Category: anti-semitism

Bret Stephens on El-Sayed

November 3, 2026 • 8:30 am

I was going to put this in my critique of Abdul El-Sayed yesterday, but forgot. Fortunately, Bret Stephens, in his latest NYT column, alludes to something like what I’m about to say:

This is what I forgot to add to my own post:

Imagine that a white American had some relatives killed by Islamic militants in Somalia (this has happened, albeit rarely, to both American civilians and military personnel).  Devastated, the American gets a gun, drives his truck into the The West Michigan Somali Cultural Religious Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan and opens fire on a group of children, wounding a security guard. Fortunately, nobody was killed, and the attacker takes his own life.  When asked about the attack, a white politician proffers an explanation: “Hurt people hurt people.”

Can you imagine how people would come down on that politician for heartlessness and obtuseness?

When Abdul El-Sayed said precisely that phrase after an attack on a Michigan synagogue and preschool this spring (apparently, some relatives of the would-be murderer were killed by the IDF in Lebanon), it was not just an explanation but an excuse.  El-Sayed later apologized for the statement, but I don’t believe his faux contrition. But he got away with it, even though it encapsulates his entire view of Jews and Israel.

But enough; Bret Stephens, a far better writer than I, draws the parallel in his latest NYT column, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot below. You can also find his piece archived here.

Excerpts (I hope you’ve seen Cenk’s pro-el-Sayed ad):

The stakes in the race were again brought home after Representative Haley Stevens, who had been El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, endorsed Rogers after a falling-out with El-Sayed, largely over his refusal to condemn what may be the most nakedly antisemitic political ad in modern U.S. political history.

The ad, which came from an El-Sayed-friendly political action committee founded by Cenk Uygur, a left-wing media personality, features a couple shopping for groceries while discussing why they can no longer afford a $7 carton of eggs: The money has already been stripped from their wallets by the federal government so that it can be sent to Israel and spent on “killing Palestinians” while also “probably” funding Israel’s universal health care.

A voice-over then asks, “Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?”

What’s wrong with the ad? For starters, the price of a dozen eggs has fallen by about half since Trump returned to office; a price-conscious shopper in Michigan could pick up a dozen eggs at Walmart for under $2. And while prices for groceries have undoubtedly been affected by higher energy costs because of the war with Iran, for which Israel is partly responsible, they’ve also been affected by the war in Ukraine; droughts in Brazil, China and the Midwest; and Trump’s capricious tariffs. Is Israel to blame for all that, too?

The larger problem with the ad is that it unites three of the oldest antisemitic tropes in history. First: There’s a powerful Jew out there who’s picking the pockets of the less fortunate. Second, that Jew is doing so to slaughter the innocent. Third, he’s paying a non-Jewish intermediary (who, by implication, is either a dope or a stooge) to do his bidding. To suggest the ad is only about U.S. policy toward Israel would be like arguing that an ad denouncing foreign aid to African countries while featuring the worst stereotypes about people in those countries isn’t racist. It doesn’t pass the smell test.

That’s the ad, but what about El-Sayed’s reaction to it?  His failure to denounce it is one reason why Stevens endorsed Rogers. Bret Stephens says this:

It would have been morally right — and a political no-brainer — for El-Sayed to forthrightly and unequivocally denounce the ad. A similar dynamic played out in early 2008, when Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., turned out to have a record of incendiary rhetoric. Obama denounced the pastor’s statements, and, after Wright kept it up, broke off relations with the man. Doing so drew a firm and effective line under the controversy, underscoring Obama’s insistence that he was no radical.

Yet the most El-Sayed has said about the ad was that it “was not made by me,” that he didn’t agree with its content but that the controversy was “not worth my time.” That’s odd: It was El-Sayed himself who called Israel “an affordability issue” while adding “we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals.” Nor has he been shy about denouncing Israel at nearly every opportunity he gets. The ad he now says he has nothing to do with merely expresses what he plainly believes.

It’s part of a broader pattern.

His initial response to the Temple Israel attack, where only a miracle spared the over 150 children and staff inside from death or injury, was that “hurt people hurt people.” It took him five months to offer a quasi apology. (“My comments may have been misconstrued.”) He campaigned alongside the antisemitic media personality Hasan Piker (who recently compared campaigning for El-Sayed in heavily Jewish West Bloomfield Township to campaigning for a Black candidate in a “Klan K.K.K. neighborhood”) and quietly distanced himself from him because he feared it was costing him votes, according to reporting by CNN. Tucker Carlson, the right’s most prominent normalizer of antisemitism, now features in one of El-Sayed’s campaign ads.

A question for Michigan voters, especially those who lean left: If the stigmatized minority here weren’t Jewish but, say, gay or Latino or Black, would you even consider a vote for any candidate abetting, or at least tolerating, the stigmatizing?

Remember that El-Sayed gained nothing with his “hurt people” statement, but he said it anyway. This is why I think it represents what he really believes, and why I distrust all his later apologies. El-Sayed doesn’t have much of a filter between his brain and his mouth.

Stephens finishes this way:

None of this will matter at all to voters who thrill to El-Sayed’s message. Nor will it matter enough to voters willing to put their misgivings about him aside because they feel that Rogers, for his part, has failed to call out the rhetorical excesses of Republicans, and that nothing is more important than sending Trump the sternest electoral rebuke they can. Yet come January, Trump will still be president, no matter how well Democrats do in the midterms.

The real issue for voters in Michigan is what moral price is worth paying for an additional seat in the Senate. There are, after all, other winnable Senate races in other states. And a vote to further strengthen the forces of antisemitism in American politics, under any party banner or political justification, is no vote for democracy, either.

This is a clear declaration that Stephens thinks El-Sayed an antisemite. I agree. But antisemitism and demonization of Israel are rapidly becoming hallmarks of not just “progressive” Democrats, but of mainstream Democrats as well. If party affiliation should always override principle, we are truly lost. And one principle should be that attacks on Jewish children, simply because they were Jewish, are evil and should at least be denounced.

Bret Stephens on Mamdani

October 10, 2026 • 10:30 am

If you’ve kept track of NYT Mayor Zohran Mamdani since he was elected less than a year ago, it’s not hard to conclude that, though he pretends to dislike bigotry, his statements and actions add up to a man who is not fond of Jews, and who wants Israel gone and replaced by a Palestinian state. His “official” statement on October 7 of this year, was thin on sympathy for Israel and touted the three Big Lies of antisemitism: Israeli apartheid, genocide, and colonialism.  To top off the day, Mamdani had dinner at a Palestinian restaurant, showing that he not only lacks the empathy he pretends to have for murdered Israelis, but also a man who in effect spits in the face of his Jewish constituency.

Of course I can’t write about this stuff nearly as well as the NYT’s op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who yesterday posted what I see as one of his best and most penetrating columns. It’s about Mamdani’s moral obtuseness, and you can read it by clicking the link below or seeing the archived version here. I couldn’t resist spouting off myself (flush left) after bits of Stephens’s text (indented):

I was going to give some quotes, but I found I quoted the entire column, and I hope Stephens and the NYT forgive me. It is, as Darwin described The Origin, “one long argument,” and the parts are inseparable.  I’ve bolded my favorite parts:

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The paragraph above shows not only the power of simile in calling out hypocrisy, but also how morally obtuse Mamdani really was, and how oblivious and/or insensitive he is to the feelings of people devastated by Hamas’s attacks on October 7.  He couldn’t keep his gob shut for just one day without condemning Israel.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

Although Mamdani gives lip service to the horrors experienced by Israeli civilians on October 7, not once have I seen him blame Hamas for the “genocide”, nor, indeed, say anything about the fact that explicitly genocidal aims are espoused not by Israel but by Hamas. That organization is responsible for the devastation that followed their invasion of Israel, as are the Palestinians who enable and approve of Hamas’s actions.

Mamdani does not mention that the kind of warfare practiced by Hamas guaranteed more civilian deaths. Indeed, Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, approved of the deaths of Gazan civilians, asserting that they were actually beneficial to Hamas. Read what he said and you’ll realize that Hamas didn’t value the lives of Gazan civilians nearly as much as did Israel. Israel tried to protect Gazan civilians; Sinwar’s attitude was “the more of our civilians die, the better for our cause.” While the movie “Naza” faults Israel for killing civilians as a necessary byproduct of eliminating Hamas, the IDF tried to prevent that, while, in contrast, the “necessary sacrifices” of Gazan civilians were something that Sinwar (and Hamas) wanted and facilitated (why else would they put military facilities in and under schools and hospitals?) Stephens continues:

It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.

It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.

It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.

I often ask those who accuse Israel of killing too many Palestinians what they would do were they in charge of Israel or of the IDF. Would they stop after killing, say, 3,000 Hamas members (and about 6,000 civilians assuming a 2:1 ratio)? Given that Hamas said they’d continue slaughter and kidnapping, why would Israel stop short of wholesale elimination of the terrorists? I’ve never heard a critic explicitly say what they think Israel would have done other than what it did to eliminate the existential threat that Hamas posed.

It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.

In my view, people like Mamdani, and other Jew haters, dislike the Jews even more because of the Holocaust, which of course arouses sympathies for what Jews experienced. That’s why they either deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of enacting the same thing in Gaza—a bit of lunacy that many have bought into.  The next paragraph is sheer brilliance:

Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.

It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.

אָמֵן

Once again: why anti-Zionism is antisemitism

August 7, 2026 • 10:00 am

Of. course I’ll get raked for putting up this post, but I’m frankly sick of people denigrating others as “Zionists”, which in most cases is simply a euphemism for “people who are pro-Israel” or even “Jews”, so that “anti-Zionist” becomes a euphemism for “anti-Israel” or “antisemitic”. My contention, echoed by Natasha Hausdorff and Douglas Murray in a fairly recent Munk debate, is that, at present, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”.

Why do I say this? Well, look at the definitions of “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism” in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), my touchstone for language.

Here’s anti-Zionism in the OED:

So you have to look up “Zionism,” and when you do, you get this:

Note that “anti-Zionism” does not mean “opposition to some of Israel’s policies” or “opposition to Netanyahu”. Rather, it means “opposition to the sovereignty of Israel and the right of the state to exist and defend itself against attacks.” (You might add “the right of the state to exist as, in part, a place for Judaism to thrive”,: but then all the Muslim nations of the Middle East are also places for Islam to thrive. In fact, Christianity and Judaism are not tolerated in most Muslim states, which, unlike Israel, criminalize the practice of other faiths. Note too the existence of official names like “The Islamic Republic of Iran” and “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan”.) There are a gazillion states in the Middle East where Islam is the official religion and other religions aren’t tolerated.

But I digress. Israel was established as a sovereign state by the United Nations in 1948.  Before that, Palestinians were offered their own state but rejected it, and have rejected it nearly a half-dozen times since. As Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf argue in a 2020 book, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, the Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution. Rather, they want a one-state solution: a single state in which all descendants of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 would be allowed to return to the present country of Israel, which would then become a Palestinian state. (The “right of return,” which is unique to Palestinians among all who fled their land in the past, is their key demand that they know, if exercised, would lead to the disappearance of Israel. Read the book, a meticulous and scholarly history of this neglected concept.)

A “Zionist,” then, is someone who believes that Israel, now established, should be allowed to remain a sovereign state on territory considered the Jewish homeland but also the homeland of the Arabs who are Israeli citizens.  As Natasha Hausdorff argues below, the state of Israel is a fait accompli. To argue against its existence now is to argue that its Jews should either be expelled or—more likely if the “right of return is exercised”—killed.

Since other groups have sovereign states, too, so singling out the Jewish people as the only group undeserving of an established sovereign state in their ancestral land is anti-Semitic because it’s discriminatory. Remember that Israel is to a large extent a secular state in which there is freedom of religion: about 20% of its inhabitants are Arab Muslims, who have full rights as citizens. 

If Netanyahu disappears as Israel’s Prime Minister, as I hope he will, it’s certain that anti-Zionism will remain, for it is really opposition to Israel, not Israel’s politics.

The video below eloquently expresses the equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. In this Munk debate, the claim that they are equivalent did indeed “win”, changing the minds of the audience more towards equivalence than to non-equivalence. Have a listen to Hausdorff’s short but telling argument:

See also the discussion of this issue by the World Jewish Congress.

I have lost friends, and will probably lose more, for being sympathetic to Israel and its right to exist. (Only a handful of American Jews—around 7%—say they are “anti-Zionist”, though there is disagreement about the term’s meaning.). One friend, an excellent scientist with whom I had a good relationship, told me he wanted to unsubscribe to this website because of my views on Israel. (I don’t have the ability to unsubscribe people.) Another, an old paramour whom I still care about, told me she doubted we could get along because of “the Israel thing.” And of course Maarten Boudry and I were disinvited to a biology discussion at the University of Amsterdam because of “our views on Israel,” which are simply that it has a right to exist and defend itself when attacked.

I’m not beefing here, as I regret nothing I’ve said. I just want to reiterate the point once again that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, for it is the view that Israel should not exist and should be eliminated. The sentiment will persist regardless of what Israel does or who is Prime Minister.

More on antisemitism in Doctors Without Borders

July 7, 2026 • 9:30 am

In April the NGO Monitor organization posted a compendium of anti-Israel and antisemitic actions by Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF), and I also put up a post on the organization, hoping it would be my last on this Jew-hating “humanitarian” group.

Sadly, I have to add one more, for there is a new report, also by NGO Monitor, which adds compiled statements from former bigwigs and employees of MSF documenting the pervasive climate of antisemitism in the organization.  You can read the article by clicking on the link below, and here’s the introduction (bolding is NGO Monitor’s):

This report builds on NGO Monitor’s April 2026 publication, “NGO Malpractice: MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and the Gaza ‘Genocide’ Campaign,” which demonstrates that Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) messaging regarding Israel is anchored in false “testimonies’” and consistently violates the principles of neutrality and medical ethics.

The evidence presented in this report reveals a widespread organizational culture dominated by antisemitism that produced a highly disproportionate obsession with and singling-out of Israel, as well as direct and repeated support for Hamas. These aspects are reflected in the Gaza “genocide” campaign; in the demonstrably false “testimonies” of MSF staffers and volunteers, such as the case of Al Ahli hospital;1 in the systematic erasure of Israeli victims and hostages; and many other examples.

Drawing from publicly available, open-source evidence relating to current and former MSF employees and board members, this report documents MSF’s internal staff conversations and culture regarding Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the personal experiences of Jewish staff members within the organization. We present direct quotations from employees’ media interviews and posts on MSF’s internal staff forum, spanning a wide spectrum of positions.

Based on these many testimonials by MSF insiders, it is clear that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias are widespread in MSF’s organizational culture and are expressed by both top officials and lower-level staff. These prejudices are reflected in the organization’s highly biased agenda and political campaigning on Israel.

A few examples, starting with those who were bigwigs in MSF (there are references to public statements):

Richard Rossin

Richard Rossin served as MSF’s Secretary-General in the 1970s and later co-founded Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World). On July 13, 2024, Canada’s National Post published “‘Not the MSF I knew’: Doctors Without Borders accused of picking side[s] in Israel-Hamas war,” in which Rossin is quoted extensively:

  • Rossin: “I think [the ideological bias against Israel] was perceptible around the beginning of the 80’s. Antisemitism within MSF began under the cover of anti-Zionism.”. .
  • National Post: “Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of ‘one-way empathy,’ where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians. He feels these same issues continue to plague MSF’s mission in Gaza today.”

Alain Destexhe

Alain Destexhe served as a doctor with MSF in the 1980s and as Secretary-General in the 1990s. He accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on MSF’s behalf in 1999.

In an October 2025 interview, Destexhe stated:

  • “It would have been impossible at the time when I was secretary-general of MSF to be as biased as MSF – Doctors Without Borders – is now in Gaza. We were defining ourselves as a neutral, impartial and humanitarian organization … I think now MSF in Gaza is really taking the side [of] Hamas and against Israel. Americans need to know that Doctors Without Borders is not anymore the organization that it was 15 or 20 years ago. It has become a biased, partial and militant organization.”
  • On MSF operations in Gaza: “The only thing that MSF can do is to say, ‘No, we don’t want to be part of this. We have to quit Gaza. And we don’t want to become accomplices with a terrorist organization like Hamas.’”
  • “MSF is lying, MSF is partial, MSF is biased and MSF are accomplices of Hamas.”

In December 2023, Destexhe published a 47-page report, “Doctors Without Borders: An Accomplice of Hamas?,” an analysis of MSF’s social media posts following Hamas’ atrocities of October 7, 2023. His report included the following:

  • “Since October 7, MSF, which is extremely active on X, has not made a single tweet denouncing the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, including the abduction of over 240 Israelis and others who have been held in Gaza as hostages, and the use of hospitals as barracks or human shields. MSF has constantly denounced Israel in virulent terms, but never the violations of humanitarian law committed by Hamas.

Michael Goldfarb

Michael Goldfarb was with MSF / Doctors without Borders US for more than 15 years, and was interviewed by The Jewish Chronicle of London in March 2026:

  • Goldfarb: “European colleagues freely told me, knowing I am Jewish, that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.” . . .
  • Goldfarb: “Nothing meaningful has been done to address antisemitism, to show solidarity with Jewish staff, or call out this hate. That creates a permissive environment in which it flourishes.”
  • Goldfarb: “My 15-plus years with MSF were among the most meaningful of my professional life. It does essential, life-saving work that few organisations can match, and the world would be worse without it. But an internal reckoning is long overdue. For an organisation that prides itself on self-reflection and course correction, it has yet to confront the antisemitism in its midst.”

Brian Sonberg

In March 2024, Bryon Sonberg resigned as Treasurer of MSF Canada’s Board of Directors. He was interviewed by the National Post article that also quotes Richard Rossin (above)

  • In his resignation letter and subsequent statements, Sonberg said “MSF’s response in the first months of the Israel-Hamas war undermined his confidence that MSF was living up to its charter principles of neutrality and impartiality,” and that MSF Canada’s claims to be “independent, neutral and impartial” were, in his assessment, “untrue.”
  • Sonberg: “When I asked about MSF’s silence about the October 7 Hamas attacks, I was told that MSF only comments on what it witnesses; as MSF did not witness the attacks or their effects, they could not comment on them.”

That is bogus.

Dr. Estrella Lasry

Lasry served as a tropical medicine advisor and consultant in the Medical Branch of MSF’s Geneva headquarters from approximately 2011 to approximately 2025, and was serving on its board on October 7, 2023.She  was interviewed for the same March 2026 London Jewish Chronicle article that quoted Goldfarb (above).

  • “I said our communication was biased and for an organisation that claims to be impartial, it was creating a biased, skewed, false narrative around what was actually going on. It was giving a very one-sided view … I was told I was part of the ‘Israeli propaganda machine’ in a meeting, and nobody flinched.”
  • “[Lasry] described what she saw as ‘the appalling lack of empathy in the organisation towards the victims in Israel’. She recalled one ‘explicit request’ from an MSF office in the Middle East ‘not to speak out on behalf of victims in Israel as it would victimise the perpetrators.’”  Lasry’s reaction: “For a humanitarian organisation, that was shocking.”

A footnote from the report in which MSF jumped the gun on the Al-Asra hospital attack, initially attributed by MSF and many others to Israel without any evidence. Within a day or so it turned out that the hospital “attack” was a rocket misfired by terrorists:

  1. On October 17, 2023, immediately after the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, MSF’s official X account posted: “We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable.” Subsequent investigations by the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Human Rights Watch and others concluded that the explosion resulted from a misfired rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not an Israeli strike. MSF neither corrected nor deleted its post. For detailed analysis of MSF’s role in media amplification of this disinformation, see CAMERA, “The Medicalization of Hamas Disinformation: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).”

That tweet remains up and should have been deleted in light of subsequent evidence. As far as I can see, MSF never walked back its accusations except to say this On October 27, 2023 I(bolding is mine:

  • 17 October 2023 – In Gaza City, a strike hit the parking lot of Al Ahli Arab hospital where an MSF doctor was operating, reportedly killing hundreds. In the days leading up to the incident, the hospital director had received warnings from Israel. MSF condemned this strike and initially attributed responsibility to Israel. However, even today it remains uncertain who bears responsibility for this act. An independent investigation is the only way to determine the responsibility for this attack.

And that’s all they wrote. . .

There are a lot more quotes, some from anonymous staffers, and the report ends with an “Analysis and Recommendations” section that includes this:

. . . Officials routinely dismissed the evidence of systemic antisemitism and requests to take action against the hatred that is part of the organizational culture. As Richard Rossin stated, “antisemitism within MSF began under the cover of anti-Zionism.” Highly discriminatory posts on the internal message board (the Souk) referred to Israel as a “76-year-old crime scene” and “a textbook example of violent, racist settler colonialism,” while promoting the “Gaza genocide” accusation that was central to the political war that accompanied the October 7 Hamas massacre.

These consistent “testimonies” – first-hand and independently verifiable evidence from MSF officials and employees – have been systematically ignored by the organization’s leadership, contradicting MSF’s claim to base its actions throughout the world on the testimonies of its staff and volunteers.

This shows how anti-Zionism is really a synonym for antisemitism: the obsession with Israel as the sole miscreant in this conflict with almost no mention of Hamas’s actions or of its kidnapping of hostages.

I was a bit worried about MSF a few years ago, but still, as I said in my last post on MSF, ” donated over $10,000 to the organization after Kelly Houle and I auctioned off a copy of Why Evolution is True that I got autographed by multiple scientists and celebrities, including two Nobel Laureates. Kelly had also beautifully illuminated and gilded the book, so it was quite the showpiece.”

In hindsight, that was a big mistake. Had I to do it over again, I’m sure we would have given the dosh to another charitable organization, perhaps one recommended by Peter Singer’s group. Most of the money I leave when I die is going to one of those groups, and MSF won’t get a red cent (although there will be no more cents).

At any rate, MSF will not only not get money from me, but I’ll call it out whenever the occasion demands. In light of what’s above, I would suggest that readers evaluate their own contributions to the Jew-hating organization.

Bill Maher’s new rule: “No Jews, no news”

May 17, 2026 • 11:00 am

Bill Maher continues his defense of Israel on the country’s birthday by pointing out the pervasive Israel-dissing of the mainstream media, adding that there is one thing that the American Left and Right agree on: Israel is the “monster country of all time” (he includes the NYT in this category). He also calls out Democrats, professors, influencers and young people for hating on the Jewish state.  Some of the quotes Maher gives will curl the soles of your shoes.  As he says, “Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable, now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy; it’s the new Che Guevara tee shirt.”

The guests on view are Dan Jones, a historian and author of Castles: A Fortified History, and David French, New York Times columnist and co-host of the podcast Advisory Opinions. I wonder what French thought of Maher’s slap at the NYT at 1:44.

This is more serious and less funny than his usual bits, but it’s a good one.

More criticism of Kristof’s allegations about Israel

May 15, 2026 • 9:30 am

By now the whole world–at least the world that reads the news–knows about Nicholas Kristof’s long NYT op-ed column accusing Israel of systemic, institutional sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. For those who already hate Israel, his unsubstantiated allegations will serve only to reinforce their hatred and antisemitism. For those who are open-minded or sympathetic to Israel, well, they do have to admit that the allegations are unsubstantiated.  But, as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Kristof is no dummy, and surely he knew that his claims would be snapped up by Israel haters and antisemites.

That is a good reason for Kristof to have verified all his sources and ensure that they had no history of bias (or at least the bias should have been made explicit)—something he did not do. This is in contrast to the Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse during its invasion of Israel. The Commission has verification of all of its sources, including forensic evidence like photographs and bodies.

As most of Kristof’s critics have said, it is impossible to affirm that there was never any abuse of Palestinians by the IDF.  But if you make an accusation that the abuse was both widespread and systemic, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Unfortunately, the NYT sees no need for that. relying on Kristof’s two Pulitzer Prizes and his claim that he interviewed witnesses brought forth by groups or people who can hardly be said to be unbiased.  But yes, his claims should be investigated, but he would have to help the investigators by providing identities and documentation. I wouldn’t hold my breath until he does that.

In the meantime, it’s not hard to find criticisms online. I’ll just link to five new ones, showing an excerpt from each. I haven’t found people approving of Kristof’s claims, but then again I don’t read the kind of site that would do that. And those sites would have to independently try to verify Kristof’s claims, which nobody has done.

Amit Segal at It’s Noon in Israel: “Anatomy of a blood libel.“

In [Kristof’s] piece, published curiously as an op-ed rather than a news investigation, Kristof accuses the State of Israel, its prison system, the IDF, and the Shin Bet of systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners—primarily men, but also women. These are serious accusations, and it is certainly possible, if not inevitable, that abuse, even sexual, occurs within the prison system, as it does in almost every prison system worldwide. Whenever there is real evidence of such acts, it must be properly investigated and the guilty punished. However, for accusations to be taken seriously, they must be backed by actual evidence. In this regard, Kristof’s column is an absolute failure.

The column falls short of almost any journalistic standard, according to [Hebrew University professor Danny] Orbach. He points out that the reporter relies on only 14 unverified and uncorroborated testimonies, lacking details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system. For comparison, in 2020, approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents. Of Kristof’s witnesses, only two identify themselves by name or provide details that could help locate the case. One of them, Sami al-Sai, is presented by Kristof as a “journalist.” In reality, he is a Hamas propagandist who cheered the mass murders of October 7—hardly a reliable source. At the very least, Kristof owed his readers a disclosure regarding who this man is. Prominent journalists have already pointed out that the two identified witnesses provided Kristof with “reheated noodles”—versions that changed and became “more sophisticated” over time, adding new gruesome details every time they spoke to a different reporter.

If it ended there, one could dismiss Kristof’s article as merely a negligent op-ed, but Orbach stresses that from here, things deteriorate. He explains that a large portion of the anonymous testimonies come from Euro-Med Monitor, which Kristof presents as a “human rights monitor.” In reality, this is a Hamas front organization whose chairman, Ramy Abdu, cheered October 7 and spread debunked lies and conspiracy theories—such as massacres at Shifa Hospital, organ harvesting, or the claim that humanitarian aid contained only burial shrouds—claims not taken seriously even by most anti-Israel journalists during the war. Unsurprisingly, Kristof mentions nothing to his readers about this organization’s reputation. Furthermore, another “source” Kristof cited in a video interview as a “man in the know” is actually an Israeli Hamas supporter and delusional conspiracist who was dismissed from the university where he worked due to sexual offenses. A “man in the know,” indeed.

The interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s “fixer”? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through “human rights organizations,” which Orbach suggests points to a pre-planned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk. In the Palestinian arena, there is a documented pattern of witness coaching and bias, a phenomenon rarely caught but exposed during the “Jenin Massacre” libel that never was in 2002.

. . . . So, what do we have here? A “respected war correspondent,” winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, accusing a state of systematic rape based on 14 testimonies—12 of them anonymous, two public but highly problematic—with zero disclosure regarding the witnesses or the biases of the organizations providing the information. Unlike the Civil Commission’s report on October 7, Orbach emphasizes that Kristof made no real attempt to cross-reference the testimonies, used no forensic evidence, and did not attempt to interview Israelis who served in prisons or civilian doctors. The only senior Israeli he did interview, Ehud Olmert, apparently never said what was attributed to him.

This is not Kristof’s first time. In the early 2000s, Kristof championed a Cambodian anti-prostitution activist, calling her a “hero” in column after column. When it turned out she was a fraud who staged the scenes that brought her fame, Kristof admitted the mistake and the paper apologized. His current column shows that his tendency to believe anyone who seems “just” to him, without critical source analysis, remains intact. He has learned nothing, Orbach concludes.

Douglas Murray at The New York Post: “Why would the NY Times make such horrific claims about Israel. The reasons are several-fold.”

Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.

As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.

In a piece which has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.

. . . So here we get to the true question. Why would anyone make such a claim? And why would a purportedly serious newspaper publish it?

The reasons are several-fold. The first is that the New York Times story landed just a day before an anticipated report into Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023.

Many of us did not need further evidence of the crimes of that day. But the release of the commission of inquiry sets out in remorseless detail the “systematic, widespread” use of rape by Hamas on that day and the way in which sexual violence was “integral” to their attack.

It lays out the calculated way in which Hamas terrorists raped men and women on the day of the attack and raped Israeli hostages — men and women — while they were held in captivity in Gaza.

The findings include descriptions from footage, first-hand, eyewitness accounts and from mortuary photographs of the way in which Hamas members gang-raped women while killing them, and even raped their victims after killing them. It is impossible to think of crimes worse than those which Hamas committed on that day.

Yuki Zeman at Quillette: “Nicholas Kristof and the pornography of accusation.”

. . . Allegations involving sexual violation by animals do not enter political discourse as neutral facts. They belong to an old repertoire of dehumanising horror. They turn the accused into something beyond cruel: a corrupter of species, a handler of filth, a director of bestial desecration, and a violator of the most basic taboos around moral and sexual hygiene. Is the claim true, false, exaggerated, mistranslated, or planted? Kristof does not know nearly enough to employ the claim in the way that he does. He treats it as a detail within a larger moral picture. A responsible and competent editor would have stopped reading right there and demanded to know what, exactly, has been established.

. . .None of this excuses abuse. The Sde Teiman case, involving alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli reservists, deserved investigation so that truth could be separated from rumour and accusation. Where Israeli guards, soldiers, interrogators, or settlers have committed acts of sexual violence, they should be exposed, investigated, tried, and punished. Any attempt by Israeli politicians or mobs to shield abusers deserves condemnation. A society at war must still guard its own standards.

But it must also guard the truth. Taking rape and abuse seriously does not require us to accept propaganda dressed up as sexual horror. Nor does it require us to pretend that anonymous testimony, activist reports, and humanitarian vocabulary automatically produce truth. The harder task is to investigate abuse without surrendering judgment. A serious press should be able to do this. It should also be able to honour Israeli victims without handing their suffering to those who spent months demeaning it.

A columnist like Nicholas Kristof may even believe he is writing in defence of Palestinian victims. But when his essay relies on the same information ecology that sought to excuse, minimise, and invert the atrocities of 7 October, it risks becoming something else: a mouthpiece for those who defended the events of that day, or who needed its victims to disappear beneath a more useful accusation. This is what divides moral inquiry from propaganda.

Sherwin Pomerantz at the Times of Israel: “Nicholas Kristof’s illogical overreaching anti-Israel rant in the NYT.“

there does appear to be some level of sexual violence that goes on in Israeli prisons and, similar to the rest of the world, often the perpetrators are not held accountable. The fact that this goes on in prisons worldwide does not, of course, make it acceptable practice and Israel has taken a strong policy position against such activity.

But Kristof often relies on sources that themselves have been found to be unreliable. In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts in his op-ed came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”

For example, one of Kristof’s sources, Sami al-Sai, had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”

HonestReporting also noted that, about a year ago, Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, and did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood, and broken teeth” in his skin.

It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who told Kristof in 2024 that he had been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post that he had been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he had been assaulted.

None of this, of course, excuses illegal activity of prison guards or, here in Israel, members of the IDF. Nor does it give a pass to a government that drops the charges against the accused, as it did in the Sde Teman case, simply because of community pressure.

This kind of activity is certainly not in keeping with the values of a county such as ours, which promises in its Declaration of Independence: The State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations.”

. . . Finally, Kristof engages in illogical overreach when he states: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

Truth be told, the $3.8 billion of annual US military aid to Israel is used to purchase armaments from US defense manufacturers and, of course, has nothing to do with the prison system or its faults. A weapon used by an IDF soldier in Gaza cannot be linked to prison abuses. Actually, it is the weapons used against us on October 7th and afterwards, paid for by the Iranians and Qataris, that are more logically linked to the alleged abuses in Kristof’s piece.

The commonality of these stories is that they admit the possibility of sexual abuse of prisoners, but argue that, given the fact that interrogations are recorded and photographed, and Israel’s history of prosecuting those who violate its law, the likelihood of widespread and systemic abuse known to the authorities is low. The articles argue that Kristof’s sources are biased and that some of their stories have changed over the years. And they say that the dog-rape story is not credible.

What should happen now? Well, Israel should conduct an investigation of the allegations.  And so should the NYT, making Kristof reveal his sources and check them itself.  The former will happen; the latter won’t.

If anybody else had done this rather than Kristof, they would be fired by the NYT. Remember that editorial-page editor James Bennet was forced to resign in 2020 after a social-media outcry following the publication of an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Cotton’s argument, that U.S. troops might be used to quell riots following the death of George Floyd, was at least worthy of discussion, but the editor who approved it became the victim of “progressive” ire.

Kristof won’t be fired, though his careless accusations were far worse than the argument made by Cotton.  But at least some of the shine is off Kristof’s Pulitzers, and the sentient world now knows him to be a crappy journalist, willing to tar an entire country on the basis of unverified claims.

A reader reports on London’s March Against Antisemitism

May 11, 2026 • 9:30 am

Reader Jeremy “Jez” Grove went to Saturday’s Rally Against Antisemitism in London (he’s not Jewish, but a friend of the Jews), and sent me a nice report, along with photographs. Although all of us know that England is full of antisemitism these days, what with Jews getting stabbed and having their ambulances and schools set on fire or vandalized, I myself know little about the complex world of British politics, encompassing multiple parties. I was thus able to learn some things about the major parties and their attitude towards Jews.

I’ve indented Jez’s commentary, and the photos are his.

I’m on my way home from the rally against anti-Semitism, which was held outside the gates of Downing Street. Unsurprisingly, our prime minister didn’t manage to make the short walk to address the crowd and stand up against the rampant Jew hatred in the UK. (Instead, the Labour Party was represented by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, whose empty platitudes were barely audible over the shouts of “Where’s Keir?” and general booing.)

By contrast, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative  Party, was met with rapturous applause and gave a barnstorming speech. I’d never vote Conservative, but Kemi has been outstanding on this issue and the fight for women’s rights.

Here’s part of Badenoch’s speech (you can see the full seven-minute version here):

The Liberal Democrats also sent their party leader, Ed Davey. He made the right sounds, but the response from the crowd was pretty lukewarm. That’s probably a reflection of his irrelevancy in British politics and his party’s invisibility on the issue. He’s best known for his ridiculous attention-grabbing stunts – the only surprise was that he didn’t arrive on the stage on a skateboard! (I’m barely joking, btw.)

The Reform UK party (generally seen as right of the Conservatives, but who just won big victories in Labour Party heartlands in our elections on Thursday) sent their deputy leader.

To no-one’s surprise, there was no representative from the (hugely anti-Semitic) Green Party, despite the boasts from their party leader, Zack Polanski, that he’s the only Jewish leader of a British political party.

It’s worth mentioning that there was a decent number of Iranian and Kurdish supporters of Israel present, who got the hearty applause that they deserved.

When I told Jez that it was ironic that the best speech of the day came from a Tory, he answered, “I guess the Tories aren’t much further to the right than your Dems. Maybe they’re even to the left of them – most Tories wouldn’t dare openly saying that they want to dismantle our (socialised) NHS. .”

More:

I’ve attached a photo of the October Declaration flag.
It was good to be amongst so many like-minded people standing up against anti-Semitism. Hopefully, the full event will be available to watch at some point soon.

Here’s the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s report on today’s rally. It contains a list of the speakers and some extracts from their speeches

Here are some of my (not very good) photos:

The airport-style security arches (I don’t believe that these have been required for pro-Palestine marches – because there has been no security threat posed to them): Note that the Jewish Community Security Trust (CST) felt it necessary to be present behind the London Metropolitan Police’s own barrier:

The  view looking from Trafalgar Square towards the stage outside Downing Street. One of the speakers claimed that the crowd was 20,000 strong. That seemed high to me, but given the security arrangements may have been a more accurate figure than is usual for protests of this type:

The view looking from Downing Street towards Trafalgar Square . This photo was taken before everyone had arrived:

Support from the Iranians. The group were applauded as they left at the end of the event chanting “Long live Iran! Long live Israel”. They were also thanked for their presence from the stage as were those flying Kurdish flags:

Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition (leader of the Conservative Party). Her speech is here:  [JAC: it’s above along with a link to her full speech]:

The pale blue flags are held by non-Jews who signed the October Declaration in support of Jews following the 7th October atrocities:

A guy holding a “This Mensch is with You” sign:

More:

I can’t remember who today’s speaker was who said he’d recently met the prime minister. And the PM audibly gasped when he was told that one synogogue alone was spending £20,000 a month on security. And the PM assured him that the “full weight of the law” would be used against those who had tried to burn down another synagogue. The speaker told him, “The 17-year-old suspect has just been released on bail and the only condition is that he doesn’t enter any synogogue”. The prime minister gasped again. But he didn’t have the guts to show up today. And nor did the deputy prime minister, or the chancellor, or any of the big names from the government’s cabinet. Instead, the Labour Party sent Pat McFadden (Secretary of State for the department of Work and Pensions). Only a political geek (guilty as charged) would know who he is. (My politically engaged wife recognised his name but couldn’t name his post.)

Shame on Labour – but even more shame on the anti-Semitic Green Party of England and Wales, who had two electoral candidates arrested for horrendous social media posts. [From the Guardian link below, the posts came from Saiqa Ali, a Lambeth Green candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, who was standing in Lambeth’s Clapham Town.]

And according to the BBC, arrests were made of people trying to get knives into the rally.

When I asked Jez what those odious Green Party social media posts said, he responded:

The Guardian (!) reported (I can’t seem to do indented quotes, but what follows is all from The Guardian article archived here.

‘Ali’s Instagram account is set to private but screenshots indicated she had posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the banned Islamist group Hamas along with the slogan: “Resistance is freedom”.

Another screenshot indicated that Mairey had shared a post which included the text: “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.” ‘