Some writers complain of an occasional mental block. I suffer from a bottleneck. Every week, there are so many topics rivaling for attention and column inches that it’s a struggle to decide which one should come out first, and hard to control the flow of ideas – or stream of consciousness – that inevitably follows.
Several of last week’s stories spilled over into this week. Rahm Emanuel’s carefully crafted speech at Tel Aviv University, followed by multiple media interviews, was acknowledged as his opening bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He warned Israel: “You don’t have a problem with the Democratic Party. You have an America problem.”
As Micha Danzig put it in The Algemeiner, “Emanuel isn’t a principled man bucking his party’s drift. He’s a cynic chasing it… A friend does not import the vocabulary of Israel’s worst-faith accusers and call it ‘tough love.’”
If Emanuel’s trip was well-scripted, the visit by Democrat Californian Congressman Ro Khanna was well-staged. He knew that making an uncoordinated visit to “the West Bank” (Judea and Samaria) would end up in a confrontation. And if he didn’t know, then certainly his guide from the Breaking the Silence movement did. That’s the point of these visits – create a provocation and film the consequences. The “settlers” fall for it every time. And Israel is paying the price.
As Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein noted, Khanna’s story about being detained by settlers and soldiers grew with every retelling, but in a TikTok world, the facts don’t matter. If you repeat the buzzwords “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism,” you can get away with murder.
If the so-called Squad, Emanuel, and Khanna are the face of America’s future, it doesn’t bode well for the world at large.
Emanuel and Khanna made the sudden death this week of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham an even more painful loss. A true friend of Israel – not Emanuel’s fake version – Graham’s support sprang from a deep devotion to Israel’s survival rather than his political survival. He also had a real awareness of the dangers of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis.
The chants “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” that accompanied the funeral in Iran of supreme leader Ali Khamenei were part of the ritual. The procession that passed through multiple locations, both in Iran and in neighboring Iraq, took place some five months after he was assassinated at the start of February’s joint US-Israel operation. Iranian sources claimed more than 15 million attended the funeral parade.
Iranian missiles and drones continued to pound targets, mainly US military assets, across the Gulf States and Jordan this week, while Iran’s Houthi proxy attacked Saudi Arabia. Together with Iranian piracy in the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks show that peace is not around the corner. Allowing the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles would be suicidal.
Among the stories jostling for attention, a special place is reserved for the reports, initially published in The New York Times, that Israel planned to replace Ali Khamenei with former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, utilizing a Kurdish uprising. The plan, reportedly cultivated over several years, reached the stage where Ahmadinejad met with then-Mossad chief David Barnea in Hungary but later got cold feet. He was last seen at Khamenei’s funeral. It’s understandable if he cried there.
It’s hard to determine how much of the plot is truth and how much fiction, but after Israel’s extraordinary eradication of the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s top cadre in the September 2024 Pager Operation, anything is possible.
I frequently warn that regime change shouldn’t be carried out without a known successor, but Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad does not spring to mind as the best candidate. I’m also not alone in wondering who leaked the story, why, and what was the significance in the timing.
The Middle East’s dangerous power games
There was another noteworthy funeral this week following the death of Qatar’s former leader Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. By chance, Israel’s public broadcaster KAN had just released an episode in its Enemies series dedicated to the most powerful woman in the Middle East: Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. She is the late sheikh’s widow and mother of the current emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who ascended to power after his father’s abdication in 2013.
The program showed how the photogenic and stylish Sheikha Moza, as a co-founder and head of Qatar Foundation, puts the presentable face on the tiny country’s tactics of buying friends and influence through its gifts, endowments, and, of course, its media network Al Jazeera. Qatar’s double game has enabled it to be perceived as philanthropic while simultaneously pushing its religious extremist agenda.
Two quick takeaways from the program: the first, that Qatari money and support contributed to the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity of October 7, 2023, and the second, that Qatar continues to offer sanctuary to the Hamas leadership.
Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan played the host at last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, but he also helps Hamas and doesn’t hide his Islamist colors. Erdogan last month declared: “Zionism threatens not only me, not only our party, and not only our alliance, but everyone.” In a CNN interview ahead of the summit, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said: “These people [Israelis] have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear.”
When US President Donald Trump accepted a $400 million plane from Qatar, he ignored the strings that came with the gift-wrapping – and continued to promote Qatar as an ostensibly neutral mediator with Iran. Trump is now considering granting Turkey the F-35s fighter jets it covets.
Israel, of course, is not alone in perceiving the threat from Erdogan’s longings for a renewed Ottoman Empire; Greece and Cyprus are also anxious (especially as Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus after its 1974 invasion), and Turkish and Russian meddling in Syria should not be ignored.
Granting Turkey and Qatar a role in rebuilding Gaza – destroyed due to the murderous Hamas regime they support – will not be constructive in any other sense of the word.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup has provided some global distraction. The Norwegians won hearts as the team’s “Viking row” went viral – although why the world today thinks violent Viking colonialism is cute is food for thought.
Looking into the Norwegian success, I came across a darker story in Politico. Norway – the country that gave the world the term Quisling and the Oslo Accords – is struggling to get Israel ousted from FIFA using the usual slogans à la Rahm Emanuel. The Norwegian Football Federation doesn’t seem to have a problem with Palestinian Football Association head Jibril Rajoub, a convicted terrorist-turned-functionary who is also calling for Israel’s removal (and preferably Israel’s destruction).
So many stories, so little space. The decision by outgoing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a threat to national security is overdue but welcome, especially accompanied by a boost in funding to counter antisemitism.
Yet, this week, the Church of England’s General Synod voted in favor of a motion “to hear” the so-called Kairos II document. Tellingly titled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” it accuses Israel of being a “racist,” “colonial enterprise,” and carrying out “genocide” in Gaza. The document also voices opposition to the Abraham Accords and objects to Christian Zionism. So much for world peace.
There was a certain irony in the rejection of Israel as a Jewish state coming this week – as we enter the Nine Days leading up to Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av on the Hebrew calendar. It’s a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.
Israel is not an implanted Western colony, as the pro-Palestinian forces would have the world believe. On the contrary, our indigenous roots here as Jews go back millennia, centuries before Christianity was created and the even later birth of Mohammed and Islam (and well before the Vikings rowed and rampaged their way to new lands).
We beat a different tune to those suddenly beloved Vikings, but unlike them, our ancestors would still recognize our religion, language, and culture (and the Jew-hatred they elicit). Of all the things I could write about, Jewish ties to Jerusalem and the survival of the Jewish people and civilization is the most important story.