The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.
From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."
The mayor devoted the opening paragraph of his October 7 statement to the victims before turning to Israel. His September 11 speech shows he knows how to do better.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the 'This Past Weekend' podcast with comedian Theo Von, October 1, 2026.(photo credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Theo Von)
New York’s mayor acknowledged that Hamas had committed “horrific war crimes.” Then came the sentence that explained where he was taking this: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day.” Most of what followed concerned Israeli genocide, as he called it, and American complicity.
Imagine a Holocaust Memorial Day message that briefly remembered the six million murdered Jews, then devoted most of its space to condemning the Allied bombing of Dresden. German civilians, including children, suffered terribly. Their deaths deserve remembrance. Choosing that occasion to put the Allies on trial would be an insult to the families you had supposedly come to comfort. They would be entitled to ask why you had bothered mentioning their dead at all.
There is another problem with Mamdani’s account. The Gaza death toll he cites includes Hamas and other terrorists killed in the war. The Health Ministry’s totals do not separate them from civilians. The number of terrorists among the dead remains disputed, but their inclusion is well established. Mamdani makes no effort to acknowledge it.
Thousands of terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, according to the IDF. The invading force included killers and rapists; a UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at several attack sites. Palestinian children killed in Gaza deserve to be mourned. Folding the terrorists’ deaths into the same indictment, without a word about who they were or what they did, is a serious omission in a statement marking their victims’ murder.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) listen as the names of victims are read during a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center at the 9/11 Memorial, in New York City, U.S., September 11, 2026. (credit: REUTERS/BRENDAN MCDERMID)
Mamdani handled October 7 anniversary very differently than September 11
Mamdani knows how to deliver a memorial address. He did it last month. Speaking at St. Nicholas church in Manhattan on September 11, he described firefighters approaching the towers, boats evacuating people and strangers helping one another escape. He stayed with those people and their stories. He managed the entire address without turning to American conduct in Afghanistan or Iraq.
I would like to hear him explain why the families of October 7 deserved a different approach. He had already found the words to condemn Hamas. He could have continued with the survivors and the bereaved.
For Jewish New Yorkers with family and friends in Israel, this is familiar and exhausting. Even on the anniversary of the massacre, their mayor makes room for only a brief acknowledgment before returning to his case against the Jewish state.
They can disagree fiercely with an Israeli government and still want their mayor to show some decency toward the people murdered there. They should hardly have to explain this to him.
Majority of New York hate crimes targeted Jews
At the city’s October 6 crime briefing, officials reported that Jews were the targets of 53% of confirmed hate crimes through September. Major crime overall has fallen. His new antisemitism strategy gives me little confidence that he will confront anti-Jewish hatred honestly. It declines to adopt a single definition, arguing that doing so is neither “necessary” nor “useful.” More than 25 New York organizations have challenged its failure to address anti-Jewish harassment and exclusion carried out in the name of anti-Zionism.
Their objections are harder to dismiss after his October 7 statement. I have little faith in an antisemitism campaign led by a mayor who uses even that anniversary to denounce Israel. He asks Jewish residents to trust his administration while showing scant respect for their attachment to the Jewish state. Until he is prepared to confront the hostility directed at Jews over that attachment, his security grants and cultural programs will leave a central part of the problem untouched.
The city controller’s September report recorded an average of 83,360 people in shelters in August and citywide rents 5.6% higher than a year earlier. Those problems will occupy any serious mayor. Mamdani nevertheless found time to explore arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, before acknowledging in July that his administration lacked the authority.
Presumably someone at City Hall could have checked that earlier.
New York’s mayor will inevitably speak about events abroad. He governs a city whose residents have families all over the world, and October 7 concerns many of them directly. A mayor who understood that would have addressed the bereaved with more care. Mamdani owes them an apology, and an explanation of why he could show that care on September 11 and abandon it less than a month later.
On the third anniversary of October 7, we discuss what that massive terrorist attack actually means for the West – and why the West’s response looks a lot like the end of the West itself.
Trump’s second-term accomplishments will be a frequent talking point on the campaign trail for Republicans: the economy, manufacturing, energy and more. Meanwhile, Democrats are campaigning on anything anti-Trump.
With midterms exactly four weeks from Tuesday, Republicans and Trump will have to highlight wins in their closing arguments, lest the second-term president becomes a lame duck.
Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, spoke to Just the News about the message of 'Making America Great Again' and putting America first and said, "It's resonating strongly." He continued, "and we're seeing huge results for it with job growth and investments pouring into our state."
Davidson highlighted some of the accomplishments that Republicans need to tout on the campaign trail: "We're seeing manufacturing employment going in the right direction. More jobs, more made in America, and we're especially seeing that here in Ohio. We had the lowest unemployment in our state's history just last week, and President Trump highlighted that [at his event] in Dayton, Ohio."
Not quite hot, but still warm economy
What voters will likely react to the most under the economic banner is inflation, which has improved from its peak under former President Joe Biden (9.1% in June 2022), with core prices up 2.4 percent over the year through August. Democrats have repeated the mantra "affordability" but in fact the real GDP rose at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the second quarter after a revised 2.5 percent gain in the first, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said.
The unemployment rate held at 4.2 percent in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, near levels long associated with full employment, and equity markets have added to household wealth, with the S&P 500 up about 14 percent year to date.
Leaks in border plugged up, immigration down, deportations up
The GOP candidates might argue that there is likely no greater improvement than that on the border and immigration issues. Under Trump, illegal crossings remain near historic lows under Trump and GOP border enforcement. U.S. Border Patrol recorded 8,870 southwest border apprehensions in August, 5 percent below July and 94 percent under the Biden-era monthly average, Customs and Border Protection said.
Immigration-related arrests were also 97 percent below the December 2023 peak. The agency reported 16 consecutive months of zero releases into the country, ending the catch-and-release practice that defined the prior surge. Most recently, nationwide Border Patrol apprehensions were 10,939 in August.
New respect for law and order: crime is down most since 1936
Across the nation, violent crime is at lows not seen in decades under Trump and Republican support for law enforcement. The FBI estimates violent crime fell 9.3 percent in 2025, the largest year-to-year drop since national estimates began in 1936.
Murder and non-negligent manslaughter declined 18.1 percent, and the homicide rate of 4.1 per 100,000 tied the lowest since 1955. Property crime fell 12.4 percent. The bureau said the decline continued into the first half of 2026.
Energy dominance and independence
U.S. energy output remains a source of supply security under Trump’s second term, becoming an energy net exporter for the first time in history.
The Energy Information Administration projects domestic crude production of 13.9 million barrels a day in 2026, up from 13.7 million in 2025 and on track for 14.3 million in 2027. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports are forecast at 17.6 billion cubic feet a day, above 15.1 billion last year, keeping the United States the world’s largest LNG supplier.
Higher Middle East prices have lifted pump costs, particularly diesel fuel, but record domestic production has limited the reliance on foreign barrels.
Facts belie the "doom and gloom" narrative: quality of life sees steady improvement
Several aspects of what political scientists call "kitchen table" issues have seen steady improvement.
For example, breadwinners are doing better as manufacturing and factory investment is a central Republican argument for Trump’s trade policy. The White House reports that more than $11.2 trillion in domestic and foreign commitments have been secured since Trump returned to office, and that American manufacturers have added 72,000 new jobs in 2026.
A Reshoring Initiative survey found that 36 percent of U.S. manufacturers have brought overseas jobs back home, or are executing moves this year, up from 29 percent in 2025, citing tariffs and proximity to customers as reasons for the success.
Making Americans healthy again
In the fall of 2024, during the presidential campaign, family health became a cornerstone of Trump’s health advocacy agenda and remains a visible piece of Trump’s second-term record.
Less than a year into his second term, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., issued new dietary guidelines, a new food pyramid, centered on whole foods and said 27 major food companies plan to drop petroleum-based dyes.
Additionally, the Agriculture Department has approved 18 states to bar unhealthy items — known colloquially as "junk food" — from SNAP purchases meant to provide sustenance for the poor.
The FDA is advancing a rule to close the voluntary GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) loophole for new food substances, and Trump signed an order tying childhood vaccine guidance to informed consent, as opposed to a "nanny state" approach where decisions on children's health are made by bureaucrats rather than actual parents.
Americans remain an endless ATM for Capitol Hill
Fiscal conservatives insist that the nation doesn't have a revenue problem: it has a spending problem.
Federal spending remains a national frustration even among Republicans who back Trump. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the fiscal 2026 deficit reached $2 trillion, about 6.2 percent of GDP, with interest costs near $1.1 trillion.
Gross national debt crossed $40 trillion in August. The Congressional Budget Office had already projected debt rising to 120 percent of GDP by 2036. Party leaders point to tax cuts and border funding, but the red ink has not narrowed.
Democrats speaking as if Trump were actually on the ballot
The exchange showed how Democrats have yet to propose a platform independent of grievances about Trump, and often confuse his sometimes irascible personality with functioning policies.
They do not appear to have a concrete agenda, and no affirmative message other than an appeal to the widely misunderstood concept of socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America have seen a significant surge in popularity among Democrats, with 59% of registered Democrats now identifying as democratic socialist supporters, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, and 1/3 openly identifying as democratic socialist.
Much of this is driven by a never-ending drive to oppose and impeach Trump, substituting association with the president for original proposals on taxes, costs, or governance.
Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here.
The concept of dar al-harb (the "abode of war") — countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails — remains current and effective in Islamic theology.
Funding from Qatar and other oil-producing states has transplanted the traditional belligerence against Judeo-Christianity from national frontiers into the very heart of these countries. Added to this innovation is that of indiscriminate terrorism, pioneered by the Palestine Liberation Organization as early as the 1960s.
The concept of dar al-harb (the "abode of war") — countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails — remains current and effective in Islamic theology. It is this concept that today mobilizes some Muslim immigrants in the West to reject integration into societies that do not practice sharia. In other words, the clash of civilizations persists, but now within Western civilizations themselves, which have lost their homogeneity through the demographic changes and host large numbers of Muslim immigrants imposing their own laws.
The present situation recalls the traditional waves of jihadist conquest of territories inhabited by Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. Greek, Serbian, and Slavic historians bitterly chronicled, over the course of centuries, the internal traitors — military figures, displaced aristocrats, princes of the Church — who made pacts with Muslim conquerors and handed citadels and cities over to them.
The radical activism today of the Muslim diaspora within Western societies and its refusal to integrate... stem from directives issued by the OIC [a sort of global caliphate representing 56 Muslim countries].
In the West, jihad operates on several levels: indiscriminate terrorism, censorship of "blasphemy," changes in customs and laws, the ballot box, the adoption of Western concepts in order to turn them against Europeans, such as cancel culture (to shut out Western evil), and calls for "resistance" (against Christian laws, by holding to jihadist principles of conquest and domination) and "liberation" (meaning the replacement of infidel law by sharia).
We also see the systematic use of the reversal of accusations, in which offenders become victims; the destruction of the infidels' knowledge such as the rejection of Western culture, history and modern history, and their replacement by linguistic fabrications, such as white racism, Western colonialism and "Islamophobia."
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be "phobic" about: paedophilia, death for alleged blasphemy, death for apostasy, permitted rape of infidels, brutality to women and homosexuals, stoning to death for adultery (which includes having been raped), and so on. The principles of Islamic law, as derived from the Quran and sharia, are fundamentally opposed to Western secular laws: they do not recognize individual rights (rather than group rights), gender equality or equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. They do not accept the testimony of non-Muslims and their rights to sovereignty, property or territorial independence. The concept of justice is defined only according to Islamic parameters of justice. Hence, the same words — rights, liberation, resistance, justice, God — can be used without Westerners realizing that their meanings and implications are often quite contradictory to those assumed in the West.
This disparity, which becomes a confrontation, is particularly evident in United Nations forums, where 56 Islamic countries vote as a bloc against Israel according to a jihadist view of justice based on the concepts of harbi (non-Muslims in a state of war with Islam) and jahiliya (the "age of ignorance," referring to miscreant non-Muslim societies, including Jews and Christians). The concept is based on the supposed chaos of evil and barbarity covering the world before the advent of Islam in 622 CE).
The social and peaceful improvements against radicalism highlighted by Riboua, such as the Abraham Accords, in the foreign policies of Muslim states are encouraging, provided that they are not limited to acquiring the levers of Western power, as they increasingly seem to be.
The name "Palestine," in fact, belongs to Jewish history. It is unpronounceable in Arabic and absent from the canonical texts of Islam. Muslims received it as a gift, an act of humble allegiance from Christians who fashioned it into a weapon against Israel. Their Muslim allies then adapted it to their Islamic version of the Bible and the Gospel — a version in which, in the Quran, all Jewish figures are Islamized, including Jesus, who becomes Isa, a Muslim prophet whose mission is to abolish all infidel religions, above all Christianity.
This supposed Quranic Palestine, whose name, temporal and geographical location appear nowhere in the Quran, was claimed as Muslim ―without Jews or Christians ―because in the Quran, Islam preceded Judaism and Christianity, both of which, according to doctrine, appeared only after Islam. In Islam, it is this Palestine that must be restored. It is in this sense that Jews and Christians, are colonists, because the entirety of Biblical history, including the Gospels, is erased. It is this meaning that Christians embrace when they pride themselves on wearing the keffiyeh, the emblem of a Palestine that is a totally political artefact created to eliminate the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The crowds of Westerners who, encouraged by some Christian clergy, jeer at Israel and worship "Palestine," are unaware that they are rejecting the foundations of their own civilization. These crowds are campaigning for the Islamization of their countries and their own deaths, or else conversion or submission to Islam as inferior beings called dhimmis.
America's main challenge will not come from external jihad but from diaspora Muslims in the United States and Europe, "driven by postcolonial resentment and a politics of permanent resistance..."
This, too, is jihad: resentment at having been humiliated by the despised infidel, at having to obey him, while Islam is supposed to command and not be commanded, and while Islam rejects the testimony of the dhimmi.
Indeed, the strict prohibition against Muslims adopting the customs and practices of Jews and Christians or forming friendships with them is as old as the Quran. It lays down these principles and, since its emergence in the eighth century, is the source of endless prohibitions in Islamic jurisprudence.
Ultimately, Muslim states can sleep soundly: the conquest of the West is well under way.... Thanks to its many clueless helpers in the West, Jihad is doing just fine.
Pictured: Women wearing Islamic niqab veils protest outside the French Embassy on April 11, 2011 in London, England. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Zineb Riboua, a Moroccan-American researcher, developed an original analysis in her recent essay for City Journal, "The West Faces Two Islams." She distinguishes between an Islam in the West, infused with Third Worldism and centered on Israeli-Palestinian issues, as opposed to an Islam in the Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Many in those regions have, by and large, modernized, are enthusiastic about technology, and seek a new relationship with their former colonizers from the West.
The fault line, therefore, is said to have shifted onto Western soil, where the West now faces a new homegrown Islam that is steeped in colonial resentment and forged in the Palestinian cause.
Riboua's analysis seems correct regarding the choice made by a large number of Muslim states, such as the United Arab Emirates, in favor of modernity and international cooperation. Anti-Western Islamic hostility, as she observes, is no longer expressed in the foreign policy of Muslim countries, but rather through divisions within Western societies themselves: in demonstrations against colonialism, racism and Israel.
Riboua's observations are accurate, but they do not disprove Samuel Huntington's theory of a "clash of civilizations"; they merely reflect a change in tactics adapted to the modern shifts in population brought about by the mass immigration of Muslims to the West. Funding from Qatar and other oil-producing states has transplanted the traditional belligerence against Judeo-Christianity from national frontiers into the very heart of these countries. Added to this innovation is that of indiscriminate terrorism, pioneered by the Palestine Liberation Organization as early as the 1960s.
Denunciations of imperialism, colonialism and racism, moreover, target only the West -- never Muslim countries, all of which were Islamized through jihadist conquest, then through the racism of "dhimmitude" directed against the non-Muslim indigenous populations, who were treated as inferior, second-class citizens.
Dhimmitude, it should be recalled, is the name given to the comprehensive religious Islamic system governing the non-Muslim populations that were defeated by the jihad wars. It therefore has its roots in the jihad ideology and military legal rules and is mainly responsible for the subjugation and Islamization of the native populations through mass deportation, slavery, abduction of women and children, the fiscal oppression of the jizya (obligatory protection tax from non-Muslims), and conversion to Islam.
From the 8th to the 12th century, the Muslim jurisdiction spread with the military expansion of Islam over Christian lands such as Spain, part of South Italy, Sicily, the Levant, Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia, mainly inhabited by Jews and Christians), Asia Minor and other parts of the Byzantine Empire. From there, it used a combination of Muslim sacred Scriptures, shariah law and Christian anti-Jewish laws from the fifth and six centuries, for repressing the original non-Muslim inhabitants: dhimmitude.
An anti-Jewish common ground sometimes led to a Christian-Muslim alliance for persecuting Jews in Muslim countries, especially in the Islamized Jewish homeland before the modern restoration of Israel. That relentless hatred, often stimulated by the clergy, the Catholic Church as well as the Eastern churches, intensified against the pro-Jewish evangelical Protestant churches in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Islamic-Christian alliance against the Jews, a recurring feature in the context of dhimmitude, took on a global dimension in opposition to Zionism.
As Europe in recent decades became the new continent of dhimmitude, it imported into its midst this uninhibited, triumphalist and exultant anti-Jewish hatred from the traditional world of dhimmitude. In the 20th century, that trend achieved its peak in the Holocaust in Europe.
The current antisemitic wave was programmed and planned by a campaign organized by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO), one of the main institutions of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, a sort of global caliphate representing 56 Muslim countries). The plan was laid out in a series of lectures given in Morocco (1993) and Jordan (2004) in the Framework of the Islamic-Christian Dialogue. In this context, the Jordanian Abdallah Kanaan presented an elaborate strategy for ways of infiltrating Islamic policy into all Western cultural and media sectors by invoking the Palestinian cause, and that matches perfectly the plan of activities decided upon by the "Alliance of Civilizations."[1]
Today, the anti-Israel wave sweeping across Europe, with the full support of governments, is spreading the customs of dhimmitude throughout the continent. The sooner Europeans become familiar with this civilization, which has existed for thirteen centuries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the better they will understand present-day pitfalls and threats.
European colonialism, furthermore, may in certain instances have represented the reconquest of formerly Christian lands that were previously colonized by Islam, such as in North Africa and the Levant. The concept of dar al-harb (the "abode of war") — countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails — remains current and effective in Islamic theology. It is this concept that today mobilizes some Muslim immigrants in the West to reject integration into societies that do not practice sharia. In other words, the clash of civilizations persists, but now within Western civilizations themselves, which have lost their homogeneity through the demographic changes and host large numbers of Muslim immigrants imposing their own laws.
The present situation recalls the traditional waves of jihadist conquest of territories inhabited by Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. Greek, Serbian, and Slavic historians bitterly chronicled, over the course of centuries, the internal traitors — military figures, displaced aristocrats, princes of the Church — who made pacts with Muslim conquerors and handed citadels and cities over to them.
The radical activism today of the Muslim diaspora within Western societies and its refusal to integrate, mentioned by Riboua, stem from directives issued by the OIC. This radical activism is not a new phenomenon in history. Islamic domination has always started with a small nucleus of a Muslim army occupying a conquered land that was populated by a vast majority of Christians as well as a Jewish minority. Dhimmitude is the evidence of what happens when Christian states are transformed into Islamic lands.[2]
Today, jihad is being waged mainly on Israel's borders, where Islamist terrorist organizations have built vast tunnels that are like an underground version of Islamic ribats, the military fortresses that for 13 centuries terrorized Christian countries.
In the West, jihad operates on several levels: indiscriminate terrorism, censorship of "blasphemy," changes in customs and laws, the ballot box, the adoption of Western concepts in order to turn them against Europeans, such as cancel culture (to shut out Western evil), and calls for "resistance" (against Christian laws, by holding to jihadist principles of conquest and domination) and "liberation" (meaning the replacement of infidel law by sharia).
We also see the systematic use of the reversal of accusations, in which offenders become victims; the destruction of the infidels' knowledge such as the rejection of Western culture, history and modern history, and their replacement by linguistic fabrications, such as white racism, Western colonialism and "Islamophobia."
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be "phobic" about: paedophilia, death for alleged blasphemy, death for apostasy, permitted rape of infidels, brutality to women and homosexuals, stoning to death for adultery (which includes having been raped), and so on. The principles of Islamic law, as derived from the Quran and sharia, are fundamentally opposed to Western secular laws: they do not recognize individual rights (rather than group rights), gender equality or equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. They do not accept the testimony of non-Muslims and their rights to sovereignty, property or territorial independence. The concept of justice is defined only according to Islamic parameters of justice. Hence, the same words — rights, liberation, resistance, justice, God — can be used without Westerners realizing that their meanings and implications are often quite contradictory to those assumed in the West.
This disparity, which becomes a confrontation, is particularly evident in United Nations forums, where 56 Islamic countries vote as a bloc against Israel according to a jihadist view of justice based on the concepts of harbi (non-Muslims in a state of war with Islam) and jahiliyya (the "age of ignorance," referring to miscreant non-Muslim societies, including Jews and Christians). The concept is based on the supposed chaos of evil and barbarity covering the world before the advent of Islam in 622 CE).
The social and peaceful improvements against radicalism highlighted by Riboua, such as the Abraham Accords, in the foreign policies of Muslim states are encouraging, provided that they are not limited to acquiring the levers of Western power, as they increasingly seem to be.
According to Riboua, Jihad will continue for as long as Edward Said's demonizations, which inaccurately portrayed Israel as the paradigm of colonialism and have gradually been replacing the West's study of humanity. Antiquity becomes displaced under the concept of jahiliyya, the world as it looked before Islam. It is because jahiliyya replaces the Bible that the Jewish people, stripped of their 3,000-year-old national and spiritual heritage, are accused of colonialism by jihadist usurpers whose history began in the seventh century. The Israeli-Arab conflict serves as an example of this replacement: both Jewish and Christian biblical history -- and civilization-- are denied (not pointed out by Riboua), erased by the jahiliyya and nothingness awaiting Islam.
That it should have been an Egyptian Christian, Edward Said, afflicted by a paranoid anti-Jewish hatred, who, to eliminate Judaism, forged Islamic weapons for the destruction of Christianity is hardly surprising. The name "Palestine," in fact, belongs to Jewish history. It is unpronounceable in Arabic and absent from the canonical texts of Islam. Muslims received it as a gift, an act of humble allegiance from Christians who fashioned it into a weapon against Israel. Their Muslim allies then adapted it to their Islamic version of the Bible and the Gospel — a version in which, in the Quran, all Jewish figures are Islamized, including Jesus, who becomes Isa, a Muslim prophet whose mission is to abolish all infidel religions, above all Christianity[3].
This supposed Quranic Palestine, whose name, temporal and geographical location appear nowhere in the Quran, was claimed as Muslim ―without Jews or Christians ―because in the Quran, Islam preceded Judaism and Christianity, both of which, according to doctrine, appeared only after Islam. In Islam, it is this Palestine that must be restored. It is in this sense that Jews and Christians, are colonists, because the entirety of Biblical history, including the Gospels, is erased. It is this meaning that Christians embrace when they pride themselves on wearing the keffiyeh, the emblem of a Palestine that is a totally political artefact created to eliminate the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The crowds of Westerners who, encouraged by some Christian clergy, jeer at Israel and worship "Palestine," are unaware that they are rejecting the foundations of their own civilization. These crowds are campaigning for the Islamization of their countries and their own deaths, or else conversion or submission to Islam as inferior beings called dhimmis. Such is Said's legacy, revered by American academics.
Riboua is correct when she writes that America's main challenge will not come from external jihad but from diaspora Muslims in the United States and Europe, "driven by postcolonial resentment and a politics of permanent resistance" ― resentment and resistance against the colonial Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospel.
This, too, is jihad: resentment at having been humiliated by the despised infidel, at having to obey him, while Islam is supposed to command and not be commanded, and while Islam rejects the testimony of the dhimmi. In traditional Islamic society, Jews and Christians were segregated in their own separate quarters, forbidden to possess land, to bear arms, to dress like Muslims, and to ride on horses or camels. Their clothes, homes and houses of worship had to be shabby. They had to be humiliated in every way. In the Ottoman Empire, each year a certain number of Christian children of both sexes would be abducted, enslaved, Islamized, and dispatched to various functions — soldiers, eunuchs in harem, sex slaves, or in the Ottoman administration where they could reach the higher levels.
Indeed, the strict prohibition against Muslims adopting the customs and practices of Jews and Christians or forming friendships with them is as old as the Quran. It lays down these principles and, since its emergence in the eighth century, is the source of endless prohibitions in Islamic jurisprudence. Such prohibitions prevented Muslim countries from adopting Western scientific and technical innovations and delayed the printing of books.
In 2000, ICESCO published an important pamphlet entitled "Strategy of Islamic Cultural Action in the West." The authors, recognizing the incompatibility of Western values and laws with Islamic precepts, recommended a series of steps to prevent the integration and assimilation of Muslims into European culture. Those principles are based on Quranic precepts such as:
"O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people." — Quran 5:51, Sahih International translation.
Ultimately, Muslim states can sleep soundly: the conquest of the West is well under way. Muslim troops are active on the ground. Their greatest ally is a visceral Christian hatred of Jews, which leads some Christians, like Nazis, to seek tearing Judaism out of Christianity — an impossible task — and thereby to rid the West of Judeo-Christianity, just as the Nazis wanted, by Islamizing Europe[4].
Thanks to its many clueless helpers in the West, Jihad is doing just fine.
[1] Dr Abdullah Kanaan, Secretary General of the Royal Committee for Al Quds Affairs, Amman, "Media Plan for Publicising the Cause of Al-Quds Al-Sharif in the West, and Mechanisms for its Implementation", in Protection of Islamic and Christian Holy Sites in Palestine, ICESCO, Nov. 23-25, 2004, pp. 187-208. For more information see, Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011.
[2] Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity, from Jihad to Dhimmitude. Seventh-Twentieth Century. With a Foreword by Jacques Ellul. Translated from the French by Miriam Kochan and David Littman, 1996. French publication, Le Cerf, Paris 1991.
[3] El-Bokhâri. Les Traditions islamiques, (al-Sahih). Translated from Arabic by O. Houdas and W. Marçais, 4 vols. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1903-14. Vol.2, title 60, chap. 69.
Russia claimed its offensive biological weapons program ended with communism, but there’s no clear proof it did.
Earlier today (Monday), I got a message from a friend who works in Russia. With some difficulty, I might add, since he’s British and has to go back and forth circuitously via the Middle East. I won’t give too much away about him, but here’s what he’d heard: Realtors in St. Petersburg are cancelling viewings because the city is about to enter a lockdown. Tomorrow (Tuesday). The reason? An outbreak of pneumonic plague that’s spread from Siberia and is now, apparently, threatening European Russia, the country’s most populous region.
By the time this essay has been published, we’ll know whether that prediction was correct. Either there will be a COVID-style lockdown in St. Petersburg and maybe elsewhere in Russia too, or there won’t. As much as I like being right—who doesn’t? —I don’t fancy a repeat of the COVID pandemic. I’ve had my fill of being confined to my house, told where I can go and whom I can associate with, being unable to go to a pub or a restaurant without a mask and a stupid app on my phone, forced to bargain with the government for my own freedom, threatened with ostracism for refusing experimental treatments I know will do far more harm than good. I’m never doing that shit again. Ever.
I hope it’s all a big, fat, juicy nothingburger, and you can pin a rosette on my chest for being 100% wrong, and I’ll smile for the camera and laugh.
As for my friend, he’s a stand-up bloke. Private school, Oxbridge, Sandhurst, patriotic, smart, very funny. If that’s what he was told, that’s what he was told, and I believe him.
Truth is, nobody really knows what’s happening in Russia right now—not even the Russian people. Only the Russian government, and it’s being tight-lipped even by its stony standards.
What has been confirmed by the Russian government is that a 28-year-old researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, Darya Shipilova, was hospitalized at the end of September with pneumonia and died a few days later. Local media claimed it was pneumonic plague, but state media has denied that claim. Actually, tests showed the pneumonia had nothing to do with the pathogens she was working on, and there was no evidence of a lab accident.
On Telegram, the governor of Irkutsk made reference to a “suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection” and confirmed that the head of Russia’s public-health watchdog, Anna Popova, traveled 2,600 miles from Moscow to the region. It also appears around 200 people suspected of coming into contact with the victim are being monitored, some confined to the hospital.
The claims of pneumonic plague appear to derive from an early statement made by the governor of the neighboring region of Buryatia, Alexey Tsedenov. He has since walked back that statement.
We have independent reporting to thank for the persistent claim that the infection was no mere pneumonia, and for further details about the circumstances of the infection, which apparently took place as a result of a broken test tube.
Given everything that’s happened over the last six years and the reputation of the Russian government, it’s hard not to jump to conclusions. A worker at the—*checks notes*—Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East dies of a “suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection” that’s then confirmed as an undisclosed form of pneumonia? Yeah, that’s pneumonic plague, and the Russkies are lying out of their Жопы. Why would the head of the public-health watchdog fly all that way for a case of pneumonia? Grandmothers die of pneumonia.
Videos on social media, including footage apparently showing men in hazmat suits walking the streets of a town close to Irkutsk, don’t exactly inspire confidence. Neighboring states in Central Asia are tightening their borders with Russia, and President Trump is telling the press he’ll gladly help the Russians.
It really does feel like the spring of 2020 all over again.
But even the independent, non-Kremlin reporting doesn’t seem to add up. Experts have already poured cold water on the idea that a broken test tube may have been the cause. Here’s Dr. Simon Clarke of the University of Reading in the UK.
“One claim attracting attention is that a laboratory worker may have been infected after breaking a test tube in the lab,” he said.
“It is not unheard of for pathogens to escape from labs, but an awful lot must have gone wrong for a lab worker to be infected by a broken test tube.
“Having worked in high-containment laboratories, I know that handling dangerous pathogens involves multiple layers of protection, strict procedures, safety cabinets, airflow systems, and careful procedures carried out by well-trained staff. Lab-acquired infections are rare events, and a broken tube would not automatically lead to exposure or infection. We also don’t tend to use test tubes very much.
“Until more details emerge, it is difficult to assess whether this represents an isolated case, an occupational exposure, or evidence of wider transmission.”
So what’s really going on?
Pneumonic plague is one of those diseases that’s actually too deadly to have a real chance of causing a global pandemic; although caught very early, it can be treated with antibiotics. Some diseases are just like that; they kill too violently, too quickly, preventing people from incubating the disease and transmitting it for long periods. If you were looking to create a really awful global pandemic, you’d balance deadliness and transmissibility very carefully. Unfortunately, Soviet scientists were working on doing exactly that for decades (see Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program (Harvard, 2012)). The plague was one pathogen the Soviets engineered extensively. Genetic engineering was used to make strains that don’t exist in nature. Pneumonic plague was crossed with diphtheria and pathogens that made it antibiotic-resistant, and scientists also found a way to make the plague drop a “secondary toxin” when antibiotics were used: you try to treat it, and instead it delivers a second dose of poison. Strains were altered so they couldn’t be detected by standard tests. We call such research “gain-of-function” now.
While the Institute at Irkutsk was not used for primary weapons research—that happened at places like Kirov and Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, where baboons were infected—the Institute did provide virulent strains for the offensive program.
The Soviets may have had something like 20 tons of weaponized plague on hand, much of it aerosolized and placed inside warheads. Russia claimed its offensive biological weapons program ended with communism, but there’s no clear proof it did. Russia is still listed by the U.S. as a biological and chemical concern, and Putin’s regime is even more paranoid, defensive, and inscrutable than ever. In the face of an existential threat—and losing the war in Ukraine is an existential threat, for Putin at least—nothing is off the table. Putin has accused the U.S. and NATO of conducting “military biological programs” in Ukraine for use against Russia.
This, of course, is the nightmare: not just a strain of pneumonic plague that’s been picked up from a marmot on the steppe, but something that’s been engineered in a lab to be much, much nastier.
We don’t know that’s the case, and it’s possible we’ll never know. As I say, this could all be a nothingburger—and I hope it is.
At the very least, now is a good time to remind ourselves that lab leaks are actually very common. According to a 2024 report from The Lancet, at least 16 lab leaks took place across the world between 2000 and 2021. One of them was in China in October of 2019, and it wasn’t COVID-19. An outbreak of brucellosis took place in Lanzhou, in the northwest of the country. As was later discovered, waste gas from fermentation vats containing the bacteria had not been properly sanitized before it was discharged into the atmosphere. Over the next year, 10,000 people were infected with brucellosis, a disease that used to kill thousands of people every year in warmer climes until the invention of antibiotics.
As well as those leaks, researchers identified more than 300 cases in which workers acquired infections in laboratories, involving 51 different pathogens. One of them was Ebola. Another was Yersinia pestis—plague.
Most of the infections were confined to the labs where they occurred. Eight researchers died.
The vast majority of these leaks and infections took place in North America, Europe, and Asia, with more than three-quarters of the total infections taking place in the U.S.
As the report notes, those numbers are just “the tip of the iceberg.” There’s no standard reporting system, which complicates matters. There are also strong incentives not to report leaks, which is to say, cover-ups happen. The report doesn’t mention COVID-19, whose origins are still heavily disputed, thanks to a concerted early effort by politicians and technocrats, including Anthony Fauci, to rubbish the idea of a lab leak and heavily penalize anybody advocating for it.
Although it’s beyond the scope of the Lancet report, we know the Soviets covered up a very nasty accidental release of weaponized anthrax at Sverdlovsk in 1979. The outbreak killed more than 60 people but could have killed many hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands if the wind had been blowing in a different direction that day—towards the city and not away from it. Authorities blamed the deaths on contaminated meat. It wasn’t until 1992, after the fall of communism, that President Yeltsin admitted the outbreak was caused by a military facility. A malfunctioning air filter had allowed spray-dried anthrax spores to be released outside the facility.
Human error is intrinsic to science. The first-ever recorded lab leak happened in 1893, when a French physician sucked too hard on a mouth pipette and swallowed a gulp of typhoid. But some kinds of error are avoidable. We still live in the same very dangerous, very stupid world that existed prior to March 2020. We haven’t really learned a thing.
Photo: A maintenance worker walks out of the headquarters of Russia's consumer and health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor in Moscow on October 5, 2026. Russian officials on October 5, 2026 downplayed reports that a laboratory technician in Siberia had died of plague, insisting the situation was under control and that post-mortem tests had not found traces of the disease. (Photo by Igor IVANKO / AFP via Getty Images)
Raw Egg Nationalist is an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He rose to prominence as “Raw Egg Nationalist.” He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'
California Republicans face a daunting political machine and entrenched electorate, but Steve Hilton’s provocative strategy may be their best chance to break through.
That’s the milieu into which Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has thrown what in football is termed a “Hail Mary,” a long ball hurled toward an end zone receiver, thrown in the game’s closing seconds by a team that’s behind. Hilton’s just-released video ad features two attractive young women. By all appearances, one of them is about to seduce the other. “Just close your eyes,” the seductress says, “I’ll do all the work.” But then, “Surprise!” The camera pans downward to show the seductress is actually just guiding the other woman’s hand, marking a ballot to vote for Steve Hilton for governor.
Of course, outrage has ensued. Democrats, joined by some Republicans, find it obscene and exploitative. Other Republicans are afraid it will “hurt the brand.” That’s rich. Republicans in California have no brand, and they have no strategy to win. They are politically irrelevant. Democrats dominate state politics. They don’t just have an edge over Republicans. They stomp the sh-t out of Republicans, year after year after year. Hilton should run more racy, spicy ads. He has nothing to lose.
As it is, the opening act of the election is already underway, and the script hasn’t changed. On October 5, ballots were mailed to voters in California. By now, votes are already being cast. “Election season” has begun, with a month of voting, followed by a month of counting. What used to take a day now takes two months. And while some common sense candidates and common sense ballot initiatives may still have a chance in the one-party state, they will be tactical, temporary victories. In a few places, they may slow the machine down. But along the broad front, the machine will roll on, consolidating its power.
Republicans in California are fighting a battle that may be impossible to win. The structural advantages the Democrats have are immense, both in terms of the machine they’ve got for getting candidates elected and the way they’ve primed the electorate to reject Republicans.
By now the mechanics of the election machine are well known. Poorly maintained voter rolls, 29 days of “early voting,” provisional ballots, same-day voter registration, automatic motor-voter registration, universal mail-in ballots, a seven-day post-election grace period for mailed ballots to still be counted, aggressive, comprehensive, micro-targeted ballot harvesting, and county elections offices with 30 days to count ballots while under oversight by Democrat politicians and staffed by Democrat-leaning bureaucrats. Thanks to a state legislature where Democrats hold 75 percent of the seats in both houses, these rules are both corrupt and completely legal.
At the heart of this juggernaut are the public sector unions. In terms of perennial, consistent campaign funding, these unions are by far the biggest political spenders in California. They’re not just active in the big races for governor and seats in the state legislature. They’re even more dominant in literally tens of thousands of elections that determine who controls every school board, city council, county board of supervisors, and special district in the state.
This power is often underappreciated by outside observers. Because public sector unions invariably support Democrats in local elections and spend whatever it takes to get them elected, they have a deep bench of candidates to advance to higher office. This level of spending is also a deterrent to potential Republican contenders. The unions will use all their resources to control local governments, because the public employees who work in them want higher taxes to pay for higher pay and more benefits. They’ve got millions to spend if they need it. Republicans, especially at the local level, do not have any similar source of consistent campaign funding. Why bother?
The machine drives off most qualified candidates and explains why most of California’s cities, counties, and school districts are run by puppets of public sector unions. And by electing their own bosses, these unions have free rein to enact policies that are inherently in conflict with the public interest. The natural motivation of any organization is to grow and prosper, but in the context of a public agency, growth means hiring more employees and prosperity means paying them more. And if programs fail, the answer is always to expand their funding and scope.
This is the insight that still evades most voters in California, which brings us to the other structural advantage Democrats wield in California. They have successfully conditioned California’s voters to associate any deviation from an escalating leftist policy agenda with submitting to bigotry and climate change denial. In an inversion of reality that would be hilarious if its consequences weren’t so tragic, they’ve managed to suggest that bigotry and climate change denial are encouraged by corporations and billionaires because it will distract gullible voters into ignoring that they’re being exploited. But California is the last place where such an argument could have any shred of validity, because in California, for decades, corporations and billionaires have used their power to support a leftist agenda. To the extent there is corporate exploitation, it is in partnership and with the consent of the public sector. Regulation feeds monopolies. In California, this misanthropic synergy has been perfected.
But the indoctrination that obscures these simple truths has saturated every cultural institution in the state. The K-12 system of public education, controlled by the teachers’ union, preaches the message over and over like a mantra, starting in kindergarten. The earth is dying. Racism is rampant. Corporations and billionaires are to blame. That message, slightly more nuanced and expansive, but even more potent, extends to California’s entire system of higher education. Faculty associations, dominated by leftists, ensure that the curricula and the administration never deviate from the message. And California’s media marches in lockstep.
Such is the political landscape for Republicans in California. There is a simple truth that ought to make a difference for Republicans, which is that Democrat policies are the reason there are so many homeless, failing schools, water rationing, the highest prices for gasoline, diesel fuel, and electricity in the United States, the highest taxes, and record levels of poverty. But telling that simple truth cannot prevail against two formidable obstacles: a political machine and a thoroughly indoctrinated electorate.
The meta issue that dominates voter concerns in California today is the cost of living, and yet the overwhelming voter consensus is to continue to elect Democrats. California voters may rebel against Democrat policies on specific issues, and they recognize many systemic problems just downstream from the cost of living, such as a huge homeless population and failing schools. But the indoctrination that most of them have absorbed for their entire lives, reinforced through campaign messaging pushed by an overwhelming funding advantage, means they remain convinced that Republicans would just make all of these problems worse.
And for those who are beginning to question the premise that more government is all we need to fix everything, they are nonetheless voting for Democrats because … Trump. In a sane world, the prevailing message in California’s 2026 electioneering would be slop. Because apart from that one magic word, “TRUMP,” it’s incoherent. They don’t even have to fall back on the leftist tropes of climate change, bigotry, and economic resentment. They’ll pull those back out and use them again when and if the magic word loses its power to induce deranged compliance. As it is, whether it’s a candidate or a ballot initiative, if California’s Democrats oppose it, they associate it with Trump. It’s infantile. It’s Pavlovian.
For these reasons, in the aftermath of the 2026 election in California, there will be higher taxes, more regulations, and ongoing failure of virtually every social program. And as we march into the 2028 cycle, California’s Democrats will continue to claim we need to tax and spend more, and if anyone disagrees, then they will be stigmatized as a MAGA Republican. The message works. It deflects accountability. It shall continue.
When there finally is a fiscal catastrophe that renders California’s state and local governments insolvent, perhaps if there is a huge tech recession, California’s electorate will reach a genuine crossroads. Voters will tilt into supporting full-blown socialism, with all the disastrous consequences that would follow, or they will start to claw back common sense by ceasing to view more government spending as the only possible way forward. We’re not there yet.
Californians cannot see what’s coming, and Republican remedies are unheard. Steve Hilton’s strategy is as good as any. Before you can ever hope to get voters to listen to your ideas, they have to know you’re there.
Much of the fraud is funneled through federal programs like Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and a “pandemic grant for concert venues,” Crocker explained.
(The Center Square) -
Fraud could cost federal taxpayers as much as $521 billion annually, according to a Foundation for Government Accountability report citing a federal estimate.
The report estimates that improper payments by the federal government have totaled about $3 trillion since 2003.
Liesel Crocker, the report’s author and senior research fellow at FGA, spoke with The Center Square in an exclusive interview regarding the findings.
“Fraud against federal programs now runs about $521 billion a year, or seven percent of everything Washington spends. Only five federal agencies have bigger budgets than that,” Crocker said. “And that's just the fraud we know about. Of more than 2,200 federal payment programs, only 64 are reviewed for improper payments each year.”
Much of the fraud is funneled through federal programs like Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and a “pandemic grant for concert venues,” Crocker explained.
“They have a lot in common. Each one frequently fails to double-check applicant information, hands the paperwork to state and county offices, and pushes huge volumes of money out fast,” Crocker said. “Fraud shows up where the checks are easiest to get.”
While the FGA, a nonpartisan think tank, applauded President Donald Trump’s War on Fraud and other antifraud efforts, it said more needs to be done—both by states and the U.S. Congress.
“The bottom line: Congress and states should build on President Trump’s efforts to crack down on fraud and corruption and save taxpayers billions,” the report said.
So far, there are more than 8,000 fraud cases being prosecuted by attorneys general across the country, which the report called just a “small fraction” of the fraud that is being perpetrated.
Crocker added to that claim, pointing to Minnesota as a particular area of concern, while the report also highlighted California, Illinois, Colorado, Maine and New York.
Those states were among 21 states that refused to cooperate with federal efforts to vet their food stamp programs for fraud. In the 29 states that did cooperate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discovered 186,000 dead enrollees and half a million people collecting benefits in two states at once.
“Food stamp trafficking is estimated to cost as much as $4.7 billion a year,” Crocker said. “Every dollar that goes to someone abusing the system is a dollar taken from the truly needy.”
She is hopeful the federal government's efforts are a step in the right direction though.
“This is not hopeless. We can fix this," Crocker said. "For 20 years, Washington never had a meaningful answer to rampant fraud. President Trump is finally treating stealing from the taxpayer like the crime it is. If this much turned up in the states that cooperated, we can only imagine what's hiding in the states that refuse.”
The report encouraged the uncooperative states to work with the federal government on ending “widespread fraud.” It also recommended:
• The Office of Management and Budget encourage more agencies to vet for fraud.
• OMB collaborates with the Treasury Department's Do Not Pay system.
• All programs better verify eligibility, evaluate high-risk providers, and investigate allegations of fraud.
Sophie Shabot experienced “verbal harassment, being chased, being pushed and shoved, being spat on, yelled at, blocked from entering a building,” according to her lawyer.
The New School University Center at 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. June 15, 2019. Credit: Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons.
Sophie Shabot was a student at the Parsons School of Design, a private art college that is part of the New School in New York City, on Oct. 7, 2023. Her classmates knew that she was Jewish and Israeli, and by Oct. 8, she had become a target, her attorney, Ziporah Reich told JNS.
Reich, director of litigation at the Lawfare Project, filed a lawsuit on Shabot’s behalf in the U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York on Oct. 7, the third anniversary of the terror attacks.
A Brooklyn-based, American Jew with Israeli citizenship through her father, Shabot “became a target for relentless antisemitic harassment that took every form you can imagine, including verbal harassment, being chased, being pushed and shoved, being spat on, yelled at, blocked from entering a building,” Reich told JNS.
“Her desk was vandalized,” Reich said. “She was trapped in a Jewish event with pro-Hamas protesters trying to rattle the door and break in, demanding that the Jewish students turn over the ‘terrorist,’ a speaker at the event.”
The lawyer described “an environment overrun with antisemitic, anti-Israel protests, graffiti, posters, leaflets and chants.”
“It was frightening for Shabot and other Jewish students,” she told JNS. “We are trying to hold the New School accountable.”
In one incident, Shabot was trying to get into a sewing studio, when protesters blocked the entrance. She “watched as non-Jewish students were given access to the building,” Reich told JNS. “When she begged to be let in and said, ‘I just need to go to the sewing studio,’ they taunted her with, ‘do the children in Gaza have sewing studios?’”
“One student spit on her,” Reich said. “When she tried to run away from being spat at, the students yelled in a megaphone, ‘f*** Israel, f*** you, b****.’”
Shabot was also called “Zio c***, Zio b****, genocidal maniac and baby killer,” the lawyer said. “They followed her in the street and yelled all kinds of profanities at her.”
Sophie Shabot. Credit: Courtesy.
When Shabot asked the school for help, “not only did they not call the police,” Reich told JNS. “At one point, the school assured the students that were violating the school’s time, place and manner restrictions that they would not be bringing in the police.”
“Students have a hard time reporting stuff to law enforcement,” Reich said. “They expect the school to deal with it. This is happening on school grounds, and they have an expectation that if they report it to the appropriate people at school, the behavior will be dealt with.”
The New School should have done something about the spitting, pushing, shoving, name-calling and students blocking Shabot from entering a building, even without the anti-Israel messaging or targeting based on ethnicity and religion, according to Reich.
“The school is under a tremendous amount of pressure, based on the societal message that Israel is the demon and that Jews are supporting a genocide and it’s a human rights issue,” she told JNS. “They’re willing to sacrifice the rights of Jewish students to allow for that message to be proliferated. Most schools, including the New School, would never take that approach if it was related to another minority.”
Reich said that if her client reaches a settlement with the New School, “we wouldn’t be settling for anything less than compensation and significant policy change.” If it goes to trial, “policy change is not on the table, because you can’t get policy change in a trial,” she said.
‘Predictable’ result
There are “similarities” between this lawsuit and the that Shabbos Kestenbaum brought against Harvard University, which reached a settlement in 2025, according to Reich. And that’s not just because of the similarities between the Jewish student names.
Their campus experiences were similar due to groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, recruiting students across different campuses, the lawyer said.
“They’re giving them the same messages, the same materials, the same tents and other paraphernalia and tools to carry out their harassment,” she told JNS. “They’re engaging in similar types of harassment. The result is predictable.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s campus Jew-hatred report card gave the New School an “F” in March 2026, noting that the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office had opened a probe into the school in March 2024 and in March 2025, the department accusd the New School of violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In 2025, Brandon White, a Parsons graduate, sued the school for failing to protect him from assault and antisemitic slurs based on the mistaken belief that he was Jewish. White also alleged that he was blocked and shoved and that protesters called him a “Zio” and slammed a door on his hand. He claimed the school refused to investigate and that it opened a disciplinary case against him instead.
A judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that White did not plausibly show he was targeted because he was perceived as Jewish or Israeli. The judge let White amend the complaint and refile, which he did in September.
As an attorney, Reich is approached by “dozens upon dozens of students and employees subjected to severe and pervasive antisemitic harassment, begging for our help,” she told JNS. But not all incidents have a legal remedy.
“Public schools are subjected to the First Amendment,” she said.
That means that protesters can gather in designated areas and shout antisemitic slogans and be legally protected.
“Antisemitism is not illegal,” she told JNS. “Stop filing lawsuits you’re not going to win. Sometimes there is no legal theory upon which you can sue, even though what is happening is antisemitic.”
Jessica Russak-Hoffman is a reporter for JNS in Seattle.
This one is notable because it carries echoes of the Crown Heights riots, but with a very different cast of characters.
I’ve been saying for years that a backlash of Black Americans, and a march off the Democrat plantation, might be the only thing that can save our country. An incident in Detroit in September might indicate such a change.
(Notice that I capitalize the terms “Black” and “White,” as I would out of respect for any ethnicity, although I do not use the term “African-American.”)
The incident in Detroit is reminiscent of one in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, in 1991, but with a change-up in the casting.
I have on several occasions mentioned the Crown Heights riots, usually in the context of the riots being an occasion for which poverty pimp/”community activist” Al Sharpton has blood on his hands and has never been held accountable. Now comes an occurrence in Detroit that carries echoes of the Crown Heights riots, but with a significant change-up in the cast of characters.
The impetus for the riots was a traffic accident in August 1991, in which a car in the police-escorted motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson ran a red light and struck two Black children, one of whom, Gavin Cato, 7, died. Rebbe Schneerson was the charismatic leader of the Lubavitcher sect of Orthodox Jews, which had a significant presence in Crown Heights (and which treated the rebbe as if he were the Messiah, or at least royalty).
There were already tensions between the Lubavitchers and the neighborhood’s Black residents, and the Reverend Al Sharpton and his cohorts used the accident to fan the flames of those tensions, which resulted in several days of rioting in which Blacks attacked Orthodox Jews and damaged and looted their homes and businesses. A second fatality was Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old rabbinical student from Australia, who was chased down, stabbed, and beaten by a crowd yelling, “Get the Jew!”
On September 12, in the Warrendale neighborhood of western Detroit, an area that is 50 to 70 percent Black and also has a significant Muslim Arab population spilling over from neighboring Dearborn (which has come to be known as Dearbornistan because Muslims are now in the majority there), an 18-year-old woman of Arab heritage drove through a red light and collided with a car driven by Susan Glass-Smith, a 49-year-old Black woman.
Glass-Smith’s car was surrounded by 20 to 30 or more Arab men who not only aided the other driver’s disappearance from the scene but also opened all of Glass-Smith’s car doors, took her purse and other items from her car, wielded a baseball bat to threaten her and a man who tried to intervene, and assailed her with racial slurs. She is still traumatized, and she is calling for hate crime charges to be filed against the men who surrounded her.
I became aware of this incident when I saw a video of members of an organization called New Era Detroit reacting to it. A dozen or more Black men appeared on the block where the accident had taken place and made their presence known to the Arab men there. As can be seen in the video, they showed great restraint in not reacting to what sounded like racial insults from the Arabs gathered on a front porch. They nevertheless made it abundantly clear that behavior of the type to which Susan Glass-Smith had been subjected would not be tolerated.
At least one of the New Era Detroit members in the video was outfitted like a member of a SWAT team, and others looked like they were channeling the intimidating look of Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers, or even the New Black Panthers members who allegedly intimidated voters at a voting station in Philadelphia during the 2008 election (in the Philadelphia incident, while the mere presence of the Black men was construed as intimidating, there was never any overt intimidating behavior).
And yet I was rooting for them.
I found it interesting that, when New Era Detroit “pulled up” on the block where the traffic accident had occurred and where Susan Glass-Smith had been assailed, they were met with similar language and gestures. I have noticed a pattern, going back to the ‘80s or earlier, of Arabs in America emulating the fashions, language, and gestures of ghetto Blacks. I’ve seen this in particular in videos of street demonstrations in Dearborn, when the Muslims there were first showing their presence and flexing their political muscles.
And, similarly, there’s been a trend among Blacks to give their children Arab-sounding names, which strikes me as a bit strange given the history of Arabs as slave-traders. Perhaps that odd symbiosis is coming to an end.
It turns out that, based on other videos I’ve seen (e.g., here, here, and here), New Era Detroit is a group of plain-spoken, even rough-looking Black men who, for some 12 years, have been working for the betterment of their own communities, largely by providing a positive male presence in a community in which such a presence has been conspicuous in its absence.
I don’t get any sense of an anti-White attitude from these Black men; rather, I get a strong sense that they are deeply embarrassed by the attitudes and behavior of other Blacks, behavior that has perpetuated negative stereotypes and encouraged and even glamorized the lack of emotional control that is at the root of so many Blacks killing one another.
They are out to change all that. And I get no sense that they feel any dependence on the Democrat Party for any kind of help or support.
In a sense, they reflect our Founders’ intent that all able-bodied Americans be organized into militias, state by state and even block by block. That aspect was on display as they walked down the middle of the street in Warrendale.
What if Black Americans declared themselves at the forefront of resistance to the incursions of Arabs and other Muslims?
This strikes me as a case of Detroit’s Arabs saying, “We own these streets!” and Detroit’s Blacks saying, “Oh, no, you don’t!” And if there’s a battle between these two groups, my money is on the Blacks.
Image created using AI.
Stu Tarlowe was, for more than a decade, the personal editor for the late Conservative talk radio icon and author Barry Farber. Stu has been a contributor to American Thinker since 2010, and also writes “Stu’s Stack o’ Stuff” (the name is an homage to the late Rush Limbaugh), the content of which is not exclusively political, but also personal, and where subscriptions are currently still free.
