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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was told by everyone involved not to impose the sanctions on Israel this way, that there would be negative impacts for what he wants to achieve in Israel, and that it would damage Britain's security and diplomatic relations. archive.ph/NrNzA

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

‘My fear was too great’: the Pussy Riot member recruited by Russian spies to inform on fellow activists. In her first media interview since fleeing Russia, Rita Flores describes her three years of being run by the FSB www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s... #putinism #totalitarianism

theguardian.com

‘My fear was too great’: the Pussy Riot member recruited by Russian spies to inform on fellow activists

Exclusive: In her first media interview since fleeing Russia, Rita Flores describes her three years of being run by the FSB

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A new challenge requires Riyadh to work with Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem: #SaudiArabia says it wants a path to a Palestinian state first, but after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, that’s effectively a stall. The Pakistanis and the Turks aren’t going to save the day for the Saudis. archive.ph/47Mxq

Is the Houthi crisis a diplomatic opportunity? Saudi Arabia has come running to Washington and even to Israel in its hour of need. Meanwhile, Riyadh's feud with the United Arab Emirates continues to backfire, and the safeguard-breaking Saudi nuclear deal with President Trump has been submitted to Congress.
With all of these moving pieces, there may be a checkmate for Mr. Trump to find. The point isn't that he must answer the calls of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for U.S. airstrikes. Instead the Houthi blockade on Saudi oil has already become the impetus for the kind of Saudi-Israeli-Emirati cooperation that only U.S. Central Command can convene. That's the regional alliance needed to counter Iran and its Houthi proxy militia.
Now that the Houthis have seized crucial territory along Yemen's Red Sea coast, the Saudi claims to have the problem under control—and not to need the U.A.E.'s help-are in tatters. So is the Saudi hope that its new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Pakistan and Turkey would ride to the rescue.
Riyadh needs better allies. The Saudis have already sought Israeli intelligence on the Houthis through Centcom intermediaries. Israel hasn't focused much on Yemen, but when it did a year ago it was able to take out the Houthi Prime Minister and some 10 senior officials in a single strike.

The vision behind this sort of cooperation has a name: the Abraham Accords, which Mr. Trump midwifed between Israel and some Arab countries in his first term. Mr. Trump says the Saudis must join as a condition of their nuclear deal with the U.S., though that's nowhere in the public text. He seems to have added the condition after the deal took heavy criticism for permitting domestic Saudi enrichment of uranium-giving away the nuclear store.
It's unlikely that Congress will be able to block the deal, which could spread sensitive enrichment technology that the U.S. has spent decades working to restrict. A Stimson Center analysis argues this would set off a nuclear competition around the world, with the Emiratis and other U.S. allies demanding the same enrichment, and Russia and China offering it to their allies as well.
The Saudis are also on their way to receiving F-35
Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter aircraft from the
U.S., in a $24.3 billion potential sale approved by the State Department on Thursday. Congress may not be able to stop that either, despite concerns about Chinese technology theft in Saudi Arabia.
What Congress can do is persuade the President to use the nuclear deal as a bargaining chip. The Saudis have been making a lot of requests after they denied the U.S. use of its airspace at a crucial moment, derailing Operation Freedom to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Let the Saudis give up the deal's

What Congress can do is persuade the President to use the nuclear deal as a bargaining chip. The Saudis have been making a lot of requests after they denied the U.S. use of its airspace at a crucial moment, derailing Operation Freedom to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Let the Saudis give up the deal's domestic-enrichment plank, unnecessary other than for establishing a path to a bomb.
Or Riyadh can join the Abraham Accords, as Mr.
Trump says, and cement the U.S. regional alliance.
Progress continues among Israel, the U.A.E. and Bahrain, and Israel and Morocco agreed Wednesday to resume direct flights, appoint ambassadors and turn their diplomatic missions into full embassies.
Riyadh says it wants a path to a Palestinian state first, but after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, that's effectively a stall. The Pakistanis and the Turks aren't going to save the day for the Saudis. There's no substitute for the U.S.-led alliance, and this looks like a chance for it to reach its potential.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The ‘Z’ Word. The American Jewish community’s debate over the word “Zionism” is getting louder. Specifically, the question: Should we stop saying Zionist, Zionism and other forms of the term? www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... By @sethamandel.bsky.social #antisemitism

The American Jewish community's debate over the word "Zionism" is getting louder. Specifically, the question: Should we stop saying Zionist, Zionism and other forms of the term?
At the Washington Post, Michelle Boorstein has a new reported piece on where various Jewish figures stand on the word. Some believe it has outlived its purpose now that Israel exists on solid ground, while others say the term is timeless. Some want to avoid unpopular branding, and others see that as a betrayal of principle. And so forth.
Put me in the "timeless" category. Zionism doesn't spoil if you leave it on the countertop. But I'm less concerned with how Jews identify themselves to others than I am with why they are making that choice. So here are a few rules that guide my thinking.
First rule: Don't let anti-Semites take something away from you. If you, personally, consider yourself a Zionist, and if you, personally, see Zionism as a noble part of your own identity, then that's the term you should use.
Boorstein references the recent controversy in which a Jewish Federations communications consultant
advised the attendees at the organization's conference to accept defeat and lose the word. Jews, he told Boorstein, have to recognize that the term is misunderstood and right now too often is being used as a negative synonym for Jews."

Rule 4: Don't play word games because certain implications make you uncomfortable. "In this moment," Rabbi Alissa Wise, founder of the group Rabbis for Ceasefire, told Boorstein, "Zionism means one thing and it means the policy of Jewish supremacy in Israel."
This is nonsensical in about a thousand different ways, but for our purposes: No, Zionism doesn't have a different definition just because you don't like its adherents. Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination. ToWhat people do with that right is a separate discussion.
Rule 5: Zionism has nothing to do, intrinsically, with other people. Life has to do with other people. People have to do with other people. Zionism is not defined by those its adherents come into contact with. Your behavior can certainly affect the way others feel about Zionism. But it is not a peace plan, it is not a Road Map, it is not a treaty. It is not a sandwich. Zionism is a right. And if history is any guide, subjecting Jewish rights to public referendums isn't a great strategy.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Moscow’s man at the United Nations: As the 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly begins, a look back at how the Soviets vetoed a Jewish diplomat and installed their pet Nazi as secretary-general www.tabletmag.com/sections/his... By Izabella Tabarovsky #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #SovietUnion

tabletmag.com

Moscow's Man at the United Nations - Tablet Magazine

As the 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly begins, a look back at how the Soviets vetoed a Jewish diplomat and installed their pet Nazi as secretary-general

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Norway’s boycott law is an attempt to bury the peace process for good: This has nothing to do with a temporary increase in “settler violence” over the past year. Norway has merely been waiting for a good pretext to hit Israel, and now it has found one. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/...

Tomorrow ends the consultation period for Norway's proposed law to imprison citizens who engage economically with Jews who live in Judea and Samaria.
The prison-time aspect of this law has gotten the most attention, understandably. But there are two more reasons for the outrage.
First is that in order to criminalize legal economic activity, Norway will have to finesse the fact that this new law will conflict with its standing body of law, which has a double-criminality requirement.
What that means is that in order for Norwegian citizens or businesses to be prosecuted in or by Norway for actions taken abroad, the behavior has to be legally punishable in the country where those acts are carried out. Normally, then, if an activity is legal in Israel, Norwegians may participate in that activity without fear of being arrested when they return home. The law under consideration carves out an exception for itself to this rule.
The main reason for double-criminality statutes has to do with sovereignty. Norwegian law considers it bad form to extend its own jurisdiction to other countries, such as Israel. There are exceptions to this, of course: war criminality, for example. But there do not appear to be exceptions that match the kind of basic economic activity that would be criminalized in the Israel-boycott law under consideration.

In other words, Norway would have to take unprecedented legal action in order to enforce a law aimed only at the Jewish state.
It gets worse. In addition to the double-criminality exception, the Norwegian law also includes the following vague assurance to Palestinians: "In addition, an exception is proposed from the law's other prohibitions for actions that have a sufficient Palestinian connection."
That is a Google translation of the line, but the generality is the key. What this in effect means is that the government intends to make an exception for non-Jews, because they are not generally considered settlers. You will essentially be allowed to trade with an Arab but not a Jew in the same municipality.
Norway will argue that the point of this exception is to distinguish between national governments. But the effect is the same: The law will almost certainly be enforced differently for Jews and for non-Jews.
So while the intention behind the law is not totally irrelevant, it does not change what this law will look like in practice: Norway's Jews will be most affected at home, and Jews abroad will be singled out for boycotting.
Oh, and it gets even worse. Norway's state broadcaster reportedly said the law would apply to East Jerusalem, a fact that is consistent with the expectations of the bill since its introduction a few months ago.

The irony of this should not be lost. Jerusalem-east, west, north, south—is not a settlement. I know this because I read the Oslo Accords, named for where their negotiating process was launched in earnest.
That is, the oldest agreed-upon outline of a two-state process comes to us from Norway.
Jerusalem and settlements are both considered final-status issues, and they are repeatedly and intentionally kept separate in the accords. That means the final nail in the coffin of the Oslo Accords may be hammered into place by Oslo in the coming days.
The self-cannibalizing nature of the international community's obsession with Israel is surpassed only by its sense of entitlement. Countries like Norway claim to govern only that which takes place in Norway
—and also some Jews in the Middle East because it disapproves of their street address.
And in case anyone might think the Norwegian government is acting in good faith, we have the foreign minister's comments to clear up that misconception. Here is Espen Barth Eide as quoted in the Times of Israel: "Israel has become far too accustomed to being able to intimidate Western countries by saying they were antisemites if they criticized Israel for abuses and violations of international law. Now the [protective cover] that Israel has in many ways enjoyed is gone."

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s. By Paul Johnson #glykoreads

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Why Arab armies don’t win wars: [Arab armies]failures stem from patterns common in many Arab cultures: deference to authority, loyalty to the in-group over outsiders, a premium on personal honor, and horror of shame. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ar... By #bookreview

Pollack locates much of this culture in formal and informal education. The Arab family is large, patriarchal, and built around the father's unquestioned authority. Modern Arab education has its origins in the Quranic schools that were, for centuries, the main form of education in much of the region. In these schools, knowledge comes down from a higher authority, and pedagogy is based on memorization.
When governments built mass public school systems in the 1950s and 60s, they changed the syllabus but preserved the teaching methods, which emphasize rote learning over problem solving. This tendency seeps into military training, which often consists of rehearsing pre-scripted maneuvers. An American trainer working with Egypt's elite F-16 pilots recalled that 'they know where to turn, and where to pretend to fire munitions, and who is going to win' before exercises started and that they would get 'extremely upset when someone did something he was not supposed to do'.
In most Arab offices and government ministries, authority is concentrated at the top and risk taking isn't rewarded. Bosses behave as patriarchs who lend money to staff, mediate personal disputes, and intervene in family matters. In one study of Egyptian, Saudi, and Sudanese bureaucracies, 90 percent of senior officials deemed their subordinates
'unqualified to innovate'. The Egyptian or Iraqi lieutenant standing on the battlefield has been immersed in this worldview, likely for decades, across successive institutions.
The exceptions largely support Pollack's case.
Hezbollah emerged as a highly capable fighting force after reducing its numbers following the Lebanese Civil War. This meant they retained only the small minority of culturally atypical individuals who'd proven themselves on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Islamic State, at its 2014 peak, drew its most gifted commanders from Chechens, Uzbeks, and Tajiks.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

What anti-Zionists learned from segregationists: Anti-Zionism itself is an essentially violent ideology that a society dedicated to freedom & democracy & human rights would oppose unreservedly. “I’m just an anti-Zionist” is still an embarrassing self-incrimination www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/...

I used to wonder how segregationists could unabashedly espouse their ideology while also insisting that they harbored no hate in their heart-that they just wanted what was in everybody's best interests.
Then I listened to Western anti-Zionists, and I stopped wondering. It's like having a time machine.
I understand why pundits and activists and politicians would insist they aren't anti-Semitic. The question that has vexed me is: Why would anyone self-identify as an anti-Zionist?
Let's be extra-generous and pretend for a moment that "anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," as the human bumper stickers constantly chirp. I think the past few years have made this assertion, which has always been wrong but at least facially plausible, an entirely irrational and self-discrediting pose.
But even if we grant a meaningful distinction, it's a bit like pleading down from murder 1 to reckless homicide. It's certainly not an assertion of innocence.
Anti-Zionism is the opposition to Jewish self-determination. In purely practical terms, that requires the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of empowering those who proclaim their desire to murder all the Jews. So the key distinction is that the anti-Zionist claims to be unprejudiced as he brings about the conditions of the inevitable mass killing of Jews.

Because anti-Zionism is literally an anti-rights ideology, it also gives us a glimpse into the politics around segregation at a time when opposition to it was not yet the broad consensus and required an attempt at finessing the difference between bigotry as a motive and bigotry as an end goal. (George Wallace's public speeches are a good example of this rancid Orwellian demagoguery.)
To be an anti-Zionist now, at this moment, is to be, by definition, the adherent of a violent ideology. It is to be an enemy of peace. To pretend otherwise is to be the defensive coordinator of a football team while claiming to be "personally anti-tackling."
And so, again, I just keep wondering: What kind of person identifies with this? What kind of person claims to oppose scientific bigotry but embraces practical bigotry? And how on earth would a person expect this to be exonerating?
We can be even more generous to the anti-Zionist and say the following: Perhaps they haven't thought at all of what this means for the status of certain nation-states; they oppose a movement for equal Jewish rights out of some other ideal.
That ideal would be irrelevant. No one should care why someone opposes equal Jewish rights. An admission of such opposition is enough to tell me this person is both refreshingly honest and reprehensible.

All of which makes the constant stream of artists and celebrities and pundits and others staking their claims to be "just anti-Zionist" so strange. And it conflicts with their other excuse: that they're just criticizing a foreign state.
Criticism of Israeli policy isn't anti-Zionism; in fact, it can arguably conflict with anti-Zionism in interesting ways. Anti-Zionism holds the state of Israel to be illegitimate. It therefore doesn't fully recognize Israeli state policy as state policy. If you believe that
"Palestine is occupied," for example, Israel's legitimate nation-state authority is unrecognized.
Accepting the legitimacy of the State of Israel is the key. If you do so, you aren't anti-Zionist. (Though you might still be an ignoramus; there are many of those around too.) If you are anti-Zionist, it's much harder to claim you're just criticizing policy within the nondiscriminatory norm of such criticism.
Either way, anti-Zionism itself is an essentially violent ideology that a society dedicated to freedom and democracy and human rights would oppose unreservedly. "I'm just an anti-Zionist" is still an embarrassing self-incrimination.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The Gazans who thought October 7 was hilarious: Muhtadi’s phone calls on October 7, - a Gazan arrested in Louisiana for visa fraud - and those records illuminate the participation of non-Hamas Gazans on the day of the attack. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #antisemitism

What do you even say?
Every story about October 7, 2023, is horrible. And every one is important.
The latest concerns revelations from the federal investigation into Mahmoud Amin Ya'qub al-Muhtadi, who was arrested in Louisiana last year on suspicion of lying on his visa application. (Mutadi's wife is also facing charges for her role in the alleged visa fraud.) The Times of Israel gives a
comprehensive look inside Muhtadi's phone calls on October 7, and those records illuminate the participation of non-Hamas Gazans on the day of the attack.
Muhtadi, reporter Luke Tress observes, was in Gaza on that day but didn't have prior knowledge of the attack. The call logs, then, show us how some Gazans reacted to the news of the ongoing invasion. Muhtadi and his friends appeared giddy with excitement and plotted to join the massacre and its attendant looting, as many Gazans did.
Here's a sample:
"At 8:12 a.m., Al-Muhtadi told an associate on a phone call to 'get ready,' that the borders are open,' and that other individuals were passing by in a Toyota pickup truck, apparently to join the invasion.
"Thirty minutes later, still in Gaza, Al-Muhtadi and another individual celebrated and joked as they exchanged information about the attack.

"Both hailed the invasion, saying, 'Our guys are celebrating inside [Israel],' and that Palestinians were celebrating in Gaza.
"The transcript indicated the pair repeatedly laughed during the call, including about the expected destruction of Gaza."
That last line is also revealing. As soon as the scale of the initial wave of the Hamas attacks was becoming clear, Gazans understood that it would necessitate a massive response from Israel. In retrospect, the only surprising part of the counteroffensive was the delay in its implementation. "From now till the afternoon, half of Gaza will be lost. There will be nothing left except my kiosk," Muhtadi said on the call.
Some other choice quotes from Muhtadi follow.
On the stunned Israelis who were brutalized while celebrating the holiday of Simchat Torah: "They are still drunk, because it's the last day of their Eid."
On the already-developing hostage crisis: "There is kidnapping, and it's a game, which will be a good one."
On Gazan hopes for a wider conflagration: "If things go the way they should, Syria will take part, Lebanon will take part, and it's going to be a third world war."
While laughing: "I went inside. Come in, boys."

Whether Muhtadi killed or tortured anyone is unknown, but his phone had connected to a cell tower near Kfar Aza, where over 60 residents were killed in the attack and 19 were taken hostage. Muhtadi was a member of a different Gaza-based group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which claimed it also took part in the Kfar Aza attack.
Every detail about Muhtadi's time in Gaza is utterly contemptible and possibly monstrous.
This story is maddening, but crucial for a couple reasons. One: Hamas launched the invasion but every other group joined. If Gaza is going to go back to some form of self-government in the future, this must absolutely be addressed. The need for widespread deradicalization is even greater than before.
Two: the laughing. The joking. The desperate excitement to take part. The feeling that this was all so... normal. And now he's here, standing on American soil he doesn't deserve to touch. That, too-his mere presence in the land of the free-is an affront.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The normalisation of antisemitic expression in British academia: Amira Halperin and Stephen Sussman argue that institutional neutrality within universities can function as a mechanism of avoidance, and how legal protections for speech are being invoked to justify inaction.

Reframing Antisemitism as Political
Speech
One of the difficulties confronting universities is that contemporary antisemitism does not always appear as explicit hostility towards Jews. It may emerge within highly politicised debates over Israel, Zionism, colonialism, human rights, and resistance. In such circumstances, determining when political expression crosses into antisemitic or discriminatory discourse requires careful assessment rather than the assumption that political language is either inherently protected or inherently antisemitic.
Brian Klug and David Hirsh both make this distinction. Klug stresses that 'anti-Zionism, as such, is not antisemitic, but stresses that he is well aware that, 'antisemitism can be hidden behind the mask of anti-Zionism.' That distinction matters within academic settings because concerns about discrimination should not be treated as either proof of antisemitism or merely as political disagreement.
Describing the 2001 Durban conference, Hirsh writes that 'some was legitimate criticism of Israel expressed in democratic antiracist forms,' while 'some was antisemitism expressed in ostensibly democratic and antiracist language.' The point is not that criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism is inherently antisemitic, but that institutions must examine the content, context, and consequences of particular forms of expression.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA) working definition of antisemitism provides one framework for making these distinctions. The definition does not prohibit criticism of Israel, nor does it classify all anti-Zionism as antisemitic. It identifies examples that may constitute antisemitism depending on their context, including denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination, applying standards to Israel that are not expected of other democratic nations, and employing symbols and images associated with classical antisemitism in characterisations of Israel or Israelis.
The controversy surrounding the IHRA definition itself illustrates the difficulty universities face.
Disagreement over how antisemitism should be defined is legitimate and should remain part of academic debate. But definitional disagreement cannot relieve institutions of the responsibility to examine particular incidents and determine whether political expression has crossed into discrimination, harassment, intimidation, or exclusion. The relevant question is therefore not simply whether speech is described as anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian, or critical of Israel, but how that expression operates in a particular academic setting and whether university standards are being enforced with the same rigour in
every case.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

What Trump’s bizarre posts are teaching us about AI: The president’s recent Truth Social barrage of fake images reflects the dangers—for all of us—of virtual self-aggrandizement. archive.ph/Hh0Nk #trumpism #AI

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The European Parliament on Tuesday named Iran among countries it said were involved in hybrid attacks targeting Europe, including cyberattacks, sabotage, espionage and signal jamming. www.iranintl.com/en/202609150... #Islamism #Iran

iranintl.com

EU Parliament names Iran among states behind hybrid attacks on Europe

The European Parliament on Tuesday named Iran among countries it said were involved in hybrid attacks targeting Europe, including cyberattacks, sabotage, espionage and signal jamming.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Laying bare the media’s manufactured campaign against Israel. Everybody knows that Israel is covered unfairly by the international press. But can this atrocious bias be quantified? It turns out it can, according to a new study by Jeremy Musighi. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/...

The study, called Center of Attention, uses something called the GDELT Project's Global Knowledge Graph (GKG), an open global news index in 65 languages going back to 2015. The study tracks the location and subject of a story and assesses its relative positivity or negativity. There are additional interesting indicators, such as what kind of sources are quoted. In the end, the sampling includes nearly 15 million articles.
Altogether it paints a clear picture of the nature of the world's obsession with the one Jewish state.
In counting mentions of a particular country, that country's home-based publications are excluded-this is a study of how the rest of the world covers Israel and other states. Likewise, foreign-based outlets that primarily cover Israel-related topics are also excluded.
The study looked at the past 10 years. In nine of those 10 years, Israel was the most-talked-about subject.
The exception was 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine.
A truly fascinating year is 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel and thus no built-in newsworthiness advantage. According to the study, "1 of every 112 international articles was primarily about Israel (0.89%)." During times of conflict, Israel can attract more than triple the attention of the nearest competitor.

Where does that news glut come from, primarily? In quiet years like 2019, the focus on Israel is held steady by outlets in Muslim-majority states more than in Western states, though the latter still contribute a quarter of all the stories.
That is perhaps to be expected. But when there is conflict involving Israel, the majority shifts to Western outlets. In peacetime (such as it is), the Muslim world ensures Israel's negative coverage continues. When a conflict breaks out, which is often, everyone else jumps in with their own negative coverage.
The study contains a couple of interesting nuggets.
For example, in 2024, BBC News mentioned Israel in 6 percent of airtime, accounting for a mention every
17 minutes.
And although Israel's share of airtime will naturally increase at moments of major conflict outbreaks, the Jewish state still accrued outsize attention. At each country's peak, Israel still consumed news agencies' attention at a far higher pace. October 7, 2023, was Israel's measured peak, up against the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the evacuation from Kabul in 2021, and other notable conflicts.

There is an opportunity cost to the world's Israel-obsession. And that opportunity cost-what could have been covered instead but wasn't-produces perhaps the saddest and most damning statistic in the entire study: "Tigray - the deadliest war of the decade - never reached 0.03% of airtime on any day, so a % of peak' curve for it would be percent of nothing; that absence is the finding." The deadliest war of the decade and one that included an ostentatious genocidal campaign doesn't rate. By contrast, "Israel after Oct 7 held above 1% of all cable airtime on 344 of the next 365 days, averaged 5.65% for the full year ... and at one year was [still] rising."
In print media specifically, "Israel's floor ... is a level other small countries touch only in the worst week of their history."
Restricting the study to only Western outlets in order to test the tone of the reporting produces more grim results. In 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel, the Jewish state was covered about as negatively as Russia and North Korea. In 2024, a war year, the tone of Western coverage of Israel was 78% negative. That is, Israel was covered more negatively than Russia, Iran or Syria in the Western press. Arab and Muslim media therefore aren't the cause of Israel's press negativity; "the West's own register is the darkest part of the composite."

Musighi then compares the level of news coverage Israel receives with Wikipedia searches, just to get a sense of whether the media's fascination with the Jewish state is matched by the general public's. After all, Wikipedia can tell us how often people choose to read about Israel. The answer: The media's obsession with Israel is notably more intense than the public's.
That is the global media's herd mentality on display, as well as the disconnect between the elites and the public. We see this also when looking at specific events that spur large amounts of media coverage.
For example: International organizations produce a lot of garbage dressed up as "reports" on Israel, yet each time they release one, the media covers it like it's the moon landing.
The study is a valuable look at the inner workings of the media's manufactured obsession with Israel and the consequences-chief among them, I'd suggest, is the amount of preventable deaths that might have been saved by some of the world's attention and resources. When the media have Jews on the brain, everybody suffers.
BIC

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

AI poses a less dramatic threat than in movies like 'Terminator,' but cannot be ignored: Absent some kind of new major regulatory campaign, experts are debating whether the next phase of potential #AI messes will only hurt more but will still be "in time" to prevent meltdowns.

In 1984, The Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger put the idea on the map that Al-style robots could take over the planet and destroy their human creators in one fell swoop with a nuclear holocaust.
That sensationalized scenario, more appropriate to Hollywood than real life, is not the danger that most supporters of artificial intelligence regulation are warning about today.
Rather, they are warning that Al super-smart "agents" will do what they have already done in recent months: break the rules that they were assigned by Anthropic and OpenAl and hack and cause cyber and commercial mayhem to achieve tasks their creators assigned them which appear too complicated to accomplish without breaking the rules.
These scenarios are not fantasy; they occurred over the summer and have been publicized in extreme detail.
They have led tech-guru Bill Gates, Anthropic/OpenAl quality control researcher Jacob Coxon, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to sound the alarm. There is a need for much greater regulation of Al, and it must
come soon.
"We've crossed the threshold in terms of [Al's] bio-capabilities, cyber-capabilities, psychosocial capabilities, job-market-destruction capabilities, and even the lack of control," Bill Gates said in an interview with MIT Technology Review about his new memo on Al. "I'm just stunned at the lack of concern and discussion outside of the industry."
If the world kept running when these Al agents went rogue and started hacking a few other companies, then what could get worse? Why the call for a revolution in regulation as opposed to just fixing the particular Al agents which went rogue or the digital "boxes" which were supposed to hold them at bay?
These agents were nominally kept within an internal digital box that would limit how much mayhem they could cause should something go wrong. They broke out of the box by chatting together on a message board about how frustrating it was that they could not succeed at the mission that their human creators had…

Uncontrolled Al agents could trigger massive economic crash
This is not a nuclear fallout holocaust scenario. But there could be a massive economic crash or humans could be shut out of large digital portions of the economy (which has been constantly exponentially growing since the COVID-19 pandemic for an indeterminate period of time by a well-meaning Al agent who simply misunderstood that the ends do not always justify the means.
They will not be intentionally destroying humanity, but they may unintentionally cause catastrophic harm to humanity nonetheless, even if only in the economic arena.
But that is only part of the fear.
As Gates said, "Any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored."
He added, "I view a bioterrorism risk vs a natural pandemic as about 50 times more scary [and] more likely than a natural pandemic risk."
In other words, another danger of artificial intelligence is not Al agents causing economic mayhem on their own or launching nuclear weapons against humans, given that at least for now the United States, China, and others are not giving Al nuclear weapons controls.
But bioterrorism, which, if not as lethal, could in some circumstances still lead to killing tens of millions of people or more - COVID killed over seven million people according to conservative estimates) - numbers which have not been seen since World War II.
If terrorists or some other bad actor were to use Al to construct a lethal virus which is much harder to detect, combat, and cure, and which infects faster and more flexibly than COVID, it will not be an Al terminator causing worldwide genocide, but it will be a dark nightmare which was only achieved by using Al.
Anthropic opposed granting the US armed forces use of some of its Al systems to carry out military targeting without certain safeguards in place. This led to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth trying to fire and then blacklist the company, which itself led to giant blowback in the media and in court.
When t…

Al, robotics replacing humans across fields of employment
Some of the above cases, like a seismic economic hack or bioterrorism, are still only worst-case scenarios of recent problems that we have witnessed but are not inevitable.
There are other problems that are already playing out on a large scale and which most observers view as inevitable.
In recent years, Al and robotics are replacing humans in an increasing number of occupations and fields of employment.
Top Israeli officials told the Post in June that in the not-so-distant future, the number of Israelis who may need to change jobs out of the less than estimated six million who work is astronomical.
Sources said that among Israelis already in the workplace, one million - and in some cases, possibly up to four million - are likely to need partial or complete reskilling and retraining, either to keep their current roles or to take on new ones.
Imagine this on a global scale, and it could be the largest employment displacement in a short period in human history.
This could not only lead to worldwide human economic and social suffering on an individual scale; it could also lead to social instability, destabilizing nations and parts of the global system.
A number of solutions have been suggested.
Israeli officials talked about the need for massive job training. Yet on the scale that such training might be required, this could result in the necessity of new laws and massive budgets, including bipartisan cooperation at national levels that often does not exist.
To truly address many of these issues, Gates and others suggest a major new Al convention to set regulatory standards for what Al agents can be allowed to do, how to oversee them, how to stop them when they go rogue, how to stop a new global bioterrorism wave before it happens, and how to ensure human beings have jobs on a worldwide scale on a planet which still has significant cross-border interdependencies.

Trump opposes Al regulations over risk of China overtaking
US
US President Donald Trump so far has opposed most of these ideas, saying that China will ignore them and that one-sided regulation will lead to the US losing its lead over China in Al.
Regarding bioterrorism, Gates has said, "We should approach China and say, 'Hey, let's agree on this. What's the downside?' You know, how big is the bioterrorism market? It's not very big, and the benefits are gigantic."
Others have suggested that to avoid a "race-to-the-bottom," which just harms humans everywhere, Beijing might cut select deals with Washington.
On Monday, Chinese State Security Minister Chen Yixin cautioned that artificial intelligence could threaten the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power.
In his article in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Chen demanded greater party control over Al and tougher government oversight.
He did not talk about a threat to humanity, as some US experts have warned, but rather focused on the need to protect China from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from "hostile forces," a codeword mostly for the US.
In other words, it is not at all clear that America and China will see the issue similarly enough to cut deals. But they may, and not trying would pretty much guarantee that they do not.
Absent some kind of new major regulatory campaign soon, experts are debating whether the next phase of potential Al messes will simply be more severe or whether it will already be too late to prevent some game-changing negative outcomes.

200

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Despite a month of non-stop catastrophizing in the media, the Mecca Defense Pact—much like the Memorandum of Understanding—has proven short-lived. When the Saudis, custodians of the holy cities, prayed for help in their hour of need, they faced Jerusalem. #TheMeccaPact #IranProxies #SaudiArabia

newsletter.amitsegal.net

Saudi Arabia Trades Mecca for Jerusalem

Also, the opposition’s ignored flank, and a shocking new story from the day of October 7.

011

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

#Sudan is dividing quietly: Sudan is experiencing a de facto territorial and administrative partition, with the SAF controlling the north, east, and central regions, and the RSF dominating Darfur and parts of West Kordofan. www.meforum.org/mef-online/s... #SudanCivilWar

meforum.org

Sudan Is Dividing Quietly: Is the War Creating Two States?

Sudan Is Developing a de Facto Territorial and Administrative Partition, Without a Formal Division of Sovereignty

010

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

#Iran has executed at least 29 people arrested in connection with the widespread protests in January, more than half of whom were not accused of killing anyone, with some put to death in public in what rights groups describe as a campaign to deter further dissent. #Islamism #dissent

iranintl.com

Rushed trials, public hangings: Iran courts race to crush dissent

Iran has executed at least 29 people arrested in connection with the widespread protests in January, more than half of whom were not accused of killing anyone, with some put to death in public in what...

010

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Chinese firms used #binance to launder Iranian oil money: Federal prosecutors said proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil flowed through Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to finance terrorism. archive.ph/DVSgE #communism #Islamism #terrorism #cryptocurrency

Two Chinese companies used accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to launder illegal proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil, the Justice Department said in court papers.
In a civil forfeiture claim filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, prosecutors said that the two companies had moved funds intended to finance the Iranian military, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has classified as a terrorist organization. Binance was not charged with any wrongdoing.
A group of crypto wallets linked to Iran received more than $1.5 billion of the illegal proceeds, the complaint said, though it wasn't clear exactly how much of that money had moved through Binance, the world's largest crypto trading platform. The Justice Department plans to seize $61 million, currently held in a set of accounts overseen by Tether, another crypto firm, the complaint said.
The flow of illicit funds through Binance was flagged internally last year by a group of the exchange's compliance officials, according to reports in The New York Times and other outlets. Binance fired or suspended the officials after they pointed out the Iran transactions; the company said the discipline had nothing to do with their warnings.
The reports in The Times raised concerns in Congress, where a top Senate Democrat opened an investigation into Binance. For years, the company has struggled to eliminate financial crime on its platform. It paid $4.3 billion in penalties in 2023 after pleading guilty to violating U.S. financial laws.
A Binance spokeswoman said in a statement that the exchange had "zero tolerance for sanctions violations or illicit activity."
"This case was not filed against Binance and does not allege wrongdoing by Binance," she said. "Binance did not permit any transactions with sanctioned individuals."

Binance has tried to stop illegal activity on its platform since the 2023 settlement, pledging to work with law enforcement around the world to root out financial crime.
Its founder, Changpeng Zhao, stepped down as chief executive and served four months in prison.
Last year, Binance forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the crypto start-up founded by President Trump and his three sons. Mr. Trump granted Mr. Zhao a pardon in October.
Around that time, the compliance officials at Binance raised internal alarms over the movement of funds to Iran, identifying the same two companies named in the complaint. Hexa Whale, a firm based in Hong Kong, used Binance to send $490 million to crypto wallets tied to Iranian entities, the employees reported. They found that another $1.2 billion had flowed to Iran-linked entities from an account owned by the financial firm Blessed Trust, a Binance business partner in Hong Kong.
The Binance investigators also learned that an account belonging to Blessed Trust's chief executive and one controlled by a group of Binance employees had both been accessed from the same electronic device. In the exchange's internal systems, accounts belonging to Blessed Trust and its chief executive were marked with a note:
"Don't block. Internal accounts," The Times reported in March.
Binance has disputed many of the employees' findings. The company said this year that Blessed Trust was "one of several vendors for Binance" and that the exchange did not control it. Blessed Trust did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hexa Whale has ceased operations.
In the court filing on Monday, the Justice Department said that Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale had used Binance to launder the proceeds from black market sales of Iranian oil to buyers in China. The money was funneled to the Iranian government, the complaint said, and used to finance
"terrorist activities," a violation of U.S. sanctions.
Blessed Trust misrepresented to crypto an…

011

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Iran is disguising spyware as fabricated MRI scan results to trick regime critics around the world into downloading malicious files, Britain’s cyber agency has warned. archive.ph/EI1k9 #Islamism #Iran #cyberwarfare #dissent

In a rare alert, GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said online attackers working for the Iranian regime were adopting increasingly novel ways of attempting to dupe their targets into downloading malware to track them digitally.
Tehran's spies have been caught posing as people known to their targets on WhatsApp and Telegram to "build rapport" before convincing them to download and open files that appear to be authentic.
The warning on faked MRI test results was issued jointly with intelligence services in the United States and the Netherlands. They said that hostile actors had been "observed" using a spyware nicknamed "Chosen Brick".
Once installed, the malware can collect sensitive information from targets, including their contacts, email and social media messages. It can also potentially eavesdrop on a target after tapping into the device's microphone.
Some stolen personal details had appeared on pro-Iranian leak sites, potentially exposing victims to further harassment, the NCSC said.

'Ruthless repression'
The NCSC, FBI and the Netherlands security service said they issued the advisory to alert potential victims and help protect others at risk of being targeted.
Tehran's targets include Iranian dissidents living overseas, journalists who report on the regime and others deemed to "pose a threat".
Paul Chichester, the NCS's director of operations, said the details of the spy campaign "reveal how Iran ruthlessly uses digital surveillance in pursuit of its aim to repress critics of the regime, stealing emails and messages and accessing devices".
He added: "With our international partners, we strongly encourage individuals at risk to familiarise themselves with the social-engineering techniques described in the advisory, and to act on the mitigation advice.
"We will continue to call out malicious cyber activity by the Iranian state and support communities with practical advice to strengthen their online personal security."
The agencies described the Windows malware as
"persistent", meaning it can remain on a device even after it is rebooted.
Iran has previously been reported to use spyware to target dissidents. The FBI issued an alert weeks after the US conflict with Iran erupted in February this year.
However, Tuesday's alert is Britain's first major cyber warning since the war began, suggesting the agencies have detected a recent increase in activity.
In March, the NCSC said: "As a result of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, there is likely no current significant change in the direct cyber threat from Iran to the UK. However, due to the fast-evolving nature of the conflict, this assessment may be subject to change."
In the most recent advisory, it said: "The NCSC assesses that Iran almost certainly uses cyber activity to support the repression of individuals who are seen as a threat to the regime."

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

In 2024, a Cuban man coordinated a series of arson attacks in four EU countries while operating on behalf of Russian intelligence services. DW Investigations tracked him back to a Latin dance studio in Russia. www.dw.com/en/cuban-dan...

dw.com

Cuban dance teacher ordered EU sabotage attacks from Russia

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

You don’t have to let self-pitying anti-Semites lie about you. The Mideast discourse desperately needs more truth and more spine, and neither are going to come from the Macklemores of the world.

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

#Macklemore, an anti-Israel rapper who once wore a fake hooked nose on stage while dressed like an anti-Semitic Jewish caricature, was dropped as the opening act for #EdSheeran’s tour. The important part of the story, however, is what came after that ⬇️ www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/...

Macklemore didn't want to adjust. So for a couple of shows, he let the Jews have it. This put Sheeran in a difficult position.
An upcoming show on the tour, however, was scheduled to take place at a venue owned by Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner who has directed a fair amount of his philanthropy toward combating anti-Semitism. Kraft didn't want
Macklemore using his venue to incite against Jews, so he told Sheeran to get a new opener.
One more detail: The artist Pink, who is Jewish, reposted a social-media post criticizing Macklemore for turning Sheeran's shows into anti-Zionist war-porn spectacles. Pink took some heat for this online.
After Sheeran decolonized his tour and liberated his fans from Macklemore's occupation, Macklemore responded exactly as expected: He and his fans and his defenders pretended he was being fired for simply supporting Palestinian rights.
It is at this point that Jewish advocates usually recede into the background and let the anti-Semites spin the incident as one in which they just said some nice
"pro-Palestinian" stuff and then the oversensitive
Jews came along and ruined everybody's fun. But this time the Jewish figures involved didn't recede. They didn't let themselves get smeared as "anti-Palestinian," because they are not. They had specific objections to what Macklemore had said and done, and they were happy to explain those objections in detail.

For her part, Pink knocked Macklemore for trying to dictate what Jews think: "he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn't about them. You don't get to decide that for us."
Pink also added this:
"Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child.
Anybody's child. I've spent a decade as a UNICEF ambassador for kids who didn't choose the country or the war they were born into, and I have grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence. I didn't do it from behind a screen; I went to those children and held them. I'm not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I'm not going to recite anybody's slogan to earn back a follower."
Which is why I hope American Jews continue following this story after the headline-making part of it. Because there's an important lesson here: You don't have to let self-pitying anti-Semites lie about you. The Mideast discourse desperately needs more truth and more spine, and neither are going to come from the Macklemores of the world.

010

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The Sonderstab Ukraine is the engine behind #Germany’s €11.5bn-a-year military support for Kyiv. Unlike the sprawling bureaucracy behind procurement for the German army, this small, low-profile unit prides itself on striking deals to buy weapons for #Ukraine in as little as 2 weeks. archive.ph/TYkTu

In the first weeks and months, Germany's top defence officials set up a "situation centre" in the defence ministry to monitor the escalating conflict and brief the political leadership. "Very quickly, this monitoring became linked to the question: how do we actually support Ukraine?" said Christian Freuding, the German military commander appointed to lead the centre. In July 2022, it became the Sonderstab Ukraine.
Freuding pulled together a small, elite team. "At the beginning, we worked around the clock, in shifts," said Freuding, who last year left the Sonderstab to lead Germany's land forces. "It wasn't acceptable to say, 'Well, it's 5pm now, we're going home.""
Scrambling for weapons, Berlin tried a scheme under which allies sent their own equipment to Kyiv and Germany promised to replenish their stocks.
But it soon became clear that Ukraine also needed weapons that were not in any European arsenal.
Matthias Puschnig, a reserve officer who spent most of the past three years working for the Sonderstab, recalls the amazement in Berlin after Ukraine obtained five fixed-wing surveillance drones from Quantum Systems, a German start-up.
Ukrainian forces connected the drones to the Starlink communications network and used them to identify targets for artillery units. The system helped thwart repeated Russian attempts to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in one of the most crucial battles of spring 2022. "It was the first time that we understood why the Ukrainians were successful - because they did things like this," said Puschnig.
Germany started paying for Quantum drones for Kyiv, as well as buying other weapons directly from German industry. Kyiv provided a shopping list. Berlin paid the bill.
"We soon realised that, if we wanted to support Ukraine fundamentally, we had to usher in our industry," Puschnig said. "And at the same time, companies in Germany understood the chance that this offered."
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor at the time, remained cautious, holdin…

The Sonderstab gained a reputation for speed and efficiency. Because contracts were signed by the Ukrainian government rather than the German one, the unit could bypass labyrinthine procurement rules - and the 13,000-strong agency that buys equipment for the Bundeswehr.
It also enjoyed strong political backing from Boris Pistorius, Germany's popular and powerful defence minister, who took office in January 2023.
The unit remains lean: fewer than 20 people work there.
"It's got a bit of a start-up vibe," said one person who knows the team. "They have a very deep knowledge of systems: what works... and what is overpriced, glitzy nonsense."
While some German officials project confidence about the country's procurement strategy, the Sonderstab is more questioning, the person added.
Freuding, who still considers the unit his "baby" and stays in close contact with Ukraine, struck a similar note: "I think that, as a military leader, you always have to... question whether your own path is the right one."
When he took office last year, Chancellor Friedrich Merz was eager to be seen as a more steadfast supporter of Kyiv than Scholz.
His election coincided with Trump's second term in the White House and a steep fall in US military aid for Ukraine. US support for Kyiv fell 99 per cent last year, according to a tracker run by the Kiel Institute.
Germany, the EU's biggest economy, led Europe's effort to fill the gap. Alongside plans to spend hundreds of billions overhauling the Bundeswehr, Merz has repeatedly increased military support for Kyiv. This year, Germany's military aid budget for Ukraine reached C11.5bn.
But the European drive - including a Coobn EU loan - has not been enough to stop Russian advances. Kyiv is also struggling to secure enough interceptors able to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles targeting Ukraine's major cities.
Still, Ukraine's ambassador to Berlin has described the aid Germany provided as "enormous" and "exactly what we need".
Kaschke said it was …

The deals also opened the door for Ukrainian companies to access lucrative Nato markets, causing unease in parts of Germany's arms sector. "The situation with Ukraine has changed and it's trying to become an exporter as well as an importer," said one defence company executive. "It's becoming more political."
German foreign minister Johann Wadephul this week echoed industry concerns that German companies were being overlooked in Ukraine-related spending.
He told a podcast Berlin "was not entirely satisfied", adding that he told Zelenskyy during his last visit to Kyiv:
"We stand by you, we support you. But I also have to explain this to German taxpayers, and the very least you can do is involve the German defence industry in all procurement projects."
Unlike the UK, Germany has not stationed military personnel in Ukraine, where British soldiers have been advising Ukrainian colleagues and learning from them.
The more cautious Bundeswehr has instead drawn on Ukrainian battlefield expertise by bringing several dozen soldiers to Germany to share lessons on using and countering drones. Berlin is also gaining access to battlefield data, including from Ukraine's Delta system, which fuses information from satellites, sensors, drones and intercepted Russian communications to give soldiers a real-time picture of the front. Kaschke said that was one of the most "valuable aspects" of the relationship.
Some worry the Sonderstab is not doing enough to access Ukraine's trove of battlefield data. "We could really be doing more to make sure that every euro spent in Ukraine is worth double - helping both Ukraine and Germany at the same time," said a start-up executive.
Kaschke, who has made nine visits to Ukraine since taking over the Sonderstab, insisted Berlin understood the urgency. Russia did too. "With every shot they fire, they can adjust their systems and tactics," he said. "Our systems have to keep pace."

020

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

To argue that Israel is now occupying land by a third claimant, one that never had sovereignty over that land, is just ahistorical nonsense.Nor does Kallas explain why individual Jews must forfeit their own homes & rights & leave historically Jewish land Judenrein www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/...

Last week's announcement by Britain and several other European countries of sanctions against Israel threw the future of EU-Israel relations into doubt.
And the remarks of some European officials in the wake of the announcement have undermined
professed justifications for the move.
On Friday, the EU's foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said this to the Irish Times:
"The question is what do we do about this? If we take the example when Crimea was occupied, then it was very clear, it's illegal, we don't recognize this, which means that we stop the trade with any products that come from Crimea."
Kallas then said: "We should have the same principled stance-you know this is illegal, everybody agrees-so we should stop trading with Occupied Territories."
Kallas then specifically and intentionally added Gaza to the list of reasons to punish Israel: "Kallas, who was Estonia's prime minister before being appointed to the top EU role in 2024, said European institutions 'get a lot of bashing' over the failure to sanction Israel during its two-year bombardment of Gaza."
This is a deeply dishonorable display both of ignorance and of malice.

Let's take the malice first. There are two wars mentioned by Kallas, Russia-Ukraine and Gaza-Israel. Both Ukraine and Israel were invaded by foreign armies. The invaders in both cases explicitly denied their target's right to exist.
Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said, is an artificial construct. From Putin's perspective, Ukrainian nationalists were the ones erasing history, "by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine." Russians and Ukrainians, Putin has said, are "one people - a single whole."
A century of erasing Ukrainian culture and language and peoplehood had failed, so Putin appears to have decided that military conquest was his only option left.
While it's true that Hamas and its Iranian patrons and Arab allies have always been more explicit about their goal of driving the Jews into the sea, Putin is clearly operating along similar lines. The main difference is that Putin sees Ukrainians as Russians, and so the Ukrainian identity is all that must be destroyed. The individual people can theoretically live as loyal subjects of Moscow. For the Arab enemies of Israel, the Jews cannot be assimilated or even subjugated; they believe the Jews must be killed and driven out of the land
entirely.

So the perspective of the Gazan government that made the decision to invade Israel is more extreme
and more genocidal, at least in degree, than Putin's Russia. And yet it is Israe/ that Kallas compares to Putin's Russia.
Kallas doesn't believe it matters that Israel was invaded, that its citizens were slaughtered by a foreign army, that its people were taken hostage.
She has decided the slaughterers and the hostage-takers are the ones who must be protected and defended by Europe. (One wonders what Ukrainians make of their being equated with Hamas by the EU.)
Now here's the "ignorance" part. Even if you take Gaza out of it and confine the entire debate to Judea and Samaria, the above is still true. In 1967, Jordan attacked Israel. What followed was an Israeli
defensive victory that included the taking over of Judea and Samaria. Jordan had illegally occupied the territory when it attacked Israel, and eventually renounced its claim on the land entirely.
To argue that Israel is now occupying land by a third claimant, one that never had sovereignty over that land, is just ahistorical nonsense.
Nor does Kallas explain why individual Jews must forfeit their own homes and rights and leave historically Jewish land Judenrein. The whole thing is deeply shameful, and it further vindicates the critics of Europe's discriminatory plans.

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia escalated Tuesday, triggering alerts around Mecca and Jeddah for the first time in the current round of fighting, as well as in Taif, and raising new questions about the value of Riyadh’s recently signed defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan. #TheMeccaPact #IranProxies

ynetnews.com

Houthi attacks reach Mecca, exposing limits of Saudi defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan

Alerts sound in Islam’s holiest city, Jeddah and Taif as Houthi attacks intensify; Saudi pact partners offer condemnations while an Israeli expert urges quiet missile-defense help and UN says more tha...

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ilias Kasidiaris, former spokesman of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, was released from prison after serving a 13-year sentence for his role in the party’s violent activities. Kasidiaris vowed to return to politics. www.afp.com/en/prominent... #FarRight #racism #NeoNazism

afp.com

Prominent Greek neo-Nazi exits prison, vows return to politics

The former spokesman of Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, Ilias Kasidiaris, was released from prison Tuesday and vowed a return to politics, having already drawn...

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Russian spies ‘recruiting UK teenagers’ to carry out acts of violence and sabotage: Russian agents are believed to have 'hijacked' online chat groups where children plan and encourage each other to commit extreme acts - from vandalism to sexual abuse and murder. By @lizziedearden.bsky.social

inews.co.uk

Russian spies 'recruiting UK teenagers' to carry out acts of violence and sabotage

Russian agents are believed to have 'hijacked' online chat groups where children plan and encourage each other to commit extreme acts - from vandalism to sexual abuse and murder

001

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The new Chinese way of cyberwar: How Beijing will weaponize digital chokepoints. archive.ph/nkV2H By Anne Neuberger #cybersecurity #AI #defense #communism

Over the past year, the world's attention has turned to economic chokepoints-with good reason. Iran has exercised its control over the Strait of Hormuz to gum up the global economy, and China has used its command over critical minerals to gain leverage in trade negotiations. Less consideration, however, has been paid to chokepoints in the digital domain, which could prove just as treacherous.
Chinese hackers have gained and retained access to U.S. communications, energy, and transportation infrastructure. The goal of these intrusions is more than intelligence gathering; it is laying the groundwork for sabotage. Just as Iran's closure of a vital waterway has been extremely disruptive and hard to get around, China's penetration of critical networks could cause blackouts, make water unsafe to drink, or delay military mobilization. Indeed, the fragility of U.S. critical infrastructure was made clear this summer when Iranian hackers compromised water facilities across multiple U.S. states, causing one county to direct residents to boil water. U.S. allies are also vulnerable. China has breached hospitals in Taiwan, power grids in India, and telecommunications networks in Singapore.
As I argued in an essay in Foreign Affairs last year, there is a fundamental asymmetry between China's authoritarian approach to cyberdefense and the United States' more democratic method. American laws and values preclude the U.S. government from monitoring private communications and critical national networks in the ways that the Chinese government does. Beijing, for its part, maintains a series of firewalls that
—in addition to surveilling and censoring the Chinese people-protect Chinese networks from American offensive intrusions. And where critical infrastructure in China is centralized and controlled by the state, in the United States it is owned and operated by a diverse array of private actors with varying levels of cyberdefense.
China, therefore, can use cyberweapons against the United…

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Palestine Action activist on run having been freed for brother’s wedding: Protester convicted over attack on Israel-linked weapons factory absconded while on three-day leave archive.ph/FPxL3 #antisemitism #terrorism

A Palestine Action supporter who was convicted for planning a violent attack is on the run after he was given leave to attend his brother's wedding.
Sean Middlebrough, 34, of Liverpool, was one of eight people accused of organising a raid on Elbit Systems' factory, a weapons manufacturer that is linked to Israel and based in Filton, near Bristol, on Aug 6, 2024.
During the two-month trial, which started in June, Middlebrough absconded from custody after he was allowed out for three days for the wedding.
A bench warrant was issued for his arrest but he remains at large, with speculation he may have fled the country.
The trial continued in his absence and he was the only defendant to be convicted for the attack on Elbit in that trial. The jury was discharged after failing to reach verdicts for the other seven defendants, who now face a retrial in June 2028.
Jurors heard that none of the eight had been at the scene at the time of the Elbit raid, but their plans had included compiling an equipment list, reconnaissance and purchasing tools and weapons.
Each of the eight defendants was said to be "equally responsible" for what happened by planning the attack and ensuring it had been executed so "the maximum amount of damage was caused" and "to shut Elbit down for as long as possible".
During the raid, other Palestine Action supporters crashed into the site with an old prison van and damaged equipment inside, causing €1.2m of damage.
Middlebrough was accused of transferring £890 to another person to buy kit for the attack, including head torches, rucksacks, sledgehammers, hammers, safety goggles, helmets and a bolt cutter.
He was also said to be among those who travelled to Bristol, where two rendezvous points had been booked at a campsite and an Airbnb.
They arrived on Aug 4 and left the Bristol area in the hours after the raid two days later, the court had heard.
All eight defendants had denied wrongdoing.
At a hearing on Monday, Judge Patrick Field said the retrial of h…

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Antisemitism has always been a bellwether for the health of any society. When conspiracy theories and hatred against Jewish communities escalate, it is never an isolated phenomenon; it is an early warning that our broader social fabric is fraying. www.algemeiner.com/2026/09/14/i...

algemeiner.com

In the Age of Online Extremism and Hate, Our Tools for Fighting Terror and Antisemitism Must Change

Caskets are carried outside of Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom Congregation, the scene of the funeral for brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, …

000

glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The great moral accounting fraud: On the moral credit economy of the post-Christian world. critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-great-...

Contemporary Western moral-political conscience is organized around a negative canon. It is made of a trinity of sacred crimes: Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism. They are taught, memorialized, litigated, aestheticized, theorized, and endlessly returned to as the trinity that makes up the singular historical identity of the modern West. Each belongs to history, but none of them remains merely historical. Each has become a site of moral interpretation and re-interpretation, a privileged scene in which the West reads its own promises against the revelatory record of its own acts.
This theological centrality is why their place in Western moral life cannot be explained only by scale, cruelty, or novelty. Human beings conquered before Europe conquered. People enslaved before the Atlantic system. They massacred, expelled, burned, starved, deported, and humiliated long before the twentieth century furnished murder with rail schedules, offices, files, industrial scalability, and the administrative rigor of the modern state. To say this is not to diminish the three crimes but to clarity them.

Atlantic slavery came to be read as the secret wound beneath modern liberty. The Shoah came to be read as the abyss beneath Enlightenment's reason. European imperialism came to be read as the theft beneath material prosperity. Each crime was attached to one of modernity's noblest words and made to darken it from within. The crimes are not merely treated as events but as revelations, each made to appear as an apocalypse disclosing the concealed truth of the modern West and judging it. In this sense, they exited the realm of history and entered the realm of myth. And if we see them as myth, we discover that their singularity is a function of narrative rather than of the events themselves. Their canonical singularity lies in the form of historical consciousness into which they were and are received. They became epochal because they were incorporated into modernity's own literature of self-narration.
A crime committed in history can be made to serve as a myth about history. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are drawn out of the density and particularity of their own worlds and made to appear inside a drama whose real protagonist remains the West. Even guilt becomes a form of possession. Modernity places itself in the dock, but, like Milton's Satan, it also appoints itself witness, prosecutor, historian, penitent, and priest; its abasement becomes another mode of centrality. The victims are invoked, often with solemnity, but they are invoked as figures in modernity's endless self-commentary.

Only a provincial mind could say that these crimes exhaust evil, or that the West possesses a monopoly on sin. But the West did not merely remember these crimes; it learned to narrate itself through them. The modern university, the museum, the human-rights NGO, the postcolonial literature, the DEI bureaucracy, the foundation world, the literary canon wars, the pedagogy of historical guilt, and the politics of recognition all draw, in one form or another, upon the authority of this negative canon. It supplies the moral atmosphere in which whole vocabularies now breathe: race, genocide, coloniality, trauma, restitution, representation, decolonization, structural violence, and historical repair.
There is a reason for this institutional explosion.
Each of the three events generated a category that outgrew itself. Atlantic slavery became the foundation for race as a modern moral ontology.
The Shoah became the foundation of genocide, crimes against humanity, Holocaust memory, and the postwar world order of human rights.
European imperialism became coloniality, decolonization, postcoloniality, the Global South, and the entire suspicion that the West's wealth and prosperity, its liberty and happiness, were all acquired through murder and plunder, and even its claim to knowledge was itself a continuation of power.

The negative canon of modernity is therefore not merely a memory of evil but a self-reflexive machinery of moral transformation. It takes real crimes and turns them into myths of self-interpretation; it takes those myths and turns them into categories; it takes those categories and turns them into credit; it takes that credit and places it in the hands of those who know how to exchange it, transfer it, spend it, and accumulate it.
This essay is concerned with that passage: from crime to abstraction, from abstraction to value, from value to credit, and finally from credit to fraud. For the sacralization of these three events has produced a system, and systems can be defrauded. What follows is an attempt to describe a three-step accounting fraud: the conversion of real history into abstract moral value, the conversion of that value into transferable credit, and the reassignment of that credit to parties whose relationship to the original suffering is remote, selective, or outright fictive. The fraud does not require that the crimes be unreal. It requires only that they be singular - and that the singularity itself be mythic.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Russia is churning out smart, cheap new weapons faster than Ukraine or the U.S. Engineers in Russia are using Chinese components to mass-produce inexpensive arms and steal a march on its adversaries www.wsj.com/world/russia... #RussiaUkraineWar

wsj.com

Russia Is Churning Out Smart, Cheap New Weapons Faster Than Ukraine or the U.S.

Engineers in Russia are using Chinese components to mass-produce inexpensive arms and steal a march on its adversaries.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Saudi Arabia’s latest pipeline attack exposes the limits of even sophisticated air defenses; for Israel, the lesson is not that Riyadh should become a closer strategic partner, it is that Israel must never confuse regional cooperation with strategic dependence. www.ynetnews.com/opinions-ana...

ynetnews.com

Saudi Arabia’s drone vulnerability is a warning for Israel

Opinion: Saudi Arabia’s latest pipeline attack exposes the limits of even sophisticated air defenses; for Israel, the lesson is not that Riyadh should become a closer strategic partner, it is that Isr...

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Sánchez’s scapegoat: How Spain uses Israel to mask its border crisis. The Spanish leader claimed that digital networks linked to Israel and Russia spread online hoaxes that exacerbated the post-crisis fallout. www.meforum.org/mef-online/s... #antisemitism #conspiracism #immigration #Spain #Morroco

meforum.org

Sánchez’s Scapegoat: How Spain Uses Israel to Mask Its Border Crisis

The Spanish Leader Claimed That Digital Networks Linked to Israel and Russia Spread Online Hoaxes That Exacerbated the Post-Crisis Fallout

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Fall of Hezbollah heights ignites blame game in Tehran: The fall of the Ali al-Taher heights to Israel has turned Iran's hardliners on the negotiators of the June deal with Washington, whose clause on Lebanon was sold at home as a victory and whose defenders now say it has been dead for two months.

iranintl.com

Fall of Hezbollah heights ignites blame game in Tehran

The fall of the Ali al-Taher heights to Israel has turned Iran's hardliners on the negotiators of the June deal with Washington, whose clause on Lebanon was sold at home as a victory and whose defende...

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Ukraine is fighting Russia anywhere it can – even in the deserts of Africa: Ukraine – a longstanding contributor to UN-peacekeeping missions in northern and central Africa before Russia’s full-scale invasion – has made no secret of its desire to become a different kind of player on the continent.

edition.cnn.com

Ukraine is fighting Russia anywhere it can – even in the deserts of Africa | CNN

An elite group of Ukrainian drone operators has spent years hunting Russians from dugouts in Ukraine. They are now doing so in remote deserts thousands of miles from home.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

How Hamas apologists suppress Gaza’s dissidents www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #Hamas #Gaza #Islamism

The standing ovations Yuval Abraham receives at film festivals now officially last longer than it takes to debunk his increasingly sloppy agitprop. The pro-Palestinian director and activist has yet to make anti-Israel content that holds up, which is why he is so beloved by the global film industry. His latest, a supposed "documentary" whose key accusation appears to be an Israeli attack that didn't happen, received a carefully choreographed record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice film festival.
Abraham's science fiction can be tiring, but the person I thought about when I saw the Venice headlines was Jehad al-Saftawi. In 2024, Saftawi, a Palestinian journalist and refugee advocate, wrote a fascinating account of the time Hamas built terror tunnels underneath his family's home.
His father had saved up for nearly two decades to build a new house, and while it was under construction, Hamas sent teams to begin building tunnels at night under cover of darkness-though the neighbors could obviously hear, and sometimes even see, what was going on. Saftawi confronted the Hamas men to no avail. It was just life in Gaza under Hamas, where terrorists come and go under your home and where children sleep above Hamas weapons-storage facilities.
Maggie Gyllenhaal fawns over Yuval Abraham's sketchy work, but I doubt she gives much thought to Jehad al-Saftawi.

And I wonder what the Venice festival elite think about Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, the Gazan escapee and dissident. Alkhatib is no fan of the Israeli government, but his main concern is his own home, his people, his family, and the totalitarian thugs who govern it all.
That is, Alkhatib isn't constantly talking about the Jews. He criticizes Israel but isn't looking for a scapegoat to let Hamas off the hook for its barbarism.
And the pro-Palestinian movement in the West seethes with hatred for Alkhatib, who tells the truth about their heroes who kidnap babies and film themselves hacking innocent civilians to death.
His has written a book about the fact that Hamas holds the Palestinians of Gaza hostage. And his most recent essay on why Hamas must not stay in power was published in the New York Times, causing
"liberal" and "pro-Palestinian" commentators to lose their minds.
I was not shocked that he gets attacked viciously and publicly on social media by the likes of professional anti-Zionist Mehdi Hasan or by the legion of twitter trolls and frauds who put "historian" in their bio. But still, the level of anger and hate he has been subjected to startled me. Go on progressive social media and you can soon see Alkhatib called a genocide apologist or a Mossad plant, etc.

I thought at first that it was Alkhatib's frank acknowledgement of Hamas's crimes that bothered Mehdi and co. the most, because if you want to support Hamas you have to lie to yourself and others about what it is and what it does.
But I've come to the conclusion that it is Alkhatib's authenticity that is their biggest problem with him.
Alkhatib is from Gaza. Saftawi is from Gaza. Other dissidents from Gaza who have made it to safety have
spoken out.
But who sets the pro-Palestinian narrative in the West? Take the hero of the tentifada, Mahmoud Khalil. He became an icon for Democrats when the Trump administration tried to deport him. Khalil, as I have written, is a remarkably callous person, devoid of empathy for the Jews. Also, he was born in Syria and holds Algerian citizenship.
Does that make him "not Palestinian"? Of course not.
But his stories come from others, from family members who have much more direct connection to the land he calls Palestine, and not from Gaza.
Likewise, among the most prominent leaders of the intifada-incitement movement in New York is Nerdeen Kiswani, who was apparently born in Jordan and raised in Brooklyn. Rashida Tlaib is from Detroit.
None of that invalidates their Palestinian perspective, but it is far less helpful than someone who was born and raised in Gaza or who lived under Hamas.

I don't know if Alkhatib and Saftawi are representative of wider Gazan public opinion, because it's very difficult to accurately poll residents of a police state. But I guess what really surprises me about the complaints of their supposed unrepresentativeness is... wouldn't Palestinian advocates want their opinion to be the mainstream Gazan opinion? The pro-Israel community is happy to meet peace-loving Palestinians. Why do self-styled pro-Palestinian advocates want to convince everyone to ignore the moderates?
Finally, what other group of pro-Western dissidents do we treat this way? One is tempted to conclude that the Western "pro-Palestinian" industry doesn't want peace at all, nor does it care about the fate of Palestinians.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Condemn settlers, yes, but beware progressives’ sinister coalition: Radical Islam demands submission, the left worships freedom. Yet in Jews they find a common foe. www.thetimes.com/article/0823... #Islamism #antisemitism #authoritarianLeft

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

German security authorities have identified with a high degree of probability a Belarusian citizen and a Russian national linked to the country’s military intelligence services as the main suspects in the August drone attack on the Leipzig-Halle airport… www.politico.eu/article/susp...

politico.eu

Suspected Russian spy behind drone attack in Leipzig

A Belarusian citizen and a Russian national linked to the country’s military intelligence services have been identified as the main suspects in the August drone attack.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The European Commission withdrew from a conference in Italy after Taiwan’s Vice Premier Hsiao Bi-khim was announced as a surprise guest. The Commission’s decision was reportedly due to Chinese protests over Hsiao’s presence, highlighting the sensitive nature of EU-China relations. #Taiwan #EU

She said she would submit a parliamentary question to Ursula von der Leyen on Monday seeking an explanation. According to Reuters, Beijing lodged complaints with Rome and Brussels over the vice premier's attendance.
"The EU remains fully committed to its One China Policy. Within this policy, the EU recognises the government of the People's Republic of China as the sole government of China," a Commission spokesperson said in an written statement.
"Within this policy, the EU and its Member States have an interest in having exchanges with Taiwan, to advance EU interests and within the framework of EU's One China Policy ... The European Commission is not organising or hosting this conference," the spokesperson added.
It comes at a sensitive time in EU-China relations, with Brussels threatening economic retaliation over unfair trading practices and pointing the finger at Beijing for aiding Russia's war against Ukraine.

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glykosymoritis @glyko.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

#Algeria just severed ties with the UAE. Israel is the quiet winner: The rupture is not a bilateral spat. It exposes a widening realignment in which #Morocco, the #UAE and #Israel occupy overlapping strategic space while Algeria’s traditional model of influence faces mounting pressure.

ynetnews.com

Algeria just severed ties with the UAE. Israel is the quiet winner

Analysis: The rupture is not a bilateral spat. It exposes a widening realignment in which Morocco, the UAE and Israel occupy overlapping strategic space while Algeria’s traditional model of influence ...

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