The Moral Inversion of the Nobel Peace Prize: From Liu Xiaobo to Navi Pillay - Sasha Gong

 

by Sasha Gong

Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize raises troubling questions about the UN’s human rights record, the politicization of international institutions, and the erosion of moral standards.

 

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Navi Pillay, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

My first thought was not of her distinguished UN career. It was of another Nobel laureate, my friend Liu Xiaobo. What would Xiaobo have thought of this year’s choice?

In 2010, Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize while serving an eleven-year prison sentence for drafting Charter 08, a manifesto demanding democratic reform in China. Beijing refused to let him travel to Oslo and placed his wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest.

The most unforgettable sight at that year’s Nobel ceremony was not the flowers, applause, or speeches.

It was an empty chair.

That chair represented a man whose freedom had been stolen by a dictatorship—and a human longing for freedom no dictatorship could imprison.

Yet Navi Pillay, then the UN’s highest-ranking human rights official, declined to attend.

According to a December 7, 2010, Voice of America report, democracy activist Yang Jianli, acting on behalf of Liu Xia, personally invited Pillay. Her office replied that she had no time. It added that UN High Commissioners for Human Rights had no tradition of attending Nobel ceremonies.

A classic bureaucratic excuse.

A man sat in a Chinese prison for demanding basic human rights. The world’s most prestigious peace prize honored his courage. And the UN’s top human rights official could not find the time to attend.

Pillay denied Chinese government pressure. There is no evidence that Beijing directly intervened. But China was a member of the UN Human Rights Council and a permanent member of the Security Council. Senior UN officials must deal with governments whose human rights records they are supposed to scrutinize.

What happens when defending human rights conflicts with keeping powerful governments happy? Which comes first?

The UN Human Rights Council embodies this contradiction.

Its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, became so discredited by political bargaining and the appalling records of its members that it was replaced in 2006. In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya had been elected to chair it. A dictatorship presiding over the UN’s human rights watchdog.

The new Council inherited much of the same institutional rot. China, Cuba, and Venezuela have all served as members. Many Council members have been classified as “Partly Free” or “Not Free” by Freedom House.

Governments that deny their own citizens basic freedoms help decide who investigates human rights violations elsewhere. What independence can such a system credibly claim?

Pillay’s subsequent career makes the contradiction even sharper.

In 2021, the Human Rights Council voted 24–9, with 14 abstentions, to establish an international commission investigating Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, and Venezuela supported the resolution. Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic opposed it. The United States had withdrawn from the Council in 2018, citing its longstanding bias against Israel.
Pillay was subsequently appointed to chair the commission. Her commission eventually accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. There is no accusation more grave.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed Israeli communities, killed approximately 1,200 people, and dragged hostages into Gaza. Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas and prevent another massacre.

Pillay’s commission found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes. Yet it accused Israel of genocide.

This is a staggering moral inversion.

Hamas’s founding ideology rejected Israel’s existence. Its October 7 atrocities demonstrated what that rejection could mean in practice. Yet the commission leveled its gravest accusation against the state fighting Hamas.

An institution that appears to apply different standards to different parties destroys the moral authority it claims to defend.

After Pillay received the prize, President Donald Trump denounced her and the Nobel Committee. He shared a statement accusing her of hating America and Israel, rewarding Hamas, and presiding over a sham investigation. He also declared that radical ideologues had permanently disgraced the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s rhetoric aside, the question remains: What has happened to the Nobel Prize’s moral standards?

There was a time when the prize honored people who confronted oppressive regimes at enormous personal cost.

Andrei Sakharov challenged Soviet tyranny. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years imprisoned for fighting apartheid. Liu Xiaobo demanded democracy in China and paid with his freedom and ultimately his life.

They were not honored for holding prestigious offices, commanding international bureaucracies, or enjoying the approval of powerful governments.

They were honored because they stood against power.

Then, in 2009, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Barack Obama, barely nine months into his presidency, with few concrete diplomatic achievements. Now it has honored a career UN official whose most prominent recent investigation remains fiercely contested. The prize increasingly resembles an endorsement of the international establishment’s political preferences rather than a tribute to moral courage.

And that brings me back to Liu Xiaobo.

Sixteen years ago, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in a Chinese prison. Pillay did not go to Oslo. Seven years later, Xiaobo died in Chinese custody. He never left China as a free man. He never stood before the Nobel Committee. He never held the medal awarded in his name.

Today, the UN official who declined to attend his ceremony has herself joined the ranks of Nobel laureates.

I do not know how Xiaobo would have judged Pillay. He was always more forgiving than I am, more willing to believe in the goodness of others.

But I cannot forget that empty chair in Oslo.

Human rights mean nothing unless they apply equally to the powerful and the powerless, to friends and enemies, to fashionable causes and forgotten prisoners.

If the Nobel Peace Prize abandons that principle, it will lose more than its reputation.

It will lose the moral force once embodied by an empty chair.

Sasha Gong holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Born in China, she joined the pro-democracy dissident movement at the age of 17 and spent a year in prison for her activism.

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/16/the-moral-inversion-of-the-nobel-peace-prize-from-liu-xiaobo-to-navi-pillay/

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Same insinuations, same Tucker Carlson - Joseph Milstein

 

by Joseph Milstein

The conservative podcaster used the third anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel to indict its victims.

 

Far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson speaking with attendees at the 2023 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

On the third anniversary of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson aired 103 minutes of television built on one premise: that the Oct. 7 attack was not what it appeared to be and that its victims have since been exploited to capture American policy.

Carlson called the attack “pretty weird,” replayed a 2023 clip of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk wondering about a “stand-down order,” and handed the microphone to comedian and talking head Dave Smith, who spent an hour explaining that America has been captured by a foreign government and its agents at home.

Consider the host: In 2024, Carlson gave a platform to right-wing podcaster Darryl Cooper, who cast Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II. In October 2025, Carlson gave a friendly hearing to far-right “groyper” Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and self-described admirer of Hitler; an interview that split the conservative movement and forced the Heritage Foundation’s president to apologize for defending it. Two months later, StopAntisemitism named Carlson its “Antisemite of the Year.”

Smith, whose debate with pro-Israel British journalist Douglas Murray made Smith the right’s loudest voice against Israel, has called Fuentes a “fellow traveler.”

Carlson’s Oct. 7 anniversary program was engineered to sound reasonable. It opened with condolences and insisted that killing civilians is always wrong. Then, claim by claim, it built a world in which only one party to the war has agency and only one party’s dead require explanation.

Carlson asked: How could the most guarded border on earth fail? Israel’s own investigations answer that: Commanders were convinced that Hamas was deterred, an attack plan was dismissed as aspirational, a southern front thinned out. That is negligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resistance to a state commission of inquiry is a genuine scandal.

But negligence is not a stand-down order. Carlson prefers a conspiracy theory because simple failure proves Israeli incompetence, while the conspiracy theory alleges Israeli guilt for the murder of Israeli children.

Carlson even mischaracterizes the clip of Kirk, who said he was not willing to claim that Netanyahu knew about the coming attack. Kirk then spent two years as one of Israel’s most forceful defenders.

He says “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians have been killed in the ensuing war, citing satellite photos but no other proof. In fact, Gaza’s Health Ministry counts about 71,000 dead without separating fighters from civilians. Israel’s military reportedly accepted this figure in January, though Israel holds that numerous Hamas terrorists—perhaps half the total casualties—were among the dead. That is still a grievous civilian toll, and no one should minimize it. But Carlson triples it.

Moreover, proportionality in the law of war weighs civilian harm against military aims strike by strike. It has never meant matching body counts. By Carlson’s arithmetic, America’s answer to Pearl Harbor was a crime.

In addition, Hamas built its military infrastructure beneath its own civilians, held 251 hostages in tunnels and civilian homes, and vowed to repeat Oct. 7 again and again. Yet, for an hour and 40 minutes, neither Carlson nor his guest assigns Hamas responsibility for a single death.

It is the oldest conspiracy theory there is, with ‘Israel’ written where another word used to go.

Carlson then likens Israel’s war to Wehrmacht reprisal executions. Reprisal killing is the deliberate execution of captives, which Israel has not committed.

More than 40 Americans were killed on Oct. 7. Yet Carlson tells viewers that they were not really American because they held dual citizenship. He further claims that hostage Edan Alexander “wasn’t even technically an American.” In fact, Alexander was raised from infancy in Tenafly, N.J.; graduated from its high school; and was a U.S. citizen when Hamas took him hostage. His own government negotiated his release on that basis.

U.S. law recognizes no second-class citizens. Suggesting that a Jew with two passports is less American than his neighbors is the dual-loyalty charge delivered in a calm voice.

Smith called Oct. 7 a “war crime” because a war was “already going on,” citing a blockade “since at least 2007.” He skips 2005, when Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from the Gaza Strip, and the 2007 Hamas coup that led Israel and Egypt to impose the blockade. Smith calls Gazans Israel’s “own people” in an Israeli “prison,” which makes Israel alone responsible and erases Gaza’s actual government.

He further asserts that “every single” Oct. 7 killer “was first brutalized by the Israeli state.” That claim cannot be tested. It exists to place the cause of Jewish deaths in Jewish hands.

Neither man says what Israel should have done with 251 hostages under Gaza’s homes and a Hamas government promising to strike again. A critique with no alternative is not policy. It is a verdict looking for proof.

Both men treat it as settled that America is at war with Iran “for Israel”; that U.S. President Donald Trump was boxed in; and that someone must “have something on” him and his cabinet. Smith called the pro-Israel community a “fifth column.”

Beyond the issue of defamation, this deletes the role Iran played in bringing on the war. Before June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency counted about 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% in Iranian hands, enough for roughly 10 weapons with further enrichment. The agency has been unable to verify the whereabouts of that material since.

Carlson calls Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) a “lunatic” for saying Iran has been killing Americans for 47 years. In fact, the Pentagon attributes at least 603 U.S. deaths in Iraq to Iranian-backed militias, which does not even count the attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983 or on U.S. military forces in Jordan in 2024.

You can oppose the Iran war; serious people do. But a podcast that claims that an American president cannot reach his own conclusions, every official who agrees with him is compromised, and a foreign nation and its domestic agents steer the world’s strongest power is simply not based on reality or realism. It is the oldest conspiracy theory there is, with “Israel” written where another word used to go.

In Carlson’s “report,” we see many things, including the insinuation that Jews engineered their own massacre. Nazi analogies for the Jewish state. Dual citizens recast as foreigners. A “fifth column.” Officials who must be blackmailed. A Jewish billionaire, Leon Black, offered as the emblem of who really benefits from all this. A history of Israel in which “a bunch of people from Eastern Europe showed up,” erasing three millennia of Jewish presence, and roughly half of Israeli Jews whose families came from Arab and Muslim lands.

Each item alone might pass as hard criticism of a government. Together they track the examples in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism adopted by most Western democracies—a definition Carlson calls a gag order.

Carlson closed his monologue by demanding universal standards that apply to everyone, regardless of faith. I agree. Apply them to Hamas. Apply them to Tehran. And apply them to two men who spent the anniversary of a massacre transforming it into an indictment of its victims. 

Joseph Milstein is the founder and managing partner of Gamma Point Advisory, an M&A and strategic advisory firm focused on the logistics and supply-chain sectors. He writes on antisemitism, Israel and American civic life.

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/joseph-milstein/same-insinuation-same-tucker-carlson

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Islam's Welcoming Not-for-Profit Organizations - Majid Rafizadeh

 

by Majid Rafizadeh

We were also taught that when, in an election, the choice is between a Muslim and a non-Muslim candidate, a Muslim must always vote for the Muslim. Voting for a non-Muslim is voting against Allah. Character does not matter. Ability does not matter. All that matters is religion.

 

• A Muslim's duty, we were taught in the Middle East, is to promote and establish Islamic government. Failing to do so means one's religion and duty to Allah remain incomplete. Everyone must perform jihad (holy war; struggle in the cause of Islam) to impose Allah's law on the world's population. Everyone is a mujahid (fighter, from the word jihad). The promised end is one Islamic ruler under whom Allah's sovereignty is complete on Earth.

• We were also taught that when, in an election, the choice is between a Muslim and a non-Muslim candidate, a Muslim must always vote for the Muslim. Voting for a non-Muslim is voting against Allah. Character does not matter. Ability does not matter. All that matters is religion.

• In Islam, you cannot be a passive religious observer. The core of Muslim identity, we were taught, requires active struggle for the political project. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put it: "We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry 'There is no god but Allah' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle [jihad]."

• This doctrinal demand makes it hard to believe the claims of Islamist nonprofit organizations that they are purely charitable and apolitical. American taxpayers lavishly subsidize them through the Internal Revenue Service's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for charitable organizations.

• According to the report, when the conduct of these groups was measured against IRS guidance on the ban against political campaign intervention by charities, the conduct detailed in the report closely tracks the agency's examples of prohibited activity. These activities include endorsing candidates, seeking campaign donations, circulating campaign materials, giving platforms to candidates without comparable access for opponents, and releasing scorecards or voting records timed to election seasons.

• Americans are effectively underwriting institutions that instruct congregants on how God requires them to vote and then handing the microphone to favored candidates.

• [T]he IRS possesses the legal tools, the evidence, and its own training materials, yet appears to lack the will to act.

• The report's author, Mahyar Entezari, emphasized that every episode rests on video, audio, newsletters, convention materials, social media posts, and published accounts, but that "no organization has faced any consequence."

• [US Representative Chip] stated it is absurd that groups with links to terrorism continue to receive tax benefits that effectively have American taxpayers subsidizing threats against themselves.

• The MEF has urged the IRS and Treasury Department to scrutinize every organization named in the report, apply available taxes and revocation remedies, and review groups still soliciting deductible contributions.

• The report points out that the IRS and Treasury Department have the statutes, the guidance, and the evidence before them. The question is whether they will enforce the law and act on anything.

The most concrete illustration of tax-exempt Islamist groups stepping directly into US electoral contests involves the 2026 Michigan Democratic Party primary for the US Senate. Abdul El-Sayed prevailed on August 4 by roughly 13,800 votes — a margin under one percent. In the preceding weeks, imams at several tax-exempt Michigan mosques urged support for him from the pulpit, and two of them brought the candidate onto the pulpit during services. Pictured: El-Sayed speaks with reporters in Port Huron, Michigan on October 6, 2026. (Photo by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

Growing up in Islamic societies in Iran and Syria, all of us could see that there is not even an iota of chance that any Islamist organization or mosque could exist as truly non-political or apolitical.

In schools and at university, we were taught that Islam differs fundamentally from other religions and spiritual practices. Whereas Christianity and Judaism allow for private faith and a separation between religion and state, Islam does not. From its inception in the seventh century, Islam was political. It was not a private spiritual matter. It was about creating a universal government run by Allah. Everything in society must be ordered by Sharia — what they call Allah's law or God's law.

A Muslim's duty, we were taught in the Middle East, is to promote and establish Islamic government. Failing to do so means one's religion and duty to Allah remain incomplete. Everyone must perform jihad (holy war; struggle in the cause of Islam) to impose Allah's law on the world's population. Everyone is a mujahid (fighter, from the word jihad). The promised end is one Islamic ruler under whom Allah's sovereignty is complete on Earth. Until then, the struggle continues. Taqiyya — dissimulation, including lying when needed to protect Islam — is recommended to advance that end.

We were also taught that when, in an election, the choice is between a Muslim and a non-Muslim candidate, a Muslim must always vote for the Muslim. Voting for a non-Muslim is voting against Allah. Character does not matter. Ability does not matter. All that matters is religion.

In Islam, you cannot be a passive religious observer. The core of Muslim identity, we were taught, requires active struggle for the political project. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put it: "We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry 'There is no god but Allah' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle [jihad]."

This doctrinal demand makes it hard to believe the claims of Islamist nonprofit organizations that they are purely charitable and apolitical. American taxpayers lavishly subsidize them through the Internal Revenue Service's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for charitable organizations. A recent report from the Middle East Forum (MEF), "Weaponized Charity: Islamist Nonprofit Electioneering in America," examines how certain tax-exempt Islamist groups have stepped directly into US electoral contests.

According to the report, when the conduct of these groups was measured against IRS guidance on the ban against political campaign intervention by charities, the conduct detailed in the report closely tracks the agency's examples of prohibited activity. These activities include endorsing candidates, seeking campaign donations, circulating campaign materials, giving platforms to candidates without comparable access for opponents, and releasing scorecards or voting records timed to election seasons.

The most concrete illustration involves the 2026 Michigan Democratic Party primary for the US Senate. Abdul El-Sayed prevailed on August 4 by roughly 13,800 votes — a margin under one percent. In the preceding weeks, imams at several tax-exempt Michigan mosques urged support for him from the pulpit, and two of them brought the candidate onto the pulpit during services.

According to the report, at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi — an Iranian-trained cleric who earlier served in the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy's Political-Ideological Bureau — welcomed El-Sayed and told the congregation that he intended to vote for him. He reportedly added that voting is "as wajib [religiously required] as prayer" and called on everyone to "vote for Brother Abdul El-Sayed."

The following day at the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Imam Husham Al-Husainy reportedly appeared alongside El-Sayed and described a win for the candidate as a "victory to God."

In Canton, an imam at the Muslim Educational Community Center of America told worshippers it was "mandatory" to elect "brother Abdul El-Sayed" because "at least we know he's a Muslim."

The report goes on illustrating that elsewhere, clerics employed language that the IRS itself regards as coded campaign messaging.

At the Islamic Institute of America, for instance, Imam Hassan Qazwini called voting a "religious duty" and cautioned against allowing a "Zionist candidate" to prevail.

On Labor Day weekend, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) provided El-Sayed a prominent speaking slot at its Detroit convention while his campaign operated an exhibitor booth featuring donation QR codes, campaign literature and "Muslims for Abdul" banners. The convention program described the candidate in language that mirrored material from a political action committee supporting him. After El-Sayed's speech, ISNA's chief executive, while asserting institutional neutrality, remarked that Muslims "know exactly what decision they should take."

The IRS explicitly warns against political fundraising at candidate events.

The MEF investigation notes that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued color-coded congressional scorecards — some highlighting incumbents facing re-election — in every federal election year from 2018 through 2024, but not in the intervening non-election years. This timing pattern, it seems, is one the IRS views as evidence of election-related intervention. In addition, according to the MEF, the 2024 scorecard appeared on the website of CAIR Foundation, Inc., the group's 501(c)(3) arm. CAIR, according to the report, has also outlined an expanded election effort for the current cycle.

The report cites additional cases, including a New Jersey mosque linked to Turkey's Diyanet, which solicited donations on social media for a congressional candidate, a Queens mosque whose parent organization received funding from the Alavi Foundation (an entity federal prosecutors had accused of being controlled by Iran, later resolved in a 2026 settlement without admission of wrongdoing) which hosted Democratic primary candidates at Friday prayers, and other groups with documented connections to Iran, Turkey or the Muslim Brotherhood — several of whose branches the US government had designated as terrorist organizations in early 2026.

The MEF report states that despite the volume of documented activity, enforcement remains rare. The IRS has identified political campaign intervention in more than two-thirds of the 501(c)(3) organizations it has examined on this issue since 2004. Gregg Roman, executive director of the MEF, observed that tax exemption functions as a public subsidy, and that Americans are effectively underwriting institutions that instruct congregants on how God requires them to vote and then handing the microphone to favored candidates. Roman argued that the IRS possesses the legal tools, the evidence, and its own training materials, yet appears to lack the will to act.

The report's author, Mahyar Entezari, emphasized that every episode rests on video, audio, newsletters, convention materials, social media posts, and published accounts, but that "no organization has faced any consequence."

Some lawmakers have begun responding. US Representative Chip Roy of Texas introduced the No Tax-Exemptions for Terror Act, which would strip tax-exempt status from extremist organizations with close ties to terrorist groups, including CAIR. Co-sponsors include Representatives Randy Fine, Byron Donalds, Clay Higgins, Andy Ogles, Keith Self, Diana Harshbarger, Mary Miller, Andrew Clyde, Andy Biggs, and Eric Burlison.

Roy stated it is absurd that groups with links to terrorism continue to receive tax benefits that effectively have American taxpayers subsidizing threats against themselves. He pointed to CAIR's associations with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and related networks, and noted that the organization's national executive director had praised the October 7 attacks.

Senator Rick Scott introduced companion legislation, joined by Senator Marsha Blackburn. Both argued that organizations identified by the FBI as having terrorist connections should not receive charitable tax treatment and that America should not fund those it fights.

The MEF has urged the IRS and Treasury Department to scrutinize every organization named in the report, apply available taxes and revocation remedies, and review groups still soliciting deductible contributions. The MEF has also called on the Federal Election Commission to examine whether any of these entities provided things of value — such as pulpit time or official communication channels — to federal campaigns, and on state regulators in Michigan, New York, and New Jersey to open parallel inquiries under charitable-trust and campaign-finance laws. It calls on Congressional committees to refer the documented cases and to require greater public reporting on the IRS's compliance work on political activity.

The report points out that the IRS and Treasury Department have the statutes, the guidance, and the evidence before them. The question is whether they will enforce the law and act on anything.

In Iran under the Shah, prior to the Islamic Revolution, Islamist organizations frequently began by presenting themselves as charitable or purely religious entities. They enjoyed the legal protections and financial advantages that the status conferred, then later revealed and expanded their political reach. The pattern is visible.

When US tax-exempt pulpits and convention floors can help decide a Senate primary by a margin of less than one percent, the longer-term stakes are foreseeable. Americans should not underestimate groups whose foundational doctrine, as was drummed into us, treat the political struggle for Islamic governance as a religious obligation.

As an eyewitness who grew up inside Islamic societies, I can assure the West without hesitation that there is not a chance — not even the slightest — that an Islamist organization or mosque can be genuinely apolitical or non-political. Politicization is woven into the identity itself. As we were taught, one's duty is to struggle, to conquer, and to establish Islamic government across the world. That goal is not a side project. It is presented as the entire completion of the faith.

As shown in the MEF's investigation, taxpayers are subsidizing organizations that enjoy tax-exempt privileges, collect public benefits, and pay nothing in return while advancing a political-religious agenda. Such groups already helped tip a Senate primary decided by less than one percent of the vote. Imagine the same networks applying the same methods to a presidential race. With margins that thin, the White House itself, as many are doubtless hoping, could one day be within reach. No religion must ever be allowed to become a vehicle for controlling a government while simultaneously ripping off the very taxpayers who underwrite its tax-free status.

• Follow Majid Rafizadeh on X (formerly Twitter) 

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a political scientist, Harvard-educated analyst, and board member of Harvard International Review. He has authored several books on the US foreign policy. He can be reached at dr.rafizadeh@post.harvard.edu

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22922/islamic-nonprofit-organizations

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No Elections, No Reform: The Palestinian Authority's Endless Excuses Are the Smallest Part of the Problem - Khaled Abu Toameh

 

by Khaled Abu Toameh

What is really needed to help the Palestinian people, now being held hostage by corrupt and self-serving leaders in all of their parties, is not just elections but reforms, all of them, and serious international accountability, starting with shutting down funding for slow or nonexistent compliance.

 

• [H]olding elections under the current circumstances will almost certainly strengthen Hamas....

• On the other hand, Abbas's decision cannot be mistaken for a genuine effort to reform anything in Palestinian politics.

• While elections can be important, they can also be bogus, faked, or even harmful, as one can see in Russia, Turkey or Iran.

• Elections do not mean there is a democracy, especially if they take place before any reforms. Elections are needed after the institutions of democracy -- freedom of speech and of the press, the separation of powers, freedom of religion or from religion, due process, equal justice under the law -- meaning accountability for everyone, property rights, rights for women, children and laborers, an independent judiciary, and so on -- have been set in place and are smoothly functioning. Only then can there be elections that mean anything.

• What is really needed to help the Palestinian people, now being held hostage by corrupt and self-serving leaders in all of their parties, is not just elections but reforms, all of them, and serious international accountability, starting with shutting down funding for slow or nonexistent compliance.

• So far, the international community has been funding leaders who mistreat their own people first, then their neighbors and everyone else second. For the sake of the Palestinians, this has to stop.

• Will [Western governments] condition financial assistance on measurable reforms?... Will they impose consequences on Palestinian leaders who obstruct reform? Or will they issue statements of regret, continue providing financial support, and wait for Abbas to pretend he is finally instituting reforms by announcing yet another -- presumably fake -- election date?

• Western governments should also avoid the mistaken assumption that an election announcement, by itself, represents progress.

• The test of reform is not the number of "presidential decrees" Abbas issues promising elections. It is whether Palestinians acquire institutions that can hold their leaders accountable.

• A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83% of the Palestinians believe corruption exists within Palestinian Authority institutions.

• The poll also showed that Hamas leaders are more popular than Abbas and that 79% of Palestinians want him to resign.

• The Palestinian political system offers no credible, nationally competitive third alternative to Fatah and Hamas.... Hamas remains an armed terrorist organization, while Fatah has presided over a system marked by authoritarianism, patronage, and corruption.

• Western governments have too often treated elections as the principal answer to Palestinian political dysfunction. They are not. Palestinians need new leaders, new faces, and new political ideas. They need pragmatic, realistic, and accountable representatives who prioritize the welfare of their own people over factional interests and revolutionary slogans. They also need an overhaul of an education system that should prepare young Palestinians for peaceful coexistence, critical thinking, and economic opportunity rather than perpetuate hatred and glorify violence. They need independent institutions, financial transparency, effective anti-corruption mechanisms, and a free press capable of scrutinizing those in power.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has done it again. On October 10, he announced that elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), originally scheduled for November 2026, will be postponed until September 11, 2027. Pictured: The PLC building in Ramallah on January 28, 2006, three days after its last election. (Photo by Zharan Hammad/Getty Images)

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has done it again. On October 10, he announced that elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), originally scheduled for November 2026, will be postponed until September 11, 2027. No date had been set for a presidential election.

The decision came as no surprise to Palestinians familiar with Abbas's record. It was not the first time that the Palestinian leader had announced elections, raised expectations, and then postponed the vote.

The postponement of the elections presents a contradiction. On one hand, holding elections under the current circumstances would almost certainly strengthen Hamas, the Iran-backed Islamist terrorist organization that won the 2006 PLC elections and violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.

On the other hand, Abbas's decision cannot be mistaken for a genuine effort to reform anything in Palestinian politics. The Palestinian Authority (PA) leader has repeatedly postponed elections, remained in office long after his mandate expired, and presided over a political system without a functioning legislature.

Even if Hamas would benefit from elections, Abbas's indefinite rule is still a message that he has no intention of instituting reforms of any kind.

The ostensible postponement also does not absolve the Palestinian Authority of responsibility for creating a political system in which Palestinians lack a credible, democratic alternative to Fatah and Hamas.

In 2021, Abbas cancelled elections at the last minute, blaming Israel's alleged refusal to allow voting in Jerusalem. This time, he is again blaming Israel by citing military operations, settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, and obstacles to holding PA elections in the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

The latest explanation, however, goes beyond Israel. According to the official PA news agency WAFA, Abbas's decision also "aims to provide an opportunity for comprehensive national dialogue to strengthen unity and address challenges facing the electoral process."

In other words, after more than two decades in power, Abbas still needs more time to reach agreement with other Palestinian factions, including Hamas.

How much more time does he need?

Abbas's latest maneuver vindicates the concerns raised by some Palestinians.

While elections can be important, they can also be bogus, faked, or even harmful, as one can see in Russia, Turkey or Iran.

Elections do not mean there is a democracy, especially if they take place before any reforms. Elections are needed after the institutions of democracy -- freedom of speech and of the press, the separation of powers, freedom of religion or from religion, due process, equal justice under the law -- meaning accountability for everyone, property rights, rights for women, children and laborers, an independent judiciary, and so on -- have been set in place and are smoothly functioning. Only then can there be elections that mean anything.

What is really needed to help the Palestinian people, now being held hostage by corrupt and self-serving leaders in all of their parties, is not just elections but reforms, all of them, and serious international accountability, starting with shutting down funding for slow or nonexistent compliance.

So far, the international community has been funding leaders who mistreat their own people first, then their neighbors and everyone else second. For the sake of the Palestinians, this has to stop.

That warning has become even more relevant. The postponement demonstrates that announcing elections is easy; allowing Palestinians to exercise a meaningful choice and hold their leaders accountable is another matter entirely.

Abbas's latest decision is particularly humiliating for Western governments that have been urging the Palestinian Authority leadership to reform its institutions and renew its political legitimacy.

On October 13, the foreign ministers of Australia, France, Canada, and Britain issued a joint statement expressing "deep regret" over the postponement. They warned that the decision would further erode public confidence in democratic institutions and called on the PA to reconsider its decision and hold elections without further delay.

"Credible elections are an important element of the commitment that President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority made to reform, including democratic renewal and accountable governance," the ministers of the four countries said in their statement.

What happens now?

The postponement raises the question: what leverage do these Western governments intend to use when Abbas ignores their demands? Will they condition financial assistance to the PA on measurable reforms? Will they demand a credible timetable, transparent institutions and independent oversight? Will they impose consequences on Palestinian leaders who obstruct reform? Or will they issue statements of regret, continue providing financial support, and wait for Abbas to pretend he is finally instituting reforms by announcing yet another -- presumably fake -- election date?

Western governments should also avoid the mistaken assumption that an election announcement, by itself, represents progress.

The test of reform is not the number of "presidential decrees" Abbas issues promising elections. It is whether Palestinians acquire institutions that can hold their leaders accountable.

Since 2006, Israel has held nine parliamentary elections, with another expected before the end of this month. The Palestinians, by contrast, have held no presidential or parliamentary elections since Abbas was elected president in 2005 and Hamas won the legislative elections a year later.

The contrast is not simply a matter of competing political calendars. It reflects two profoundly different political realities. Israelis have repeatedly gone to the ballot box to replace governments, punish politicians, and resolve political deadlocks. Palestinian politics, meanwhile, has remained trapped in a struggle between the faction led by Abbas, Fatah, and Hamas.

This struggle has included violent confrontations, arbitrary arrests, torture, and political repression. In 2007, Hamas routed Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip, killed and abused Palestinian rivals, and seized control of Gaza. Since then, Palestinians have lived under two rival political authorities: the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Legislative Council has not functioned since 2007. Abbas formally dissolved it in 2018, further concentrating legislative and executive power in his own hands.

Abbas, now 91 years old, is still serving long after the four-year presidential term for which he was elected expired in January 2005. He is about to enter the 22^nd year of his illegitimate presidency without ever seriously having sought a renewed popular mandate at the ballot box.

Although each time Abbas called off an election, he blamed Israel, the internal Palestinian political landscape offers another explanation for his decision.

Abbas and his ruling Fatah faction are deeply unpopular among many Palestinians, who regard the Palestinian Authority as corrupt, authoritarian, and ineffective. A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83% of the Palestinians believe corruption exists within PA institutions.

The poll also showed that Hamas leaders are more popular than Abbas and that 79% of Palestinians want him to resign.

Additionally, Abbas's Fatah faction is divided by internal rivalries, while his political opponents have been exploring ways to challenge his continued rule.

Recently, Hamas and supporters of former Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan have reportedly been involved in efforts to develop an electoral alliance or joint political framework. Such an arrangement poses a serious challenge to Abbas and his loyalists. For a leader who has spent years consolidating power, the prospect of a competitive election is hardly attractive.

There is, however, an important caveat. The postponement does not mean that holding elections under the current conditions would necessarily have been a good idea.

The Palestinian political system offers no credible, nationally competitive third alternative to Fatah and Hamas. Both parties have contributed to political repression and have obstructed the emergence of independent candidates. Hamas remains an armed terrorist organization, while Fatah has presided over a system marked by authoritarianism, patronage, and corruption.

Western governments have too often treated elections as the principal answer to Palestinian political dysfunction. They are not. Palestinians need new leaders, new faces, and new political ideas. They need pragmatic, realistic, and accountable representatives who prioritize the welfare of their own people over factional interests and revolutionary slogans. They also need an overhaul of an education system that should prepare young Palestinians for peaceful coexistence, critical thinking, and economic opportunity rather than perpetuate hatred and glorify violence. They need independent institutions, financial transparency, effective anti-corruption mechanisms, and a free press capable of scrutinizing those in power.

• Follow Khaled Abu Toameh on X (formerly Twitter)

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22921/palestinian-authority-election-excuses

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Is it Islamophobic to connect the dots between Islamists and El-Sayed? - Jonathan S. Tobin

 

by Jonathan S. Tobin

Despite family connections and political stands that point to links between the Michigan Democrat and the Muslim Brotherhood, his supporters are crying foul.

 

Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed holds a campaign town hall event at the Ionia Theater in Michigan on Oct. 11, 2026. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

According to his supporters, it’s worse than guilt by association; it’s Islamophobic. That’s what those who are backing Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed are saying about claims that he is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist group that spawned the Hamas terrorist organization.

The fact that President Donald Trump termed El-Sayed “100 percent” affiliated with the Brotherhood, as well as a “Muslim radical” and a “con man” who “hates our country,” will likely only reinforce the belief of most Democrats that he is innocent of the charge.

In this, they are not only instinctively disbelieving anything that Trump says. They are also following the lead of most of the liberal media, which has continued, despite evidence to the contrary, to assert that there has been a post-9/11 discriminatory backlash against Muslims. So they are likely to believe the candidate’s assertions that any attempt to accuse him of being linked to the group or of being any sort of radical Islamist is, by definition, Islamophobic.

Smear or credible accusation?

Since no smoking-gun Brotherhood membership card has yet to be produced, that’s likely to be the way Democrats treat this issue. Indeed, most of their liberal media cheering section is simply ignoring the issue altogether as beneath their dignity to fact-check something that they regard as a slur, rather than a credible reason to doubt El-Sayed’s fitness for high office that ought to be reported.

And given that in a contemporary culture in which the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are being racist, the attempt not merely to refute the allegation but to shut it down altogether, the odds are that El-Sayed is likely to succeed in getting most mainstream outlets to treat it that way.

But there is a problem with this attempt to dismiss this discussion. Far from being a smear, there are good reasons to think long and hard about the implications of electing someone to the Senate who not merely is closely associated with persons who are Brotherhood supporters in one form or another, but who is also largely championing their political platform.

Simply put, El-Sayed isn’t being accused of being connected to the Brotherhood because he is a Muslim. The charge sticks because, regardless of whether he has ever personally belonged to the Brotherhood or one of its many affiliated groups, given his positions, he might as well be.

It could be a waste of time to play a political version of the “six degrees” trivia game about actors with him and the Brotherhood. But what those covering this race should be talking about is something different. A question needs answering: How is it possible for someone who traffics in the sort of antisemitic invective and advocacy that represents the hallmark of the Brotherhood and its advocates to rally mainstream Democrats and liberal media behind him, and be on the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate?

Equally as important, the row about El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood illustrates the meaning of Islamophobia in 21st-century American politics. What we learn from this serious accusation is that someone has noticed antisemitism coming from an American Muslim—and is being denounced for having the nerve to say it.

Lying on ‘NBC’

The question of El-Sayed’s radicalism has been rattling around the Internet since the soon-to-be 42-year-old won his party’s primary in August. Nevertheless, it has become a national topic of conversation since he was asked about possible ties with the Brotherhood between himself or his family during the course of a generally fawning Oct. 11 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The candidate’s answer was a flat “no.” He argued that it was not a legitimate question. And he went on to say it was evidence that his Republican opponent Mike Rogers and others opposing him are both “shameful” and “Islamophobic.”

It might have ended there. Yet within a day, evidence surfaced that contradicted El-Sayed’s denial.

His half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a supporter of her brother’s political career and a radical professor at the University of Chicago, arrested for assaulting a policeman at an anti-ICE rally, posted on social media about their mother’s record as a Muslim Brotherhood activist in the 1970s.

El-Sayed and his supporters attempted to swat that down by pointing out that he was born a decade after that. More to the point, he wasn’t raised by his mother, as was the case with his sister, but had instead grown up with his father and second wife in a separate state.

Connected to terror

Yet even more damning was evidence uncovered by The Washington Free Beacon that El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Dr. Tayeb Jukaku, a Michigan neurologist, is a leader and donor to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an American front group for the Brotherhood. The ISNA was one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the notorious case in which leaders of the Holy Land Foundation were tried and convicted for using the organization to raise more than $12 million to funnel to Hamas terrorists.

The ISNA, like the more well-known Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was created in the 1990s to act as cover groups for those organizing on behalf of the Brotherhood and Hamas. Since then, these groups have attempted to position themselves as civil-rights groups representing the interests of a supposedly persecuted Muslim minority in the United States.

What they really do is put forward a sanitized version of the Brotherhood’s political agenda of an Islamist war on the West. That has fooled much of the media and many in the Democratic Party, including the Biden administration, which not only employed CAIR in designing its anti-Islamophobia strategy paper but also in its even more disingenuous effort to combat antisemitism. This was outrageous as well as ironic because CAIR itself is a major source of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel invective and advocacy.

Needless to say, the leadership of ISNA and CAIR, along with 41 persons connected to Hamas fundraising in the United States, happen to be donors to El-Sayed’s campaign.

Dismissing his mother’s involvement, El-Sayed’s father-in-law’s role in ISNA and his welcoming of funds from those who are linked to the Holy Land case and Hamas should be enough to make questions about El-Sayed’s ties to the Brotherhood legitimate.

Yet even beyond these factual ties that deserve scrutiny is the fact that El-Sayed’s open antisemitism—and opposition to Israel’s existence and right to defend itself—is more troubling than anything else. The same is true for his efforts to mainstream blood libels about Israel committing “genocide.”

Open antisemitism

El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the Michigan Democratic primary by smearing her as a puppet of Jews who were trying to buy American elections for Israel. What was truly “shameless” was his invocation of traditional tropes about Jews and money that came straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups still promote.

This is also the candidate whose initial reaction to an attempt to plow a vehicle filled with explosives at a synagogue and Jewish school was to sympathize with the terrorist, rather than the intended victims. It took him several months to walk that back. But like most gaffes, it said more about him than he would like to admit.

El-Sayed may claim that he dislikes Israel, but not Jews. It’s an oft-used attempt to force them to drop an essential element of Jewish peoplehood to get the approval of the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that he embodies.

Some prominent Democratic activists, including Jews, are stating that the reluctance of Jews to vote for El-Sayed shows they care more about Israel than their own country and will suffer for doing so. But what it actually illustrates is that even most liberal Jews understand that his anti-Zionism and spreading of blood libels are indistinguishable from those of antisemites. In fact, they pose a clear and present danger to their safety and that of their children.

In their frenzy to win a majority in the U.S. Senate, what Democrats are doing is trying to legitimize a Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent candidate. That they are doing so amid an unprecedented surge of hatred and violence since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, is particularly shocking and especially irresponsible.

If they are successful, the consequences in terms of shifting the Overton Window of acceptable discourse even further to make Jew-hatred acceptable will be obvious.

The role of hate groups

Just as obvious are the implications of media labeling any criticism—or even reporting about El-Sayed’s antisemitism and his links to an international terror group—as Islamophobia and thus reprehensible.

Denial of the Brotherhood’s role in promoting Jew-hatred around the globe is nothing less than the moral equivalent of flat-earth advocacy. The same is true for efforts to make Americans look away from how Hamas supporters continue to evade accountability, even after the atrocities of Oct. 7. Like their friends operating within the terrorist organization based in Gaza, groups like CAIR and ISNA seek Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide. They are hate groups, not advocates for civil rights.

It’s bad enough that public figures like El-Sayed won’t distance themselves from the effort to destroy Israel by condemning these groups. More than that, the dishonest campaign to claim that those who notice this hateful activity are just prejudiced against Muslims is doing real damage to Muslims in the United States. What’s more, by allowing these groups to get a foothold in the American public square, let alone put one of their friends in the Senate, El-Sayed’s apologists are undermining the security of all Americans and not just Jews.

Far from a campaign smear that will fade with time, the question of the Brotherhood’s efforts to gain a beachhead in the United States threatens democracy, and the safety of Jews and Americans at large. In the long run, that some on the left think that’s a small price to pay to get another Democrat elected to the Senate is a scandal that only further inflames a crisis of antisemitism for which El-Sayed’s supporters bear responsibility. 

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, available on major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won 60-plus awards for his columns, commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/is-it-islamophobic-to-connect-the-dots-between-islamists-and-el-sayed

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Trump immigration lockdown saves taxpayers about $30B a year, but border towns go from boom to bust - Sharyl Attkisson

 

by Sharyl Attkisson

The flow of illegal migration along the southern, U.S.-Mexico border is roughly 95% less than it was during the Biden administration.

 

President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has been hugely successful at dialing back on illegal border crossings. But for some of America’s border communities whose economies relied on illegal immigrants and Border Patrol operations, there’s a big adjustment underway.

Grocery store owner Felix Chavez has spent the better part of five decades building this business in the small border town of Donna, Texas. He’s expanded to eight grocery stores and one convenience store.

Each year, he says, sales have climbed. That is, until now. 

“The last year has really impacted our sales. We have seen drops anywhere between 10 to 12%,” Chavez says. "Also, the labor force, where we used to employ around 550 employees, right now we have dropped down to about 450.”

The economic ripples extend far into border communities. Richard Cortez is an elected official in Hidalgo County, Texas.

“It's estimated that in my county we have at least, about, I'm gonna say 10, 15, maybe as high as 20% of our people here that are not legal citizens. So I knew it would have a huge impact,” Chavez says. 

“Many of our construction workers are here as noncitizens that are working. And today, you know, we're starting to see a big impact of that. Our economy here was largely agricultural based, agri-based. So you have to harvest your products. Many of the farmers just didn't wanna put any crops in the ground because they were concerned about harvesting those crops.”

A massive tent center in nearby Donna, Texas, was constructed during the Biden years and peak illegal immigration. The center covered 185,000 square feet on 40 acres of city-owned property.

In its heyday, nearly 700 Border Patrol agents worked there. They processed about 611,000 illegal immigrants from 90 countries. The lease and utilities alone provided the city of Donna with more than a million dollars a year: around 8% of its entire budget.

Today, the lot is empty.

Jared Ashby is the top Border Patrol official in charge of the Rio Grande Valley sector in South Texas.

“At one time, the US government, and specifically the U.S. Border Patrol, contracted out numerous facilities across the country to help detain and then process illegal aliens," Ashby said. "Now that the flow has [been] reduced by 95%. ... We would hold thousands or up to 10,000 plus in different holdings across the US. Now we're at hundreds. 

"So [with] a 95% reduction, there is no longer a need for those detention facilities or those temporary facilities like the Donna facility. So without the need for those facilities, some of those facilities were in the tens of millions of dollars per month for the taxpayers, and that is at a savings for U.S. taxpayers now.”

That’s an important point. Overall, analysts say the tightened southern border has delivered a huge windfall for American taxpayers.

Some estimates put the total number of forced and self-deportations under the current Trump administration at more than three million. Nobody can say for sure, but savings are estimated at about $30 billion a year – counting the costs of prison, education, health care, enforcement, and more.

For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson's most recent bestseller is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."

Sharyl Attkisson

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/economy/trump-immigration-lockdown-saves-taxpayers-about-30b-year-border-towns-go-boom-bust

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Trump signs executive order putting new sanctions against Russia under Lindsey Graham Act on hold - Misty Severi

 

by Misty Severi

The president said the order only impacts sanctions under the Graham Act, and not sanctions imposed by other executive orders.

 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Friday in which he paused sanctions against Russia that were imposed under the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which he signed into law last month.

The legislation authorizes additional sanctions and tariffs against Russia as they continue their war with Ukraine, but includes a caveat that allows the president to waive the application of sanctions, duties or restrictions against foreign persons if the president tells Congress it's in the country's national interests.

"I am hereby waiving the application of such sanctions, restrictions, and duties provided for in the Graham Act," Trump wrote in the order. "I have submitted to the Congress a certification that the issuance of such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States."

The legislation called for the president to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on the top five buyers of Russian energy, including countries that are helping Russia evade sanctions. It also extends current sanctions on Iran.

The president said the order only impacts sanctions under the Graham Act, and not sanctions imposed by other executive orders.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.

Source: https://justthenews.com/index%2Ephp/government/white-house/trump-signs-executive-order-putting-new-sanctions-against-russia-under

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OpenAI engineer arrested by FBI for bugging conference had one-way flight to Saudi Arabia planned - Kevin Killough

 

by Kevin Killough

OpenAI personnel discovered an audio recording device inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of their buildings in San Francisco.

 

The Saudi engineer at OpenAI, who was fired after being charged with placing an audio recording device inside a company conference room, was arrested by the FBI just three days before he planned to fly back to Saudi Arabia with his family — with a one-way ticket. 

FBI Director Kash Patel announced Tuesday that the bureau has arrested an OpenAI employee who allegedly bugged the company's executive conference room in San Francisco, California. Officials have identified the man as Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested on October 9. 

Alfozan said in a recent podcast interview that he helped advise Saudi Arabian government agencies on technology and bragged about meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then the deputy crown prince, during the prince’s 2016 visit to Silicon Valley, the New York Post reported. 

Alfozan, who was seeking guidance on whether to return to Saudia Arabia, said in a podcast interview last month that the prince advised young Saudis working in Silicon Valley to hone their skills at major tech companies and then bring that expertise home. 

“You learn from the source and then, God willing, bring that experience and knowledge back to the homeland,” Alfozan said.

According to the complaint, Alfozan had been employed as an engineer by OpenAI since July 2025. OpenAI personnel discovered an audio recording device inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of their buildings in San Francisco. 

OpenAI determined that the device, which had been concealed in toilet paper, was installed on or about Sept. 28, and its contents were encrypted. Footage inside OpenAI’s office showed Alfozan near the executive conference room on multiple dates prior to the device’s discovery, although he had no authority to access or to participate in meetings that occurred in the room.

William Pernik, a lawyer representing Alfozan, said his client was charged with violating a federal recording statute, but he wasn't charged with stealing trade secrets or working as a foreign agent. Pernik asked for “everyone to withhold judgment until full facts become known.”

If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release.  

Kevin Killough

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/crime/openai-engineer-arrested-fbi-bugging-conference-had-one-way-flight-saudi-arabia

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Protestors in French cities clash with police, break windows, block roads - Nicholas Ballasy

 

by Nicholas Ballasy

ATR reported that French broadcasters CNews and Europe 1 in western Paris had their office windows smashed due to protesters throwing projectiles.

 

Protesters are clashing with police in major cities in France on Saturday ahead of the presidential election.

ATR reported that French broadcasters CNews and Europe 1 in western Paris had their office windows smashed due to protesters throwing projectiles.

Police shot a "water cannon and teargas after hundreds of protesters, most wearing face masks and some setting off fireworks, confronted them at several locations," AFP reported.

The protestors, angered by the rising cost of living, have also tried to block roads, reports said. 

Police had to push out protesters who entered the town hall of France's second-largest city of Marseille, reports said.  

Nicholas Ballasy

Source: https://justthenews.com/world/europe/protestors-french-cities-clash-police-break-windows-block-roads

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Can the new Haredi Public party change the rules on military service, women in politics? - Gabriel Colodro

 

by Gabriel Colodro

The Haredi Public party seeks to preserve Torah study while expanding participation in Israeli society, challenging the priorities and authority of the established ultra-Orthodox parties.

 

Haredi Public chairman and Deputy Mayor of Beit Shemesh Moti Leitner.

(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

 

When hundreds of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protesters descended on Modi’in last week to prevent military police from arresting a draft evader, Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer saw a dispute that had gone badly off course. He opposes the arrest of yeshiva students as a tool for enforcing enlistment, arguing that it creates friction and strengthens extremists. But the organized effort to prevent the arrest disturbed him just as much.

For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.org

“This is not just opposition to serving in the army. This is also lawlessness,” Pfeffer told The Media Line.

Pfeffer chairs the rabbinic committee of the Haredi Public party, a new political party led by Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Moti Leitner. The party is seeking a place in the Knesset in Israel’s October 27 election, appealing to ultra-Orthodox voters who identify strongly with Torah life but no longer feel adequately represented by Shas or United Torah Judaism.

Leitner’s political experience began at the municipal level. In 2024, he led the Derech faction to two seats on the Beit Shemesh City Council, campaigning on education, employment, housing, and representation for Haredim whose needs he believed were being neglected.

The national movement emerged this year after its founders sought greater representation within the established haredi parties. When that effort failed to produce an agreement, they launched an independent electoral campaign.

The Haredi Public party launched a large-scale advertising campaign at the entrances to and exits from major haredi cities on July 19, 2026. (credit: Office of the Haredi Public Party)

Leitner says the decision grew out of problems he had encountered in Beit Shemesh long before election season: families struggling to make ends meet, limited employment opportunities, shortcomings in education, and an increasingly difficult housing market. Then came October 7.

For Leitner, the Hamas attack turned a social argument into a question of responsibility. He said haredi society had spent years trying to preserve a separate way of life, but parts of that separation had hardened into detachment from the rest of the country.

In his view, the result hurt both haredim and Israel. He said a community that makes up a large and growing share of the Jewish population cannot expect others to carry the burden of defense, economic productivity, and national institutions indefinitely.

The parrty is not interested in winning approval from secular Israeli community

Leitner describes that message primarily as an internal haredi reckoning, not an effort to win approval from secular Israelis. He wants a community that can finance its own institutions, support Torah study through a stronger economy, and rely less on government subsidies or fundraising abroad.

Military responsibility fits into the same idea. Haredi families, he said, cannot assume that other Israelis will always be the ones sent to protect their children, neighborhoods, and cities.

That political argument places Haredi Public inside the Israeli right rather than between the country’s competing political blocs. Leitner told The Media Line that he wants a right-wing, national, and conservative government on economic, diplomatic, and security issues.

He said he would be comfortable joining a government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also favoring a broader national coalition built around those principles.

The party’s difference with the established haredi leadership becomes sharper on military service.

Haredi Public says men genuinely committed to full-time Torah study should remain protected. It does not extend that principle automatically to everyone enrolled in a yeshiva.

Pfeffer said some institutions keep men who are not serious full-time students largely to avoid military service.

“Those institutions are not legitimate,” he said. “Boys who are not in full-time Torah study have to be in the army.”

The dispute comes against a difficult legal background. In June 2024, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government lacked a legal basis for continuing the longstanding exemption arrangements for haredi yeshiva students. In April 2026, the court ordered additional enforcement measures against men avoiding the draft.

The Knesset subsequently approved temporary legislation in July intended to suspend certain enforcement measures against full-time yeshiva students. However, the Supreme Court issued an interim order preventing that law from taking effect while its legality was examined.

The ongoing dispute has put haredi politicians under pressure from religious leaders seeking to preserve yeshiva study and from other Israelis demanding greater military service participation.

Haredi Public proposes a distinction between students genuinely pursuing full-time Torah scholarship and those whose primary occupation lies elsewhere. Under its platform, men in the second category would be expected to undertake military or other qualifying security service through arrangements compatible with haredi religious life.

Who decides which men qualify for exemptions is where the proposal becomes more difficult.

Pfeffer does not want the decision left entirely to haredi institutions, where he believes internal pressures and political deals could affect the process. He supports a designated state body, with criteria and quotas during an initial transition.

Such a system would require legislation establishing who qualifies for deferment or exemption and how the rules would be enforced.

Pfeffer’s goal is a system in which military service becomes ordinary for haredi men who are not suited to years of full-time Torah study, rather than a choice that carries a social stigma.

Pfeffer himself served in the military after October 7. He said Israelis outside the community often underestimate what enlistment means for a young haredi man.

Separate units, stricter kosher standards, and other accommodations matter, but they do not resolve the deeper issue. The army has been one of the institutions most closely tied to Israeli identity since the state’s founding.

For thousands of haredi men, entering it would change more than where they spend several years. It would alter how part of the community sees itself.

'Partnership' over 'equality'

That is why Pfeffer prefers the word “partnership” to “equality.”

“What we care about is partnership,” he said. “A demand not of equality, but a demand of partnership.”

Under that formula, Israel could keep a significant number of serious Torah scholars in yeshiva while expecting many others to serve, including in regular military units.

Pfeffer also welcomed proposals for yeshiva-based security frameworks that combine study with defense duties, calling the idea “a positive creative idea.”

The disagreement with the established haredi parties goes beyond the draft.

Pfeffer says Haredi Public’s rabbinic committee is not meant to replicate the structure of Shas or United Torah Judaism, where senior rabbis exercise decisive authority over political representatives.

In the new party, he said, rabbis advise and guide, but elected officials don't simply carry out instructions.

“The lay leadership is not there just to carry out the instruction of the rabbis,” he said.

Pfeffer knows some of the rabbis connected to the traditional parties but said there has been no meaningful dialogue with their leadership since the new party was formed.

He also believes the established political leadership has damaged the way haredi society is viewed outside its own communities.

When Israelis asked for more haredi participation in defense, education, and the economy, Pfeffer said, the response from parliament too often sounded like “a flat no.”

That has consequences, he said, because political representatives become the public face of a much larger population.

“That answer creates not just friction and tension, but also anger, resentment, even animosity.”

Ziva Glanz, fourth on the party’s candidate list, approaches the same problem from another part of Haredi life.

She spent years working in housing, infrastructure, economic development, and immigrant absorption, and said the traditional haredi parties never fully represented her.

Many haredim already work, study, and participate in the wider economy, she said, but the political priorities associated with the community have not always followed them there.

“They wanted to be part of society. They wanted to contribute to Israel,” Glanz said. “They don’t see themselves as the haredi problem.”

Her presence on the list also breaks with a longstanding feature of haredi national politics.

Glanz is one of two women among Haredi Public’s top four candidates. The other, Dr. Nechumi Yaffe, a scholar of haredi society and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, is third on the list.

Their inclusion marks a departure from the practices of Shas and United Torah Judaism, which do not place women on their Knesset candidate lists.

Glanz argues that women taking responsibility inside haredi society is hardly new.

“Women have been at the forefront of haredi society already now for 20 years,” she said. “They are the main breadwinners in their families. They’re running companies, they’re running organizations, they’re running schools.”

What they have lacked, she said, is a seat in the political institutions that make decisions affecting them.

Education is one of the areas where Glanz and Leitner see the existing system as too restrictive.

Glanz wants haredi children to have access to mathematics and English starting in elementary school, along with more state-haredi schools, secondary yeshivas that offer general studies, and higher education programs adapted to religious requirements.

Leitner frames the issue partly as parental choice. He said haredi parents who want state-haredi education often cannot find it because local structures refuse to open the schools they are asking for.

The party’s educational proposals also reflect its economic priorities. Its leaders want more haredi men and women to gain the qualifications needed for stable employment while maintaining religious observance and supporting Torah-study institutions.

Leitner remains firmly Orthodox in his understanding of Israel as a Jewish state, but he also criticizes religious coercion.

On disputes involving different Jewish movements or issues such as public policy on Shabbat, he said the government should recognize that Israelis do not all live by the same religious standards.

In some cases, he argued, transferring authority from the national government to municipalities could reduce conflict.

He was particularly critical of haredi politicians who, in his view, have made Israelis more hostile toward religious institutions by relying too heavily on coercion.

Glanz sees October 7 as part of the reason those older boundaries have become less rigid.

Before the attack, she said, secular and haredi Israelis often behaved as if they were standing in opposite corners of a “boxing match.”

The emergency brought people from different communities into the same volunteer centers and civilian operations.

She calls the network that emerged a kind of “citizen government,” where secular Israelis, hasidim, and everyone between them worked together because the immediate task mattered more than their political disagreements.

Whether that spirit of cooperation can be translated into electoral support remains an open question.

Haredi Public faces established parties with longstanding religious leadership structures, extensive political organizations, and loyal voting constituencies.

It must also clear Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold to win a seat in the 120-member Knesset.

Several national surveys published in late September and early October did not show the new party crossing that threshold. A separate survey of young voters aged 18 to 22, published by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, indicated stronger support among that age group, equivalent to five seats if its preferences were reflected in the electorate as a whole.

The findings suggest the party’s message may resonate with some younger voters, but a survey limited to that age group cannot establish its support across the electorate.

For now, Haredi Public is trying to persuade voters that its proposals protect traditional haredi life while addressing problems its leaders believe the established parties have neglected.

Asked where he wants haredi society to be in another decade, Leitner did not describe a community with less Torah study.

He described one economically strong enough to sustain it, while tens of thousands more haredim work, serve, and take part in the institutions responsible for the country’s security.

For Leitner, the test is not whether haredim become less haredi. It is whether they can stop depending on other Israelis to carry responsibilities that a growing community will increasingly have to carry for itself.

Gabriel Colodro

Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-election-2026/article-911772

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