This is the central intellectual sleight of hand performed by Sharon Brous, the prominent Reform rabbi, and IKAR, the progressive Los Angeles congregation she founded. They present themselves as a vibrant, modern expression of Jewish tradition. In reality, there is very little about their political activism that is rooted in that tradition. Instead, they engage in a relentless, cynical exercise of reverse-engineering: deciding on a progressive political outcome first, and then rummaging through ancient texts to find a quote that can be twisted to justify it.

Nowhere is this dynamic more glaring than in Brous’s recent speech condemning Israel’s new death penalty legislation for convicted terrorists. In her address, she described the Knesset’s passage of the law as a “dark day” and a “poison pill” destroying Israel’s moral core. She branded the legislation, which targets Palestinians convicted by military courts of deadly terror attacks, as racist, dangerous, and vengeful.

To lend this political attack the veneer of religious authority, Brous retreated into the Talmud. She cited the story of the “murder beneath the fig tree,” a narrative illustrating how ancient rabbinic courts interrogated witnesses with such absurd specificity about the color of the figs and the thickness of the branches that their testimony was inevitably thrown out, allowing the accused to go free. She presented this as a model of enlightened jurisprudence, arguing that a justice system should be so encumbered by procedural hurdles that execution becomes practically impossible.

It is a clever rhetorical trick, but it is intellectually bankrupt. Brous is taking an ancient debate about the theoretical limits of capital punishment in a fundamentally different legal system and weaponizing it against a modern nation-state fighting for its survival against genocidal terror.

The individuals targeted by Israel’s legislation are not the hypothetical subjects of a Talmudic thought experiment. They are terrorists. They are men who have committed premeditated, savage attacks against innocent civilians. They are individuals who often film their atrocities and broadcast them to the world, celebrating the slaughter of children, women, and the elderly.

To demand perfect, unassailable testimony about the “twigs and branches” of a crime scene when the perpetrators proudly confess to their barbarism is not a safeguard of justice. It is a surrender to evil. It is a mechanism for guaranteed acquittal dressed up as high-minded principle.

More importantly, Brous’s selective reading ignores the vast, robust tradition within Jewish law that deals with the absolute obligation to protect innocent life. She conveniently omits the concept of the rodef, the pursuer, which mandates that one must stop an individual who is attempting to murder another, even if it requires killing the pursuer. She ignores the overarching principle of pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, which overrides almost every other religious commandment. When a society is under constant siege from actors whose stated goal is its complete destruction, the death penalty for terrorists is not an act of vengeance. It is a desperate, necessary measure of deterrence. But Brous cannot acknowledge this, because doing so would conflict with the progressive dogma that views all state power, particularly Israeli state power, with inherent suspicion.

This is not an isolated incident. It is the defining methodology of IKAR. The organization has positioned itself at the vanguard of progressive religious activism, frequently aligning with groups like J Street and the New Israel Fund. These organizations have made a cottage industry out of criticizing Israel’s defensive measures while demanding concessions that would jeopardize the nation’s security.

Brous has made a habit of launching rhetorical broadsides against the Israeli government, always cloaked in the language of prophetic critique. During a Yom Kippur sermon, she accused Israel’s leadership of harboring a messianic agenda aimed at turning the country into a fascist theocracy. She described the government’s actions as a “metastatic tumor.” More recently, she publicly expressed “revulsion” at what she characterized as Israel’s “moral failure” in Gaza, accusing the government of using starvation as a weapon of war.

In a particularly revealing Purim sermon, she argued that American politicians who support Israel’s security measures are not acting out of genuine concern for Jewish safety. Instead, she claimed, they are exploiting Jewish trauma to advance a “white Christian nation” agenda in the United States.

This is not theology. It is partisan politics wearing a prayer shawl. The implication is staggering: any political support for Israel’s right to defend itself, particularly if it comes from the political right, is, at its core, a cynical manipulation. In this worldview, conservatism is inherently suspect, and any alliance with conservative forces is a moral compromise.

By consistently framing Israel’s defensive actions as moral failures and its government as a proto-fascist enterprise, Brous provides intellectual scaffolding for those who seek to delegitimize the state entirely. She draws a false, grotesque equivalence between the desperate, often imperfect decisions made by a country fighting for its life and the deliberate, ideologically driven violence of terrorist organizations like Hamas.

There is a profound moral difference between a nation that uses force to protect its citizens and a terrorist group that uses force to maximize civilian casualties. To blur that distinction is to lose one’s moral compass entirely.

It is remarkably easy to demand that a nation absorb the costs of procedural perfection when you are not the one burying your dead. It is easy to describe a government’s security measures as fascistic when your own city is not the target of relentless rocket fire. Brous’s congregation in Los Angeles is not rushing to bomb shelters in the middle of the night. Her children are not growing up with the sound of air raid sirens.

That geographical and existential distance does not disqualify her from having opinions. But it should inspire a profound humility. It should temper the absolute certainty with which she delivers her indictments.

Brous closes her speech with a vision of a redeemed world where every person sits peacefully under their own vine and fig tree. It is a beautiful, utopian vision. But utopias are not built by tying the hands of those forced to do the hard, ugly work of survival. Peace is not achieved by handcuffing the defenders while the aggressors run free.

True peace requires confronting evil honestly, not laundering it through a fog of philosophical abstraction. It requires acknowledging that sometimes, the only way to protect the innocent is to forcefully, unapologetically defeat the guilty. Until Brous and IKAR are willing to grasp that fundamental truth, their lectures on moral purity will remain exactly what they are: the empty, self-indulgent noise of the unthreatened, using ancient texts to justify modern cowardice.

His frustration is not new, and on a narrow demographic level it is not entirely without basis. Of the roughly 6.3 million Jews living in the United States today, only 3,773 made aliyah in all of 2025. Segal describes this as immigration “in a trickle, in a horrifyingly stingy manner, meager to the point of insulting the vision of the return to Zion.” That is a real and legitimate tension. But the argument he builds on top of that frustration is something else entirely. It is not a serious policy proposal. It is a provocation that manages, in a single essay, to be theologically confused, economically illiterate, and strategically self-defeating.

Start with the theology, because Segal opened there. He tells American Jews that when they pray three times a day for the ingathering of the exiles, “you don’t really mean it, because the shofar has already sounded, and there is no longer any technical or political obstacle to the gathering of our exiles, only a selfish obstacle on your part.” But this only works if you accept that the modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of that prayer, and that is a premise with a great deal of Jewish history and religious thought arrayed against it. The Jerusalem of Jewish liturgy is not a nation-state. It is not a Knesset, a Defense Ministry, or a secular government that has spent decades in bitter internal conflict over its own Jewish character. The prayer for the ingathering of the exiles is a prayer for divine redemption, for a world made whole under the sovereignty of God, not under the sovereignty of a coalition government in Jerusalem. To equate the two is not Zionism. It is a theological sleight of hand. Many deeply observant Jews, not fringe radicals but serious scholars and communities with centuries of tradition behind them, have argued precisely this. The state may be a historical miracle and a political necessity. It is not, by that fact alone, the answer to the Amidah. Segal is entitled to believe it is. He is not entitled to call those who disagree traitors.

But set theology aside, because the more damaging flaw in Segal’s argument is economic and strategic, and here the numbers are unforgiving.

Walk through any major Israeli institution and you will find, carved into the stone above the entrance or etched onto a donor wall inside, the name of an American Jewish family and the words “Friends of.” Friends of the Hebrew University. Friends of the Technion. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Friends of Hadassah Medical Center. These are not sentimental gestures. They are the financial architecture of Israeli civil society. A joint study by researchers at NYU and Tel Aviv University found that in 2021 alone, American donors contributed over $2.65 billion to Israel’s nonprofit sector, with “Friends of” organizations accounting for nearly 45 percent of that total and their share still growing. U.S. donors collectively provided up to three-quarters of all international philanthropic funding to Israeli nonprofits. The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces distributed more than $132 million in 2025, the largest annual sum in its 44-year history. In the first month after October 7, North American Jewry raised an estimated $1 billion in emergency donations. This is structural, not sentimental. Israeli universities, hospitals, and military welfare organizations have built their budgets around the assumption that diaspora Jews will keep writing the checks. When Segal dismisses all of this as “the joy of destitute poor people who received a dollar from a millionaire cousin,” he is not being provocative. He is being ignorant of his own country’s balance sheet.

And then there is Washington. The annual U.S. military aid package, the diplomatic shield at the United Nations, and the broader American political will to stand with Israel in moments of crisis are sustained, year after year, by the political engagement of an American Jewish community that votes, donates, lobbies, and advocates. Remove that community from the American political landscape by relocating it to the Negev, and you have not strengthened Israel. You have amputated one of its most vital limbs.

There is also a compounding irony that Segal seems entirely unaware of. Israel currently deploys thousands of shlichim, emissaries, to Jewish communities across North America, staffing day schools, running summer camps, leading Birthright trips, and working inside synagogues. The Israeli government funds this outreach. The Jewish Agency coordinates it. Billions of dollars and decades of effort have gone into building a diaspora that is engaged, Zionist, and philanthropically active. Segal himself acknowledges this, writing that “we send them emissaries, swoon over the initiatives of the Nefesh B’Nefesh organization.” He says it as though it is a mark of Israeli generosity. He does not seem to notice that it demolishes his own argument. You cannot simultaneously construct a vast infrastructure designed to keep Jews thriving in the diaspora and then call those same Jews traitors for living there. And threatening to dismantle that very infrastructure as punishment for insufficient aliyah is not an ultimatum. It is self-sabotage.

Nor can Segal avoid the uncomfortable question of yerida. Hundreds of thousands of native-born Israelis have chosen to leave, settling in Berlin, New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles. Before issuing ultimatums to communities abroad, it might be worth asking why so many people who were already there chose to go. Beyond that, if Israel genuinely wants more aliyah, it might start by making the process less punishing. American Jews who do make aliyah consistently cite the same obstacles: an impenetrable bureaucracy, prohibitive housing costs, a professional landscape that does not easily absorb foreign credentials, and a cost of living that has risen sharply. These are not excuses. They are policy failures. If the Israeli government treated mass aliyah as the urgent national priority Segal claims it is, it would fix them. The fact that it has not suggests the urgency is more rhetorical than real.

There is also a fundamental intellectual dishonesty running through Segal’s argument that needs to be named directly. He cannot decide who he is actually angry at. In the same essay, he accuses the Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn who davens three times a day of insincerity in his prayers, and in the next breath points to “some” who “have even reached the low point of supporting the Hamas invasion of Israeli territory on October 7.” He lumps together the Shabbos-observant family in Teaneck who sends their children to Jewish day school and donates to every Israeli institution they can find with the editor of Jewish Currents who treats Zionism as a moral crime. These are not the same people. They do not share the same values, the same relationship to Israel, the same theology, or the same politics. To address them in a single rebuke is not moral seriousness. It is intellectual laziness masquerading as prophetic fury.

Then there is the matter of the IDF draft, which Segal raises only to dismiss. He acknowledges that the Haredi community evades military service, then waves it away by noting that they “at least live in the country and assist to the best of their ability in solving the demographic problem.” This is a staggering concession buried in a paragraph about American Jewish failure. Israel is currently in the middle of a wrenching national crisis over the refusal of a large and growing segment of its own population to serve. The Supreme Court has ruled the exemptions illegal. Soldiers who have served multiple reserve tours since October 7 are watching their neighbors receive state stipends while refusing to share the burden. This is a real, immediate, solvable problem that lies entirely within Israel’s own hands. It requires political will, not American immigration. To suggest that mass aliyah from abroad is the answer to a manpower shortage that Israel is actively choosing to perpetuate through its own draft policies is not a serious argument. It is a way of avoiding one.

One need not argue that diaspora life is preferable to life in Israel to find Segal’s central charge profoundly ignorant. The word he chose is traitor. Not mistaken. Not spiritually diminished. Traitor. Consider what that word actually requires. A traitor betrays an obligation he has clearly and unambiguously accepted. Segal himself acknowledges that there is no legal or political barrier preventing American Jews from making aliyah. There is no draft notice they are ignoring, no oath they have broken, no law they are violating. What he is really saying is that they have failed to fulfill what he believes to be a moral and religious duty. That may be a legitimate critique. But a failure to meet a contested religious obligation, one that serious halakhic authorities have debated for generations, is not treason. It is a disagreement. Calling it treason does not make the argument stronger. It reveals that Segal has run out of one.

His essay is, at bottom, a demand that American Jews answer for a choice they have every right to make. He has dressed that demand in the language of prophecy, tradition, and existential urgency. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is an argument that is theologically presumptuous, strategically incoherent, and blind to the very financial and political lifelines that sustain the state he is defending. Israel at 78 faces real and serious challenges. The Haredi draft crisis is real. The demographic pressures are real. The cost of housing and the dysfunction of the absorption bureaucracy are real. These are problems that require honest leadership and political courage from within Israel, not a guilt campaign directed at communities abroad that have, by any fair accounting, given more to this state than Segal is willing to admit.

If he wants more American Jews to come, he might try making the case for Israel on its merits, with honesty about its failures and generosity toward those who love it from a distance. What he should stop doing is calling them traitors. That word belongs to people who have turned against their own. American Jews who pray for Jerusalem, fund its hospitals, lobby its allies, and mourn its dead have not turned against anything. They have simply not moved there. In a free society, under any serious reading of Jewish law or ethics, that is their right. And no ultimatum, however passionately delivered, is going to change that.

That admission points to a much deeper, systemic problem that has haunted the IDF since the October 7 attacks and the ground offensive that followed. The destruction of the statue isn’t some isolated lapse in judgment. It’s part of a long, troubling pattern of soldiers documenting their own misconduct that began the moment boots hit the ground in Gaza. Social media feeds were quickly flooded with bizarre, self-incriminating videos. Troops filmed themselves looting abandoned homes, playing with children’s toys, and, in a widely condemned trend, posing with the lingerie of displaced Palestinian women. They added mocking captions and treated the devastation like a dark joke. Most observers were appalled, considering the behavior demeaning and deeply unprofessional. When soldiers feel comfortable enough to broadcast these acts to the world, it signals a severe breakdown in basic military discipline and moral conduct.

The fallout from the Jesus statue incident now threatens to spark a diplomatic crisis that Israel can ill afford. The image strikes a raw nerve in Lebanon, particularly among the Maronite Christian community, which has already endured casualties and displacement in the crossfire. The incident also risks alienating Israel’s Western allies and drawing sharp condemnation from the Vatican, which has consistently demanded the protection of Christian minorities and religious sites across the region. As military brass try to manage the situation through the chain of command, that shattered statue stands as a glaring reminder of how quickly one soldier’s reckless behavior can spiral into an international nightmare.

JD Vance recently faced such a test. He failed it spectacularly.

Speaking at a Turning Point USA gathering in Athens, Georgia, the Vice President of the United States was asked by a young conservative whom he should be listening to for political and cultural insight. This was a teachable moment. It was an opportunity for the second most powerful man in the country to point a young mind toward the great thinkers of the conservative tradition, or at the very least, toward commentators who treat the American experiment with the reverence it deserves.

Instead, Vance offered an endorsement that was as baffling as it was morally bankrupt. He told the young man to listen to Theo Von. “I love Theo Von,” Vance declared. “He’s one of my favorite. He’s just incredible.”

For those unfamiliar with the darker corners of the internet, Theo Von is a comedian and podcaster who has recently traded his folksy Southern humor for the toxic currency of political conspiracy. To endorse him is not merely to endorse a comedian with a penchant for the absurd. It is to endorse a man who has actively mainstreamed some of the most vile and dangerous ideas circulating in our public discourse today.

Let us examine the “incredible” insights of the man JD Vance wishes our youth to emulate.

On a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the conversation turned to Israel’s efforts to defend itself against terrorism. Von’s response was not a nuanced critique of foreign policy. It was a moral inversion of the highest order. He called Israel the terrorist. “That’s crazy though, if you’re the fucking terrorist,” Von said. “If you want to stop them, fucking stand in front of the fucking mirror and start there.”

He called the State of Israel, fighting for its very survival against genocidal enemies, a terrorist state. On the most listened-to podcast in the world.

But the rot goes deeper. On a previous episode of the same show, Von casually asserted that the left-wing media is “mostly Jewish” and then posed the insidious question, “But why do they hate white guys?” He has complained that “all of our fucking money goes to Israel, and they’re using it to fucking genocide people.” He has described the Israeli government as a “satanic regime.”

And when fellow comedian Dave Smith appeared on Von’s podcast to boast about hosting Nick Fuentes, a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier, Von did not push back. He did not challenge the normalization of a man who has built his career on pure hatred. Instead, Von called Fuentes “fucking brave.”

This is the drek that JD Vance is serving to the next generation of American conservatives.

One must ask why a man of Vance’s intellect would make such a grotesque recommendation. The answer, sadly, appears to be a mixture of political cowardice and cynical calculation.

Vance’s closest ally in the media has long been Tucker Carlson. But just days before the Turning Point event, Donald Trump publicly excommunicated Carlson, calling him a “low-IQ person” and a “fool” after Carlson criticized the administration’s Iran policy and called Trump a “slave” to Israel.

Unable to recommend his friend without drawing the ire of the President, Vance needed a substitute. He needed someone who possessed the requisite “bro” credibility to appeal to young male voters, but who was not currently in the President’s crosshairs. He chose Theo Von, seemingly indifferent to the poison Von injects into the cultural bloodstream.

The irony is that in his desperation to pander, Vance selected a figure who actively undermines the conservative agenda. Von recently demanded the Department of Homeland Security remove his image from a video celebrating deportations, distancing himself publicly from the administration’s border policies. He then hosted Senator Bernie Sanders for nearly ninety minutes, nodding along as the socialist senator railed against the free market and the billionaire class. He even publicly called out Vance himself for flip-flopping on the release of the Epstein files.

Theo Von is not a conservative. He is a nihilist who flirts with antisemitism and socialism with equal enthusiasm, and who has made clear he has no interest in being anyone’s political mascot.

When a leader is asked to guide the youth, he is being asked to set a standard. By elevating Theo Von, JD Vance has signaled that intellectual rigor, moral clarity, and basic decency are no longer requirements for conservative leadership. He has told young Americans that it is perfectly acceptable to traffic in antisemitic tropes, to call our greatest ally a terrorist state, and to praise Holocaust deniers, so long as you have a large podcast audience.

This is not leadership. It is an abdication of responsibility. It is the triumph of the algorithm over the intellect, of the viral clip over the virtuous life.

Conservatism, at its core, is about conserving what is good, true, and beautiful in our civilization. It requires defending the institutions and values that sustain human flourishing. It demands the courage to reject the gutter, even when the gutter is popular.

JD Vance had a choice between the high road of statesmanship and the low road of pandering. He chose the gutter. And in doing so, he failed not only the young man who asked the question, but every young American who looks to their leaders for moral clarity in a confusing world.

April 6, 2026

To the Clergy and Board of Trustees of Central Synagogue –

I cannot in good conscious continue to support Central Synagogue financially with the payment of dues. So, it is with the deepest sorrow and extreme regret that I hereby resign from the congregation of Central Synagogue. Central has been a special place for me and my family. All three of my children became bar and bat mitzvah at Central. They all gained an appreciation and love for Judaism at Central’s religious school. Perhaps most importantly, the loving and uplifting services inspired them and drew them closer to the practice of Judaism. That is why I find it so painful to continue to watch the leadership of the congregation commit the most serious of shogeg despite all evidence to the contrary.

I have reached the point, however, where for the sake of my children, grandchildren, and our community, I can no longer allow myself to be complicit. The rising tide of antisemitism did not start on October 7^th, 2023. It started many years before. After the terrorist attack of September 11^th, educated people responded uniformly with a defense of freedom, democracy, and Western civilization. Twenty years later, after the savagery of October 7^th, they responded with a defense of the horrific atrocity and, in many circles, with a celebration of it. What changed?

To some of us, the answer is obvious. The seeds of antisemitism had been planted years ago, often with the help or at least indifference of Jews, and the roots have grown deeper and deeper into our institutions. Those seeds have been fertilized with virtuous sounding rhetoric, and with each graduating class the harvest grows larger and larger. The only surprise in the post-October 7^th world, was that President Biden, the senescent old guard, after waffling, did not abandon Israel.

I have watched in vain as the slow motion trainwreck has played out before my eyes, feeling, like many others, hopeless and powerless to slow it. Our clergy, like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot, have failed to perceive the steady poisoning of our educational system and a major political party which has now become toxic. For that reason, I believe that much of the American Jewish leadership has failed us. The reform movement has most certainly failed us. Central, as the flag-bearer of the reform community, has failed us. Many of our politicians, especially Jewish ones, have failed us. The German reform rabbis in the early 1930’s were so blinded by their belief that they were German, good Germans, that they did not recognize that their nation had turned against them. Many urged patience and compliance, advising their congregation to remain in Germany because the actions of the Nazi’s were so antithetical to what they believed were German values that it was only a matter of time until reason prevailed. Rabbi Leo Baeck even protested the exclusion of Jews in the 1935 German general conscription because the duty of being in the army means the right to be a German soldier, and the reform Jews saw themselves as loyal Germans. History has now repeated itself here in the US and in our hometown of New York City.

I have written to the clergy previously, urging a more prominent role in fighting the forces that have led us to this moment and pointed to a speech by Bari Weiss given at the Federalist Society as one that really illuminated the rising institutionalized threat against Jews. What I received as a response from Rabbi Buchdahl was an email pointing to an article in the Atlantic by Franklin Foer that, unwittingly, captures the delusional partisan bias that has been ingrained in too many American Jews. In trying to reconcile the undeniable virulent antisemitism that has erupted all across the left, from political parties (Democrats), to movements (Progressive, Gay-rights, Black Lives), to institutions (blue state universities), to media sources (NY Times, CNN), he instinctually creates a moral equivalency between the left and the right to avoid shattering his guiding narrative. The problem is that no such duality exists outside of his imagination. As Foer correctly points out, Jews have enjoyed a long stretch of freedom and safety in America until this latest rise in hostility, which has unquestionably only come from one source. That is not to say that antisemitism has never existed on the right, or that it does not exist there today, or even that it will not exist in greater force in the future. But as Foer admits, it has, and currently still is, remained on the fringe as fodder for talk shows and op-ed pieces, but otherwise invisible in lives of those in our community. The far-right antisemitism has not been institutionalized. Moreover, when it has popped up on the fringe in the form of lunatic podcast personalities, it has been rightfully shunned by the mainstream party and we, as Jews, have quickly called out anyone who allowed themselves to be associated with it. Whereas the antisemitism on the left is not on the fringe and has either been embraced or at best ignored universally by the leadership. Worse yet, for reasons involving deeply embedded biases, Jewish leadership has failed to hold public figures accountable for their support or tolerance of such egregious ideologies.

Even sermons at Central have tried to equate the fear of rising antisemitism (which presumably is from the left) with a fear of losing rights (presumably from the right). The fallacy with that is that the former fear is objectively real and easy to measure. And more importantly, it should be the focus of our community leadership as it is an issue for all of us and our families. The latter fear is at best a subjective one and at worst an imagined one that serves to help rationalize when democracy does not go your way. One is very much the responsibility of Jewish leaders to address, including those in our community. The other is for political debate to be decided in succeeding elections and has nothing to do with being Jewish.

Unfortunately, Foer is not alone in his biased-induced blindness, as similar projected narratives echo across our community and our congregation. Using some form of twisted logic that is hard to follow, somehow there are those that try and tie the election of President Trump, the unequivocally most pro-Isreal and pro-Jewish president in American history by any objective measure, to Jewish kids being accosted across college campuses. Like the reform rabbis of 1930’s Germany, they are unable to comprehend that their self-identifying movement have turned against them. Even worse in this case, that the policies and values that they fought for have enabled the hatred now being directed at their children and grandchildren. While history clearly teaches us that dividing society by race, religion, or any other identity has NEVER worked out for the Jews in the long run, they continue to look for some other explanation that better fits what they want to believe.

We have reached a tipping point whereby being silent is being complicit and the silence from the clergy of Central has become too loud to ignore. When our children were hiding in library closets to avoid angry mobs looking for Jews on campus, where was Central? When our children were attending NAIS conferences and being subjected to speakers encouraging violence against them, where was Central? When our schools adopted curriculum teaching that Israel was an invader or apartheid state, where was Central? When a major political party allows prominent members to promote the destruction of Israel without consequences, where was Central? While current administration has been trying to root out antisemitism that has grown unchecked in our universities, where was Central? We have long passed the point when joining the chorus of those paying lip service to antisemitism can be said to be of any value. Without demands for consequences and accountability, empty condemnations are counterproductive, and too many of our loved ones have been left to fend for themselves without calls for accountability. I for one, have mailed my Columbia Law School and Business School diplomas back, as I believe Columbia is a failed institution. I have repeatedly called out the Dean of the Law School for his many ideological failings and have mourned the loss of what was once a great institution of learning.

Recent events have become too much to ignore. I cannot teach my children to be proud to be Jewish, to stand up for what is right, and to treat everyone with respect while tacitly supporting the antithesis by remaining a member of Central. After the death of George [Floyd], a drug addict and criminal whose life contributed nothing positive to society, I was flooded with e-mails discussing his death, which regardless of his character in life, was certainly tragic and regrettable even if not intentional. During the riots that followed, when the hard work of innocent families was destroyed, looting was widespread, and antisemitic movements like BLM came into power, Central continued to send emails urging the congregation to put the crime and destruction “in context.” Central even went so far as to recommend books by antisemites who now support the destruction of Israel to help gain that “context.” Whereas, after the assignation of Charlie Kirk in cold blood, in front of his wife and young children, which was the most significant act of political violence since the murder of Martin Luther King, there was silence. Loud silence. Charlie Kirk was a devoted family man who preached nonviolence and free speech as the cornerstones of democracy. He welcomed competing viewpoints and modeled how to address them, with spirited debate, not bullets or intimidation. While he was not Jewish, but he kept the Sabbath and was, perhaps, the single greatest defender of Israel and Jewish people to set foot on a college campus in decades, perhaps ever. That omission is not only offensive, but racist and antisemitic. It goes against everything I have taught my children about free speech, democracy, respect, and courage. I could only explain such disparate treatment to them as an example of intolerance for differing views and a complete and utter lack of moral conviction.

While the clergy continues to pay lip service to its support of Zionism, its actions, or lack of action, undermine the very notion. Their lack of real conviction and continued soft pedaling of the forces that have aligned against us and Isreal, only serves to compound the strength of those who seek our destruction. This is seen throughout Central, including the prayers said in synagogue – whereas the prayer for Isreal we used to recite asked G-d to: “Strengthen the hands of those who defend our Holy Land. Deliver them; crown their efforts with triumph,” now we ask G-d to “Give strength to the injured…and Grant wisdom and vision to the leaders of the region [not Israel]…and to Grant strength and shelter to [the] displaced in [Israel] and Gaza.” Central has also continued to invite guest speakers who have been associated with anti-Zionist, antisemitic, and racist organizations and policies.

While claiming to be apolitical, Central very strongly promoted an antisemitism speech given by Chuck Schumer and even arranged for him to speak to the congregation. If there has been a more feckless defender of Jewish rights in either national party, I am not aware of them. Like Central, his speech gives lip service to the antisemitism rising across campuses and the nation – yet where was he when the Trump administration as actually fighting to root out institutional antisemitism and racism within our educational system? As the leader of his party, where does he condemn AOC and others who call for an end of aid and military sales to Israel? Where was his challenge of the long list of antisemitic acts and statements of the mayor of his hometown during the election? Schumer is not a real defender of Zionism, he is a political animal too blinded by partisan politics to be anything other than a tool. Meanwhile, there have been more than twice the number of Republican speeches/op-eds delivered on the national stage all by politicians who unequivocally support the defense of Israel and condemn AOC, Mamdani, and all other politicians who try to undermine Israel or Jews, including those on the fringe of their own party. Whereas beyond Chuck, the handful of other Democrats who spoke to rising antisemitism on the national stage, all also supported restrictions on aid to Israel, and none had an issue with the various anti sematic/Zionist statements that have come out of their colleagues in “the squad.” And yet the Clergy would strongly argue that they are nonpartisan and not guided in their conversations with the congregation by politics. But has the Clergy reached out to local politicians who not only have spoken on the floor about antisemitism, but have taken real action to hold schools accountable, support aid to Israel, and called out those who have shown their hostility towards Jews? Like Representative Lawler, Representative Stefanik, or Representative Smith? Or national champions of Zionism like Nikki Haley, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Katie Britt, Senator John Kennedy, Mike Huckabee, [Marco] Rubio…the list goes on and on. These are actually truly committed supporters of Israel and the Jewish people, not mealy-mouthed politicians like Schumer or Nadler who now kowtow to the strong anti-Zionist segment of their party for fear of risking their political careers.

But, despite all this, it was the notification sent out by Central claiming that it was unable to comment on the mayoral election for fear of losing it’s 501(c) status that convinced me that I could no longer remain silent and passively accept such behavior. The cowardice evidence by such an email was matched only by its absurdity. With a proud antisemite and anti-Zionist on the verge of becoming mayor of our city at a time when it has been open season on Jews even under a sympathetic mayor, Central chose to fold like Vichy France. To hide behind the 501(c) status as a reason for not being able to comment on the risk to Jews posed by one particular candidate is as insulting as it is embarrassing. The excuse that the silence from Central is from fear of the IRS, given the current administration, which was more likely to give Central a federal grant to oppose Mamdani than anything else, is surreal. The idea that in a congregation of over 3,000 households or around 7,000-9,000+ Jews, there is not a lawyer or accountant capable of guiding our clergy on how to voice concern over the danger we face when our city is being run by a mayor who will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state is preposterous, if not statistically impossible.

The fact is that the combination of the IRS recently clarifying that clergy can comment on elections and candidates during a sermon to their congregation together with the chances that the IRS would look to limit that exception by challenging an influential rabbi pointing out the danger of someone like Mamdani under our current administration was literally zero. Local clergy from conservative congregations like Park Avenue to reform ones from Stephen Wise, found the courage to lead, and not follow, their communities. There were an endless number of ways that Central could have made the point that voting for anyone who held such antisemitic views was a danger to us all.

Ironically, what compounded the damage from this unforgivable silence during the election was Rabbi Buchdahl’s last minute “mea culpa” made in a surprise return sermon. While I initially appreciated what I thought was perhaps an acknowledgement, the first that I was aware of, that the time had come for some unbiased leadership based on the health and safety of our community, that goodwill was quickly undone when the sermon evolved to include “listening to,” and therefore legitimizing, the views of students she met with on the reasons for their Mamdani support. In that non-sequitur acknowledgment, once again Rabbi Buchdahl gave into her political biases and accepted ideas that aligned with a subconscious narrative rather than showing leadership and debunking such fiction with facts and logic.

The Talmud teaches us that leaders are especially accountable to speak out against dangerous rhetoric or incitement when their voices can help: “Whoever can protest the conduct of their household and does not is held responsible for the household; of their townspeople—responsible for the town; of the whole world—responsible for the whole world.” We as Jews are commanded to look out for each other and to speak up when members of the community are doing wrong, lest we share the blame for remaining silent: “All Israel are responsible for one another.” Make no mistake, there is war underway that threatens our very survival. Not the war in Gaza, that one I have every confidence will be won and it was never an existential threat. It’s the war being fought against the Jews in the wider West, on campuses, in the media, and increasingly in mainstream politics, that we must fear, and sadly, that one we are currently losing.

Those who do not speak out will have the blood of our families on their hands, and there will almost certainly be blood. If you think that the recent events of violence are about, the inhabitants of Gaza, the prime minister of Israel, or settlements, or some other red herring, you are naive. War will end, the antisemitism will not. When violence erupts and we have a mayor who generally does not believe in the police and clearly does not believe in Israel’s right to exist, who do you think will defend us? If the leader of our city sees nothing wrong with calls to globalize the anti-fada nor demands for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea,” are our children safe? As each graduating class is increasingly against the right of Israel to exist and believes in its elimination in the name of “social justice,” what do you think happens?

Generals “always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they won it.” (French Prime Minister Clemenceau) Past generations of Jews have been guided by Jewish values and played important roles in fighting to get the underrepresented and disadvantaged a seat at the table. That fight was generally against the entrenched southern establishment and white male dominated social systems. The institutions they created, the forces they fought against, even the country as a whole, have all evolved since that time, but many “Jewish Generals” continue to tilt against past ghosts unable to see that the soldiers and battlefields have changed. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature or the Golam of Prague, however, much of what they created has turned against the creator. Social Justice warriors do not want a seat, they want retribution, and it turns out the Jews are not faring well in the Oppression Olympics, putting them where they almost always end up when society starts handing out labels, directly in the line of fire. Until the training grounds for the identity-politics crusaders are shut down, Jews will remain on the front lines.

The majority of democrats already favor Hamas, a terrorist organization, over Israel. The party continues to include and increasingly cede power to those democratic politicians who would cut off all aid to Israel. They are steeped in a culture of identity politics, intersectionality, and victimhood, none of which bodes well for Jews. They see the world in terms of oppressor and oppressed, indigenous and invader, successful and not, all divisions that will result in Israel being on the short end of their narrative. The current administration is the most pro-Israel one in American history, but that will soon change. That we will eventually have an administration that favors severing ties with Israel and siding with most of the UN in condemning its existence is now close to a mathematical certainty. When that day comes, I want to be able to tell my children and grandchildren all that I did to try and stop it.

How can I teach my children the importance of standing up for your family and your community as Jews when I remain silent while watching our clergy remaining complicit as the threats to us grow increasingly louder? A big tent congregation is a mitzvah, and a very Jewish one as hachnasat orchim is a very Jewish value. But when the person who seeks to destroy you tries to enter the tent, the law of din rodef applies as we should “not stand idly by the blood of your brother.” So, this resignation is my hocheach tochiach, so that I do not bear the same sin. There is no neutral ground in this fight. If you are not with us, you are against us. The silence from Jewish leaders as antisemitism is increasingly institutionalized in our schools, promoted in biased media, and ignored by our politicians, is a tacit approval, and I do not find that acceptable.

Nothing would make me happier than to return to Central and once again participate in its loving celebration of our tradition. “You must surely rebuke…giving tochecha is not a suggestion, it is a command. Tochecha is an act of love…it’s not about pushing someone away; it’s about drawing them close…like holding up a mirror so they can see evidence of how they fell short.” (A. Buchdahl Yom Kippur sermon 5786) But until Central joins the fight to stop antisemitism at its core, I cannot, in good conscious, be a part of that denial. I pray that the leadership of Central come to realize that there is a big difference between being inclusive and being irresponsible.

I wish all of you and your families peace in their lifetimes.

Bekhavod Rav

The actual facts of the incident are so boring they’re almost comical. On Palm Sunday, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the Custos of the Holy Land were walking privately to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When they arrived, police prevented them from entering and forced them to turn back. It was a stark moment. For the first time in centuries, the heads of the church were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday Mass at the site.

But look at how the Cardinal himself reacted. Showing the kind of grace you’d hope to see from a religious leader, he didn’t throw a tantrum or call a press conference to declare a holy war. He simply pivoted. He went to the nearby St. Savior’s Monastery, which happens to sit next to an underground music school deemed a safe shelter space by the military, and celebrated Mass there instead. Later that day, he held a prayer service on the Mount of Olives, and kept his focus exactly where it belonged: on faith and the safety of the people in his care. He later described the disagreement with authorities as a polite difference of opinion.

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That really should have been the end of it. Just a bit of logistical friction in a city that has seen plenty of actual, bloody conflict over the millennia. But in the fever swamps of modern political commentary, restraint is basically a sin. Opportunists immediately hijacked the incident to feed their own narratives, turning a fleeting moment of confusion into a full blown international crisis.

Take French President Emmanuel Macron. Instead of pausing to get the facts straight, Macron rushed out a solemn condemnation of the Israeli police. He declared his full support for the Patriarch and framed the incident as part of a “worrying sequence of violations” of the status quo at holy sites, demanding that freedom of worship be guaranteed. It was a statement of profound gravity that was completely disconnected from the triviality of the actual event. When the leader of a major Western power treats a beat cop’s error like a geopolitical crisis, you start to grasp the depth of the hysteria.

The populist right was just as eager to fan the flames. Professional provocateurs like Jack Posobiec immediately cast the police action not as a misunderstanding, but as a deliberate, sinister provocation. He declared that “these people really don’t care to understand Christians,” framed the incident as an attack on access to holy sites, and dramatically urged his followers to “Defend the Holy Sepulchre.” When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban chimed in to call the police action “unacceptable,” Posobiec offered a sycophantic “Amen, Prime Minister.”

Others in that same ecosystem took it even further. Commentator Auron MacIntyre bizarrely framed the incident as “just one humiliation ritual after another,” suggesting it proved the Israeli government doesn’t care about the dignity of Christians. For this crowd, the incident was an intentional insult, a sign of some deep seated animus against Christianity orchestrated by the Israeli state. It’s the kind of reflexive grievance peddling that only works if you strip away all context and nuance.

Then you have the other side of the political spectrum, populated by hyperventilating critics of the current Israeli government like commentator Nadav Eyal. Their instinct is to immediately blame any friction in Jerusalem on the machinations of the political right. Eyal acknowledged that a junior officer had made a discretionary call, but couldn’t resist turning it into a sweeping indictment of the government. He declared that “this government is the most hostile to other religions since the state’s founding,” and tied the incident directly to Ben Gvir, whom he described as “a convicted felon, a disciple of Kahanism, and a former member of the outlawed racist movement Kach.” He sees the heavy hand of radical nationalism in what was, quite obviously, the clumsy hand of a low level police officer. To Eyal, the incident is ironclad proof of a deliberate erosion of the status quo, a warning shot of things to come.

Both narratives are equally absurd. Both require a massive suspension of disbelief and a willful ignorance of how the real world actually operates.

If you want to understand what truly happened, just apply Occam’s razor. The principle is straightforward: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. When faced with competing theories, pick the one that requires the fewest assumptions.

Look at the assumptions required by the outrage peddlers. To believe Posobiec, MacIntyre, or Macron, you have to assume that the Israeli government, currently fighting a multi front war for its very survival, decided that Palm Sunday was the perfect moment to intentionally antagonize the Vatican, the global Catholic community, and its Western allies. To believe Eyal, you have to assume that a minor police action at a church gate was a carefully calibrated ideological maneuver directed from the highest levels of the national security apparatus, and then executed flawlessly by a junior officer on the ground.

The simplest explanation requires zero grand conspiracies. Israel is a nation at war. Jerusalem is a city on edge, operating under heightened security protocols. The context that the outrage merchants conveniently ignore is stark: just days prior, an Iranian ballistic missile fragment fell within 1,500 feet of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The threat of mass casualty events isn’t theoretical. It’s a daily reality.

In this environment, the police department has to manage massive crowds in narrow, ancient streets. They issued orders to prevent gatherings in places without adequate shelter. The Old City is a complex maze that doesn’t allow access for large emergency and rescue vehicles. A mass casualty event there would be an absolute nightmare. So, a police officer, likely exhausted and operating under strict directives regarding public safety in the shadow of literal missile strikes, enforced those rules at the church entrance when the Patriarch arrived.

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It was a mistake. A classic example of bureaucratic rigidity clashing with religious tradition. And we know it was a mistake because the Israeli government corrected it almost immediately. Within hours of the incident, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally intervened, instructing authorities to grant the Cardinal full and immediate access. The Israeli police themselves clarified the situation the very next day, confirming that the incident was entirely about enforcing safety regulations, not some sinister change in policy regarding freedom of worship.

In fact, the police and the Latin Patriarchate quickly sat down and hammered out a perfectly reasonable agreement. They arranged for limited groups of Christians to pray at the church and for ceremonies to be broadcast to the faithful worldwide. It was a practical compromise, balancing very real wartime restrictions with the need for worship. The churches even publicly thanked President Isaac Herzog for his intervention.

If this was a deliberate “humiliation ritual” or a grand ideological plot orchestrated by Ben Gvir, why would the Prime Minister instantly reverse it? Why would the President step in to smooth things over? Why would the police immediately negotiate a compromise? The conspiracy theories collapse under the weight of basic facts.

There is no grand conspiracy here. There is no war on religion. There is only the friction of daily life in a complex, heavily policed city during wartime.

The rush to politicize this non event reveals a deep sickness in our public discourse. We’ve lost the ability to tell the difference between a genuine crisis and a clerical error. We are so desperate for villains that we invent them out of thin air, projecting our own ideological obsessions onto the actions of ordinary people who are just trying to do their jobs.

Cardinal Pizzaballa understood this. He saw the incident for what it was and refused to play the role assigned to him by the outrage merchants. He chose proportion over panic. He chose grace over grievance.

It’s a lesson that the commentators, the provocateurs, and even heads of state would do well to learn. Not everything is a symbol. Not every plot is a conspiracy. Sometimes, a misunderstanding is just a misunderstanding. And sometimes, the most radical act of all is simply to tell the truth, unadorned by hysteria, and move on.

He fell in battle in southern Lebanon this past Friday night. Three other soldiers were wounded in the same attack. He was the fifth Israeli soldier killed in southern Lebanon since the fighting began.

His father, Mendy Katz, broke the news to the world in a Facebook post that stopped people in their tracks.

“With unspeakable tragedy I regret to inform you that my 22 year old son Moshe Yitzchak a*h a sergeant in the idf, fell in battle in Lebanon. My oldest Son with a zest for life and jokes. Burial is tomorrow in israel. Maybe we only share good news. My heart is shattered and the wound is real. May he be a malitz yosher for only good things. With love. Mendy Katz”

A zest for life and jokes. That one line says so much. Because everyone who knew Moshe would tell you the same thing without hesitation.

A close friend, a fellow lone soldier who lived nearby and spent countless hours with him, shared his memories in the raw, unfiltered way that grief sometimes forces out of people. For lone soldiers, he explained, the community they build together becomes their family. Three apartments, always in and out of each other’s lives, always checking in, always making plans the second they got off base. And Moshe was at the center of all of it.

“I don’t remember seeing him without a smile,” his friend said. Whatever came his way, Moshe just took it and kept going. He was always happy, always up for anything. Call him up and say you’re going for a beer, he was there. Say you’re going to eat, he was already putting on his shoes.

About three weeks ago, Moshe finished his training march and earned his beret. His friend ran into him outside a barber shop and noticed he was limping. Moshe shrugged it off. “Yeah, I just hurt my knee.” His friend happened to have a knee brace in his bag from his own injury and handed it over without a second thought. Later that same Friday afternoon, Moshe called him up. “You want to go to eat?” They went out, his friend paid for the meal as a way of saying congratulations, and they sat together for a long time. Good food, good company, a lot of laughs. That was Moshe.

“Really amazing person,” his friend said, his voice breaking. “Wow, what a loss.”

He did not have to be there. Moshe grew up in New Haven, thousands of miles from the front lines. He chose to leave, chose to enlist, chose to serve. That is not a small thing. It speaks to something deep in who he was as a young Chabad man, a commitment to his people that went beyond words. He put on a uniform and stood where it counted, with a smile on his face and a joke always ready.

The Jewish people lost one of their own this Shabbos. A son, a friend, a brother in arms. May his memory be a blessing.

The media eagerly amplifies this narrative. It makes for explosive headlines. It frames the issue as a righteous battle for equality against a stubborn, archaic religious establishment. But these headlines ignore a deeply entrenched reality.

Let us establish the parameters of this argument right now. I am not here to adjudicate who is morally right or wrong. I am not taking a side on the theology of Torah study versus the ethics of national defense. This is strictly an exercise in calling balls and strikes on the practical realities of the Israeli state. And the reality is a truth nobody wants to utter out loud. Neither the secular left nor the military leadership actually wants a mass influx of Haredi soldiers.

If those 100,000 men actually showed up at the induction centers tomorrow, the secular establishment would be the first to panic.

Consider what a truly integrated army would require. The IDF today is a melting pot, but it is a distinctly secular, liberal, and Zionist one. It prides itself on being a progressive institution where men and women serve side by side, where LGBTQ soldiers are accepted, and where the culture is fundamentally modern.

Now drop 100,000 soldiers who require absolute, strict gender segregation into that mix. We are not talking about tweaking a few regulations. We are talking about a radical cultural overhaul. Entire bases would have to be redesigned so men and women never cross paths. Female instructors, who form the backbone of training for many combat units, would be legally barred from teaching Haredi recruits. The mere presence of women in leadership roles would become a daily flashpoint for insubordination.

Then there is the logistics. The dietary laws required by the ultra-Orthodox go far beyond the standard kosher rules the military currently observes. The IDF would have to tear up its supply chain to provide Glatt kosher meals, importing an army of religious supervisors to monitor every kitchen. The entire rhythm of military life would have to bend to accommodate rigid prayer schedules and religious study.

Proponents of the draft often point to the Religious Zionist community as proof that religious soldiers can serve without issue. And indeed they do. They serve in massive numbers, often in the most elite combat units, bridging the gap between strict observance and military duty through specialized programs. The army knows exactly how to work with them.

But comparing the Religious Zionists to the Haredim is a profound category error. The Religious Zionist camp is, by definition, Zionist. They view the State of Israel as the dawn of redemption. To them, military service is a sacred religious duty. They are ideologically in lockstep with the general goals of the state.

The Haredi community is a completely different entity. They are largely non-Zionist. Their ultimate allegiance is not to the state, the flag, or democratic institutions. It is to Torah values and the rulings of their rabbis. They do not view the secular state as holy. Many, in fact, see its secularizing influence as a direct threat to their spiritual survival.

That ideological chasm is what actually terrifies the military brass. The IDF functions on the absolute authority of the secular state. If you conscript tens of thousands of young men whose ultimate authority is a rabbi rather than a general, you are playing with fire. You fundamentally compromise the chain of command.

What happens when a rabbi declares a specific military operation violates Jewish law? What happens when soldiers are ordered to dismantle an illegal outpost, and their spiritual leaders instruct them to refuse? The IDF relies on unquestioning obedience. Introducing a massive bloc of soldiers who answer to a higher, non-state power is a recipe for mutiny.

The generals know this perfectly well. When they complain about manpower shortages, they are usually trying to squeeze more reserve days out of the secular and national-religious populations, or perhaps angle for a larger budget. They have zero desire to manage the explosive friction of integrating a non-Zionist population that views military service as a spiritual hazard.

The secular establishment complains loudly about the inequality of the draft, and they have every right to do so. The burden of defending the country falls heavily and unfairly on their shoulders. But they are terrified of the cultural shift a truly integrated army would demand. They vastly prefer the status quo of a smaller, secular army over a larger, deeply religious one.

This fear is the quiet consensus simmering just beneath the surface of Israeli politics. When secular politicians demand a universal draft, they are picturing a fantasy. They imagine Haredi men putting on a uniform, happily taking orders from female commanders, eating standard army rations, and suddenly embracing the Zionist ethos.

The Haredi community has made it crystal clear that this is a pipe dream. If forced to serve, they will demand the military adapt to them. They will not adapt to the military.

This leaves the secular left and the military leadership trapped. They cannot abandon the principle of equality, but they also cannot stomach handing over the country’s most revered institution to religious control. So, they play the game. They pass laws demanding integration, knowing full well those laws will get tied up in court or quietly slow-walked by the military brass.

The manpower crisis is real. The strain on the reservists is brutal. But the idea that drafting the Haredim is a simple fix is a dangerous illusion. It ignores the profound cultural chasm dividing the country. Until secular Israelis and the IDF are willing to confront what a truly integrated military would actually cost them in terms of their own values and lifestyle, the demands for a universal draft are just noise. The Haredi exemption is unfair, without question. But for the secular establishment, it might just be the price they are quietly willing to pay to keep their army looking exactly the way they want it to.

This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of documented regulatory policy. In a January 2018 meeting summary, the Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Health laid down a clear directive: United Hatzalah must not develop or advertise its 1221 call center. The government mandate requires all emergency calls to be routed through Magen David Adom (MDA), the country’s sole nationally mandated emergency medical provider. By law, United Hatzalah and every one of the roughly twenty other independent Hatzalah organizations across Israel must transfer every emergency call into MDA’s system. When a call comes into 101, the system immediately dispatches both an ambulance and the closest available first responders, who may come from MDA, United Hatzalah, or any other local Hatzalah branch. That structure is designed to unify the country around lifesaving care. When credible media figures take sponsorship money to broadcast the 1221 number, they are not just bypassing official protocol. They are lending their credibility to an organization that has repeatedly clashed with Israeli health authorities over precisely this issue.

What makes this even harder to excuse is how deliberate the strategy appears to be. After years of being told by the Ministry of Health to stop advertising 1221, United Hatzalah found a workaround. The organization formally updated its legal registration so that its official name became “United Hatzalah Israel 1221.” By embedding the number into its legal identity, the group ensured that 1221 would appear on every financial report, government filing, and audit document. It would be painted across ambulances, motorcycles, and emergency vehicles. The High Court of Justice later upheld United Hatzalah’s right to possess the 1221 line, but it did not overturn the Health Ministry’s prohibition on promoting it as a national dispatch number. The distinction matters enormously in practice, and the name-change maneuver exploits that gap in a way that critics argue was entirely intentional.

The confusion this creates abroad is particularly damaging. Foreign donors see the vehicles, the 1221 branding, and the promotional materials and reasonably assume that United Hatzalah is Israel’s frontline emergency service, something like 911 in the United States. The organization rarely emphasizes to its international supporters that it is not the primary national responder but a supplementary volunteer network legally bound to defer to MDA. The result is a fundraising narrative that, at minimum, omits material facts and “Call Me Back” is now helping to amplify it to an audience of engaged, pro-Israel listeners who trust the podcast’s editorial judgment.

The problem with United Hatzalah goes far beyond a disputed phone number. It extends to a pattern of statistical claims that simply do not hold up against the official data, particularly during times of national crisis. Take the recent conflict with Iran, referred to as Operation Roaring Lion. During the height of the missile exchanges in early March 2026, three organizations published casualty and treatment figures that can be compared directly.

On March 3, the Israeli Ministry of Health reported approximately 1,050 hospital arrivals. MDA reported treating and evacuating around 369 individuals. United Hatzalah claimed to have treated 1,361 people that same day. Two days later, on March 5, the Ministry of Health recorded 1,563 hospital arrivals, and MDA reported 491 treated. United Hatzalah’s reported number was 1,499.

These figures require a considerable suspension of disbelief. If United Hatzalah’s numbers are taken at face value, their volunteers treated nearly every casualty in the country on those days, far outpacing the national, legally mandated emergency service that operates the central dispatch system. The numbers do not reconcile with the Ministry of Health’s own totals. In crisis situations, accuracy is not a minor administrative concern. Inflating figures for donor appeals and infographics does not save lives. It distorts the public’s understanding of how the emergency system actually functions.

This tendency to overstate is not new. The organization routinely claims to handle roughly 2,000 emergency calls per day across Israel. Yet on the days when Iran launched its heaviest barrages, the actual response data published by official sources did not reflect a force of that claimed scale operating independently of the national system.

The credibility problem runs deeper still. The most serious questions about United Hatzalah’s conduct center on the October 7 attacks. The organization’s founder appeared on The Ben Shapiro Show and described a version of events involving Itai and Hadar Berdichevsky, the young couple from Kfar Aza who were murdered in their home while protecting their ten-month-old twins. The account included claims that the couple had called United Hatzalah’s private line at 6:30 a.m., that Hadar had been brutally raped multiple times, and that United Hatzalah volunteers had been embedded with Yamam special forces commandos during the rescue of the twins. The same story was later spread on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, reaching audiences across the political spectrum.

Every one of those central claims is contradicted by the available evidence. According to the grandfather of Itai Berdichevsky, the couple were among the very first victims in Kfar Aza that morning. Hadar was killed when she stepped out to prepare bottles for the babies, and Itai was shot shortly after as terrorists tried to break into the safe room. Their twins were left alone beside their parents’ bodies for roughly fourteen hours. It was soldiers from the Golani Brigade, led by Tomer Grinberg (who was later killed in Gaza), who entered the house, found the infants alive, and carried them to safety. Two United Hatzalah volunteers did transport the babies to the hospital afterward, and that act of care deserves recognition. But the rescue itself was performed by the Golani Brigade. The claim that the couple called 1221 at 6:30 a.m. and then waited in their shelter for two hours is directly at odds with the timeline confirmed by the family. The rape allegation is not corroborated by any credible source. Even those who have most aggressively documented and publicized sexual violence from that day have never claimed this happened.

The fabrications extended well beyond the Berdichevsky account. Beer personally told the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas that he had witnessed, with his own eyes, a Hamas terrorist opening a pregnant woman’s stomach, removing the baby, and stabbing it in front of her. He did not present this as hearsay. He claimed direct personal witness. The story spread widely. It has since been confirmed false by multiple people directly connected to the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, who stated plainly that no such incident occurred. It was further discredited by a member of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit who reviewed all raw footage from that day and confirmed that the video circulating as supposed evidence was not from October 7 at all. It was footage from an entirely different crime in Mexico. Beer also promoted the claim that infants had been placed in ovens, another story for which official investigations found no evidence. These were not offhand remarks made in the fog of war. They were delivered from conference stages and broadcast on some of the most influential media platforms in the world, reaching millions of viewers. Based on the documented record of falsehoods the organization promoted during and after October 7, it has next to zero credibility as a source of factual information. When an organization is willing to fabricate or wildly embellish its role during the nation’s darkest hour, and to do so on national television, there is no rational basis for trusting its daily operational statistics.

The pattern of false origin stories extends to the organization’s most recognizable symbol. United Hatzalah and its founder Eli Beer have built a significant part of their international brand on the claim that Beer personally invented the ambucycle, the motorcycle ambulance at the heart of the organization’s identity. The story appears in Beer’s TED Talk, which has accumulated millions of views, in his book, in a 2013 WIRED profile, and in a Forbes piece. The organization’s own website states plainly that United Hatzalah invented the ambucycle. In reality, motorcycle ambulances have existed for over a century. British, French, and American militaries used them in World War I. The London Ambulance Service launched its official Motorcycle Response Unit in 1991, fifteen years before United Hatzalah was even founded in 2006. Eli Beer did not invent the concept. He adopted an established global practice, gave it a new name, and repeated that origin story to millions of people as though it were a personal act of innovation. Presenting a rebranded existing idea as a revolutionary invention, in a TED Talk, in a book, in major publications, is not a minor exaggeration. It is a foundational misrepresentation that the organization has never corrected.

For years, the group’s leadership also pushed a narrative that MDA was withholding emergency calls and causing preventable deaths, running campaigns that accused the national service of killing people. The Israeli legal system addressed this directly. In a 2021 ruling, the Tel Aviv District Court found that the Ministry of Health had unequivocally determined there was no basis for United Hatzalah’s claim that MDA was withholding calls or causing deaths. The court concluded that United Hatzalah had initiated a smear campaign without justification and ordered the organization and its leadership to pay substantial damages for defaming Israel’s national rescue service. The judgment is a matter of public record.

Israel faces enough genuine threats without having to navigate a fractured emergency response network driven by marketing metrics. A unified dispatch system saves time, and time saves lives. When organizations prioritize their own brand visibility over government regulations, they become a liability. And when respected voices in the media accept sponsorships to promote a number that health authorities have prohibited from being advertised as an emergency line, they provide cover for conduct that deserves scrutiny, not amplification.

Real heroism does not need to be exaggerated. It certainly does not need to be sold on a podcast. It is time for donors, media partners, and the public to look closely at the data and ask why the numbers never seem to add up.

Let’s be precise about what Kent actually wrote. On official government letterhead, as the sitting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he declared that Iran posed “no imminent threat.” This from a man who had the clearances, the briefings, and the raw intelligence. Since October 2023, Iranian-backed proxies had attacked American forces in Iraq and Syria more than 170 times. In January 2024, three of those attacks killed soldiers at Tower 22 in Jordan and wounded dozens more. The Houthis spent two years firing Tehran’s ballistic missiles at U.S. Navy warships in the Red Sea. The IAEA caught Iran enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, a level that has exactly one purpose, and it is not generating electricity. Kent sat in those rooms. He read those assessments. “No imminent threat” is not a heterodox view or a lonely act of conscience. It is a lie, and he is counting on most people not knowing enough to call it one.

What is truly unforgivable, though, is the claim about his wife.

Kent describes himself as a Gold Star husband who lost his beloved Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel. Let that sink in. Shannon Kent was a Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer and cryptologic technician who died on January 16, 2019, in Manbij, Syria. She was not killed by Israel. She was not killed because of AIPAC. An ISIS suicide bomber walked into a restaurant full of American service members and detonated himself, murdering Shannon Kent along with Green Beret Jonathan Farmer, DIA civilian Scott Wirtz, and interpreter Ghadir Taher. ISIS is a Sunni jihadist death cult whose pathological hatred of America predates any Israeli military operation and has nothing to do with Israeli foreign policy. Shannon Kent died hunting those killers. She died doing the job. To take her death and retrofit it into an antisemitic fever dream about Israeli manipulation is not grief talking. It is a moral obscenity, and it dishonors her memory.

A Gold Star wife posting under the X handle SharrellAnne put it better than any columnist could. Her husband Alan was killed by Iranian proxies in Iraq, and responding to Kent’s letter, she wrote: “When ISIS killed your wife, you supported going after the people responsible. You understood exactly why we were fighting and never called it ‘Israel’s war.’ You understood it when it was your loss. Now you’re minimizing it when it’s mine. You don’t get to redefine this war just because it’s not your grief anymore.”

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That version of Candace Owens no longer exists. What remains is something very different. Politics has been replaced by spectacle. Conspiracy theories, antisemitic narratives, and attacks on a grieving widow have become the core of her content. The reason is not difficult to understand. Outrage travels faster than argument. Conspiracies generate more attention than policy. Owens discovered that reality and built an entire media enterprise around it.

What she is doing now is not a political misjudgment. It is a moral failure. Political errors can be corrected. A person can revisit a position, reconsider evidence, or refine an argument. Moral failures demand something deeper. They require humility, restraint, and genuine remorse. Nothing in Owens’s conduct suggests any interest in those things.

On March 2 she wrote: “From 9/11 to the Lavon Affair and many inbetween, false-flags are the Israeli way. Mossad agents are taught that they will inherit the earth ‘by way of deception.’ Bibi wants a third world war so they can hit a global reset, as they have done everytime people start noticing.”

The next day she responded to a video of Benjamin Netanyahu explaining Israel’s strategy against Iranian backed militant groups by writing, “You murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. For starters.”

This is not criticism of Israeli policy. Anyone is free to criticize Israeli governments just as they would criticize any other government. What Owens is repeating is something far older and far uglier. The claim that Jews secretly engineer disasters whenever the world begins to notice them is one of the oldest accusations in history. It fueled centuries of persecution. It appeared in medieval Europe. It resurfaced in modern propaganda that helped justify the Holocaust. The medium has changed. The lie has not.

The allegation that Israel carried out the attacks of September 11 has been investigated exhaustively. The 9/11 Commission, intelligence agencies, and courts all reached the same conclusion. Al Qaeda carried out the attacks under the direction of Osama bin Laden. To tell the families of the three thousand Americans murdered that the Jewish state killed their loved ones is not courage. It is contempt for the truth and contempt for the dead.

Owens understands exactly what she is doing. She knows how suggestion works. Linking the Lavon Affair to September 11 is not random. It creates the impression that Jews operate through deception as a matter of doctrine. That is not analysis. It is the digital age version of blood libel.

Her conduct becomes even harder to defend when it turns toward Charlie Kirk’s family. Charlie was my friend. His murder last September devastated the people who loved him and shocked countless others who followed his work. His widow, Erika Kirk, has carried that loss with remarkable composure and dignity. Most people instinctively understand that certain lines should never be crossed in a moment like that.

Owens crossed them anyway.

Her series titled “Bride of Charlie” presents itself as investigative work. In reality it is a collection of insinuations built from fragments, speculation, and conspiracy. She digs into Erika Kirk’s birth records. She questions stories about her upbringing. She repeatedly hints that Erika may somehow be connected to Charlie’s death while leaving herself enough room to deny making a direct accusation. In the opening episode she went even further, suggesting that Erika had been groomed as a child for a government role connected to a CIA program involving ancient Sumerian technology used to see the future and alter events.

That is not journalism. It is spectacle built on someone else’s grief.

There used to be a shared understanding that certain human boundaries existed outside politics. When someone is murdered, you leave the widow alone. You do not build conspiracies around her pain. You do not turn her loss into serialized entertainment for millions of viewers. These are not difficult moral questions. They are the most basic rules of decency.

What may be most disturbing is not simply that Candace Owens crossed those lines. It is that there is an audience willing to watch it, share it, and reward it. In a saner moment in public life, this sort of cruelty would end a career. Today it generates engagement. That fact says something unsettling about the moment we are living through, a world where moral gravity has weakened enough that even the exploitation of grief and the recycling of ancient hatreds can be repackaged as content and consumed as entertainment.

And then you watch Tucker Carlson’s latest podcast. Recorded just after the surgical strike that killed the Ayatollah, it’s a masterclass in this kind of retroactive conspiracy-building. It’s a sprawling, confident performance that pins every event, every conflict, every tremor in the Middle East on a single, all-powerful cause: Israel. The war with Iran? “This is Israel’s war,” he says. The region’s instability? The work of an expansionist Israel. The motives of American leaders? Don’t be silly. They’re merely puppets.

The timing is what makes it all so stunning. This wasn’t some theoretical debate about a war that might happen. The main event, the decapitation of the Iranian regime, was already done. The Ayatollah was dead. But instead of analyzing this decisive act of American and Israeli power for what it was, a clear demonstration of agency against a shared and dangerous enemy, Carlson builds his grand theory. His job isn’t to predict the future, but to reshape the past. The event itself, a victory for the West, has to be twisted to fit his narrative of American subjugation. It can’t be a straightforward act of national interest. No, it must be a plot, a manipulation, a move on a chessboard controlled by someone else. The theory must be protected, even from the accomplished fact.

Let’s be clear. The central thesis, that the United States, the greatest economic and military power in history, is a pawn for a tiny client state, is absurd. It’s an argument that turns America into a child, a mindless golem animated by its supposed masters in Jerusalem. This isn’t serious geopolitical analysis. It’s the stuff of fever swamps.

Carlson poses as a courageous truth-teller, a lonely voice speaking forbidden knowledge. “It’s just important to tell the truth about this now,” he insists. But what follows isn’t truth. It’s a masterwork of innuendo. He doesn’t deal in facts, but in leading questions and dark suggestions. “How did this tiny country...convince the world’s great superpower...to do its bidding in a way that was going to hurt it?” he asks. The question is the argument. The answer is assumed. Evidence is replaced by a knowing wink.

This is the conspiracy theorist’s method: a closed loop where the lack of evidence just proves how cunning the conspiracy is. Every action is seen through the same predetermined lens. When Israel’s actions align with American interests, it’s manipulation. When they don’t, it’s a sign of malevolent independence. The theory is perfect, unfalsifiable, and completely detached from reality.

It gets truly irresponsible when he starts talking about nuclear war. Carlson imagines an Iranian missile hitting Jerusalem and asks what Israel would do. His answer isn’t a sober analysis of deterrence, but a leap into fantasy. Israel, he suggests, “might respond with nuclear weapons, which it has, and which it has threatened to use before.” He offers this as a genuine risk, a reason America must “contain” its supposed client. “Don’t make us go crazy and do something wild,” he says, putting words in an imaginary Israeli’s mouth, “And that would include the use of nuclear weapons.”

This isn’t analysis; it’s a ghost story. Where’s the evidence for these so-called threats? Which Israeli leader has ever publicly brandished the nation’s nuclear deterrent this way? The claim is left hanging, meant to create a gut-level fear that bypasses rational thought. The entire history of nuclear deterrence, a doctrine of ultimate resort meant to prevent existential threats, is thrown out the window. In its place, Carlson gives us a caricature of Israel as a rogue state, just itching to unleash Armageddon. It’s a baseless and reckless claim.

And the hypocrisy is profound. Carlson, who built a career railing against the “ruling class,” now sells the ultimate elitist fantasy: that a shadowy cabal is secretly in charge. He attacks the media’s alleged lies while spinning a tale free of verifiable facts. He mourns the loss of American sovereignty while pushing a theory that says it doesn’t even exist.

This is the new isolationism, a sour and resentful retreat born not of confidence but of paranoia. It’s an ideology of grievance that tries to absolve America of its responsibilities by claiming it has no real agency. If America is just a tool, then it’s not responsible for its actions. It’s a doctrine of moral surrender dressed up as patriotic dissent.

But then the real poison comes out. The mask of geopolitical analysis slips, and we see a raw, theological animus. Discussing the desire among religious Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, a messianic hope central to Jewish faith for millennia, Carlson calls the entire theology “deranged and demonic.” This isn’t a political disagreement. It’s an arrogant condemnation of another faith’s core beliefs. To call the yearning for the Messiah and the Temple, a principle of faith codified by Maimonides, “demonic” is to leave political commentary behind for undisguised religious bigotry. Here, the grand theory shows its ugly root. The problem, we’re led to believe, isn’t just the state of Israel, but Judaism itself. At least he’s being clear.

So what is this intellectual project? It’s a politics of the void. It offers no solutions, only scapegoats. It gives no path forward, only a descent into a hall of mirrors where every event is a trick and every leader a traitor. It’s a profoundly demoralizing vision.

The world is, and always has been, a dangerous place. A revanchist Russia, an expansionist China, and a millenarian, apocalyptic regime in Tehran are not phantoms. They are real dangers that require clear-eyed analysis and American strength, the very strength that was on display when the Ayatollah was removed from the board. To dismiss these threats as mere scenery in a drama directed from Tel Aviv is an act of breathtaking intellectual negligence.

To argue, as Carlson does, that the main threat to America is not the ayatollahs who chant “Death to America” but the ally that shares many values is to turn reality on its head. It is to abandon the first task of statesmanship: to know the difference between a friend and a foe. In Tucker Carlson’s world, there are no friends, only manipulators; no threats, only deceptions. It is a lonely and terrifying universe of his own creation. We should decline the invitation.

Here is the link to the episode (the description is below). As always, I greatly appreciate your feedback.

What really happened on October 7—and what happens to the truth when Jewish nonprofits start fundraising off of it?

In this episode, Rabbi Daniel sits down with investigative journalist Daniel Mael for an unflinching look at how some Jewish organizations have allegedly distorted both October 7 and the antisemitism that followed in order to raise money and protect their own reputations.

Mael walks through his family’s experience with IDF gear shortages after October 7, and why he began publicly challenging groups like Friends of the IDF and their “no shortages” messaging. From there, the conversation digs into viral atrocity stories that appear to be fabricated—babies cut from wombs, infants in ovens, mass rape claims—and how, he argues, they migrated from Gaza Telegram channels and cartel snuff videos into mainstream Jewish fundraising speeches and films featuring groups like ZAKA and United Hatzalah.

Along the way, we wrestle with big questions:

Does spreading fake horror stories actually undermine the case for Israel—especially with people in the middle?

What happens when legacy institutions like Anti-Defamation League (ADL) get captured by mission creep and politics?

How should Jews think about platforming extremists like Nick Fuentes—expose them or ignore them?

Did conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens help shift the right from ideas to “owning the libs” clips?

Why did Jewish campus strategy lean so heavily into intersectional coalitions and groups like Hillel International and Turning Point USA end up on opposite sides of the culture war?

If you care about October 7, Israel, Jewish safety, and the integrity of our own institutions, this episode is uncomfortable on purpose. It’s about choosing nuance over propaganda, and truth over easy unity.

We have to call things by their real names. This isn’t about sensitivity training. It’s about evil. A seventh-grade girl is hunted in a hallway by boys screaming “We want you to die.” That’s not bullying. That’s a preview of a pogrom. And the school’s silence is a message to every other student: this is fine.

Then you have the teacher, paid with tax dollars, who decides to torment a 12-year-old boy because of his Star of David. She invents infractions. She falsifies reports. The school’s big solution is to yank the boy from her class. He’s punished. She’s protected. This isn’t a solution. It’s the administration taking the side of the bully against the child.

This is the pattern. It is a moral inversion. A high school chemistry teacher celebrates the mass murder of Jews on October 7th with a mocking note on his whiteboard. A Jewish student is, understandably, horrified. The school’s response? The student is forced out of his honors class. The teacher who celebrated mass murder keeps his job. The message is unmistakable: if you are a Jew, your pain does not matter. Your presence is the problem. Your removal is the solution.

This is how a society begins to rot. Not just from the presence of evil, but from the accommodation of it. The lawsuit calls this segregation. And it is. When you remove Jewish children from classrooms so that an anti-Jewish ideology can be taught without objection, you are not managing a conflict. You are cleansing the room. The term for that is Judenfrei.

The ideology is being taught. In Oakland, teachers held an unapproved “teach-in” where children were told that “a free Palestine means the annihilation of Jews.” Fifth graders were filmed reciting what they had learned, one child looking into the camera and saying the Jews “basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and that America is “helping the bad guys.” The district called the teach-in unauthorized. It disciplined no one.

In Los Angeles, a teacher ran a similar event over the objections of more than a thousand parents. LAUSD’s own Office of the Superintendent later admitted the materials were not “objective, as had been represented.” The slides justified the October 7th massacre. They recycled old tropes about Zionist money and power. No one was held accountable there either.

California will say these are local failures. A few rogue teachers. Isolated incidents. That answer is a lie, and the people giving it know it. The state has been warned about this, repeatedly, by parents, by Jewish organizations, by legislators. The California Constitution places the duty for equal education on the state. The Department of Education has the authority to investigate, to sanction, to compel districts to act. It has not used that authority in any way that has changed anything. The complaint process parents are told to use is described in the lawsuit as “glacial and opaque,” with remedies so toothless they amount to permission for the next offense.

The families suing are not asking for money, they simply want the state to enforce its own laws. They want officials to investigate what has been documented, stop the use of antisemitic propaganda as curriculum, and protect Jewish children the same way they would protect any other child. That is not a radical demand. It is the minimum. The fact that it takes a lawsuit to get there tells you everything you need to know about how far California has fallen.

Let us be precise about what Oliveira does in this video. He does not simply report. He manipulates. Through a sequence of loaded framing and sinister narration, he presents Hatzalah vehicles running lights and sirens as though they are a Jewish militia operating outside the law. He lets his interview subjects call it “a community watch that thinks it’s the cops.” He lingers on the imagery. He asks the questions that lead his audience exactly where he wants them to go. The message is unmistakable, even if he never says it outright: Jews have created a parallel power structure that answers only to itself. It is a lie. And Oliveira knows, or should know, that it is a lie.

Here is the truth, and it is not complicated. Hatzalah is a volunteer emergency medical service that responds to everyone who calls. Not just Jews. Everyone. I had the zechus, the merit, to sit personally with Rabbi Hershel Weber, the man who founded Hatzalah in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1965. I heard this from his own lips.

Rabbi Weber told me that the mission was shaped from the very beginning by a ruling from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost halachic authority of the 20th century. I raised this point directly with Rabbi Weber. He was unequivocal. Rav Feinstein’s directive was grounded in pikuach nefesh, the Jewish legal obligation to save human life, which recognizes no religious boundary. But Rav Feinstein went further than the law required. He specifically instructed that there must not be even a hint, not even the faintest perception, that Hatzalah would limit its response to the Jewish community. The moral standing of the Jewish people demanded nothing less. Whoever calls, Hatzalah comes. That has been the rule since day one.

So when Oliveira insinuates that Hatzalah vehicles are “acting like cops” by using lights and sirens, he is either ignorant of basic facts or he is counting on his audience to be. Hatzalah volunteers are state-certified EMTs and paramedics. Their vehicles are state-certified ambulances. They operate under the exact same New York State Department of Health protocols as any paid municipal service. The lights and sirens are not a privilege. They are the law. They are how you get to someone in time. To frame that as something suspicious, something exclusive, something Jewish in a sinister sense, is not journalism. It is provocation.

Hatzalah was born because city ambulances in the dense Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn were taking twenty minutes or more to arrive. Medical care was dangerously delayed. A community responded by building something. And what they built, guided by the moral vision of Rav Feinstein, was open to all. That is the story Oliveira chose to bury.

He buried it because the truth does not serve his purposes. Oliveira has built an audience on the premise that Jewish communities are a threat, that their institutions are exclusionary, that their presence is an invasion. Over three hundred thousand people watched this video in its first day. They were not watching to learn. They were watching to have their suspicions confirmed. And Oliveira, with a camera and a smirk, was happy to confirm them.

This is the real danger. Not one wrong video, but a content machine that runs on Jew hatred and calls it documentary filmmaking. The algorithm rewards outrage. Clicks pay the bills. And when a sixty-year-old institution built on the principle of saving every human life gets repackaged as a symbol of Jewish supremacy, something has gone badly wrong, not just with one YouTuber, but with the culture that made him possible. That is what we are fighting. And we had better be clear-eyed about it.

Olympic substitution rules are strict: an alternate steps in only for verified injury or illness. One athlete claimed illness, underwent a medical exam, and completed the paperwork to enable the change. It later came to light that the claim was false. The Olympic Committee of Israel then withdrew the substitution request and barred the team from the remaining runs. AJ Edelman stated publicly that the approach fell short of Olympic standards. That ended their competition.

The intent seems straightforward enough. With no competitive stakes left, the team wanted to give their alternate a moment on the Olympic stage. It was a chance with real historic weight for Fawarseh. The method crossed the line, and the authorities enforced the rules without hesitation.

Within hours, certain outlets and commentators in anti-Israel circles amplified the incident into something far larger, framing it as emblematic of dishonesty while downplaying the Israeli Olympic Committee’s swift self-correction and the team’s own withdrawal. The core facts remain modest: a last-place squad tried to create an opportunity for a teammate the wrong way. Officials intervened. The noise around it far outstrips the event itself.

Why wasn’t there any outrage over what started this?

Because something did start it, and the timeline matters more than anyone in the media seems willing to admit.

On February 12th, a woman named Nerdeen Kiswani, who co-founded the pro-Palestinian group “Within Our Lifetime” and has ties to New York City’s new mayor, posted the following on social media: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

I’d encourage you to read that a second time. A politically connected activist in the largest city in America declared that New York is “coming to Islam” and that this means dogs shouldn’t be kept in people’s homes anymore. She wasn’t whispering this in private. She posted it publicly.

Three days go by. Congressman Randy Fine of Florida fires back with a tweet that’s now been seen by over 33 million people: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Was that bluntly put? Yes, it was. I wouldn’t have said it that way. But I keep coming back to a more important question, which is whether his underlying point was actually wrong. And I don’t think it was.

What Fine was really saying, underneath the roughness, is something I think most Americans instinctively agree with: if somebody tells you that your city is “coming to” their religion and your pets have to go as a result, you’re going to say no. That’s not hatred. Frankly, that’s just common sense. Name me a civilization that survived by saying “sure, come on in, rewrite all the rules, we don’t mind.” You can’t, because those civilizations don’t exist anymore.

But try saying any of this out loud in 2026 America and see what happens to you.

What happened to Fine is instructive. CAIR demanded his resignation. Democrats in Congress want his committee seats taken away. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, a state where you can step on a used needle walking to get your morning coffee, called Fine a “racist slob.” He actually typed those words and posted them. About a sitting congressman. And the media treated Newsom like the adult in the room.

OK. So what happened to Kiswani? What was the reaction to her announcing that New York is “coming to Islam” and dogs need to be banished from homes? I’ll tell you what happened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No calls for an apology, no press conferences, no outraged editorials. Silence.

And that silence is really the whole story, isn’t it? The pattern has become so consistent it’s almost boring. Someone on one side says something genuinely radical. Nobody reacts. Someone on the other side pushes back. And that person gets the full weight of institutional outrage dropped on their head. The provocation is always fine. The response to the provocation never is.

That’s not how a free society works. Or let me put it more precisely: that’s how a free society stops being free.

Here’s something I’d genuinely like an honest answer to. There are about 65 million dog owners in this country. Sixty-five million. If you sat each of them down and said, look, you have to pick, your dog stays or you accommodate an ideology that says your dog is unclean and can’t live with you anymore, what do you think they’d say? Come on. We all know the answer. Fine’s critics know the answer too, which is exactly why they won’t touch the substance of what he said. They can’t win on the merits so they skip straight to calling him a racist. It’s tired, but it works, at least in Washington and in newsrooms, and so they keep doing it.

Kiswani later said her post was “satire.” Of course she did. It’s always satire after the fact. You say the revealing thing, you get pushback you didn’t expect, and suddenly you were just kidding around. Fine doesn’t get that option though. His words are treated as a confession of bigotry, pulled completely free of context, and waved around as proof that he’s unfit to serve.

I want to say something about the double standard here because I think people feel it even if they can’t always articulate it. We are living in a country where you can publicly announce that America’s biggest city is “coming to” your religion and nobody bats an eye, but if you object to that, if you say actually, no, I don’t accept that, then you’re a bigot who has to resign. Think about what kind of society operates on those rules. It’s not a democratic one.

Fine is far from a perfect spokesman for any cause. His comments on Gaza have been harsh, even by the standards of people who strongly support Israel. He’s not necessarily who you’d pick for this fight if you were casting the movie. But here’s what he did that mattered. When a political activist said that his country’s largest city is coming to Islam and the dogs have got to go, he said no. Just no. He said it badly, but he said it. And then he wrote something else that I think is worth taking seriously: “We will not be shamed into being conquered like the Europeans.”

People have treated that sentence like it’s a hate crime. But what’s actually wrong with it? All he’s saying is that Western Europe accepted sweeping cultural changes over the past few decades that their own citizens never voted for and were actively discouraged from questioning, and that America shouldn’t repeat that mistake. You might disagree with his framing. But the idea that holding this opinion should cost someone their career in elected office? That idea is far more dangerous than anything Randy Fine has posted on social media.

The question we should be debating isn’t whether Fine chose his words well. He didn’t. The question is whether we still live in a country where someone, anyone, can hear “your city is coming to Islam and your dogs have to go” and say “no, it isn’t and no they don’t” without having their life torn apart.

If we don’t live in that country anymore, we’ve got a much bigger problem than one congressman’s X feed.

Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman’s investigation shows that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi did not speak to each other for nearly four hours after Hamas launched its attack. Four hours. For a country hit by the worst assault in its history— mass killings, kidnappings, dozens of breaches along the border—that silence at the very top is hard to accept.

The piece describes leaders who were all in the same building, the Kirya in Tel Aviv, but somehow not in the same reality. No generals rushed to the main command room at first. No unified war cabinet formed quickly. Officers lower down the chain scrambled to make sense of reports pouring in from every direction. War is always confusing, especially an attack this big, this sudden, this savage. But the lack of direct contact between the three people who carry ultimate responsibility made the confusion worse.

Could one early call among them have changed the day’s outcome? No one can say for sure. Hamas planned the operation for years, struck everywhere at once, and counted on paralysis. Even perfect coordination at the top might not have stopped the massacres in the kibbutzim or the abductions. The Jerusalem Post story doesn’t pretend otherwise.

What it does show, convincingly, is something more serious than a single tactical mistake. Trust among the top security figures had already cracked long before October 7. The judicial-reform fight had turned bitter and public. Gallant and Halevi both warned openly that political division was hurting readiness. The article ties that morning’s eerie quiet—at least partly—to the damage those months had done to basic working relationships.

That matters more than people sometimes admit. Countries can absorb intelligence failures and battlefield losses. What they have a much harder time surviving is top-level paralysis caused by distrust. When the people with final authority stop talking to each other, everything below them becomes improvised, delayed, disjointed.

The real question isn’t whether one phone call would have rewritten October 7. It’s whether the political atmosphere in the year leading up to the attack had already eaten away at the routines of consultation and joint command that Israel’s entire defense posture depends on.

Several internal inquiries have started, but Israel still has no full, independent state commission of inquiry shielded from politics. Without it, the public gets a steady drip of leaks, defensive statements, and dueling versions of events. Everyone protects their own record. The country gets more confusion instead of answers.

Real accountability isn’t about pinning medals or blame. It’s about nailing down a clear, honest timeline that no one can spin. The Jerusalem Post reporting gives us one sharp, painful piece of that timeline: four hours when the country’s highest civilian and military leaders did not form a single command cell.

For a nation built on the idea of fast mobilization and tight coordination, those four hours are not a detail. They demand serious examination—not as a political club, but as a necessary question. If the basic trust that holds the system together was already broken before the rockets flew, that has to be faced.

Nations only recover from deep wounds by looking straight at what hurts. The silence at the top on the morning of October 7 isn’t just a fact to note. It’s a warning that some of the most important defenses may have failed before the first shot was fired.

The day before Super Bowl LX, Belichick appeared publicly with his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. She was wearing a T-shirt featuring the logo of Orchids of Asia Day Spa, the Florida massage parlor tied to Robert Kraft’s 2019 prostitution investigation. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t random. It was a reference designed to be noticed.

The episode itself is not in dispute. Kraft was charged after a high-profile sting in Jupiter, Florida. The case was later dismissed after a judge ruled the evidence was improperly obtained. There was no conviction. Legally, it ended years ago. Kraft absorbed the hit, stayed quiet, and moved on.

Dragging it back into view now, on the eve of the NFL’s biggest weekend, felt unnecessary. Whatever bitterness still exists between Kraft and Belichick has roots in their professional split, not in some unresolved legal score. The Hall of Fame snub didn’t create the rift, and it doesn’t explain why a dismissed case suddenly needed to be turned into a visual gag.

What made the moment stand out wasn’t the shirt itself, but the contrast it exposed. Kraft, even after their breakup, has publicly defended Belichick’s legacy and supported his place in football history. That wasn’t required. Many owners wouldn’t have done it. Hudson’s move went the opposite direction, reopening a closed chapter for the sake of provocation.

Neither she nor Belichick explained it. Kraft didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

What lingered wasn’t Kraft’s past. It was Belichick’s present. The coach who once preached discipline and seriousness now stood silently as his 20-something girlfriend trolled his former boss on the eve of the Super Bowl. That doesn’t read as strength or rebellion. It reads as erosion. The old Belichick would have shut this down instantly. This version didn’t. And that may be the clearest sign yet that the image he spent a lifetime protecting is finally coming apart.

Years later, a recording buried in the Epstein files renders those words hollow.

The voice on the tape belongs to the same former prime minister, now speaking casually with Jeffrey Epstein. No crime is committed in the conversation itself. That is beside the point. What stands out is the absence of moral awareness. The discussion proceeds without hesitation or discomfort, without recognition that it concerns human beings rather than abstractions. What emerges is not ethical leadership, but a habit of mind that treats a nation as something to be engineered.

Barak raises a demographic concern and moves immediately to a solution: mass conversion into Judaism. The framing is technical. People become figures to be adjusted. Identity becomes a tool. The question is not what conversion means spiritually or culturally, but how efficiently it can be scaled. Institutions that stand in the way are dismissed rather than engaged. The Orthodox rabbinate’s authority is treated as a bottleneck. Even the definition of who is a Jew is presented as malleable.

The tone does not change even though Barak is speaking with a man who had already entered a plea agreement, registered as a sex offender, and become publicly known for abusing minors. Barak did not end the relationship after that point. He maintained it for years. That decision is not incidental. It speaks directly to judgment and moral boundaries.

Against that backdrop, Barak speaks of importing a million new citizens and praises the opportunity to be “selective.” Earlier generations, he says, took in whoever they could to save lives. Today, quality can be controlled. Then comes the line that dispels any remaining doubt. Speaking with Epstein, Barak muses about the appeal of bringing in “young, handsome girls, tall, thin.” The remark is casual. That is precisely why it matters. Human beings are discussed as commodities. Physical traits are treated as assets. This is not irony or provocation. It is a glimpse into how he thinks.

This way of thinking did not appear out of nowhere. It is visible elsewhere in Barak’s record. In 2000, he ordered Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, a decision praised abroad as bold and enlightened. On Israel’s northern border, it was understood as retreat. Hezbollah quickly filled the vacuum, fortifying southern Lebanon and turning it into a launchpad for thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. That same year, Barak presented Yasser Arafat with an all or nothing offer at Camp David. The strategy assumed rational calculation would override ideology and hatred. When Arafat walked away, the result was not stability but the Second Intifada and a wave of suicide bombings in Israeli cities. Again and again, ideas conceived in abstraction collapsed when confronted with reality.

This pattern extends beyond one man. It reflects a broader elite mindset that treats borders as inconveniences, culture as adjustable, and people as units to be managed. Identity is flexible. Faith is negotiable. Deep hatreds are dismissed as irrational obstacles that will dissolve under the right incentives. When enemies act out of belief rather than interest, surprise almost certainly replaces accountability.

Zionism did not emerge from demographic models or spreadsheets. It arose from memory, obligation, and sacrifice. It was rooted in history and responsibility, not social engineering. What appears on that tape has nothing to do with that tradition. It is a vision of a nation assembled through pressure and incentives, held together by management rather than meaning.

Ehud Barak is not a tragic figure overwhelmed by complexity. He is defined by his choices. A former leader who maintained a relationship with a known sexual predator, who spoke casually about selecting people by appearance, who reduced faith and nationhood to a technical exercise, forfeited moral authority long before that recording surfaced. Intelligence without moral judgment is not wisdom. Detachment from human consequence is not sophistication. The tape does not capture a lapse. It captures a worldview. One in which people are raw material, belief is an inconvenience, and leadership is mistaken for control. What remains is not a legacy in need of reinterpretation, but a record that explains itself.