ANTI-SEMITISM, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Love Island USA: does Gen Z have an anti-Semitism problem? Jewish contestant Elan Bibas’s social-media accounts have been flooded with Israelophobic bile. Hannah Kotkin

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/love-island-usa-does-gen-z-have-an-anti-semitism-problem/

The seventh season of Love Island USA is taking America by storm. Already, it’s the second-most watched streaming show on television this summer, with a whopping 1.2 billion minutes viewed across the first nine episodes of the series. But it isn’t just the young, attractive singles that have caused a stir recently. It now seems the mere presence of a Jewish contestant is enough to cause controversy.

Last week, a show usually known for providing vapid entertainment took a surprisingly sinister turn. Rather than oohing and aahing over the abs, tattoos and five-inch inseam swimming trunks of the six men, social media erupted with rage. The vitriol was directed at Elan Bibas, a 24-year-old Jewish Canadian who had arrived at Love Island’s ‘Casa Amor’.

Love Island might only be a TV show, and one aimed at a young demographic at that. But such is its popularity that the commentary around it, particularly when it turns hateful, cannot be ignored. In some ways, it reflects the thinking of a generation.

The show’s concept is simple. Attractive singles are sent to an island – in this case, somewhere in Fiji – and must remain ‘coupled’ or face expulsion. The winning couple nets $100,000.

The combination of skimpy outfits and raunchy challenges – examples include ‘kissing booths’ and truth or dare – has proved particularly addictive for a Gen Z audience. The timing of the show is also deliberate: it’s currently summer break in the US, which means students are free to tune into the show on the six nights of the week that it airs. Its booming young audience has developed an almost parasocial relationship with the contestants. Bibas has now found himself at the centre of this cultural phenomenon – not, however, in a pleasant way.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’ The burning of Jews in Boulder, Colorado speaks to the lethal intolerance of Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/karen-diamond-killed-by-anti-zionism/

A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.

Officialdom has expressed grief over Diamond’s tragic yielding to the fires of Jew hate that swept Pearl Street Mall four weeks ago. The City of Boulder has extended its ‘heartfelt condolences’ for the loss of this good, long life to an ‘anti-Semitic attack’. But you will search in vain for commentary from ‘anti-racists’. The activist classes are shamefully and horrendously mute. Opinion-makers who pose as ‘anti-fascist’ seem blissfully unbothered by this fascistic horror that entailed the death by fire of a Jew. There will be no ‘George Floyd treatment’ for Karen Diamond.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In the End, Everyone Hated the Iranian Theocracy The new reality in the Middle East. by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-the-end-everyone-hated-the-iranian-theocracy/

It is hard even to digest the incredible train of events of the last few days in the Middle East.

Iran had been reduced to an anemic, performance-art missile attack on our base in Qatar — the last Parthian shot from a terrified regime, desperate for an out — and a ceasefire.

Iran would have been better off not launching such a ceremonial but ultimately humiliating proof of impotence.

Even worse for the theocracy, Iran’s temporary reprieve came from the now magnanimous but still hated U.S. President Donald Trump.

So ends the creepy mystique of the supposedly indomitable terror state of Iran, the bane of the last seven American presidents over half a century.

For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, it was hard to swallow that U.S. bombers got their permission to fly into Iranian airspace from the Israeli air force.

A good simile is that Trump put a pot of water on the stove, told Iran to jump in, put the lid over them, then smiled, turned up the heat — and will now let them stew.

As postbellum realities now simmer in Iran, the theocracy is left explaining the inexplicable to its humiliated military and shocked but soon-to-be-furious populace. All the regime’s blood-curdling rhetoric, apocalyptic threats against Israel, goose-stepping thugs, and shiny new missiles ended in less than nothing.

A trillion dollars and five decades’ worth of missiles and centrifuges are now up in smoke. That money might have otherwise saved Iranians from the impoverishment of the last 50 years.

How about the little Satan Israel, to which Iran for nearly 50 years promised extinction?

Israel had destroyed Iran’s expeditionary terrorists, Iran’s defenses, its nuclear viability, and the absurd mythology of Iranian military competence. And worse, Israel showed it could repeat all that destruction when and if necessary.

So, the most hated regime in the world crawled into the boiling pot because it looked around in vain for someone to void Trump’s ultimatum for a cease and desist.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Final Court Showdown Begins Over Whether Trump Can Get These Gang Members Out of Here The real issue at the heart of this battle. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/final-court-showdown-begins-over-whether-trump-can-get-these-gang-members-out-of-here/

It’s a grim sign of the times that Old Joe Biden’s regime can open the door to millions upon millions of illegal migrants without a peep from the courts, but as soon as President Donald Trump tries to remove them, our self-anointed moral superiors in the judiciary burn the midnight oil to come up with pretexts to stop him. Trump has been trying to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the legal foundation to remove Venezuelan gang members, but several courts, including the Supreme Court, have stymied him. Now, the final showdown has begun in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 states that “whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”

This law has the admirable directness and simplicity that was characteristic of statute-making in an earlier, less complicated age. The extract above continues for a lengthy paragraph, and then the Act goes on for a couple more, but that’s it. If a similar law were drafted in 2025, it would be 700 pages long.

The Alien Enemies Act has been the law of the land for 227 years, even if it has been ignored from time to time. The Trump administration contends that the Act allows today for the deportation of members of the lethal Tren de Aragua gang, which constitutes a “hybrid criminal state.” Trump issued an executive order on March 15 stating that Tren de Aragua was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” That certainly seems to be the case. Tren de Aragua members didn’t come into the country hoping to get jobs and become “Maryland dads.” They came here to traffic in drugs and engage in other crimes. If that isn’t a “predatory incursion,” what is?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California’s ‘Perfect Dictatorship’ The Dems’ model for the nation – sustained by illegal voters. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/californias-perfect-dictatorship/

Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away in April at the age of 89, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. Ten years earlier, the Peruvian novelist (The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World ) gained global attention for speaking the truth to power. In a 1990 conference organized by Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa proclaimed that “la dictadura perfecta” was not communism, the USSR or Fidel Castro. The “perfect dictatorship” was Mexico.

As the Peruvian understood, a dictatorship is not a nation where there are no elections. A dictatorship is a country where one party never loses, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominated Mexico since the 1920s. In a practice known as el dedazo, PRI presidents picked their successors, following up their choice with fake elections. In the US state of California, Democrats have established a perfect dictatorship of their own.

Democrats have been in power in Sacramento since 2011 and now hold all major elected offices: Governor (Gavin Newsom), Lt. Gov (Eleni Kounalakis), Secretary of State (Shirley Weber), Attorney General (Rob Bonta), State Treasurer (Fiona Ma) State Controller (Malia Cohen), Insurance Commissioner (Ricardo Lara), and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Like all state Democrats, these officials enjoy the support of an imported electorate.

For years, Pew Research pegged the number of illegals in the United States at 11 million. A recent study by scholars at MIT and Yale – conducted before the massive influx under Biden – estimated more than 22 million. So the 11 million figure likely underestimates the number in California alone. In 2019, when state attorney Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration, he displayed a sign citing “over ten million immigrants” in California – “immigrants” being code for false-documented persons illegally present in the USA. With illegals, California’s approach has been two steps forward, no steps back.

Under California’s “motor voter” scheme, the DMV automatically registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ian Kingsbury George Mason University’s Disastrous President Gregory Washington has backed racially discriminatory DEI programs and failed to address campus anti-Semitism.

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/george-mason-university-president-gregory-washington-dei-anti-semitism

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, among others, have come under fire or been forced out in recent years for failures of leadership on campus anti-Semitism and racially discriminatory DEI programs. Yet Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University, has managed to keep his job despite similar failures. Mason may not be an Ivy League school, but anti-Semitism and discrimination are problems at nonelite public universities, too. Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.

Mason’s Board of Visitors selected Washington in 2020, just as woke fever was reaching its peak. Upon appointment, Washington committed Mason to being “a national exemplar of antiracism and inclusive excellence.” True to his word, Washington built a gigantic diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, with 7.4 DEI staff per 100 tenure-track faculty members. This was the second-highest ratio among the more than 70 universities the Heritage Foundation examined

Despite President Trump’s executive order calling out DEI bureaucracies for promoting illegal discrimination, and a Supreme Court decision prohibiting racial preferences, Washington has refused to scale back his DEI efforts. His commitment to DEI surpasses his concern for the legal liability those activities impose on Mason.

Washington’s ideological commitments also eclipse his obligation to follow the law when it comes to face-coverings worn by campus protesters. Virginia law forbids wearing a mask to conceal one’s identity in public. Courts have upheld that law—created in response to the state’s experience with the KKK—as constitutional, and the state attorney general advised universities to amend their policies to prohibit face-coverings at protests.

All major public universities in Virgina complied—except for George Mason. Instead, it merely requires protesters to show identification upon request, a policy that is impractical to implement and does not actually align with the law. Washington claimed to favor this approach out of concern for free speech, even though courts have ruled that concealing one’s identity during a public protest is not protected speech.

Meantime, anti-Semitic activity at George Mason is on the rise. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has subjected the university to investigation for its failure to protect the civil rights of Jewish students during both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mason students were arrested for planning anti-Semitic violence in two incidents last year. In the first, police searched the home of two sisters who led the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, finding an illegal gun and “pro-terror materials, including Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Jews,’” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Is Proud To Be An American?

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/03/who-is-proud-to-be-an-american/

The headlines this week have blared about how pride in America has plunged under President Donald Trump. But the Gallup Poll driving all these stories paints a very different picture from the headlines.

What the data actually show is that, not only did pride among Democrats plunge this year, it has been falling for them over the past 23 years – even when the sainted Barack Obama was in the White House.  

In Obama’s first year in office, 78% of Democrats said they were “extremely or very proud” to be an American. But by his last year in office, that share had dropped to 68%.

Not surprisingly, given their hatred of Donald Trump, Democrats’ pride then plunged during Trump’s first term. But even under Joe Biden, only 62% of Democrats could bring themselves to say they were proud to be an American.The Democrats’ growing disdain for their country aligns perfectly with their increasing radicalization – a trend we have been noting here at I&I for years (see, for example, “Don’t Be Surprised By Democrats’ Radical Turn – Fanaticism Is In Their DNA“) and before that at Investor’s Business Daily.

And the fact that only 36% of them say they are proud to be an American today says less about Donald Trump than it does about just how pusillanimous their pride in this country has become.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Qatar Must Not Be Allowed to Play Any Role in Gaza by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21725/qatar-role-gaza

Allowing Qatar to be part of an Arab consortium that would replace Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip is essentially placing the alpha-fox in charge of the henhouse.

Al-Jazeera, Qatar’s flagship media network, operates around the clock as a propaganda outlet in the service of Hamas.

After America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites on June 22, journalists and those who shape public opinion in Qatar condemned the US and President Donald J. Trump. Al-Jazeera presenters and columnists for Qatar’s government newspapers took to social media to slam the US and Trump, calling him a “brazen liar”, “the leader of a modern crusade”, and a “war criminal”…

“… Israel must be destroyed and eliminated and must disappear. This should be a strategic Arab doctrine. [Operation] Al-Aqsa Flood showed us that the Israelis have no connection to the land….” — Qatari General (ret.) Mubarak Al-Khayreen, X.com, June 22, 2025.

In 2017, [Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates] severed ties with Qatar and imposed a sea, land and air blockade on it. They accused Qatar of supporting various terrorist groups and extremist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and demanded the closure of Al-Jazeera.

Qatar has never abandoned its goal of promoting the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, including Hamas. Anyone who watches Al-Jazeera (in Arabic) can see that the Gulf state and its media outlets are fully mobilized in favor of Islamist Jihadis engaged in terrorism against Israel and the West.

Qatar cannot be allowed to play any role in the administration of the Gaza Strip.

According to a recent report, the Trump administration is floating the idea of having four Arab states administer the Gaza Strip as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas. On June 26, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported:

“Gaza hostilities will conclude within two weeks, ending conditions will encompass four Arab nations (including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) to administer the Gaza Strip, replacing the murderous Hamas terrorist organization.”

Although the newspaper did not name the two other Arab countries that would take part in administering the Gaza Strip, there is speculation in the Arab world that one of them is Qatar, which has expressed readiness to help rebuild Gaza after the Hamas-Israel war ends.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Donald Trump, Meet the Twelfth Imam Peter Smith

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/donald-trump-and-the-twelfth-imam/

I am a bit this way but mostly that way on Trump’s strategy on Iran. Mostly unenamoured. Dropping those bunker-buster bombs was an unmitigated good thing. It seems unlikely after the Israel bombardment and Trump’s coup de grâce that the Iranians will be able to get back on the nuclear track very quickly, even if some minor mole in the Pentagon leaked it otherwise. But where to from here? Has anything been lastingly solved? Hardly.

While the mullahs call the shots nothing will change. I get the impression from Trump that he believes the Iranian leaders will get behind a MIGA movement (make Iran great again). Doubt it. He is dealing with religious fanatics who look forward to the end times when Muhammad al-Mahdi, the twelfth imam, will return and make Shia Islam great again.

I trust that someone has educated Trump on Islam. Otherwise, however good his negotiation skills, he is out of his depth. Islamists (i.e., fundamentalist Muslims to which legion the ayatollahs most certainly belong) will lie and cheat with impunity if they believe it is in the interests of protecting and promoting Islam. They are obliged to do so. Quite simply you can’t deal with them on a transactional basis. Netanyahu understands that. That’s why he must be secretly ropeable about Trump’s 12-days war when many more days were required.

An opportunity has been recklessly thrown away. Not only to inflict considerably more damage on Iran’s military apparatus but to trigger a regime change; the only pathway to a lasting peaceful solution. There is no other. Was Trump fearful of being blamed for American casualties if the war continued? I hope not. That would be the most fatal of flaws. There is another explanation. Bad enough but not so bad.

A clue is in Trump’s comment: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” The expletive is unimportant. What is important is the equivalence he appears to draw between Iran and Israel. Don’t get me wrong. Trump knows where the fault lies. The equivalence he is drawing is a transactional one.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Schumer Flips on Antisemitism by Rafael Medoff

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/382488/schumer-flips-on-antisemitism/

 Israeli ambassador Abba Eban was greeted by an irritating sight when he rose to speak in Harvard University’s Sanders Hall on a chilly Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1970. A group of anti-­Israel extremists in the gallery had unfurled a banner denouncing “Zionist imperialists” and tried to shout Eban down when he began to speak.

    Half a century later, another group of extremists, including Zohran Mamdani—now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City—employed similar tactics in their own anti-Israel protests.

    Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has cited Eban’s response to the Israel-haters as a transformative event in his own political life. Schumer’s very different response to the Israel-hater Mamdani reflects his own curious transformation.

    Schumer, who in 1970 was a Harvard undergraduate, was in the audience the night Eban spoke. He was so moved by the ambassador’s rebuke of the radicals that he spoke about it at length in what was arguably the most important speech of his life, delivered on the senate floor in November 2023.

    As Schumer rose to speak that day, anti-Israel protests, often mixing with blatant antisemitism, were erupting on college campuses and beyond. Schumer, who by then was the senate majority leader, was shocked at the refusal of many of his fellow-Democrats to acknowledge that antisemitism was coming from their own political camp.

    The reality, Schumer told his visibly discomfited colleagues, was that the people expressing antisemitism after the October 7 massacres “are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.” He continued: “The vitriol against Israel in the wake of October 7th is all too often crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations in this country—­if ever.”

    Sen. Schumer then recalled with admiration the way Ambassador Eban responded to the hecklers in 1970. “Eban pointed his finger up at the protesters in the gallery, and with his Etonian inflection, he calmly but strongly delivered a statement I will never forget,” Schumer recalled. 

    Schumer then quoted Eban’s words: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery. Every time a people gets their statehood, you applaud it. The Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Zambians, you applaud their getting statehood. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it—­ and that is the Jewish people. We Jews are used to that. We have lived with a double standard through the centuries. There were always things the Jews couldn’t do. . . . Everyone could be a farmer, but not the Jew. Everyone could be a carpenter, but not the Jew. Everyone could move to Moscow, but not the Jew. And everyone can have their own state, but not the Jew. There is a word for that: antisemitism, and I accuse you in the gallery of it.”

    The audience of more than 2,000 “broke into heavy applause,” The Harvard Crimson reported. Young Charles Schumer never forgot that moment.