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October 2025

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Requiem for the Pro-Israel Democrat How the party of Truman became the party of Mamdani by Daniel J. Samet

By on October 12th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/articles/daniel-samet/democrats-break-up-with-israel/

The Democratic Party’s long-running love affair with Israel is over. Like most breakups, this one has turned ugly. The signs are omnipresent.

Washington Democrats are a case in point. Prominent Democratic politicians decry Israel’s supposed sins in Gaza and spare the culprit, Hamas. In 2024, then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer literally demanded the removal of Benjamin Netanyahu, the duly elected prime minister of a democratic ally in the grip of an existential war. In July 2025, 27 Democratic senators—a majority of their caucus—voted to withhold military assistance to Israel. Bernie Sanders, who led the legislative charge, bemoaned the fact that “American taxpayer dollars are being used to… support the cruelty of Netanyahu and his criminal ministers.” In August, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House) said the war in Gaza was a “genocide.”

Democratic politicians at the local level have assumed an even more venomous affect. New York City’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, refused to denounce the genocidal cry “globalize the intifada” and opposed a day of Holocaust commemoration. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who runs the third-largest city in America, has worn a keffiyeh in public and called Israel’s actions “genocidal.” Staffers for Omar Fateh, who has a good shot at being the next mayor of Minneapolis, applauded the attacks of October 7, 2023.

The anti-Israel animus in the Democratic Party could very well accelerate. Democratic politicians lag behind the party’s grass roots when it comes to the Jewish state. Activists routinely protest Democratic leaders they see as too sympathetic to Israel. The numbers indicate that the rest of the party is with the activists. According to a recent Pew poll, 69 percent of Democrats view Israel unfavorably. That’s an astounding number for a party once admiring of the Jewish state.

“I saw a Palestinian senator, his name is Schumer. He’s a great Palestinian,” President Trump said this summer of the Democratic leader. “He’s become a Palestinian, he has abandoned the Jews.” In the comment was the very Trumpian mélange of overstatement and truth. Schumer, a self-styled shomer, who dubbed himself a “guardian of the people of Israel,” was once a stalwart Zionist voice in Congress. No more.

The pro-Israel Democrat is on his deathbed. And he was, for decades, a fixture of the American political scene. His death came, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, gradually, then suddenly. Democrats were adamant Zionists for decades. In 1991, for instance, 62 percent of Democrats supported Israel. They then grew increasingly critical of Israel before becoming outright hostile. The reason? The Democratic Party has fallen more and more into the thrall of far-left theories holding that Israel is a “settler-colonialist” oppressor deserving of scorn, not succor.

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The Democratic affinity for Israel was on display as early as 1948. Then it was President Harry Truman, a partisan Democrat if there ever was one, who overrode his own Department of State in recognizing the nascent State of Israel just 11 minutes into its life. Truman recognized that the Jewish state would be friendly to America, and he lent U.S. recognition accordingly. Supporting his decision were many rank-and-file Democrats who believed that it was the right thing to do.

Democrats liked much about Israel. They adored its cause. Zionism was about the rebirth of the Jewish people—and the advancement of progressive ideals.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The sinister truth about Greta’s selfie ship The Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla served primarily as a stage for rampant Israelophobia. Hugo Timms

By on October 12th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/12/the-sinister-truth-about-gretas-selfie-ship/

After Israeli forces had detained and removed her from a flotilla supposedly carrying aid to Gaza, all-purpose activist Greta Thunberg arrived at Athens airport on Monday night to a raucous hero’s welcome.

If you listen carefully, though, the crowd seemed less interested in the plight of Gazans than in calling for the death of Israelis. Specifically, members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Cries of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ were so loud and protracted that they, and other chants, twice interrupted Thunberg’s press conference.

The 40-boat Global Sumud Flotilla on which Thunberg had been sailing had been intercepted by the IDF roughly 100 kilometres off the coast of Gaza. Those on board were taken to the Port of Ashdod in southern Israel, arrested and mostly flown home by Israeli authorities on Monday. Thunberg has alleged ‘abuse and mistreatment’ at the hands of Israelis – a claim that is hard to reconcile with the sight of a healthy, unharmed Thunberg, energetically addressing a crowd late at night after an international flight. Then again, she could hardly have told the crowd that she had been rescued by the very people they wanted to kill.

The crowd’s intense loathing for Israel was evident from the moment Thunberg arrived. A supporter who introduced the Swedish activist to the crowd emphasised the importance of her giving a speech ‘the day before Israelis use 7 October to lick their wounds’ – which is one way to talk about the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. These were hardly the words of someone who ‘believes in human dignity and power of nonviolent action’ – a core principle of the flotilla, at least according to its website.

Other members of the flotilla have expressed views even more repugnant. The public comments of activist Sarah Wilkinson afford a glimpse of the kind of small talk that might have been on offer below deck. ‘The Israelis are not human’, Wilkinson said. ‘They have hands, they have faces, but they are not one of us. They are monsters.’ She described Hamas fighters who took part in the 7 October attack as ‘heroes’, and celebrated the news of Israelis ‘fleeing their homes’. She posted these comments along with a picture of an Israeli woman running for her life from Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival.

There is a distinct possibility that Wilkinson’s views were the rule, rather than the exception, among flotilla members. This week, an Israeli government department published a report linking several of the armada’s ‘steering members’ with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The evidence includes members of the flotilla being photographed at meetings with senior members of Hamas and attending the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah.

One thing the flotilla appeared to have no interest in, despite its public objective, was delivering aid to Palestinians. Israeli police claimed that none of the ships on the flotilla was carrying food, water or medical supplies. Not an ounce, they said, could be detected of the purported 300 tonnes of vital supplies that the media told us the flotilla was so gallantly conveying to Gaza.

Israel’s claims aren’t without credibility, even before we consider the footage taken by police on board the ships, who found them empty. This might explain why Thunberg and other members of the flotilla steering committee repeatedly rejected offers from the Vatican and Cyprus to deposit aid with them, thus allowing for its distribution through organisations such as the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Paper Chase: A Global Industry Fuels Scientific Fraud in the U.S. By Vince Bielski

By on October 12th, 2025

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/10/08/paper_chase_a_global_industry_fuels_scientific_fraud_in_the_us_1139567.html

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.   

It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive fields. 

These sophisticated outfits also engage in trickery to get papers published, infiltrating journals with their own editors and reviewers and even resorting to bribery, according to investigators and a white paper from Wiley, a New Jersey-based publisher. The scale of the fraud is eye-popping: One Wiley subsidiary, Hindawi, retracted more than 8,000 articles two years ago for suspected paper mill involvement. 

U.S. universities and regulators have been able to brush off the threat of paper mills because they have mostly sold their services in China, where research integrity standards are rarely enforced, according to experts. But these rogue operators are building on their success in Asia and expanding to the U.S. and Western Europe, where the prize is the prestige of naming an author on an article from a famous university. 

“Paper mills have become a huge business,” said Jennifer Byrne, professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, who studies the enterprises. “If some journals are pushing back on papers from China, and they probably are, it makes sense that paper mills will try to diversify their clientele and start working with people in different countries.” 

 As paper mills expand from the fringe to the center of research, placing professional-looking articles in high-impact journals owned by major publishers like Springer Nature, experts worry about the potential harm to scientific discovery. Researchers willing to break the rules in a Darwinian world of ‘publish or perish’ may mislead other scientists who incorporate their false findings into their own work. “We know little about the actual impact of paper mills on research,” Byrne says. “But if scientists are building on bad information, they are wasting resources and not making progress in their fields.”

Paper Mills Spread to the West

Paper mills appear to be expanding at a rapid clip, aided by AI that enables them to overwhelm journals with dozens of papers in a short period of time, adding to the challenge of detecting fakes. A study by the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) revealed that, on average, journals suspected about 2% of submitted papers came from mills about five years ago. After journals published fake papers, however, the paper mills saw the opening and pounced, accounting for nearly half of new submissions. 

In a corrupt echo of Moore’s Law, a 2024 study concluded that the number of suspected paper mill articles has been doubling every 18 months, “far outpacing that of legitimate science.” 

Researchers in the West appear to be a small but important part of the expansion. Journals have retracted more than 140 papers that name a U.S. co-author because of evidence of organized fraud, and almost 200 retracted papers name a co-author from Western Europe, according to data collected by watchdog group Retraction Watch and analyzed by Cristina Candal Pedreira, an assistant professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Scholars at many leading U.S. universities, including the University of California, Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Texas, have co-authored papers linked to paper mills in recent years. 

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

US Paying High Price to Qatar for Deal Hamas is Already Violating Article V protection and military training to the state sponsors of Islamic terror. by Daniel Greenfield

By on October 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/us-paying-high-price-to-qatar-for-deal-hamas-is-already-violating/

What do you get if you back an Islamic terrorist group that launches a regional war?

If you’re Qatar, you get Article V protection, normally allotted only to NATO allies, that declares the United States has to respond to any attack on the Islamic terror state which harbored the mastermind of 9/11.

On top of that Qatar, a tiny slave state with a small military, gets to sign a high-profile agreement to have its pilots trained on a US Air Force base right here.

Turkey, fresh off putting its Al Qaeda terrorist in charge of Syria, just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. Considering its role in Islamic terrorism, that doesn’t seem as if it will end well either.

The timing of these obvious payoffs connects it to the Hamas ‘peace deal’ that the Islamic terror group is already violating.

Hamas has made it clear that it will not disarm. As I predicted, it’s rebranding its terrorists as ‘police officers’ and beginning a purge of anyone in Gaza it accuses of cooperating with Israel.

200 US troops are on the way to the region. Reportedly they’ll be ‘monitoring’ the ceasefire from inside Israel without entering Gaza. But either way, we’re getting more and more involved, and providing military benefits to Islamic terrorist states for getting the terrorists to sign on the dotted line of a ceasefire they keep saying they won’t abide by.

Hamas keeps insisting that it will go on to fight and destroy Israel. If so, what is all this even for? And why are we providing benefits to Qatar which promised it could get us a deal in exchange for everything it’s getting before Hamas even keeps its part of the deal?

Qatar played us with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now it’s playing us all over again.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Physics and Politics of Peace: Trump’s Triumph in the Middle East Trump’s latest triumph—brokering peace between Israel and Hamas—echoes Bagehot’s truth: civilization advances only when strength learns the art of deliberate restraint. By Roger Kimball

By on October 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/12/the-physics-and-politics-of-peace-trumps-triumph-in-the-middle-east/

Peace in the Middle East was impossible—until it wasn’t. Donald Trump started to traverse that impassable domain in his first term with the Abraham Accords. Then, just a few days ago, he managed another impossible passage when he brokered peace between the irreconcilable forces of Israel and Hamas. Almost as impressive, Trump solicited and received the support of Muslim countries from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Amazing.

How did he do it? Well, in part, it was “the art of the deal” in practice. But stepping back, Trump’s forceful yet patient endeavor on behalf of peace reminded me of Walter Bagehot’s insights in his neglected masterpiece, Physics and Politics. First published in 1872, this curious book is partly a contribution to political history and partly an exploration of the often forgotten truism that not all things are possible at all times and in all places. If political liberty is a precious possession, Bagehot saw, it is forged in a long development of civilization, much of which is distinctly, and necessarily, illiberal.

The notion that human beings—and, by analogy, advanced human societies—had developed out of more primitive forms had been in the air for decades by the time Bagehot began Physics and Politics. Evolution—often called “descent with modification” or simply “development” in the early nineteenth century—was an Enlightenment idea par excellence. Darwin’s theories about the place of natural selection in biological evolution, published in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, gave the idea of evolution new scientific authority. But the basic idea of evolution—minus the explanatory motor of natural selection, which Darwin adopted from Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (first published in 1798)—was part of the mental furniture of the age. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was one of several books on the subject that influenced Bagehot. The crudities of “Social Darwinism,” put forward most famously in the writings and speeches of Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley, were a natural outgrowth of these ideas.

The long subtitle of Physics and Politics—“Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society”—certainly suggests that it belongs to that unpromising genre of muscular Darwinism. As always with Bagehot, however, things are not as straightforward as they at first seem. To be sure, by “physics” Bagehot meant “science,” more particularly “Darwinism.” He approvingly quoted various works by Spencer and Huxley, and indeed, such passages are among the most dated in the book. He referred on and off to the “transmitted nerve element” and other Lamarckian museum pieces (Gregor Mendel’s recent discoveries in what we have come to call genetics were unknown to Bagehot and Darwin alike). But Bagehot early on made it clear that in invoking the idea of natural selection, he was merely “searching out and following up an analogy.” As he put it at the end of his last chapter, the great theme of Physics and Politics concerns “the political prerequisites of progress, and especially of early progress.” How far Bagehot’s use of the term “natural selection” is from Darwin’s is shown by the way he links its operation to the operation of Providence—an agency conspicuously missing from any orthodox Darwinian account of evolution.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Campaign to Undermine Relations between Christians and Israel by Amit Barak

By on October 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21971/palestinian-undermine-relations-christians-israel

In recent months, we have witnessed a well-timed campaign led by the Palestinian Authority, civil society organizations and anti-Israel Christian elements – some of them declared anti-Semitic – to undermine the relations between the State of Israel and Christian communities around the world, especially evangelical and pro-Israel Christians whose long-standing support for Israel is not self-evident.

Four notable events this year indicate the tremendous power of this campaign: The blood libel falsely alleging the burning of the Church of St. George in Taybe; an episode of the Tucker Carlson Show with an American nun who presented a series of anti-Semitic claims without any factual, historical or theological basis; the Declaration of the World Council of Churches in June 2025; a Palestinian food advertisement mocking Christianity.

The World Council of Churches over the years has tried to wear the mask of a supposedly “neutral” organization. In light of the campaign, it seems that in this statement, the WCC has dared to say openly what it always wanted but previously did not dare to say.

This group uses clear anti-Semitic messages, and… the expected response from the Israeli government was therefore to declare a ban on entry into Israel to any person who is a member of the WCC or to any activist in the illegal EAPPI program, which the WCC has been operating in Israel since 2002. But the government did not declare such a ban.

While the Christian population is persecuted under the Palestinian Authority, outwardly it conveys a completely opposite image.

This anti-Christian campaign in the PA areas did not reach the wider world or the international media.

The events listed above are not accidental. They are part of a sweeping campaign run well by the Palestinian Authority, BDS organizations and anti-Semitic elements in global religious institutions, aimed at harming Israel’s relations with the Christian world, weakening the support of Christians for Israel, and, through the churches, isolating Israel in the international arena.

From Taybe to Tucker Carlson, Palestinians are trying to drive a wedge between the Christian world and Israel, while Israel’s government appears to be asleep on guard duty.

In recent months, we have witnessed a well-timed campaign led by the Palestinian Authority, civil society organizations and anti-Israel Christian elements – some of them declared anti-Semitic – to undermine the relations between the State of Israel and Christian communities around the world, especially evangelical and pro-Israel Christians whose long-standing support for Israel is not self-evident.

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