. Will the resulting actions encourage and enable the next genocidal war against the Jewish State remains to be seen.
The United Nations Security Council is comprised of five permanent members (P5) and ten elected members (E10) who try to pass resolutions to promote global and regional peace and cooperation. It fails repeatedly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict as it prioritizes protecting the political-terrorist group Hamas above all else.
On June 4, 2025, E10 put forward a draft resolution which “demand[ed] an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza; the immediate, dignified, and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups; and the immediate and unconditional lifting of all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into the territory.”
The acting US Representative Dorothy Shea vetoed the draft resolution saying “US opposition to this resolution should come as no surprise – it is unacceptable for what it does say, it is unacceptable for what it does not say, and it is unacceptable for the manner in which it has been advanced. The United States has been clear: we would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza.” She added “We cannot allow the Security Council to award Hamas’ intransigence. Hamas and other terrorists must have no future in Gaza. As Secretary [Marco] Rubio has said: ‘If an ember survives, it will spark again into a fire’.”
Knowing that the United States would use its veto right to reject the resolution, one is left with two conclusions: the rest of the Security Council wanted the US to veto the resolution, or they care more about protecting Hamas than civilians in Gaza.
Perhaps the fourteen UNSC countries want Israel to continue the war but want to placate their pro-Palestinian constituents, appearing to support Gazans while knowing that no relief would happen until Hamas is defeated. Maybe the countries want Israel and the United States to both look isolated – the “little Satan” and “Big Satan” as the Islamic Republic of Iran calls them – hoping to curry favor among the Global South, with 80% of the world’s population.
Either way, the world cannot really believe there is a genocide happening in Gaza, if the path to a ceasefire was simply adding two lines calling for Hamas to surrender.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is first and foremost a politician, not a human being. What else can be the reasons behind his ignoring the slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel, burning entire towns, raping women and kidnapping 250 people, other than serving his constituents of the Global South whom he has learned are rabid antisemites?
When a radical socialist-jihadi gunned down two young Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. in May 2025, Guterres immediately issued a statement condemning the murders. It was something he did not do after the massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. Or October 8. Or October 9. Or October 10.
But he rose to the occasion in May 2025 after the targeted killing of the Israeli couple by a lunatic yelling “Free, free Palestine,” as if he were surrounded by fantom college campus agitators. Perhaps anticipating blowback from the anti-Israel horde he leads (read serves), Guterres explained this statement “reiterat[ing] his consistent condemnation of attacks against diplomatic officials.”
THIS particular antisemitic murderer should be “brought to justice” because he killed diplomats, a Bozo no-no. In this circumstance, the UN “extends sympathies to the Government of Israel,” because members of the sacred circle of high brow governmental officials were gunned down, not Jews having breakfast with their kids in their kitchens.
The thousands of butchered and injured people in Israel by over 3,000 Gazans in October 2023 were just Jews and therefore deserved no sympathy from the United Nations. Guterres could not offer any words of condemnation or consolation to the Jewish State for such barbarity; he has been so trained by the Global South. His office would not demand that thousands of Gazans “be brought to justice”; they are the UN’s protected wards.
When the head of the United Nations explained to the world that he decided to quickly condemn the murder of two Israelis when he ignored the butchering of 1,200, because of unity among diplomats, he further exposed the profound inhumanity of the cancerous global institution.
First One Through 