I haven’t looked at Natasha Hausdorff‘s videos in a while, but you’ll remember her as a British lawyer, an expert in international law, and a “pro bono legal director of the advocacy group, UK Lawyers for Israel.” Here is her reaction to the latest anti-Jewish violence and anti-Israel protests in England, both of which have become regular events. Here she goes up against Owen Jones, left-wing “British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist,” whose Wikipedia entry shows a photo of him wearing a Palestinian flag shirt. The channel is LBC, or Leading British Conversation.
The question is whether the pro-Palestinian marches in the UK should be banned because because they fall outside the boundaries of free speech. Hausdorff says they are violations because they constitute “hate speech” that incites violence against Jews, while Jones says that they’re not only legal, but a necessary outlet for opinions that Israel is committing genocide against Gaza. (He claims that Israel has killed 100,000 Gazans, which is surely untrue.) Jones is a big proponent of the “genocide canard”, and while I am not sure whether the marches violate British speech law, I agree with her that Israel has not committed genocide against Gazans. Anybody who knows what genocide is and how the IDF operates knows that’s a lie. But of course Jones has nothing bad to say against Hamas.
In response to Jones, Hausdorff can’t come up with anything that the Israeli government has done to justify the accusations of genocide (she doesn’t mention the West Bank, but may have done so somewhere in her talks or writing). But she correctly notes that the accusations of genocide aren’t being raised against the noncombatant deaths produced by the U.S. in WWII—and in that case, as in virtually all other wars, the ratio of noncombatant deaths to combatant deaths is much higher than seen in Gaza.
Jones cites several academics and “genocide scholars” who back the “g-word” as what Israel is doing in Gaza He adds that one can find identifiable Jews participating in the marches on the Palestinian side. He places the blame for hunger and destruction on Gaza squarely on the doorstep of Israel, while Hausdorff says that in contrast, it’s the fault of Hamas, which has embedded itself among civilians. Hausdorff argues that accusations of things like “starvation” are untrue, and also claims that the protests are a product of the “Hamas propaganda machine, ” which I think is an unwise accusation even though it is to some degree true: some of the figures and accusations bandied about by the protestors and by Jones and his experts come from Hamas.
Jones seems to argue largely from authority, citing none other than the Lancet and The Economist for the casualty figures, which must have come from Hamas. Hausdorff says that she’d be willing to debate the cited pro-Palestinian “genocide scholars” any time, but so far they’ve refused to do so.
Here are the notes added to the YouTube site by the UK Lawyers for Israel. I’m not whether if Hausdorff was interrupted in an unwarranted matter: you be the judge.
This recording includes comments on whether restrictions should now be placed on anti-Israel marches in London and other British cities, as well as strongly disputed allegations regarding casualty figures in Gaza, war crimes and genocide.
Unfortunately, Natasha Hausdorff was repeatedly interrupted by the interviewer when she tried to set out the inaccuracy of these allegations. It seems that many interviewers cannot stand to hear the expression of any view that supports Israel – as soon as a person interviewed starts to deploy facts contradicting the false propaganda the interviewer interrupts to prevent the truth being told.
For details of Gaza casualties according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry down to 10 November 2025, see this thread by Gabriel Epstein: https://x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status/…. This shows that even according to this information (which may itself be distorted by Hamas propaganda):
1. A much higher % of males of fighting age died than of females of the same ages, indicating that Israeli military action targeted combatants and was not indiscriminate.
2. A much higher % of male teenagers died than of female teenagers, indicating that a significant number teenagers, who are classified as children, were killed because they were combatants.
3. The claim initiated by Hamas and disgracefully maintained by the BBC, that 70% of those killed were women and children, is false.
The claim stated by Owen Jones, that the IDF has admitted that 83% of those killed were civilians, is completely bogus, as Chief Magistrate Goldspring found in paragraph 81a of this recent ruling: https://www.uklfi.com/wp-content/uplo…
The details provided by the Gaza Health Ministry do not identify how they died. They probably include around 10,000 who died of natural causes: see Salo Aizenberg https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2021…. Thousands more may well have been killed by Palestinian fire – rockets falling short, explosive devices, and crossfire. They certainly include 471 allegedly killed in the explosion outside Al Ahli hospital caused by a Palestinian rocket that fell short: see https://www.uklfi.com/false-al-ahli-c…. Well over a thousand other Palestinian rockets also fell short; each of them may have killed dozens of people.
Finally, here’s a related email I got yesterday from the editors of a small publication in the Pacific Northwest that has clearly fallen for some of the Big Lies. I am accused of being a histrionic Zionist, a proponent of settler colonialism—and pro-genocide (they call it “modern Holocaust denial”) as well. Their arguments are largely the same as those of Jones, even citing casualty figures taken from medical journals. They also try to tell me how to write this website. Finally, they seem unaware of my criticisms of religious Judaism, made on this site as well as in Faith Versus Fact, so they haven’t done their homework. But they don’t really care if I’ve also criticized Jewish superstition: their point is that I am pro-Israel, which they see as immoral.
At any rate, they can take a hike. Their email will not change how I “write my blog”. The email is indented:
Reading your blog, we were appreciative of the fact that you seemed to promote science and counter narratives from the religious establishments.However, your inability to separate your own Zionist histrionics from what should have been strictly an antitheistic, science-focused platform ruins the experience for anyone who isn’t A) a genocide apologist, B) deeply insecure about their ethnic identity to the point that they associate it with a 20th century settler-colonialist project, or C), both.Does your criticism of religion only extend to Christianity and Islam, or do you take on the Jewish religious establishment too? The most tangible and powerful form of that, of course, being the state of Israel, which reputed medical journals estimate has killed close to 100,000 civilians just since 10/23.Atheism today needs smart, conscientious voices to lead, not modern Holocaust deniers. We won’t change your views with this email, but maybe we can change the way you write your blog to not repel people (a hopefully increasing majority) who are appalled by the Zionist crimes of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement.
I am so frustrated that the propaganda produced by the terrorist group Hamas can be accepted by so many. Please keep up the fight, many of us find you as a beacon of reason in these perilous times.
I guess the small publication can feel good about themselves for being on the right side of history. Is this a start of redefining “holocasut denial”? They seem to be saying that denying that Gaza is a genocide is holocaust denial in the last paragraph you quoted.
Most of the claims being disputed here in the post (e.g., deaths, genocide, …) appear unrelated to the question of whether marches should be banned. One can deny the claims as exaggerations (e.g., deaths) or completely false (e.g., genocide) but still think that protest marches that obey existing laws should be legal, even if pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel and even if promoting falsehoods. The tricky distinction, perhaps, is when does “inciting violence” become illegal? Yes, protests might increase the likelihood that someone / somewhere acts violently against Jews, but that would be true of mainstream and social media or numerous ways to depict what is happening in Gaza in the most horrific, inflammatory possible way. Is all that illegal? Or do we mean more direct impetus to act violently, as in provoking people to break store front windows of Jewish businesses and assault occupants? Where’s the boundary and who gets to decide whether it’s been breached?
Agreed. Unless the marches are designed to provoke imminent violence and lawless behavior, they should be legal, as they are in the U.S. I haven’t seen any of the marches in London that violate what is legal in the U.S. That is somewhat of a judgement call, as you note.
The courts are who decides whether the law has been violated.
1) you are applying US Constitutional law here to Britain, which not only does not have our exact Constitutional protections for free speech, but has Public Order Act 1986 [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64] which targets speech or conduct likely to incite broader hatred, and which covers hatred against religion and nationality.
There is strong correlation between Pro-Palestinian demonstrations and anti-Semitic incidents not only in Britain, but in the US. That should be enough to trigger Act 186 all by itself.
Additionally, what is the messaging we see at these British protests? The false claims that Israel is committing genocide, infanticide, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism. That Israel is causing starvation. We see the flags of Hamas, the PFLP, the PLO, and of the Iranian Regime – all Anti-Israel terrorist groups and all being supported. We see signage and chants for “Intifada” and “Free Palestine” – both calling for the terroristic murder of Jews. Every one of these things is hateful, and should therefore be illegal in Britain.
Jews live in fear for their lives in Britain, which is not enforcing its own laws against hate speech during these rallies. That is the issue.
2) Municipalities have the right to regulate not only the manner in which demonstrations take place, but also their frequency. Even if British municipalities scrubbed the Hate Speech violations from pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the question of whether these demonstrations by their very frequency intimidate Jews is a valid question. As I pointed out in another thread, there have literally been thousands of these demonstrations in Britain, with a corresponding explosion of anti-Semitic incidents. And that is why banning or limiting these demonstrations is under discussion.
Thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure whether the British law is better here.
The actual numbers out of Hamas (https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/hamas-debunks-the-genocide-narrative/):
A total of 68k deaths over two years of a war that was started by Hamas and ended when the hostages were returned:
– 10k natural causes
– ~24k fighters
– leaving ~34k civilian deaths from the war itself
Moreover total number of deaths from starvation is on the order of hundreds to a thousand.
These numbers are worth comparing with other armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa over the past decade. Even now there are ~400-500k deaths in the latest round of the Sudanese civil war (started in 2023), to say nothing of Yemen (300k deaths), Tigray (~100k-600k), and of course we all know about Syria (~600k).
It is a remarkable coincidence that the net number of civilian deaths is comparable to the ~30k protestors killed by Iran in 36 hours in January.
Continuing yesterday’s discussion on AI, I fed Jerry’s fan email into Grok with no comment other than: “Jerry Coyne received this email today. Tell me what you think.” Here’s Grok’s response:
“This email is a textbook example of tribal moralizing disguised as principled criticism. It weaponizes ‘antitheism’ and science advocacy to police Jerry Coyne’s views on Israel, while relying on hyperbolic, one-sided claims. Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, has long criticized religion across the board—including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—on his blog Why Evolution is True. His support for Israel (and criticism of Hamas/Islamist extremism) doesn’t ‘ruin’ an antitheistic platform; it reflects consistent application of secular, evidence-based reasoning to geopolitics rather than selective outrage.”
What followed were three paragraphs detailing the errors in the email. Grok then concluded:
“Coyne’s blog separates science/atheism from politics but doesn’t pretend religion is irrelevant to conflicts. He calls out Islamist extremism, Jew-hatred in protests, and double standards. Many atheists (Sam Harris, etc.) do the same: Israel isn’t perfect (settlements, right-wing politics), but it faces existential threats from groups whose ideology rejects secular reason, atheism, and Jewish existence.
The email’s goal isn’t dialogue—it’s shaming to enforce an ‘increasing majority’ narrative. It repels by demanding conformity on a complex issue. Real science-minded skepticism questions Hamas stats, examines incentives (Hamas benefits from high casualties for PR), and notes Palestinian leadership’s rejectionism (Camp David, etc.). Polls show majority Palestinian support for Oct 7-style attacks in some periods.
Coyne shouldn’t self-censor. Blogs thrive on independent thought, not pandering. The email reveals more about the sender’s priors than Coyne’s supposed failings.”
Grok already has more “sense” than many presumably educated people.
Ha excellent. I prefer Claude. Same prompt, similar reply (just the headline response and the tl;dr).
“This is a hostile, rhetorically manipulative email.”
“Bottom line: This email mistakes contempt for argument. Whatever one’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this kind of correspondence is more about asserting moral superiority than genuine engagement. Coyne would be entirely justified ignoring it.”
I’ve really got to try some of this AI stuff myself – I’m curious and I’ve seen so many REALLY impressive examples, like you guys provide Mike and Doug. Thanks.
I’m partly (emotionally) aversive as MOST of the jobs I’ve had have been destroyed by tech of some sort. Now I’m a columnist I just don’t want to know it writes better than I do.
The computers are spot on in this example. Wow.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Why didn’t I think of using Grok???
Thanks to the two of you.
Prof., is that a typo in the last two lines your third paragraph? In the WW2 case, I would have thought the ratio of non-combatant deaths to combatants was higher than that seen in Gaza or have I got it confused? Sorry if I have, it’s close to my afternoon nap time.
lI may have fouled up; I’ll look, thanks.
Anyone who uses the term “settler-colonialism” in without irony is immediately outing themselves as an intellectually dishonest person not worthy of being taken seriously.
Please see Judge Altman’s video that I point to in comment #8 below as settler colonialism is one of the errors he addresses in his book…who are the real colonialists? Or a more direct attack on the settler colonialism meme is in his talk at uatx, “ Are Jews Colonists?” video at url
Young Federal District Judge Roy Altman is doing a publicity tour for his just published book, “Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law”. There is a 45-minute Tikvah videocast example of his story at url
He points out how disconcerting the anti-Israel reactions starting 8Oct on campuses and in the western media were to him and how it sent him researching the claims he was seeing and hearing. He applied his lawyer’s and judge’s skills to the task and over the two years produced the book and this video gives the viewer insight into the main points of the book…which I ordered as soon as I finished watching the video. Much as does Douglas Murray, Judge Altman sees these reactions as a part of a larger war on liberal democracies and western civilization. I empathize with him as I also have spent the past two-plus years buried in books and papers on the Middle East East and Israel and Jewish history, coming to some of the same conclusions he did…but I am not so eloquent to present the evidence and conclusions as is he.
Dear PCC(E),
Sorry you get hate mail from loony lefties. I don’t know why relatively intelligent people (OK, some of them are stupid, but it can’t be all of them) fall for the genocide/colonialist lies against Israel. I suspect this is just straightforward antisemitism in the guise of progressive thinking. If there has ever been a military force in the history of warfare that has tried harder NOT to target non-combatants than the present IDF, I would be very surprised. Owen Jones is an odious little twerp – and yes, I know that is an ad hominem remark.
Owen Jones is the lefty I love to hate.
For me he is one of the bishops in the Church of The Cause of Palestine. I mean to say that among the British left it has become a religion with all that is Palestinian being light, truth and goodness and Israel…well, you can guess.
Probably the most annoying thing about Jones is that he is reluctant to come out to debate in a forum where his views could be examined in real depth. You only ever get superficialities from him in ‘talking heads’ short interviews like this one.
I would truly look forward to seeing him debate 1:1 with Natasha or someone else the issue of Israel committing a genocide. View Jones’s YouTube channel, almost every video is saturated with the accusation of genocide. No, you can’t ban him from saying it but it’s this kind of drivel that’s contributing to murderous attacks against British Jews. Jones should have the spunk to should sit down and debate the issue openly rather than preaching to his disciples.
He must be an archbishop; he also tends the flock of Our Lady of Girlbollocks.
Here is J K Rowling on Owen Jones : .. his immense self-regard and his unshakeable belief in the rectitude of all his opinions has created a cast iron sphere around his brain through which self-awareness cannot penetrate.
Ha!
Your Pacific Northwest correspondents are hilarious. Unserious, like Owen Jones, but hilarious.
The idea of “genocide” …like “racism”.. is the word has been stretched and extended and beat up beyond all meaning such that ANYTHING communists/Islamists think “I don’t like” can be either.
Israel’s conduct in the many wars started lately by the opposition, by any sober expert account, (think John Spencer, “Perun”, William Spaniel, etc., other US experts) is unusually “moral” in its targeting and results.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Given one can be arrested for a tweet in the UK, I’m tending towards letting the watermelon idiots have their Fetal Alcohol Syndrome marches – as much as I hate them. The problem is larger than the crowds who march. Plus they tip their hand by marching. This is good intel for the forces of civilization.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Funny how today’s far Left has become virtually indistinguishable from the neo-Nazi/Islamist ultra far Right. I wonder if people such as those who sent the email ever look in the mirror and see something like the picture of Dorian Gray staring back at them.
Classic example of horseshoe theory. The extremes meet.
Meet, fall in love, marry, and have children even more deformed than themselves.
It is difficult to develop a strategy to combat the antisemitism displayed by the mob. And yes, it is antisemitism, and unashamedly includes, at times, Jews drinking non-Jewish blood, cutting up non Jewish babies for organs, etc. Western societies rightly value freedom of speech in the public spaces.
But such nonsense can be stopped at universities. I do believe in academic freedom, but that freedom should not include teaching falsehoods. Classrooms are not public spaces. And the fact that so much of this originates with academics tells me that if we would limit the falsehoods taught in universities, that might go some way toward reducing the size sand strength of the mob. Universities have a lot to answer for.
The First Amendment does not protect the teaching of falsehoods in courses. I could not, for example, teach creationism (esp. in evolution class). Academic freedom does not protect professors who teach deliberate lies, either. You can be disciplined or fired for that.
Is it out of line to ask the name of the publication that sent you such an arrogant, self-righteous piece of trash? I live in Seattle and since you identify it as from the PNW, I am curious. I have a suspect in mind and am wondering if they’re the ones who sent that.
I, too, am curious about the name of the publication. I fail to see how it could expect confidentiality.
I’m also somewhat boggled by the idea of a publication writing a letter to an individual — especially a letter trying to tell him what he should write. Can you imagine the Washington Post, the Economist, or GQ doing that? If they disagreed with you, they’d simply publish an article saying so. That’s the whole point of being a publication.
So isn’t this really one or more individuals cloaking themselves in the name of the publication? But that would work only if the publication commands respect. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case.
I would just like to add some facts here in re the “genocide” slander: The Anti-Israel Industrial Complex has been accusing Israel of “genocide” for decades. Edward Said was already accusing Israel of genocide in his 1979 book “The Question of Palestine”, where he claimed “U.S. allies like Israel sponsor naked genocidal wars”; Noam Chomsky has been accusing Israel of genocide since at least the 1980s, and refers to “Israeli concentration camps” and the “genocidal texts of the Bible,” and warning of a Zionist “final solution” that will annihilate the human race.
In 2001 at the UN Conference against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, all the Anti-Zionists gathered to call for “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state…[and condemned] those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.”
At the 2004 conference on “Resisting Israeli Apartheid,” held at the University of London, it was declared in unison: “There is no valid comparison between South Africa and Israel; Israel is much worse. South Africa exploited its native population while Israel expelled and committed genocide against its native population.”
And then there are the usual campus Islamo-Leftists, such as Mr and Mrs Mamdani, who were accusing Israel of “genocide” a day or so after the 10/7 massacre, before the IDF even entered Gaza.
The charge of genocide has nothing to do with facts or reality—it is not a fact claim but a dangerous and dishonest narrative weapon. Charging Israel with genocide is an attempt to transform Jews into Nazis and thereby morally delegitimize the Jewish state and the Jewish desire for self-determination. It is an ugly hateful smear and should be treated as such.
The 2004 conference was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (known to some as the “School of Orchestrated Anti-Semitism” due to its history of “anti-Zionist” student politics and incidents of anti-Semitic discrimination). SOAS is indeed under the University of London umbrella, but the latter is rarely mentioned. (I’ve no idea why the University of London isn’t regarded in the same way as the University of Oxford or University of Cambridge as an institution.)
Academia is ultimately the culprit behind anti-Semitic fallacies and failures of logic— along with such other hoaxes as ethnomathematics, the fad of males becoming “females” by announcement, the outrage of “affirmative care”, etc. etc. They all stem from the post-modernist dismissal of empirical knowledge and logical structure as mere “narratives” no more serviceable than politics, indigenous mythology, premodern superstition, or marvel comics stories. From this attitude, there could well grow mass protests in favor of magic, homeopathy, voodoo, and against settler-colonial concepts like arithmetic and the assessment that the earth is round.