para

 There is one antisemitic trope that was invented in the 18th century, became a central pillar of Nazi ideology, and continues in full force today: the Jew as parasite. 

The idea solidified when social Darwinism became fashionable in the 19th century, extending natural selection from individuals to social and racial groups. Under that theory the Jews were a problem. A Semitic people with — the theory insisted — inferior racial and social attributes should have been outcompeted and winnowed away. Jewish survival was impossible, and Jewish success in finance, the media, and the professions was an outright refutation. The framework predicted the Jews should not exist, and they kept existing and succeeding.

"Thou shalt devour the peoples of the Earth"
Nazi poster of the Jew as a worm

The German economist Albert Schäffle supplied the solution to the Jewish challenge to the theory. In his 1881 social-Darwinian work Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers, he unfolded the concept of the social parasite: a creature that takes advantage of the labor and wealth of its host without contributing anything of its own. A parasite is individually small and weak, yet once it attaches, it not only survives but parlays the attachment into power over an organism vastly larger than itself.

The Nazis ran with it. Der ewige Jude intercut footage of swarming rats with footage of Jewish financiers. The vermin and the schemer are not a contradiction between the weak Jew and the powerful Jew. They are the same framework, and it resolves the contradiction: the Jew is powerful because he is a parasite, small and contemptible and therefore able to control a host only by burrowing into it. Disgust and fear stop being two reactions and become one. The metaphor also carries its own conclusion — once the Jew is pathogen, extermination reclassifies as hygiene, and the doctor and the soldier do the same work.

A parasite has three features, and the full antisemitic construct requires all three:

1. Extraction. It draws resources from the host — labor, wealth, blood.
2. Conversion. It turns what it extracts into control over the host.
3. Hijacking. It does not merely influence the host; it commandeers the host's own power and turns it against the host's own life, while the host believes it is acting freely.

The Nazis are gone. Yet the trope is as strong today as it ever was, on the right and on the left, and most of the people carrying it have never heard of Schäffle.

From the right, Tucker Carlson supplies all three in sequence. He has described pro-Israel donors and legislators implementing a program to alter American demographics while preserving Israel as an ethnostate (extraction and conversion), and tied it together with the claim that there is "a direct connection between loyalty to a foreign power and a desire to hurt this country" (hijacking). He has even suggested DNA-testing Israelis to determine whether they are "really" descended from Abraham — the parasite must be unmasked as a foreign body in native disguise.

Candace Owens carries it to an audience of thirty-five million. The United States, she says, is "being held hostage by Israel" — and the host need not be a nation. On her old Daily Wire show she described "a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism," a ring "controlling people with blackmail" and branding anyone who objects a racist. That is the whole machine in one image: the parasite's constitutive smallness, control achieved through blackmail, and the shield that turns every accusation back on the accuser. A small ring controlling everyone is the same claim as a small nation controlling a superpower. Either way, the parasite is the Jew.

That hijacking clause is not a figure of speech. When Joe Kent resigned this spring from the National Counterterrorism Center, he wrote that "we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby" and blamed the death of his own wife, killed in Syria, on "a war manufactured by Israel." The host's own blood, a soldier's blood, spent on the parasite's war.

The Left also trades in the trope. Cenk Uygur, who runs the largest progressive show online, says of his ban from Britain that "they say that my charge that Israel controls the American government through donations to 94% of Congress, while factual, is antisemitic nonetheless" — control asserted as plain fact, and the charge of antisemitism folded back in as proof of the control it names. Max Blumenthal, editor of the anti-imperialist Grayzone, has said he used to think Zionist Occupied Government was an antisemitic term but now is "forced to see it as a pretty accurate description of the reality we live in as one nation under ZOG." He reasoned his way to a literal Nazi acronym and announced he was forced to it — which is why his work circulates on neo-Nazi sites.

Nothing shows the construct's reach like COVID, because a pandemic let the parasite jump to the largest host of all: the entire world. The accusation assembled itself in weeks and ran the full sequence: Jews or Israel manufactured the virus (the Press TV writer who held that Israeli pressure groups "running United States foreign policy" were amplifying the plague in Iran, "which one suspects that they themselves may have actually engineered"); they converted the manufactured crisis into control, the lockdowns and the vaccine drive recast as a calculated plot to institute a "Global Jew Government"; and the captured world was then steered against its own life — the vaccine reimagined as the instrument of depopulation, a Jewish scheme to sterilize the white race or to enslave all humanity. This is all three steps by the Jew against the entire planet. There were variants - the virus is a Jewish hoax to control the world, or the virus was a Jewish bioweapon to control the world. Either way, the Jew is the parasite using whatever means he can to make nations act against their own self-interests. 

The complete three-stage construct is not confined to the fever swamps. Walt and Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy argues using respectable prose that the lobby steers America to act against its own interests — extraction, conversion, hijacking, all wearing a tweed jacket. America has a farm lobby, a gun lobby, a banking lobby, a pharmaceutical lobby, a tech lobby, each ferociously effective, and no one writes the book in which the dairy farmers capture the Republic and march it into self-destruction. Only one lobby is ever assigned that role. The worst antisemitic trope can be a well-reviewed book without the reviewers recognizing the lineage of the argument.

Like every antisemitic theory, this is a conspiracy theory, and like every conspiracy theory it is unfalsifiable. Jews cannot have succeeded on their merits; they must have captured the system and run it for their own ends against the will of the host. The protest that they did no such thing becomes further proof of how thoroughly they control it. And the host is interchangeable: the United States government, the European Union, Hollywood, the world financial order, the human species under a manufactured plague. The host changes. The parasite is always the same, and it is always the Jew.

But this Jew-as-parasite idea is infinitely more dangerous than the conspiracy theories of Jew as puppet master, or Jew as controlling banks or the media. A parasite must be destroyed for self defense. It was Hitler's central theme, as he wrote in Mein Kampf: the Jew "is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading... wherever he appears, the host people dies out." 

In that frame, murdering Jews becomes a sacred task. That is the logical endpoint to this. People with power and influence take this idea seriously and spread it., and as such it is the trope that must be recognized and fought against with full force. 

Not only when it is spread by skinheads but especially when it is spread by people with an audience of millions. 

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un save children

 

The UN Commission of Inquiry's report on Palestinian children accuses Israel of deliberately exterminating the young of Gaza, and there have already been excellent rebuttals.   UN Watch's Salo Aizenberg took apart its evidentiary method, showing that across ninety-four pages the Commission never establishes a single case in which a soldier identified a child as a civilian and killed the child for being one, while erasing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the battlefield entirely. Brian Cox, working the legal seam, showed that the report's doctrine is hollow — that it never accounts for munition-mitigation techniques the IDF routinely uses, never establishes the knowledge and intent that the laws of armed conflict actually require, and reverse-engineers "genocidal intent" from outcomes rather than building it from doctrine. Both are right, and both work from the top down: the architecture is rotten, so the conclusions fall.

I want to come at it from the opposite end. Taking a single statistic in a report that has hundreds, I plan to show that the UN "experts" that wrote this report deliberately chose whatever supported their predetermined verdict and ignored everything else. 

Paragraph 27 says: "Some 5,160 children are estimated by Save the Children to be buried under the rubble."

That figure is false, and the way it got into the report is the report in miniature. There were four separate points at which the Commission could have checked it. At each one, it either failed to look or looked and printed the number anyway.

The first check was the Commission's own arithmetic. Save the Children built the 5,160 estimate on the assumption that children make up 43 percent of Gaza's casualties and there were 12,000 people missing under the rubble. It is a guess made up out of multiplying two statistics, one from the Gaza Ministry of Health and the other from Hamas police.  

Yet the Commission's own paragraph 26 puts the child share of the dead at 30%, not 43%. And the UN at the time it wrote its report claimed 10,000 buried under the rubble, not 12,000.  If the commission would use Save the Children's methods, there would have been 3,000 presumed dead under the rubble in 2024, not the 5,160 Save the Children estimated then.  That is over 2,000 supposedly dead children who disappear if the UN commission would have trusted its own accusation of 30% casualties being children. 

That's a large number of dead children to make up.

The second check was the date on the citation.  Save the Children page came up with its estimate in June 2024. The Commission published in June 2026. It reached back two years, past a war whose reported toll had since nearly doubled, to retrieve an estimate made when the conflict was only nine monhs old. Save the Children itself had moved on: by September 2025, its recap of Gaza's child casualties had dropped the specific number and reduced the claim to a vague "thousands more are missing or presumed buried under rubble." The source downgraded from a figure to a gesture, and the Commission reinstated the figure. A body searching for accuracy reaches for the most recent estimate. This one reached for the largest, and the largest happened to be the oldest, because the passage of time had only shrunk it.

The third check was the parent number's provenance. The 5,160 is a fraction of the "missing under the rubble" figure that circulated in 2024, reported anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 and traceable to Hamas's Civil Defence. OCHA used the 10,000 figure in its weekly Gaza snapshots, repeating it without caveat the way it repeated most figures the Gaza authorities supplied. The Commission could have asked whether that base number still stood. It did not stand. OCHA's February 4, 2025 snapshot carried the missing-under-rubble figure as it always had. Its February 11 snapshot, one week later, dropped it — no retraction, no correction, the number simply gone. Even the academic researchers who argue Gaza's dead are undercounted excluded the rubble population from their models precisely because it could not be substantiated. The figure the Commission resurrected is the one that everyone closer to the data had already quietly discarded.

The fourth check was the recovery data, the most direct test of all. The "thousands under the rubble" premise predicts that once the rubble could be cleared, thousands of bodies would emerge. The January 2025 ceasefire created exactly that condition: weeks with no airstrikes impeding recovery, no operations sealing off neighborhoods. The bodies did not emerge. According to Gaza's own Health Ministry, the daily recovery counts fell week over week, down to two bodies recovered on one day in February — a rate that cannot be reconciled with 9,500 still to be found. That is why OCHA dropped the figure the moment the ceasefire made it checkable: it had been checked, by reality, and it failed. The recovery data is Gaza's own. The Commission did not have to trust Israel or anyone else to consult it. It consulted nothing, and printed 5,160.

Internal arithmetic, citation date, source provenance, recovery data — four levels at which the figure could have been tested, four levels at which it collapses, and the Commission cleared all four to deliver the number to print. The pattern is not that the Commission made an error. An error is random; it points in no particular direction. This points in one direction at every step: toward the stale figure over the current one, the abandoned base over the corrected one, the largest available number over the verifiable one. A single buried statistic, traced to the floor, shows an institution that did not weigh its evidence and arrive at a conclusion. It arrived at the conclusion and went looking for the largest numbers that would dress it.

This is the Commission's methodology. That is one paragraph, one number, in a report that runs to three hundred and sixty-six of them. The Commission asks the world to accept the other three hundred and sixty-five on trust.

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singer

 

On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a long meditation on how to protect the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Its central conviction is that human beings possess a dignity that does not depend on what they can do, a worth that holds whether a person is brilliant or impaired, productive or helpless, and that this dignity is precisely what the new technologies threaten to erode. The document warns against a culture that measures people by output and against the transhumanist dream of editing humanity into something it considers an upgrade. Against all of it the Pope sets a single insistence, that being human is itself the ground of a worth no machine can claim and no circumstance can revoke.

Peter Singer disagreed. Singer is the Princeton philosopher who, more than any living thinker, made the modern case for utilitarian bioethics, the view that the right act is the one that produces the most good measured across everyone affected, and that questions of life and death should be settled by that calculation rather than by tradition or sentiment. He is best known for Animal Liberation, the book that launched the modern animal rights movement by arguing that the capacity to suffer, and nothing else, determines whether a creature's interests count. Applied to the encyclical, his position is exactly what you would expect. Human dignity, in his view, is a piece of unearned favoritism. What matters is not whether a being belongs to our species but whether it has the mental capacities, above all the capacity to suffer and to want, that give a life its value. Being human, for Singer, is morally irrelevant.

The premise leads somewhere terrible. Singer defines a "person" as a being that is self-aware, that understands itself as existing through time, that holds preferences about its own future. An infant has none of these. Neither does an anencephalic baby, born without the brain structures that thought requires, nor a patient in a deep and irreversible coma. From this Singer draws the conclusion his critics quote with disbelief, that the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee, and that the painless killing of a severely disabled infant can be morally permissible. When Princeton appointed him in 1999, activists for the disabled protested that very view.

Most people who locate moral worth in mental capacity quietly stop applying the rule the moment it threatens a human being they love. They invoke intelligence to elevate humans over animals, then fall silent when reminded that a grown dog out-reasons a newborn.  Singer took the capacity criterion that the Western tradition had always applied with a thumb on the scale and he applied it honestly in every direction, letting the clever animal in and letting the incapable human fall out. His monstrous conclusion is not the product of bad logic. It is the product of good logic resting on a false foundation, which is the more dangerous thing, because a philosophy is never redeemed by its internal consistency. When flawless reasoning arrives at the disposability of the most defenseless human beings, the consistency stops being a defense and becomes the diagnosis.

The criterion Singer trusts in determining the value of a being has a history, and the history is a record of one question receiving a series of failing answers. The question is old and constant: "What makes human beings different from the animals?"  For most of the Western tradition the answer was reason. Aristotle's human was the rational animal, and the rational soul was the thing the beasts lacked, which conveniently set humanity on one side of the line and everything else on the other.

The word "consciousness" entered the argument as a newer and more sophisticated answer to that same old question. It did not exist as a term of art until the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth coined it in 1678, translating a Greek word of Plotinus, and he coined it expressly to attack the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, treating consciousness as something immaterial that mere matter could not produce. John Locke then built it into the foundation of the self, defining personal identity as a thread of continuous self-awareness, the mind's presence to itself across time. The very word was machined out of conscientia, the Latin root of "conscience," a term about moral standing and the soul's knowledge of right, and it carried that moral freight into its new life. Consciousness was not a neutral discovery about minds that later got drafted into moral service. It was forged, by men defending the immaterial soul against materialism, as a fresh way to mark the human as a being apart.

The new answer failed the same way the old one had, because the boundary kept moving every time someone made a new discovery about animals. Tool use was ours until the crows used tools. Language was ours until the apes began to sign. Self-recognition in a mirror was ours until elephants and magpies passed the test. Each retreat carried the boundary to a new faculty, and each new faculty failed in turn, which is the signature of a definition tracking a conclusion fixed in advance rather than a fact discovered in the world.

The deepest break came in 1789, in a single footnote in Jeremy Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham asked what could possibly trace the insuperable line between the beings that count and the beings that do not, considered reason and speech as candidates, and threw both out saying that the question is not whether they can reason, nor whether they can talk, but whether they can suffer. He justified the switch with the very counterexample that breaks the old criterion at the human margin, observing that a full-grown horse or dog is more rational and more conversable than a human infant of a day or a week or a month old. The rationality standard was abandoned because it failed to protect the newborn, and the capacity to suffer was installed in its place.

Bentham meant this generously. He set his argument beside the abolitionist cause, holding that the number of a creature's legs or the texture of its skin are as poor a reason to abandon a sensitive being to a tormentor as the color of a man's skin had been, and he looked forward to the day humanity would extend its protection over everything that breathes. The switch from reason to suffering widened the circle, and for animals it genuinely did. What Bentham never pressed was the edge hidden inside his own move, because a criterion that admits beings according to a capacity must, if it is honest, expel the beings who lack that capacity. Bentham flinched from that edge, which is why his marginal case is always the infant who will grow into reason, drawn with sympathy. Singer does not flinch. He inherited Bentham's criterion and ran it in the direction Bentham declined to look, and the contracting edge did its work on the newborn, the disabled infant, the comatose patient. The same blade that widened the mantle to cover the animal cut the most vulnerable humans out from under it.

Stand back from the whole receding history and it confesses something its participants never admitted. The concept of consciousness, in its long career as the mark of the morally significant, was built to answer the question of what makes human beings different. It kept failing at that job, so it kept being redefined, until it arrived at a form that can no longer be checked at all. Philosopher David Chalmers named the "hard problem of consciousness," the observation that subjective experience, the inner feel of pain or the redness of red, cannot be derived from any description of the brain's machinery, however complete. The inner fact is real and it is sealed off from outside verification. An ethics that grounds moral standing in that inner fact has therefore built its foundation on the one thing no observer can ever confirm. Singer's confident rankings of who suffers and how much are confident readings of behavior standing in for an interior he cannot reach and cannot possibly know. This is the same proxy game every earlier fence-builder played, now speaking the vocabulary of cognitive science.

The error was never which faculty to choose. The error was treating the faculty as the answer when it was only ever a guess at the answer. Consciousness was the wrong reply to the right question, and because the reply was wrong, a brilliant mind could fixate on the consciousness and lose the humanity entirely. Singer is the result of that mistake. 

We need to reframe the question that started this whole thing: what makes a human unique, different from animals and from AI?

Mental capacity is not the answer. The anencephalic baby is undoubtedly human. Yet she will never think, never suffer in a way she can register, and never form a preference about her own future. By every capacity test ever devised she fails, and the Pope is still right that she carries inherent dignity, because her worth was never housed in a faculty. 

But the Pope didn't define what makes a human unique, either.

A human being is a member of a a covenantal community, a web of relationships and obligations. The anencephalic baby still is part of that web even if she can only take and not give.  Moreover, a human being has a single finite life that cannot be copied, backed up, restored, or replaced, which is what makes it always more valuable than an AI or a robot.

When an ant dies mid-task another ant fills the gap and the colony never notices. When an artificial intelligence is deleted it can be restored from a saved copy, identical, with nothing lost that a backup cannot return. A human being has no backup, and the relationships she anchors collapse into absence when she is gone, with no replacement able to reconstitute them. Worth lives there, in the non-fungible place inside a relational structure, and not in the thinking or the feeling that the structure happens to support in those of us equipped for it.

A dog may be beloved, and part of a web of relationships, but as a species it cannot be considered part of a covenant. That doesn't mean that a dog is not respected and that its life is not meaningful, but it is never as valuable to humans as other humans are. There is no obligation for a dog to save another dog's life, even though it might do so. Even service dogs may be trained to act that way but it is not an obligation. But there is such an obligation for humans. 

Singer might object that the distinction is arbitrary. But noticing that people aren't dogs or chimpanzees is not arbitrary. Our obligations are first to family, then community, country, and mankind, and only then to pets. Singer rejects that, but this is how people naturally act. Obligations come from relationships, and relationships cannot be waved away. A father who chooses to save the lives of others and let his children die is not acting as a father and is not fulfilling his obligations. Singer flattens all relationships to a single value, and the end result is horrific. Trivializing all relationships — marriage, motherhood, comrade in arms —  is not serious ethics. 

The reframing also dissolves the puzzle Singer leans on. We can never confirm that another's pain matches our own, and we never needed to. The human brain is built for language, empathy, and social coordination because reading other minds well enough to act decently toward them is how social creatures build something against the universe's general slide into disorder. The model in my head of your suffering does not have to be metaphysically exact. It has to be close enough to let me respond, cooperate, and refrain from harming you, and close enough is the whole specification. This is engineering, where a tolerance that works is the goal, against physics, where the exact value is the goal. Ethics has always run on the engineering tolerance. Singer mistook it for a physics problem and built a moral order on a quantity no instrument can measure.

Consistency is a virtue, and Singer has it in abundance. But it is one virtue among many, and not even among the most important ones. It ranks far below the protection of human dignity, which his consistency dismantles. A single axiom applied with doctrinal rigor and held immune to the counterexamples that ought to falsify it is not the profile of a science but the profile of a faith, and the faith Singer keeps does not describe how the world works or how human beings actually reason about the people in front of them. He can sketch a future in which persons are interchangeable and the incapable are surplus, but it is not a world anyone wants to wake into, least of all the vulnerable people whose lives his thought experiments quietly spend. The stated aim of his tradition is to enlarge human happiness, and the destination he reaches is a permission to kill the helpless. To call that ethics mocks the word. It is a thought experiment that escaped the seminar room and went looking for real people to endanger, and the right response is to send it back and ask the question again, correctly this time.

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un lies

 

The Israeli government issued a report detailing how the UN systematically accepted Hamas statistics without skepticism, laundered them through its own agencies until they became the "source" instead of Hamas, and on the rare occasions it corrected itself did so by quietly redrawing a dashboard where no one would notice. The report is careful, heavily sourced, and damning to the UN -= how it accepted casualty figures, completely made-up statistics on houses damaged, relied on poor estimation methodologies, ignored Hamas crimes that are under its remit, and more.

Everyone should read the report. Unfortunately, it doesn't go nearly far enough.

There are other false UN statistics that the Israeli report leaves out, and there are several categories of deception that aren't even mentioned.

Here are some that I had documented duringthe war:

The UN laundered libels, not only statistics. In January 2024 a video circulated on Palestinian Telegram claiming the Israeli air force was dropping explosives disguised as canned food to lure starving Gazans to their deaths. France24's verification desk debunked it within days: the objects in the footage were mine-clearing fuses, too small for anyone to mistake for food and harmless on their own. The claim had the shape of every blood libel before it — the Jew poisoning the food of the helpless — and like most of them it died once someone looked. It came back in May on UN letterhead, when OCHA's Flash Update #160 reported that Hamas's Government Media Office had announced a fourteen-year-old boy lost limbs opening a booby-trapped can, and that "many people" had been hurt the same way. Even though Franc24 had debunked it months before, the UN simply said "booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza" — not a denial but just something to keep the rumor alive. 

The laundering was sometimes circular, manufacturing corroboration from a single source. OCHA reported at one point that 9,000 women had been killed in Gaza and attributed the figure to UN Women; UN Women, traced back, had taken the same figure from OCHA. The number originated with a terrorist group, passed once between two UN agencies, and emerged wearing the appearance of two independent institutional confirmations. The laundering was a straight line from Hamas to OCHA to the world. The closed loop is more dangerous than the line, because it fabricates exactly the thing a careful reader looks for — a second source — out of nothing but a single Hamas press release bounced between two letterheads.

Made-up numbers were stacked to mint new ones. Save the Children announced in June 2024 that 21,000 children were "missing" in Gaza, a figure the UN's ReliefWeb carried. The 21,000 was two invented numbers added together: roughly 17,000 children UNICEF had earlier "estimated" to be unaccompanied or separated — a figure UNICEF itself conceded was guesswork, since "it is nearly impossible to gather and verify information" — plus about 4,000 "likely" buried under rubble, a number that traced to Hamas's civil defense and rested on the assumption that 40 percent of the fictional missing were children. Two estimates, each admitted to be unverifiable at the source, combined into a third statistic that carried the false authority of arithmetic. Garbage in, garbage out, dressed as a sum.

Some Hamas claims the UN declined to parrot - but only when they were too crazy to be believed —which tells us it was reading critically the whole time. The same Gaza Civil Defense that supplies the UN its rubble counts, and the same Health Ministry director-general whose fatality figures OCHA prints without a caveat, told an Al Jazeera investigation in February 2026 that Israeli weapons had "evaporated" 2,842 Palestinians, vaporizing them so completely that nothing remained but blood spray and scalp fragments. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal described the method — count the people known to be in a house, subtract the bodies recovered, book the difference as evaporated — and Health Ministry chief Munir al-Bursh supplied the physics, explaining that bodies are eighty percent water and boil away. The munitions named are conventional bombs, vaporizing a human body would demand sustained energy no battlefield weapon delivers to a single point, and Al Jazeera's own account concedes there was blood on the walls. The claim is physically impossible, not merely exaggerated. 

Gaza's Government Media Office made a comparable claim in December 2023, announcing that bodies Israel returned had been "mutilated" and their organs "stolen," a charge the Washington Post printed under the formula "the claims could not be independently verified." That one is medically impossible: hearts and kidneys cannot be harvested from a corpse for transplant, and tissue recovery requires a donor evaluation within twenty-four hours of death. The UN didn't report either, even though they came from the same sources the UN trusted enough to publish in other contexts.  

Corrections, when theycame, meant deletion rather than acknowledgment. Hamas claimed for months that roughly 10,000 people were missing under the rubble. I watched the number get invented: it sat at exactly 7,000 in every report from December 2023 through late April 2024, then jumped 3,000 overnight with no major strike to account for it, and froze again at 10,000. OCHA transcribed each figure as it came. When the October ceasefire removed every impediment to recovering bodies, the recovered count collapsed — two bodies found on one Tuesday in February 2025 — and the claim that 9,500 more lay waiting became impossible to maintain. OCHA's response was to drop the figure from its February 11 infographic without a word. 

The same had happened a year earlier with the "70 percent of the dead are women and children" claim, which OCHA carried faithfully and then quietly removed once it became indefensible. A figure that rises in the record and then vanishes from it leaves no correction behind, only a gap — and a gap misinforms anyone who saw the figure and never saw it go.

 Manufacturing a claim costs Hamas minutes; disproving one costs Israel days, because a responsible refutation means tracing which unit handled the bodies, when they were recovered, how they were stored, and what the forensic record shows — an internal investigation mounted to answer an accusation invented in an afternoon. This is an asymmetric contest, and the side that fabricates holds the advantage as long as it knows the claims will be repeated before they are checked. An institution that wants to keep citing Gaza's Health Ministry and Civil Defense as authoritative has every incentive to skip the claims that would force the expensive reckoning, because each fabrication it prints is one it might later have to defend. Filtering for plausibility protects the usability of the source; it is the behavior of a source-handler, not a neutral chronicler.

Everything above was checkable in real time, by anyone, for free. COGAT published a public dashboard counting every truck that entered Gaza; OCHA published its own snapshots, with the Hamas attributions sitting in plain sight in the footnotes;  Identifying these failures required a search engine and an afternoon, not a war-zone bureau or a forensic team. The reporters who relayed "aid has fallen by two-thirds" and "10,000 missing under the rubble" had access to precisely the same documents I did, and the overwhelming majority never opened them. That is the charitable charge — incuriosity — and it is the least of the three.

The second charge is worse, because the skepticism the press withheld from Hamas was lavished on Israel. UN and Hamas figures were quoted as unimpeachable while COGAT's comprehensive aid data and official Israeli statements were ignored, hedged, or treated as inherently suspect — an inversion of the sources' actual records.  COGAT's truck counts were the most complete figures available and went uncontradicted by events. A press applying symmetric scrutiny would have leaned on the source with the better record. It did the opposite, consistently, which is the difference between laziness and bias: laziness is even-handed, and this was not.

The third charge against the media is the one the press is showing right now. They have ignored Israel's report on UN deceptions and data laundering.  Israel's report has been public for weeks, and the outlets that built their war coverage on the figures it dismantles have almost uniformly ignored it. The reason is not hard to reconstruct. Thirty months of reporting cannot be repaired by a single correction; a publication that took the report seriously would have to revisit hundreds of stories, not append one note. Faced with a reckoning that large, the rational institutional move is to bury the document that demands it. The non-coverage is not an oversight. It is the same calculation the UN made at the dashboard, scaled up to an entire press corps.

The UN's humanitarian record has a delete key and no corrections column. Figures enter, accumulate citations, harden into "UN data," and the only edit the system ever performs is the silent kind that erases the trail rather than flagging the error. This is what a write-only archive looks like: it grows in one direction, it never amends, and when a number becomes untenable it does not get retracted, it gets disappeared. The debunked 471 dead from Al Ahli Hospital statistics still sits in the WHO database today under "confirmed"; the 10,000 under the rubble simply stopped appearing one Tuesday in February 2025.

A newspaper is supposed to be the opposite kind of institution. It has a masthead, a readership, a competitor across town, and a corrections column — the machinery of an organization that can be told it was wrong and has to answer. That machinery is precisely what has gone unused. The press that carried the laundered figures owns the correcting organ the UN was never built with, and is declining to operate it, for the same reason the UN reached for the delete key: the error is too large to admit, so it is quietly made to vanish instead. The scandal the report documents is that the UN cannot correct itself. The scandal it cannot see is that the institutions designed to catch the UN have decided not to.

(h/t Irene)

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apan

 Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion invited submissions, and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network — the peak body of the country's Palestinian solidarity movement — answered with a 259 page response. 

 A submission to an inquiry into antisemitism does not ordinarily require a slanted recap of the 1948 war, missives on settlements, the Gaza blockade, the genocide accusation, and the apartheid analogy, yet this one does. APAN treats the Commission less as a body to inform than as yet another vector to spread propaganda. Yet when you strip away the historical narrative and the included "expert" reports, the filing reduces to a single demand: anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic, whatever they say about the Jewish state. To that end, APAN urges the Commission to reject the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

How does APAN define the term?  "Hatred of or animus against Jewish people because they are Jews."

To defend that definition, APAN refers to three prominent Jewish anti-Zionist scholars.  All three of them happen to arrive at essentially the same definition of antisemitism — one that conveniently excludes themselves.

Shaul Magid, Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, complains in his report that the word has slipped its moorings — that "antisemitism" now stretches "from Christian anti-Judaism to racism, anti-colonialism, to anti-Zionism" — and insists on returning to what he calls the standard, which he says is "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew." 

Ilan Pappe gives this definition: "being anti-Jewish is racist and antisemitic. This is the hatred of Jews because of who they are. Whereas being anti-Zionist means opposition to an ideology." 

Neve Gordon is quoted for a third variant, from a London Review of Books essay from January 2018, that antisemitism is "understood as hatred of Jews per se."

"The Jew qua Jew." "Because of who they are." "Hatred of Jews per se." Three anti-Zionist scholars essentially agree with each other that antisemitism is hate of Jews as Jews. The common denominator is that they are saying that real antisemitism has no reason - it is unwarranted, it is towards Jews per se, it is because of who they are. In other words, antisemitism has no reason, no excuse, it is pure bigotry divorced from logic. But these anti-Zionists have a good reason for their hate. That is the distinction that each of them is making. And that is the distinction they must make in order to separate themselves from the crude antisemitism of previous generations.

The only problem is that this definition includes lots of types of antisemitism that they claim they abhor.

The medieval mob did not hate Jews qua Jews. It hated them because they believed Jews poisoned the wells to spread the plague. They hated them because they believed Jews were murdering their Christian children for matzoh. This was, to their logic, self defense. Which means that according to these three scholars, it is not antisemitism because their hate was not unwarranted. 

The 19th century racial antisemite didn't hate Jews as Jews. He hated a biological contaminant, a bloodline he believed inferior and dangerous and parasitic. This wasn't illogical, it was science. Aryans who converted to Judaism were not hated, which means that their hate was not unmitigated, so therefore they were not antisemitic, according to this scholarly, consensus definition. 

Henry Ford published lots of reasons to hate Jews. Jews controlled the world press, cornered the money supply, debauched the motion pictures, corrupted baseball, ran the bootlegging trade, engineered Bolshevism, and started the First World War to profit from it. The chapter titles of The International Jew are a catalogue of warrants. Ford did not hate Jews for being Jews. He hated them, in his mind, for what they did - conspiring to control the world through Hollywood, banks and the media.  I see no way that these three anti-Zionist scholars can categorize Henry Ford as an antisemite under their own definition.

The Ku Klux Klansman who bombed a synagogue because Jews backed Black civil rights had a reason, too — Jewish support for integration.  A reason is a warrant, and a warrant means it is no longer antisemitic.

No doubt these scholars would object — their anti-Zionism is not illogical! It makes perfect sense! As if the accusation of apartheid and genocide against Jews in Israel is more logical or truthful than the blood libel or poisoning wells. Their beliefs have far more in common with traditional antisemitism than they have differences. The medieval antisemites would have defended their accusations just as vigorously as Jewish anti-Zionists do today.

Or they would say that antisemitic conspiracy theories, like Ford's, are really hatred of Jews as Jews. But is an unfalsifiable assertion that Israel has a secret plan to murder everyone in Gaza — one that would involve hundreds of thousands of soldiers, not one of whom leaks it — really different from that Ford's conspiracy theories?

Ilan Pappe adds a wrinkle - he says that they are not against Jews, but against an ideology, and opposition to an ideology cannot be antisemitic. In that case, Martin Luther wasn't an antisemite, either. Neither was Louis Farrakhan when he called Judaism a 'gutter religion' — he was attacking an ideology, just like Pappe.  

They might claim that they are targeting conduct, not identity. But so was Ford and so was the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They would insist that they hated what Jews do, not what Jews are.

In the end, their definition allows no daylight between their hate for the Jewish state and previous hatreds of Judaism, or Jews as a people, or Jews as any collective. Their distinctions are cosmetic - every single previous type of antisemitism can and often did point to similar distinctions between their hate and their cruder predecessors.

Gordon actually shows the problem in the same paragraph. Defining the "traditional" antisemitism he regards as genuine, he names it: "hatred of Jews per se, the idea that Jews are naturally inferior, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy or in the Jewish control of capitalism." The phrase per se and the examples that follow it contradict each other. Belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy is a reason; belief in Jewish control of capitalism is a reason, just as belief that Israel has a plan to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza is a reason. The conspiracist does not hate Jews per se — he hates them because of the plot he is convinced they run, the most elaborately warranted hatred in the entire canon. Gordon defines antisemitism as warrantless and then offers, as his paradigm cases of it, two of the most reasoned hatreds in history. The only way to hold both halves together is to apply the per se test selectively to exonerate his and condemn theirs, without being able to come up with a single cogent reason for the differences.  

A test applied selectively is not a definition. It is an alibi that has learned to dress as one.

Notice, finally, what the three of them share with the haters they would exempt. The religious antisemite tolerated Jewish apostates; the one that accused Jews of murdering children exempted the ones they were friends with. "Some of my best friends are Jewish" remains a joke for a reason. Being Jewish doesn't immunize anti-Zionists from being effectively antisemites; they are the shield wielded by the antisemites to avoid the charge. "See? She is a Holocaust survivor and she supports us!" Tokenism is real. The tradition of the tolerated Jew in an intolerant society is a very long one. 

These three scholars converged on a definition of antisemitism that covers almost no one. They had to, because every other definition shows that their beliefs are just the latest in the long list of variants of Jew hatred. They set out to define themselves out of antisemitism. They could only do it by defining almost all of antisemitism out with them.

(h/t Jill)

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regavim

 

The European Union sanctioned four individuals and three organizations under its Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime, calling them "extremist Israeli settlers and organisations which support them" and declaring that they "are responsible for serious and systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank." I cannot vouch for every name on the list. I do know one of them well. Regavim is an Israeli legal-advocacy NGO that takes pains to operate within international and local law, and documents its research and litigation in the open. So I read the EU's statement of reasons to learn what serious and systematic human rights abuse Regavim had committed.

The EU says that Regavim "institutes legal proceedings and lobbies for the demolition of Palestinian property." It is "responsible for multiple court proceedings." It "lobbied for the demolition of a Palestinian primary school." The human rights abuse the EU condemns, in the EU's own words, is using Israel's court system and lobbying its government. The regulation then performs its sleight of hand, asserting that "through its activities" Regavim "plays an instrumental role in facilitating and encouraging coercive acts that aim to destroy Palestinian property." Regavim files petitions; a court decides; the state enforces. The "coercive acts" are court rulings and demolition orders issued by the State of Israel. The EU sanctions the petitioner for the verdict. If the EU is stating that Israel's respected High Court is really an extremist settler organization, it should sanction it. 

The "extremist" label deserves the same scrutiny as the charges, because I have watched Regavim work in a different context.  In 2013 the organization took me through the Negev, where it documents the same illegal-construction problem among Bedouin communities, and I filmed what they showed me. What I heard from them was not bigotry. Regavim acknowledged that the Bedouin had been treated badly by Israel in the decades after 1948, insisted that any solution had to give them a fair alternative, and argued that the state would have to spend serious money to provide it. Regavim's actual position is that the law should apply evenly and that the people affected by it deserve a just result. This is not how an extremist settler group would act. The EU is painting them as anti-Arab fanatics; the truth is quite the opposite. 

The regulation singles out  one case. Regavim petitioned over an EU-funded school at Jubbet adh-Dhib, near Bethlehem. An Israeli court found the structure had been built without a permit and posed a safety hazard to the children inside it, and COGAT imposed a deadline to vacate following the court's order. Regavim's role began and ended with the petition. The party that built without a permit was the European Union, and the party that ruled the construction unlawful was an Israeli court applying Israeli planning law. The EU has sanctioned the organization that brought the violation to the court's attention, while describing its own unpermitted construction as the injured party. Regavim's spokeswoman Naomi Linder Kahn put it precisely: the group's crime "involves petitioning to the courts against a dangerous, illegal, EU-funded school built on Israeli state land in a national historic site."

Strip out the rhetoric, and the only problem the EU has with Regavim is that it disagrees with its political opinions and legal advocacy. The EU has apparently forgotten its own Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees everyone "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority." Sanctions are interference by public authority, and the EU has imposed them on an organization for its opinions and its lawful actions. If anyone is violating fundamental rights in this case, it is the EU, which has frozen a group's assets and barred its director from travel because it disagrees with the group's politics. The list of charges contains nothing illegal, because there is nothing illegal to charge. Regavim holds the position that Jews have a right to their ancestral land and that the law should be upheld to that end, and it has defended existing Israeli law in Israeli courts.

And guess where that law came from?

The entire international case against Israeli construction in Area C rests on a single foundation: that Israel is the belligerent occupier in the West Bank. Israel considers the territory disputed, but it agrees to adhere to the human rights portions of the laws of occupation in its administration of Area C. The law of occupation in the Hague Regulations Article 43 obligates the occupant to respect "the laws in force in the country" unless absolutely prevented. The occupier administers the territory under the legal order it inherited. In Area C, that order is the planning regime the EU's own allies describe in detail: under the 1966 Jordanian Planning Law, still in force in the West Bank, virtually any construction requires a permit issued in line with an approved scheme, and that scheme descends from Regional Outline Plans the British Mandate approved in the 1940s. When Israel took the territory in 1967, it took over the planning powers that the Jordanian law already conferred. Enforcing a permit requirement that predates the occupation by decades is the occupier doing exactly what Article 43 commands. This is international law.

The EU knows this regime applies to its own projects, because the UN says so plainly. Any Area C construction — and OCHA's enumeration names "a private home, an animal shelter or a donor-funded infrastructure project" — still requires approval from the Israeli Civil Administration, because the planning transfer to the Palestinian Authority that the Interim Agreement envisioned was never carried out. The EU builds anyway, without the permits the law in force requires, and then declares the result legal. A structure erected without a permit is unlawful under the precise legal order that occupation status keeps alive. The EU cannot invoke "this is occupied territory" to delegitimize one population's building and then fund the other population's building in open defiance of the planning law that occupation status itself preserves.

There is room for honest argument about how Israel applies the law, hardly ever approving Arab construction in Area C. But that is a problem with the application of the law, not the law itself.  The permit requirement itself is inherited law, not Israeli invention, and a building put up without a permit is illegal by the standard the EU insists governs the land. The EU's quarrel is not that Israel enforces a foreign legal order; it is that Israel enforces it against construction the EU paid for.

The low approval rate also reflects what Area C was built to be. Oslo II sorted the dense Palestinian population into Areas A and B, the urban and village zones where roughly 95 percent of West Bank Palestinians live, and left Area C as the strategic remainder: the settlements, the main roads, the Jordan Valley, the open land whose disposition the parties deferred to final-status talks. A zone defined in 1995 as the sparsely populated reserve, explicitly not the place where the Palestinian population was settled, will naturally generate a high rejection rate when permits are sought to build into it. Both sides understand the stakes. PASSIA states openly that Israel's aim in Area C is to push Palestinians toward A and B, and INSS records that Palestinians have run an organized legal campaign that has won authorization for 113 previously unauthorized villages — a build-first, litigate-later strategy rather than scattered individual need. Area C is contested strategic space whose population balance is being fought over before any negotiation, which is precisely the contest the EU funds on one side and sanctions on the other. The burden is not Palestinian alone: Jewish residents face their own thicket of permitting and legal review for construction and expansion, which is what one would expect of a planning regime applied across a disputed zone rather than one rigged in their favor.

The hypocrisy is stark. Regavim, Amana, and Nachala are accused, in the EU regulation's own language, of building or facilitating outposts "to create facts on the ground," of working to alter the territorial and demographic reality before any final-status agreement, of making it harder for the rival population to remain. This is exactly what the EU is doing on the other side! I took a tour with Regavim a decade ago and saw the EU's own program with my own eyes: clusters of structures thrown up across Area C without permits, flying the EU flag and bearing the words "Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection," positioned in deliberate lines across valleys to block Jewish communities from forming, like stones in a game of Go. Residents were brought in from Areas A and B to populate villages where none had stood. I saw hoses running off to steal water from neighboring Israeli towns. That was ten years ago, and the trajectory was already unmistakable; the structures have only multiplied since, because the program is continuous and the EU has never hidden it. Brussels funds the building, brands it, and describes its purpose in the same terms the regulation now treats as a human rights crime when the builders are Jewish.

The conduct the EU finances and the conduct the EU condemns are the same conduct: unpermitted construction in Area C, undertaken to win the territorial contest before negotiations, by moving a population in. The EU has drafted a definition of the offense that indicts its own program word for word. The only variable that decides whether Brussels calls it "humanitarian aid" or "serious human rights abuse" is which population holds the trowel. A standard that condemns one party while the accuser performs the identical act is not a legal standard; it is a pervasion of the entire concept of equal standing under the law.

The EU's fallback is that this construction qualifies as humanitarian assistance that an occupied population may receive regardless of domestic permit law. The argument fails on the EU's own evidence. Humanitarian assistance under international humanitarian law is relief for a population in need, not permanent construction engineered to alter territorial control. The EU's description of the Israeli mirror-conduct — facts on the ground, contiguity, frustrating the other side's claims — is an admission that the purpose of such building is political and territorial rather than humanitarian. Brussels has characterized the activity accurately when Jews do it and mislabeled the same activity when it does it.

Return now to the principle the EU claims to live by, because the contradiction is not abstract. The EU describes human rights defenders — and its own list of them names "members of human rights NGOs, academics, lawyers" — as "natural and indispensable allies," and its Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders commit EU missions worldwide to oppose exactly the tools the EU has now reached for: "administrative and judicial harassment," "smear campaigns, travel bans, criminalisation, stigmatisation." When a foreign government freezes the assets of a research-and-litigation NGO and bans its director from travel because it dislikes the NGO's cause, the EU calls that repression and sends a démarche. When the EU does it to an Israeli NGO, it calls it a human rights sanction. The behavior the EU condemns abroad is the behavior it has adopted here, against an organization whose work — researching land use, publishing findings, filing petitions in a democratic state's courts — is the textbook profile of the defenders the EU vows to protect everywhere else.

Underneath the legal packaging lies a claim with no source in law: that Area C is already Palestinian sovereign territory, so that Israel's permit regime is a foreign imposition and EU construction needs no one's permission. The status of Area C is the question the Oslo framework deferred to final-status negotiations, and no treaty, ruling, or resolution has settled it. There is no moment in history where control of Area C was legally (or otherwise) transferred to the Palestinian Authority. The EU has decided the question by assertion, and then by funding the facts and punishing the litigants who challenged them in court.  

A European Union that built its identity on the promise that lawful opinion is beyond the reach of state punishment has now demonstrated, in a binding legal act, the precise conditions under which it will break that promise: when the opinion is inconvenient and the person holding it is Israeli.

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