Over the past six months, the mass protests in Israel over judicial reform have elicited loud cries in the West that Israel is "in crisis." In its eagerness to identify such crises, however, the West looks everywhere but in the right direction.

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Three years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron said, "Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today."

While the extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood cannot operate in Muslim countries like Bahrain and Oman, said Tawhidi, they are operating in Britain, France, Canada, and Washington, DC.

The West imported the "garbage" promoted by jihadis whom Muslim countries were attempting to neutralize, he said. By allowing in this "filth" and even amplifying or glorifying it, the West had made its bed and must now lie in it.

This grim assessment was amply borne out by the riots in France. The violence broke out after a 17-year-old Muslim boy with a criminal background who was wanted by police was shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop.

This triggered rioting on an unprecedented scale. For five days, Muslim youths torched large numbers of buildings and vehicles. Jewish businesses and institutions were targeted, including kosher restaurants and food shops. Terrified Jews barricaded themselves into their homes as rioters screamed: "Death to the police," "Death to France" and "Death to the Jews!"

Order was restored only when the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic drug barons called the youths off the streets.

People can see that the French president is no longer in control of his own country and that the scale of Muslim population increase means that France is losing the battle to remain recognizably France. Similar demographic trends are changing the face of other European countries such as Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the U.K.

With indigenous Europeans failing to have enough children to reach replacement rate, there are fears that within a few decades, European civilization will be lost.

"Europe is one step away from Islamic globalization," the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal told L'Incorrect magazine. Islamism, he said, was "in the air and in the wifi that the winds of venality, resignation and the woke push in the right directions."

While Europe teeters on the brink, the US has abandoned its historic role as leader of the free world. Instead, President Joe Biden's administration is supporting the enemies of the West and undermining America's historic allies.

Indefatigably and inexplicably, the administration is desperately trying to reach a deal with the Iranian regime that would enable that regime legitimately to build nuclear weapons and funnel billions of dollars into regime coffers to boost its terrorist war against the free world.

In Afghanistan, the US is likewise channeling billions into the hands of the Taliban. This is despite UN evidence of a "symbiotic" link between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, which is rebuilding itself in the country.

In Britain, Biden snubbed the coronation of King Charles, sunk a potential US-UK trade agreement, and backed as the next secretary-general of NATO Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, over Britain's far better-qualified candidate, Defense Minister Ben Wallace.

As for Israel, the US continues to fund the Palestinian Authority despite the PA's "pay-for-slay" rewards to terrorists and their families, as well as its incitement to hatred and murder of Israelis. The administration harasses and bullies Israel over building homes in the disputed territories to which Israel alone is entitled under international law, while failing to condemn the Palestinians for their regular murder of Israelis and repeated daily attacks.

The administration presumes to lecture Israel about democracy, which it suggests is threatened by the judicial reforms. Yet the US is a country in which an attempted coup was mounted against an elected president through black arts deployed by a corrupt administrative class, and where that same class is currently thwarting a proper investigation of alleged corruption by the Biden family.

In the great political and ideological struggle now underway in America, those opposing the Biden approach are themselves in chaos.

In Europe, however, a fightback is underway to save the West that may well transform its political complexion. Many observers believe that public fury over the Islamization of France will bring the ultra-nationalist Marine le Pen to power in the presidential election in three years' time.

Last week, the Dutch government was brought down because of its perceived failure to curb immigration. Hungary and Poland, meanwhile, are regarded by liberals as neo-fascist because of their policies to preserve their own culture and traditions.

While these countries are authoritarian and antisemitism continues in their societies, Hungary is arguably the safest place in Europe for Jews right now. Neither country has experienced Islamic terrorism.

Although many Muslims in the West simply want to live in peace and prosperity, these achievements by Hungary and Poland are due to the fact that they've largely kept Muslims out.

For Western liberals, however, such exclusion is anathema – as is anything that challenges the dogma of liberal universalism and so-called "human rights" culture.

In fact, "human rights" doctrine has empowered some very bad people to victimize others. This is the result of the liberal mindset that has hijacked the language and turned words and phrases such as "racism," "human rights," "democracy" and even "man" and "woman" inside out.

Most of Israel's protesters have gone through the same looking-glass. They claim the Israeli government is provoking civil war and ending democracy. Yet the government is merely trying to enact its election promises, while the protest masterminds openly call for organized civil disobedience to bring the government down.

That government has now junked most of the judicial reforms. One of the few remaining provisions, voted into law by the Knesset this week, is a restriction on the Supreme Court's ability to strike down government actions on grounds of "reasonableness."

This is being hysterically denounced by opponents as the end of the court's power to check government overreach by reviewing government decisions. This is also untrue.

Judges will still be able to review the government's activities. What they won't be able to do is continue to do what they have been doing: Hijacking and distorting a principle of law in order to undermine the ability of a democratically elected government to do the job for which it was elected.

This is because the legal principle of "reasonableness" has a specific meaning, laid down in a benchmark ruling by Britain's top court in 1983.

The ruling stated that a decision is "reasonable" unless it "is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it."

That's precisely the charge against Israel's Supreme Court and attorney-general in preventing the elected government from carrying out its pledges to the voters, insisting on other policies, or legitimizing the paralyzing disruption of the country by a movement to bring down that government.

Unfortunately, many Diaspora Jews have embraced the looking-glass description of Israel's crisis. More tragically still, many of the same Jews subscribe to the suicidal undermining of Western culture.

As a result, in the battle lines that are now being formed, many Diaspora Jews will be left stranded as Western civilization fights for its survival.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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The unspeakable performance by Roger Waters in Berlin last week crossed a number of new red lines, even for him.

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The former Pink Floyd guitarist has long been infamous for his venomous attacks on Israel and antisemitic remarks. Few, though, could ever have imagined that he would be allowed to stage the obscene performance he put on at Berlin's Mercedes-Benz arena.

As described on the German website Bell Tower, Waters displayed the names of people supposedly killed because of their identity. In an odious comparison, Anne Frank, who was indeed murdered because she was a Jew, was displayed as equivalent to Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot dead while covering clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen in Jenin.

Dressed in a Waffen SS uniform under fascist-style banners hanging from the roof, Waters pretended to fire on the audience with a dummy rifle. When he exchanged this for a keffiyeh in an unsubtle reference to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, the giant LED screen flashed up: "F*** bombing people in their homes. F*** the occupation. You can't have occupation and human rights."

In a speech bubble displayed on that screen, a fragment of dialogue channeled Jewish conspiracy theory by suggesting that the world was controlled by a cabal of wealthy individuals who were secretly pulling all the strings. This diabolical spectacle of Jew-hatred received a standing ovation from the audience. And this happened in Berlin, the very epicenter of the Shoah.

Many who visit Berlin speak about the "impressive" or "moving" Holocaust memorial there. The fact that Waters could nevertheless stage this obscenity in that very city shows how thinking has become badly skewed. There is now an unprecedented amount of Holocaust memorializing and education in the West. Yet the Shoah is nevertheless routinely misappropriated, trivialized and demeaned.

Words like "Nazi," "fascism" and "holocaust" are now used to describe a dizzying range of presumed social ills. Meanwhile, verbal and physical attacks on Jews are becoming ever more frequent and brazen.

There are several reasons for this frightening trend. But Holocaust memorializing has itself played an unwitting part.

The demonization of the Jews is, of course, the never-ending hatred, as is the corresponding impulse to deny Jewish suffering. At the core of the form it takes today lies moral relativism – the replacement of objective truth by personal opinion, feelings and emotion. Relativism means no one's values or status can be higher or lower than anyone else's.

There can be no hierarchy of suffering. So Jews can never be allowed to make the justifiable claim that the Jewish people are unique, or that antisemitism is unique, or that the Nazi genocide of the Jews was unique.

Of course, this so-called equal status merely produces an inverted hierarchy in which good and bad, truth and lies, victim and victimizer are reversed. That's one reason why, in the minds of progressives for whom relativism is a kind of faith, Israel is an oppressor and Palestinian attackers are its victims. That's why such progressives can't acknowledge that the fate of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism is in a different moral universe from the fate of the Palestinians.

That's why CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour misrepresented the point-blank murder of Lucy Dee and her daughters by Palestinian terrorists in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria as a "shootout"; and why Amanpour's belated and lame attempt at an apology, altering "shootout" to the scarcely less distorted "shooting," merely compounded the offense.

It's why Waters so disgustingly equated Anne Frank with Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed not because she was a Palestinian-American but because she had put herself in harm's way by standing in the middle of a fire-fight.  And unfortunately, this most immoral equivalence has now become embedded into much Holocaust education and memorializing, which equate the genocide of the Jews with "other genocides."

In his book The End of the Holocaust, Alvin Rosenfeld observed that the Anne Frank story has been reframed to articulate the need to overcome racism and homophobia, prevent mass murder and promote tolerance and kindness.

Jews like Anne Frank, however, were wiped out not because of a lack of tolerance or kindness or through prejudice but because of a derangement beyond comprehension directed at the Jewish people.

In Mosaic in 2016, Edward Rothstein wrote that Holocaust museums flinched from emphasizing the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. No such museum, he observed, could seemingly be complete without invoking other 20th-century genocides in Rwanda, Darfur or Cambodia.

If we are all guilty, though, then no one is guilty. More balefully still, if everyone can be a Nazi so, too, can the Jews. Holocaust universalism has thus led directly to the demonization of Israel by people claiming to be anti-racist.

In Britain, this is one reason why there have been strenuous objections to the Holocaust memorial and education center that the government wants to construct in a small park next to the Houses of Parliament. The project has been derailed by the late discovery of a planning law that forbids any such construction in this park, a law that the government is determined to overturn.

Aside from environmental objections, significant concerns have long been expressed that the message to be delivered by this center will relativize and thus devalue the Holocaust. These objections have been brushed aside by the government and the project's backers in the Jewish community leadership.

However, the government itself has now given the game away by acknowledging that the main purpose of this center is not to commemorate the genocide of the Jews. As Housing Minister Baroness Scott disclosed earlier this month, its aim is to ensure that the story of what happened in the Holocaust "resonates with the public."

And how will it do that? By denying the unique nature of the Jewish genocide. "The content will also address genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur," she said.

This drew a furious response from one of the leading opponents of the project, Baroness Deech, who said it would "demote the Shoah."

Deech, who is Jewish and whose late father, historian Josef Fraenkel, fled the Nazis, said: "It would prompt generalities about hate and intolerance and would drain the presentation of the Shoah from its antisemitic origins dating back thousands of years."

She went on: "They are going to put forward the message that if you see something bad going on, you must not be a bystander. If it's just 'don't be a bystander,' I don't see how that helps people understand antisemitism and the plight of the Jews."

Deech was backed by Gary Mond, chairman of the National Jewish Assembly, who said: "The main concern is that there must be no dilution to the principle that the Holocaust was totally unique and incomparable."

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But that message will be utterly diluted by this proposed memorial.

The government is being egged on by Jewish community leaders who refuse to get the point. Instead, they have bullied objectors to the project and vilified them as antisemites, despite the fact that a number of them are Jews.

These leaders are thus weaponizing antisemitism to drive through a project that will instrumentalize antisemitism, in order to deliver a message that will betray the memory of Jews murdered in the Shoah by diminishing their unique fate.

Universalizing the Holocaust has happened for two reasons. The non-Jewish world wants to share the protected moral status of being victims of the greatest crime in history by claiming other evils are just as bad. Diaspora Jews, desperate not to be viewed as different, are terrified of asserting Jewish uniqueness, even over this.

Meanwhile, Waters struts the stage in Berlin.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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On Saturday, Britain's King Charles III will be crowned in London's Westminster Abbey. The coronation, which will be viewed by millions around the world, promises to be a spectacle of ceremony and magnificence for which the British have no rivals.

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Even this week's dress rehearsal, which was carried out in the middle of the night, was attended by crowds of spectators and produced awe-struck responses to the mile-long military procession taking the gold state coach to the abbey from Buckingham Palace. The significance of the event, however, goes far deeper and wider than all the pomp and circumstance. The coronation makes two statements of great importance for today's world about the place of religion in public life and the importance and meaning of the nation.

Both religion and nation are currently opposed, scorned and vilified by the dominant progressive elites of Western culture. Many such people also oppose the monarchy, viewing it as an anachronism redolent of hereditary privilege that has no place in a modern democracy. Throughout the West, there is now an all-out assault on the very idea of the nation along with its inherited culture. This is fueled by a determination to impose supposedly universal values that will usher in the unity of all mankind.

This onslaught involves an attempt to dismember the traditional nuclear family; vilify white society, normative sexuality and men; and hijack education and replace knowledge and rationality with propaganda and the suppression of dissent. At the core of this agenda – whose echoes can also be heard in the anti-government protests that have been rocking Israel – lies the aim of exiling religion from the public square.

The monarchy in Britain embodies both religion and nation. The core of the coronation is a religious dedication. Dressed in a simple shirt, the King will be anointed with holy oil and in this private ritual will take his monarchical oath of service to God. Few realize that the British monarchy is patterned on Jewish history. Early English kings even believed they were descended from King David. They appreciated the revolutionary aspect of ancient Israel: Its monarch was not the supreme ruler, a status which invites tyranny and despotism, but was himself answerable to God, the one true king over all.

The British coronation rite is modeled on the accession of King Solomon as described in the Book of Kings. Solomon was escorted to the throne by both religious and military leaders, as will happen to Charles, and was anointed by Zadok the high priest, represented this weekend by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The choir in the abbey will raise the roof with Handel's sublime "Zadok the Priest," and the holy oil will have been brought from Jordan, part of the original Land of Israel.

Jews know better than anyone that what keeps a nation together is continuity – the adherence to principles, traditions and rites that shape a people and are handed down through the generations. Britain, however, is a very different nation from the one that greeted the late Queen Elizabeth II when she was crowned more than 70 years ago. Demographically, it is far more diverse, with a plethora of different cultures and faiths.

This will be acknowledged at the coronation. Britain's Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, and the equivalent representatives of Britain's Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist communities, will step forward towards the king at the end of the ceremony and extend to him their good wishes and blessings. To ensure the Chief Rabbi does not break Shabbat, he and his wife will spend the night before the coronation at St. James's Palace so they can walk to the abbey, and his words will not be amplified by a microphone. In addition, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh and a Hindu will present the King with artifacts that play a part in the ceremony – the Imperial Mantle, the sovereign's ring, a pair of ceremonial bracelets and the coronation glove.

There is relief among traditionalists that, while these gestures are a sensitive nod towards diversity, the core principle underpinning the coronation has not been eroded. This is that the monarch swears to defend the Protestant Christian faith. Although when he was Prince of Wales Charles stated his wish to be "defender of faith," he will in fact retain the all-important definite article and swear to be "defender of the faith."

An increasing number of people can't see the point of this in a society where religious belief is now a minority pursuit. However, Christianity remains key to the nation's integrity and sense of itself. Christian values are fundamental to the West. Justice and the rule of law, compassion and putting others first, above all respect for every individual's humanity as created in the image of God – all come from the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that cemented them into Western culture.

The idea that minority cultures can only thrive without that umbrella structure is mistaken. In its absence, groups will fight other groups for power and the weakest will go to the wall. America, which has neither a monarchy nor an established religion, nevertheless subscribes to those values. Biblical precepts and the example of ancient Israel are explicitly referenced through America's foundational institutions.

Only a nation whose citizens are united by a common culture within a delineated territory can defend those values and that territory, and thus protect civilization itself.

That's why the onslaught on the Western nation and its core religious inheritance is so very troubling. The King is an intelligent and sensitive man who is devoted to his people and did many very good things as Prince of Wales. However, unease remains that he may not properly promote and defend these values that are now under siege.

The monarch must never be associated with anything that divides the public. Throughout the reign of the late Queen, the public never knew what she thought about anything. By contrast, the King's long record as a passionate supporter of causes such as environmental issues threatens to undermine the monarch's role as the embodiment of the nation. While the King has already become much more popular than might once have been imagined, there are concerns that he may not hold the line in the culture wars.

For example, instead of standing up to the bullying and distortions of those who characterize Western society as white oppressors, Charles has already supported research into the historical links between the British monarchy and the transatlantic slave trade. This genuflection to contemporary witch-hunting is precisely how the new King may rapidly lose the support of the people.

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Traditionalists are also uneasy about various tweaks being made to the coronation to make it more "relevant." For example, everyone in the abbey and watching at home will be invited to swear to God a simultaneous oath of allegiance to the new sovereign, his heirs and his successors. This has gone down very badly among the British, for whom this seems to blend Game of Thrones with North Korea.

People are muttering that the late Queen would never have entertained such a wildly inappropriate proposal. It accentuates the feeling so many had when the Queen died: That with her had also passed a Britain of understated wisdom, self-restraint and innate strength of purpose. The tears that were shed during that most sublime and affecting of funerals were not just for the departed Queen but for the country she had so perfectly embodied and whose like, many feared, would never be seen again.

Into this cultural maelstrom comes this weekend's majestic coronation, as if from a different era. Somehow, King Charles has to hold all this together.

God save the King. Or at the very least, may he put him right on a few things.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The political crisis in Israel over the government's judicial reforms has deepened. An increasing number of institutions and prominent individuals have called for the changes to be halted. All are deeply alarmed by the enormous demonstrations that they perceive as posing an increasing threat to Israel's security and the social resilience on which that security depends.

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After Defense Minister Yoav Gallant threatened to call publicly for the reforms to be halted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on TV to speak to the nation. The reforms would address fears on both sides, he said. They would broaden the makeup of the Supreme Court, safeguard civil rights for all citizens and reinstate a proper equilibrium between politicians and the judiciary.

This is unlikely to bring much-needed calm to the situation. Israel's current maelstrom is not in the pattern of normal political protest. It represents an existential upset. The focus of Opposition is the proposed judicial reforms. The protests are also fueled, however, by fear of the nationalist and religious ultras in the governing Coalition and by hatred of Netanyahu, who for some people has achieved near-demonic status.

Significant as these factors are, a convulsion of this magnitude suggests that something even more fundamental is at play. What is striking about the protests is the irrationality at their core. Although there are legitimate concerns about aspects of the reform package, the overwrought Opposition to it is out of all proportion. The protesters claim, for example, that giving politicians a decisive role in selecting new judges, as is being proposed, will destroy the rule of law and an independent judiciary.

They say the changes, which would stop the courts from overturning laws made by the Knesset, end the power of legal advisers to prevent government ministers from enacting the policy programs for which they were elected and end the slippery concept of "reasonableness" through which the judges have substituted politics and ideology for law, would herald the end of democracy and the abolition of civil rights.

Yet as law professor Avi Bell has pointed out, for many decades after the State of Israel was founded, only the Knesset could legislate and no court could overturn legislation for any reason. Attorneys-general and all other legal advisers could be dismissed and their legal opinions bound no one. No government action could be reversed by the Supreme Court simply because the Court considered it "unreasonable." In other words, the reforms will largely return Israel to the situation that prevailed before 1993, when Supreme Court President Aharon Barak launched his revolutionary campaign of judicial activism.

So, what explains this unprecedented uproar? The clue lies in the claim that the reforms spell the end of democracy in Israel, whose values will no longer be recognizably Jewish. In fact, at the core of the protests lies an attack on Jewish values. Judaism has something important to say about both law and politics. Law is central to the Torah and therefore to Judaism. Moreover, during the Davidic monarchy, judges – along with prophets and priests – provided an essential brake on the otherwise despotic powers of the monarch.

So, judges have always played an important role in Jewish civic life. But of even more fundamental importance to Judaism is the principle that the laws themselves are rooted in popular consent. The authority of Moses had to be grounded in the consent of the people and their promise to obey the laws he was promulgating, as was done at Sinai, where the people asked Moses to relay the word of God to them and said, "We will do and we will hear." This emphasis on public consent at the very core of Judaism, as well as Judaism's practice of limited government, made a deep impression on the thinkers who helped formulate the civic patterns that ultimately created Western democracy.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes highlighted Judaism's doctrine of public consent, as did the framers of what became Britain's constitutional monarchy in the 18th century. The Davidic monarchy became the template for the British Crown. In America, the Hebrew Bible is a conspicuous element of its foundational institutions and laws. The Liberty Bell that sits in Independence Hall in Philadelphia is engraved with an inscription from Leviticus: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

Democracy is rooted in this core principle: The laws governing the people are founded upon the consent of the people. That consent is demonstrated by the people's election of representatives in parliament who pass those laws. That's why, although government needs checks and balances, the elected parliament in a Western nation is supreme. But now, the very idea of the Western nation itself is under sustained assault. The progressive narrative, so dominant in Western culture, holds that the Western nation is exclusive, racist and oppressive.

National laws must therefore be superseded by universal "human rights" laws promulgated by international judges, as well as domestic judges who prioritize those laws over the laws of their own nation. The democratic process by which those national laws are formed and passed is disdained. That process is what is now under attack in Israel by those protesting against the judicial reforms. The agenda of the politicians who have been elected by the people conflicts with the liberal universalism of man-made human rights that prioritizes approved minorities over the majority and is promulgated by Israel's activist Supreme Court.

As the American foreign-policy specialist David Wurmser has observed, the "illiberal" left no longer believes that elections matter. They believe instead that there is a moral objective to policy matters that the left has the power to divine and define. For such elites, ordinary people who don't share their views are the "deplorables." By contrast, the judges – educated, liberal, cosmopolitan – are people like themselves.

Although the massive protests in Israel consist overwhelmingly of the Left (with the backing of groups with a malign agenda towards Israel) others have joined them because they are frightened by the ultras in the government, and by what they perceive to be an opening for authoritarian or dictatorial government as a result of the judicial reforms.

Nevertheless, what all the protesters have in common is that, at base, they would prefer rule by judges to rule by an elected government. Although one might recoil from some members of the government or despair of Israel's dysfunctional political system, this is a dangerous tipping point – and one that has a baleful resonance far beyond Israel. For this is the West's post-democracy moment, in which a dominant mindset is prioritizing universal laws over national ones, elevating the legitimacy of street protests and appointing politically activist judges as the shock troops of the progressive assault on traditional values.

As Wurmser observed, this view of the world has a following in Israel, which has produced a "core quasi-judicial tyranny through the judiciary." This, he said, has made Israel into "the dream palace of far-left European progressives. A structure of courts that even Europe has rejected or most countries in Europe still have not ratified."

Faced now with a threat to that judicial power, Wurmser asserted, the "illiberal left" in Israel, America and the West is willing to launch a kind of "civil war on some level and burn down the governments in the countries they're in order to ensure that their power is either secured or preserved." In other words, this is no longer a protest against government policy. It represents a fundamental split in the West over how to view the world and how society should be ordered.

It is an extremely dangerous inflection point, not just for Israel but for Western civilization, in a battle for which Israel's beleaguered government is now revealed to be the unwitting outlier.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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America and Britain claim to be allies of Israel. There is no gainsaying the deep links between them of military assistance, intelligence and trade. Israel is the invaluable strategic asset for America and Britain in the Middle East, a crucial bulwark in the defense of the West.

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And yet, both America and Britain undermine Israel's security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state.

A recent event illustrated this particularly sharply when British diplomatic officials in Jerusalem effectively endorsed the Palestinian Authority's agenda to eradicate Israel.

Palestinian Media Watch has revealed that at last Friday's annual "Palestine Marathon" held by the PA, seven British officials taking part as "#TeamUK" wore marathon T-shirts displaying the PA's map that erases Israel and represents the whole country as Palestine.

The Jewish Chronicle reports that the team consisted of the UK's Deputy Consul General Alison McEwen and Foreign Office colleagues. A picture of the team was tweeted from the official account of the British Consulate in Jerusalem, hailing "the incredible Palestine Marathon to support #FREEDOMOFMOVEMENT for all Palestinians."

Palestinian Media Watch observes that this hashtag was conceived to support the PA's demand that Israel remove the security measures it has adopted to prevent the flow of Palestinian terrorists from PA-controlled areas into Israel's cities.

According to The Jewish Chronicle, the marathon was organized by a group called "Right to Movement," which campaigns against "the many obstacles that we live daily under fascist racist occupation."

The race was held under the auspices of the Palestine Liberation Organization Supreme Council for Youth and Sports headed by Jibril Rajoub, a man who has been convicted of numerous terrorist offenses and who persistently glorifies Palestinian terrorist murderers.

So these British diplomats took part in an event supervised by a terrorist sympathizer; openly supported the Palestinian Arabs' lie that Israel is subjecting them to "fascist racist occupation"; openly opposed Israel's measures to protect its citizens against attack; and openly endorsed the eradication of Israel altogether.

The current British government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak contains an unprecedented number of Israel supporters. So how can its diplomats have displayed such egregious hostility to Israel's security and even its very existence?

The consular bodies run by both Britain and America in Jerusalem, which provide assistance to the Palestinian Arabs in the east of the city, the disputed territories and in the Gaza Strip, have long been viewed by the Israeli government as working against Israeli interests.

Although former President Donald Trump shut down the US consulate in 2019, the Biden administration effectively restored and upgraded America's diplomatic mission to the Palestinians when it opened the US Office of Palestinian Affairs last June and installed Hady Amr as "special representative for Palestinian affairs."

Amr, who had previously worked as national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network, had said that he was "inspired by the Palestinian intifada"; that the Arabs "will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children"; and that "there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents."

At last month's summit in Jordan ostensibly aimed at calming the violence between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, which has produced a rising number of Israeli murder victims and near-daily Arab attacks, Amr promoted an American plan requiring Israel to sharply curtail counter-terror operations by the Israel Defense Forces while providing 5,000 Palestinians with commando training as security personnel.

This was despite the fact that Palestinian security forces have been repeatedly involved in attacks on Israelis – hardly surprising since the PA is controlled by the Fatah terrorist group whose chairman is the PA's own president, Mahmoud Abbas.

None of this is acknowledged by the Biden administration, which continues instead to sanitize, ignore and even incentivize the Palestinian Arabs' murderous rejectionism of Israel.

What is the reason for this two-faced attitude? There's a charitable explanation and a less charitable one.

The charitable one is that neither the American nor British government accepts that the PA's objective is the extermination of Israel. This is because these governments are committed to the "two-state solution." It requires them to define the problem to which this is the solution as the division of land between two sets of people with legitimate claims to that land.

This is clearly untrue. The PA's own repeated statements, its maps and insignia depicting a state of Palestine that erases Israel, its incitement to seize Israeli cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, and its support for terrorism all show that its aim is Israel's destruction.

Yet the American and British governments can't allow themselves to acknowledge this. Partly, this is due to pressure from the Arab world. Mostly, though, it's due to the implacable liberal belief in conflict resolution and peace processes.

Since the Americans and British can't allow anything to disrupt such a peace process, they ignore any evidence of a non-negotiable and unconscionable agenda.

So Israel, which has always been willing to negotiate and has indeed offered a Palestinian state on numerous occasions, gets blamed for endangering the peace process when it insists on defending itself against never-ending Palestinian Arab terrorism.

That liberal tunnel vision helps explain why the Biden administration funds the PA even though it continues its "pay-for-slay" stipends to terrorists' families.

The same mindset helps explain the astonishing determination of the Biden administration – like the Obama administration before it – to make a deal with Iran that would enable it legitimately to develop nuclear weapons after only a short delay while receiving billions in sanctions relief with which to ramp up its terrorist activities and regional power grab.

The term for this mindset is cognitive dissonance. Such a denial of reality may be hard to credit. But it's very real and very frightening.

I came up against it this week in a conversation with BBC journalists, similar to ones I've had on numerous previous occasions. They were simply incredulous at my assertion that the BBC's coverage of Israel is grotesquely unbalanced, selective and distorted and amounts in large measure to Palestinian propaganda.

These conversations are always distressing. This isn't just because the BBC rarely corrects its distortions, thus effectively abandoning Israel to an agenda of extermination. It's also because the news outlet genuinely believes that its Israel coverage upholds its core mission to be objective, balanced and truthful.

The reason such people can never grasp that the opposite is the case is because they share the bias. They cannot see the distortions in the BBC's coverage of Israel because they themselves believe them to be true – and that all who object are themselves biased partisans.

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This is frightening because it represents a perfectly closed thought system. No evidence can ever penetrate it. Exactly the same mindset is behind the Orwellian denial of reality involved in race and gender identity politics, and in other liberal causes.

The less charitable explanation, meanwhile, is that some of those promoting the Palestinian Arab cause are motivated by malign hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. In the Biden administration, several such individuals are working in sensitive Middle East policy positions.

In Britain's Foreign Office, its history of antisemitism going back to its shameful administration of the Palestine Mandate in the last century continues to this day, fueled by anti-Zionist "intersectionality" that has become the orthodoxy in much of Britain's official class and many of its institutions.

What is the antidote to this madness? To call it out at the highest possible level, to hold feet to the fire and to proclaim the truth at all times.

Can this really have any effect? Yes, if there's a proper strategy. But for that to emerge, the leadership of the Jewish world must radically up its game.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Forget the bromides about America's "unbreakable bond" with Israel and how the United States is Israel's "greatest friend." Over the past week, the Biden administration has crossed two ominous red lines.

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For the first time in six years, the US enabled a vote against Israel at the United Nations, supporting a UN Security Council statement condemning Israeli "settlements."

Eight days previously, Israel had legitimized nine Israeli settlements that were erected without government approval. This was Israel's bullish response to the wave of recent terror attacks by jihadi gangs that the Palestinian Authority has allowed to proliferate in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Legitimizing the settlements delivered the message that the more the Palestinian Arabs murder Israelis in order to force the Jews from the entire land, the more Israel will embed itself in the entire land.

The Security Council promptly had a hissy fit. So did the US State Department, which said it was "deeply troubled."

But the Security Council statement that America supported wasn't "deeply troubled" by the Palestinian Arab terror attacks in Jerusalem over the previous few weeks, in which 10 Israelis were murdered. It wasn't "deeply troubled" by the P.A.'s unremitting incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land in an Islamic holy war.

America's obsessional error of blaming Israeli settlements for the absence of peace rather than the real cause – the Palestinian Arabs' unceasing attempts to destroy Israel – is nothing new. Nor is the way it pressures Israel to compromise its own security while the US privileges, sanitizes and incentivizes Israel's attackers.

Four days after the nine outposts were legalized, the Biden administration crossed a new red line when it arrogantly presumed to tell Israel how to run its domestic affairs. Not only did it criticize Israel's contentious judicial reforms, but it also issued a veiled but unmistakable threat.

In a podcast, US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides revealed that President Joe Biden was pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause his reform program.

"We're telling the prime minister – as I tell my kids – 'pump the brakes,' slow down, try to build a consensus, bring the parties together," said Nides.

Israel's judicial reforms have absolutely nothing to do with America. They have no bearing on the Middle East conflict. They are an internal Israeli issue.

The reforms simply get up the Bidenites' collective nose because curbing judicial activism is to curb the power of the left to impose its agenda. And the left-wing Bidenites think Israel must behave as the Bidenites want it to behave because they assume that the military and financial support the United States gives Israel entitles them to tell Israel what to do.

According to Nides, what binds America and Israel together is "a sense of democracy and a sense of [the importance of] democratic institutions."

That's not actually true, since America needs Israel as its principal strategic asset in the Middle East and depends on its military intelligence and other such benefits.

In any event, this pious statement about democracy actually constituted a none-too-subtle threat that if Netanyahu continues with the judicial reforms, the US-Israel relationship will suffer.

"That is how we defend Israel at the UN," said Nides. "When we believe that those democratic institutions are under stress and strain, we're articulating [our concern]. That's what we're doing now."

Four days later, America abandoned Israel at the United Nations.

Israel's judicial reforms are intended to reverse a three-decades-old power grab by the courts that has undermined democracy and the ability of elected governments to govern in accordance with what they decide are Israel's interests.

The mass hysteria this has induced is largely down to the rage of the Israeli left that has lost political power for the foreseeable future but relied on their ideological soulmates on the Supreme Court to impose their agenda. But beyond the left, others are also concerned that in curbing unbridled judicial power the reforms may hand too much power to the politicians.

While compromises are therefore essential, much of this uproar is the result of overwrought and misleading reporting and commentary. Yet parroting the hysterics in both Israel and the Diaspora, Nides implied that the judicial reforms would destroy Israeli democracy.

This was echoed by President Biden, who said that both American and Israeli democracy are "built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary."

This was particularly ludicrous, considering that the judiciary in America is politically appointed – one of the very aspects of Israel's judicial reform that is being identified by its opponents as a mortal threat to liberty.

There is indeed a threat to democracy in Israel right now, but it's not coming from the government. It's coming from the thousands of opponents of the judicial reforms who, oblivious to their own absurdity, are screaming that the newly elected Israeli government must be brought down in order to save democracy.

It's coming from the calls for violence and even for Netanyahu's assassination.

It's coming from people like Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, who said, "This is the history of the world. Countries become dictatorships through the use of democratic tools. … Countries do not become democratic again, except with bloodshed."

It's coming from Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who declared, "What is needed is to move to the next stage, the stage of war, and war is not waged with speeches. War is waged in a face-to-face battle, head-to-head and hand-to-hand, and that is what will happen here."

Israel's judicial reforms have nothing to do with America. They have no bearing on the Middle East conflict. They are an internal Israeli issue.

Yet none of this appears to have troubled Nides at all. And there's a common denominator between the Bidenites' attitude towards Israel's judicial reform and their attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs.

In both cases, the Bidenites blame the victim and excuse the aggressor. They issue no criticism of those threatening violence over the judicial reforms and trying to bring down the government.

Instead, they implicitly blame Israel's government for the threats of violence, on the basis that if it hadn't proposed these reforms, no one would have gotten upset.

In exactly the same way, the Bidenites deny the fact that the Palestinian Arabs aim to destroy Israel. Instead, they accuse Israel of provoking the Palestinian Arabs by settling the land to which Israel alone has a legal, moral and historical claim.

The Bidenites' purported belief in being even-handed inevitably means they end up punishing the victim and empowering the aggressor.

Yet suddenly a fresh double standard has arisen over America's newly tough policy of supporting Ukraine. Speaking in Warsaw, Biden said, "Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never."

Yet Biden doesn't say no to the Palestinian Arab autocrats; he doesn't tell them they will never take the Jews' country; he doesn't tell them that they will never have victory over Israel. Instead, he appeases them and subsidizes their murderous incitement.

Biden went on: "If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, it would be the end of Ukraine."

But this merely appropriated the well-known saying: "If the Palestinians stopped attacking Israel, it would end the war; but if Israel stopped defending itself against the Palestinians, it would be the end of Israel."

Yet while America believes this about Ukraine, it clearly doesn't believe it about Israel.

Israel unfortunately needs America, not least to deal with Iran, which is now dangerously close to a nuclear breakout thanks to America's lethal appeasement of Tehran.

Nides talks about America's "ironclad commitment to Israel's security." After the betrayals and threats of the past few weeks, this can only elicit fury – and hollow laughter.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs – casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims – has been absorbed by so many people.

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Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It's not just that "intersectionality" demonizes the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism. As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet, "In queer and women's studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine."

The astonishing story of Mohammed al-Durah illustrates just how perverse this is. On Sept. 30, 2000, the French TV station France 2 broadcast footage from Gaza that apparently showed the 12-year-old al-Durah being shot dead by Israeli fire as he clung to his father during a demonstration.

This iconic picture detonated the second intifada, the Palestinian terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians that murdered more than 1,130 of them and wounded more than 8,000 between 2000 and 2005. The footage incited hysteria across the Arab and Muslim world.

Eleven days later, when two Israeli reservists strayed into Ramallah, a mob beat them to death. They threw one body out a window, mutilating it and parading it through the streets. A gloating Palestinian Arab was pictured waving his hands in the air covered in the Israelis' blood while the mob screamed "revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!"

One year later, at the UN's sickening anti-Jewish hate-fest in Durban, South Africa, Mohammad al-Durah's body was paraded in effigy among thousands of demonstrators screaming hatred of Israel. Then Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded by al-Qaeda explicitly for the killing of the child.

The whole al-Durah killing, however, was a set-up and a grotesque lie. As I saw in a Paris courtroom in 2007, previously unseen French TV footage showed that the scenes of battle had been staged with cameras, producers and even make-up technicians visible in a carnival atmosphere.

Palestinian "demonstrators" were laid out on stretchers and carted off to ambulances. But there was no blood or evidence of injuries whatsoever, not even on Mohammad al-Durah, with the boy peeping through his fingers moments after a reporter announced he had been killed.

The person who has done more than anyone else to bring this monstrous calumny to public attention is Richard Landes. As a professor of medieval history at Boston University specializing in apocalyptic millenarian sects, he suddenly realized he was looking at precisely the same phenomenon among the Palestinian Arabs. He reported the al-Durah hoax on his blog and coined the term "Pallywood" to describe the Palestinians' theater of murderous fabrications.

Landes dwells upon the al-Durah hoax in his new and magnificent book "Can the Whole World be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad." It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand today's lunacies.

The book asks the question: How has the West simply lost its mind over the issue of the Palestinian Arabs?

As Landes says, today's Western journalists behave like true believers in the lies about Israel. They have never corrected the record on Mohammad al-Durah, which remains an incendiary blood libel, damning the Israelis for the supposedly cold-blooded killing of a defenseless child.

They have also never corrected the record on the Jenin "massacre" blood libel. In 2002, after 16 months of human bomb attacks in which more than 600 Israelis were murdered, the IDF killed 52 to 56 Palestinian Arabs in Jenin, around 40 of whom were combatants. Israel also lost 23 IDF soldiers during that operation in ambushes forced upon them by their commanders' insistence on going door-to-door to limit civilian casualties.

Yet the Western media – pushing what Landes describes as "lethal journalism" – published hysterically inflated Palestinian Arab claims of a massacre in which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinians had been killed.

The Western public has been left with the impression that the human bomb attacks arose out of resistance to Israeli "occupation" and "war crimes." In fact, they are the result of genocidal jihadi war propaganda delivered and concealed by Western journalists themselves.

Appallingly, the Israelis were described at the time as the new Nazis. But the malice that was unleashed was even worse. As Landes writes, "It was mostly about being freed from a sense of obligation to the Jews, a chance to take up again the Jew-baiting so long denied Europeans by a politically correct post-Holocaust sobriety."

Landes quotes a poisonous comment made by a member of the House of Lords and reported in the Spectator, "Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last." During that time, I was told something horrifyingly similar to my face.

This lethal Western mindset among liberals and progressives goes beyond bigotry against Israel. It has also fueled the West's failure to identify and deal with the jihadi war of conquest being waged against Western civilization.

Liberals, writes Landes, have enforced the primary law of submission: Do not offend Muslims. The inevitable cognitive and moral dissonance has produced a "politics of outrage" that has left a radically disoriented West defenseless before the jihadist attack.

Western politicians maintained after 9/11 that Muslims around the world were outraged by the atrocity because Islam was a "religion of peace." They did so even though Muslims were celebrating across the world and some 90% of them, according to various commentators, thought America "had it coming."

When an Islamist named Ahmad al Aliwi Alissa murdered ten people in Boulder, Colorado in March 2021, many identified him on Twitter as a "white Christian supremacist." Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born woman who fled Islam to become one of its most forceful accusers and lives under a fatwa commanding her murder, was denounced by feminists and disinvited by Brandeis in 2014 as an Islamophobe.

"Lethal journalists" who report Palestinian jihadi war propaganda as objective fact fail to grasp that they are thus reporting their own enemy's war propaganda as news.

This critical blindness is rooted in half a century of the West being blamed for its "original sins" of colonialism and imperialism. This cultural self-loathing has spawned the identity politics of race and gender. Human rights NGOs excoriating Israel and the U.S. for racism and slavery have adopted the jihadi apocalyptic narrative that holds that the U.S. and Israel are the Big and the Little Satan.

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This has led to what Landes terms, "The Alice in Wonderland mindset: When jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy." So, while jihadi antisemitism is sanitized as resistance against the oppressor, criticism of Islam or the Palestinians has been denounced as "hate speech."

As Landes writes, in this poisonous mix a new antisemitism has taken hold in progressive circles around the world.

It is a stupefying alchemy of inverted narratives, which Landes describes as a preemptive surrender to Islamist attack. The result, he writes, is that "when the worst Jew-haters in the planet act out their Jew-hatred in the most revolting fashion, supporting them has become the litmus test for radical credentials." And the most tragic aspect of all is that so many progressive Jews have gone along with this madness.

So how can we fight it? In the only way we know how: With facts, evidence and reason. But we should be in no doubt that we are not just fighting to establish the truth about Israel and push antisemitism back underneath its stone. We are fighting to rescue a Western world that has simply lost its collective mind.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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So, how's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faring in his supposed program to smash democracy at the behest of the religious extremists in his government? Well, as Israel's newly-minted dictator, he's not doing too well in that regard.

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Consider: Netanyahu has demonstrated his supposed craven subjection to the ultra-nationalist Bezalel Smotrich, to whom he gave authority over civilian administration in the disputed territories, by brutally slapping Smotrich down when he attempted to overrule an IDF and Defense Ministry decision to tear down an illegal Israeli outpost.

Netanyahu has shown his allegedly despotic determination to ditch the rule of law by bowing to the Supreme Court's ruling against his minister and long-time ally Aryeh Deri and firing him. And Netanyahu showed himself captured, bound and gagged by the zealots in his government who want to turn Israel into a theocracy when he effectively overruled the Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, who said he would stop funding cultural activities on Shabbat.

In other words, in every case, Netanyahu has chosen to uphold the existing order rather than overthrow it.

Undoubtedly, the fight between Smotrich and the defense establishment has further to go. Netanyahu has said he will somehow bring Deri back into his government. We have yet to see how these and other issues will turn out. Maybe Netanyahu will yet morph into a cross between Viktor Orban, Herod and Mussolini. But so far, he has been behaving as a cautious, risk-averse prime minister determined to keep the liberal, constitutional show on the road.

Of course, this has received no acknowledgment from the "progressive" Jewish world, both in Israel and the Diaspora. To such people, Netanyahu is personally irredeemable, and because the government he has formed is committed to defending Jewish interests rather than left-wing principles, it is deemed incapable of doing anything sensible or good. This reflects the frightening polarization of our times, in which issues aren't assessed on their merits and in accordance with evidence and logic, but are denounced or embraced depending solely on which side of the ideological line they fall.

This is not just confined to the left. Netanyahu's supporters have demonstrated similar tunnel vision over the Deri issue. The Supreme Court ruled 10-1 that Deri's appointment as interior and health minister was "unreasonable in the extreme" due to the crimes he has committed, including two convictions for tax fraud in 2022 and previous convictions for bribery and fraud in 1999. In a plea bargain with the attorney general over the tax offenses, Deri admitted wrongdoing and pledged to resign from the Knesset.

In a sentencing hearing in Jan. 2022, Deri appeared to go further. He told the court that he now wanted to "represent the segments [of society] and the public that I represent in a different manner, even if not from the Knesset." In the same hearing, the state prosecutor urged leniency because Deri's "public statement and his retirement from his political life reflect his sincerity." As a result, the court gave him a suspended jail sentence. The court's president said the public could rest assured that Deri "will no longer be involved in the needs of the public that involve financial dealings, due to his distancing himself from the public arena."

But before the Supreme Court, Deri claimed he had only declared an intention to step down temporarily, not retire permanently from political life. Five of the Supreme Court justices dismissed this claim under the principle of "estoppel," which governs the enforcement of a promise in legal proceedings. The Oxford Dictionary of Law defines estoppel as a rule of law "that prevents a person from denying the truth of a statement he has made." Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage defines it as "a bar that precludes a person from denying or contradicting something that he or she has said before." Other legal experts, however, say that Deri's pledge doesn't qualify under estoppel because he made no legally binding commitment to step down permanently from political life.

Supporters of the government's proposed legal reforms who have commented on the Deri case have mostly ignored the estoppel point altogether, on the grounds that the judges making it were simply playing politics. That's because the majority on the Supreme Court ruled that Deri should be removed from office because his appointment was "severely unreasonable"; and the Israeli judiciary's elastic definition of "unreasonable" is a core reason the judges are accused of judicial overreach, including striking down laws of which they disapprove. The government's proposed judicial reforms are designed to correct this.

But the core of the Deri uproar is not the court ruling. It was Netanyahu's decision to bring Deri back into government. Whether Deri did or did not breach a legal principle, bringing back a man who was twice found guilty of corruption – and who made disingenuous statements to avoid being barred from the political arena, to which he then promptly returned – was a distasteful political decision.

Opinion polling suggests that most Israelis agree. Deri's return offended their sense of justice and propriety. On this, however, supporters of the judicial reform proposals are silent. But it should be possible to say both that Netanyahu was wrong to bring Deri back and that it cannot be right in a democracy for unelected judges to overturn laws passed by the Knesset. It should be possible to say both that the judges need to be restrained from ideologically-driven overreach and that there is a problem with checks and balances on the executive.

The judges claim they are the only brake on the government. But unelected judges should not be able to countermand laws passed by those the public elect to govern them. The proposed reforms would give Israel the same relationship between the courts and the legislature as in the UK, where the judges cannot overturn laws passed by Parliament.

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But the Israeli judges aren't wrong to say government checks and balances are inadequate. That problem derives from the deeply dysfunctional Israeli political system itself. In the UK. members of Parliament elected by the public serve individual constituencies that can vote them out of office. This encourages MPs to put pressure on the government to keep its election promises and not depart radically from public opinion. Members of Knesset have no such relationship with the public and exercise no such brake on the government.

A further corrective is provided in the UK by its second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, which can delay legislation and make amendments. Israel has no such second chamber. No Israeli politician is brave enough to identify this problem and propose fundamental political reform. But this democratic deficit must not be made worse by unelected judges imposing their ideological agenda.

At the same time, turning the judges into political appointees would unbalance the system in the opposite direction. A key principle of democracy is that the judiciary and prosecuting authorities must be independent of the government. In Britain, this is the case. As a result, it looks askance at America, where, from the Supreme Court on down, judges and prosecuting attorneys are political appointees.

In British eyes, it would be wrong if Israel went down that road. But if Israel did so, it would merely make Israel more like America. Do American Jews screaming about the end of civilization in Israel think democracy doesn't exist in America? Almost certainly, these judicial reforms will involve compromises along the way. Crucially, every system depends on everyone playing by the unspoken rules of the democratic game and not taking partisan positions.

Unfortunately, at present that does seem like too much to ask.

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An ostensibly minor incident a few days ago has provided devastating evidence of the brainwashed malevolence within the Biden administration towards not just Israel but the Jewish people.

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In a ceremony at the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Bethlehem, the Department of Homeland Security's investigative arm delivered to the Palestinian Authority a 2,700-year-old spoon dating from the Assyrian empire.

The Assyrians, an ancient people that first emerged around 2000 BCE in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), developed a vast empire that included much of the Middle East, including Egypt, Babylonia, Israel and Cyprus. It finally collapsed around 600 BCE.

The spoon, which is thought to have been used to load incense onto fires during rites dedicated to the Assyrian gods and the dead, was seized from the Jewish-American billionaire Michael Steinhardt as part of a criminal probe in New York. In a deal he struck to avoid prosecution, Steinhardt agreed in 2021 to turn over $70 million worth of stolen antiquities that the authorities claim were illegally acquired in Israel.

Ivan J. Arvelo, a special agent in charge of US Homeland Security Investigations in New York, described the transfer of the spoon to the PA as "the historic repatriation" of the artifact. In a similar effusive vein, George Noll, head of the US Office of Palestinian Affairs, called the spoon "an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony."

Another DHS official, Jeff Brannigan, declared, "This repatriation is representative of HSI's commitment to ensuring the storied heritages of peoples around the world through the preservation and protection of cultural artifacts."

This is all utter garbage. It was not an act of repatriation, because the spoon never belonged to the "cultural patrimony" or "storied heritage" of a Palestinian people. There was no "Palestinian people" in antiquity.

The "Palestinian people" didn't exist at all until it was invented in the 1960s in a strategy to destroy Israel cooked up by Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in cahoots with the Soviet Union.

During the 1920s and 1930s, many of the Arabs who were the 20th-century ancestors of today's "Palestinians" poured into what is now Israel and the disputed territories from neighboring Arab states in pursuit of the prosperity they believed would result from the return of the Jews to their ancestral Jewish homeland.

Despite this, the "Palestinians" have gone to laughable lengths to assert that they were the original inhabitants of the land. For example, they have claimed to be descended from the Philistines – who were in fact ancient Greeks.

PA chief Mahmoud Abbas has claimed that the "Palestinians" are indigenous to Israel because they are descended from the Canaanites. "This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago – and we are the Canaanites!" he declared in 2019.

There is no evidence for this whatsoever. In any event, the people who lived in Canaan during the Bronze Age comprised various ethnic groups.

So precisely who were these ancient "Palestinian" Canaanites? The Semitic Amorites? The Hyksos, a group of Asian peoples who came to Canaan from lands to its north? The Hurrians or the Hittites who came to Canaan from Anatolia?

The actual facts cut no ice with Abbas, who has also claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian – even though he was a Jew from Judea.

The claim about the Assyrian artifact is firmly in line with all this nonsense. The PA's Tourism Minister Rula Maayah acknowledged that the spoon is the work of the Assyrian civilization and dates from between 700 and 800 BCE. Yet the Assyrians were among the many conquerors in the land of Israel. So, if the Palestinians descended from the Assyrians, how could they also be descended from the Canaanites?

These wild declarations arise from the Palestinians' Big Lie. Central to their appeal to gullible supporters in the West is the claim that they are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. They deny that the only people for whom Israel was ever their national kingdom were the Jews and that the Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land.

That denialism writes the Jews out of their own history. To that end, the "Palestinians" have tried to conceal the stunning archaeological evidence of the ancient Jewish kingdom that is being uncovered in Israel all the time.

Thus, they have dumped as refuse truckloads of material excavated in Israeli archaeological digs, which the Israelis then painstakingly sifted in a desperate attempt to retrieve the precious finds it was likely to contain.

Despite all this, some Palestinian Arabs have themselves blurted out the truth.

In 1977, a PLO executive committee member, Zahir Muhsein, said, "The Palestinian people does not exist. … Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism."

In 2006, Nazmi al-Jubeh, an associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University who has denied the historic link between the Jews and Jerusalem, made plain that Palestinian identity was invented solely to destroy Zionism and Israel.

Those living in Palestine from the time of the Romans, he wrote, were "mostly part of a greater regional or international political entity, which usually housed several nations, ethnic groups and cultures."

Similarly, today's Palestinians, he wrote, "are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied and passed through this strip of land."

"The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders and the Kurds who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine," he claimed.

What gave the Palestinians their identity, said al-Jubeh, was their "struggle" against Zionism and the State of Israel. "There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict."

So why is the US, which claims to be Israel's staunch ally, giving credence to a false Palestinian identity created to write the Jews out of their own history?

The Biden administration's sympathy with the Palestinians is well documented. It has persistently refused to call them to account for their murderous aggression and incitement. It continues to fund them regardless of their "pay-for-slay" rewards to terrorists' families. It forces Israel to undermine its own security in pursuit of a "two-state solution" that the Palestinian Arabs have refused for almost a century.

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In creating a new role of special envoy to the Palestinians, for which it appointed a man with a record of profound hostility to Israel, Hady Amr, the administration upgraded the Palestinians' status by giving them direct and public access to the US government. It has also appointed other profound enemies of Israel to several prominent positions within the administration.

But what the Assyrian spoon transfer reveals is that the Palestinian Big Lie is being promoted as truth by none other than the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11 to protect America against terrorist attacks.

Far from being a key link in the chain of Western security, the DHS has internalized the fiction about Palestinian identity that is promoted as a principal weapon in the war of extermination against Israel – and is in turn the flag behind which march the Islamist foes of the West.

Noll said of the spoon transfer, "This is a historic moment between the American and Palestinian people and a demonstration of our belief in the power of cultural exchanges in building mutual understanding, respect and partnership."

It was certainly a historic moment. What it demonstrated, however, was that the Biden administration is a far more profound foe of Israel and the Jews than most people have yet realized.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Those scratching their heads over the way Western liberals have lost all connection with reason over issues of race, gender and Western "colonialism" might usefully look at the reaction to Itamar Ben-Gvir's visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount this week.

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Here was a Jew walking for 15 minutes on the site that is most sacred to Judaism. He did it without fanfare or media attention, early in the morning when the compound was almost empty, and didn't pray there or say anything to stir up trouble.

Yet his visit provoked uproar with claims that it was an extremist act, that it was likely to spark a new terrorist war and even that Ben-Gvir was leading Israel "on the road to hell."

In any sane universe, this is simply unhinged. Ben-Gvir was fully entitled to be there. He did nothing out of the ordinary. Other Israeli Jews, including government ministers, regularly visit the site.

The people actually responsible for inciting violence over the Temple Mount are the Palestinian Arabs. Since the 1920s, they have been provoking fanatical religious hysteria and the murder of Israelis with the wickedly false claim that the Jews were either storming or planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Similar claims were made in 2022 when Palestinian Arabs turned Al-Aqsa into an ammunition store from where they hurled rocks down at Jews praying at the Western Wall and attacked Jews making their way there.

The reason is that, as the site of the Jewish Temple that was the focus of Jewish religious life in ancient Israel until it was destroyed in 70 CE, the Temple Mount stands at the very center of the Jews' unique entitlement to Jerusalem and the land.

That's why the Palestinians have tried to destroy the archeological evidence that has been dug up at the site over the years. They attempt to wipe the Jews out of their own history in the land – centuries before the first Arabs or Muslims invaded it – in order to support the laughably bogus claim that the Palestinian Arabs were its indigenous people.

Yet this use of the Temple Mount for incitement, violence and religious supersessionism draws no condemnation from the Western left. They do not acknowledge that this aggression, which strikes against Judaism itself, is the real cause of the Middle East conflict.

Instead, the Biden administration condemned the Ben-Gvir excursion as an "unacceptable" and "unilateral" action that "undercut the historic status quo." Not only was this untrue, but the status quo, which Israel has upheld, is itself unacceptable.

The status quo prevents Jews and Christians from praying at their own holy site; it restricts non-Muslims to entry through only one of 12 gates while Muslims can use all the gates; it forbids Jews from drinking from the water fountain in the compound because of the claim that Jews are "unclean."

While falsely asserting that Israel is attempting to drive Muslims out of their holy site, the Palestinian Arabs bellow that no Jew is to be allowed to set foot on the Temple Mount with what Palestinian Authority chieftain Mahmoud Abbas described as "their filthy feet."

This odious racial discrimination and violence draws no condemnation from the Biden administration or the Western left. Instead, it is Ben-Gvir who is accused of racism.

The Oslo Accords state: "The Palestinian side shall ensure free access to, respect the ways of worship in and not make any changes to, the Jewish holy sites." At both the Temple Mount and the sacred Jewish site of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly broken this pledge.

For years, Jews visiting Joseph's Tomb have been attacked by Arab rioters and gunmen, most recently on Dec. 21, 2022, when Jewish worshippers and the soldiers guarding them came under heavy gunfire.

Yet this draws no condemnation from the Biden administration or the Western left. Instead, there are veiled threats that the US will punish Israel for having Ben-Gvir in its government.

In the same way, successive Democratic administrations and other Western liberals have held Israel responsible for the Arab war against it on the grounds that Israel is "illegally occupying" Palestinian land.

This is geopolitically illiterate. Only the Jews have a legal, historical and moral entitlement to this land. The Jews are its only extant indigenous people and the Palestinian Arabs are its would-be colonial occupiers, declaring that "not one Jew" will be allowed to live in a state of Palestine.

Yet this attempt to erase the Jews from their own country and even from their own history is ignored by the "anti-racist" Western left, who instead accuse Ben-Gvir of promoting ethnic cleansing.

In a savage tweet this week, Sen. Ted Cruz said that the Biden administration's "pathological obsession" with undermining Israel was endangering the national security of America and its allies.

The administration's attacks following the Ben-Gvir visit, Cruz said, will convince Palestinian officials that compromise is unnecessary because Democratic administrations "will coerce our Israeli allies into making dangerous concessions." The administration, he added, consistently seeks to undermine Israel's security and sovereignty while pouring more than $1 billion into Palestinian areas and "bringing officials from the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization to Washington D.C."

This perverse behavior by Western liberals, aided by Israeli leftists who fan the flames by even more hysterically promoting these lies and appeasement, hugely incentivizes further Palestinian rejectionism and violence. It also actively emboldens Israel's existential foes among the world's tyrannies and kleptocracies who use United Nations resolutions and "lawfare" to try to bring Israel down.

Just imagine if America said that these Palestinian lies and incitement have to stop, that Israel has law and history on its side and that the only aggressors in this war are the Palestinian Arabs who want to destroy the Jews' right to their country and historic identity.

The Palestinians' strategy of extermination would collapse overnight because the main reason this war never ends is the West's support for their cause.

The result is the unique and insane situation in which Israel is forced to fund people who continue to build an infrastructure of genocidal warfare that they periodically unleash against Israeli civilians; in which so-called allies prevent Israel from taking measures essential to defend its people against mass murder; and in which the same so-called allies now have the gall to tell Israel that the composition of its government doesn't meet with their approval.

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Israel, however, is not the only example of a looking-glass world in which aggressor and victim, right and wrong, truth and lies have been turned on their heads.

Many are observing similar denials of reality and character assassination in the West's culture wars and are concluding that the world has simply gone mad.

Israel's new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may turn out to behave badly or unwisely. Ben-Gvir and the other two "extremists" in Israel's government may promote the fanaticism or recklessness with which they are associated. If they do so, they will deserve to be criticized.

But just as happened with former US President Donald Trump, such a rational, evidence-led approach is vanishingly unlikely. To liberals, there are simply no facts or evidence that can reframe the way they view the Netanyahu government: That it has crossed over to the dark side from which there can be no return.

Antisemitism repudiates reason. Anti-Israelism repudiates reason. It's well known that the Jews are always the canary in the cultural coal mine.

Today, anti-Jewish bigotry is both symptomatic of and fueled by a far broader and deeper phenomenon. We can see this in the madness of identity politics. The West, having produced the age of reason, is now intent on destroying it.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post The Israeli canary in the West's cultural coal mine appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.