Category Archives: News

Provocation, Politics and Prudence

Two questions:

1) Which contemporary public provocateur poses the greatest threat to Israel?

2) Has Mike Huckabee, who has called attacks on Arabs in Yehudah and Shomron “Jewish terrorism,” thrown Israel under the bus?

The answer to the first question, I believe, isn’t Tucker Carlson or even Hasan Piker. It’s Itamar Ben-Gvir.

No, I don’t think Mr. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, is the monster many media have made him out to be. Yes, he has strong views about Arabs he sees as posing dangers to Jews. And such Arabs, and the dangers they represent, certainly exist.

But he is a politician, too, who, to impress a particular constituency, has done things like boasted of reducing food rations for Palestinian prisoners (and Israel’s high court ruled in 2025 that the prison service under Ben-Gvir deprived Palestinians of a minimum subsistence diet). And posted (though later removed) a video of corpulent, smiling Arab prisoners entering prison and then exiting as gaunt, drained creatures.

And he has also made statements calibrated, like the video, to inflame. In a more recent one, responding to Israel’s drawdown of military strikes in Gaza,  he opined that “targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night.” He added: “Not just those who pose an immediate threat – there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

Now, arguably, he meant the 30 to 40 deaths to be of Hamas terrorists. And few of us would be disappointed if the earth were no longer cursed with the presence of such murderous people.

But it was entirely predictable that media and nations (not just Arab ones but western ones as well) would understand his wished-for victims to include random Arab residents of Gaza. And, equally predictable, that those media and nations, along with countless pundits, would seize upon the “not even people” phrase as mirroring things like the Nazis’ portrayal of Jews.

Such incendiary statements provide potent ammunition to anti-Israel provocateurs like Carlson and Piker, who then gleefully feed them into their “genocide” generator. And from there, the libels spread into other parts of the populace.

As to question #2, Mr. Huckabee has been the friendliest and most empathetic US ambassador to Israel that she has ever known. And his condemnation of acts of violence by nationalist hotheads against innocent Arabs is not only justified, but also in Israel’s best interest.

He made clear that roughly half a million Israelis live in Yehudah and Shomon, and that the men responsible for “settler violence” represent “a very tiny minority” of that population, at most, “a few hundred men.”

He added that that is “a few hundred too many,” but he clearly rejects the myth that, as BDS supporter Mairav Zonszein put it a recent New York Times guest column, violence against Arab residents “is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy… [which includes] the emboldening of settler militias,” and that the “systematic destruction of Palestinian life” is the government’s goal.

Israeli Jews in outposts in Yehudah and Shomron point out that there have been many more instances of attacks on them by local Arabs than there has been violence against Arabs. And that there have been times when what seemed to be anti-Arab violence turned out to be nothing of the sort (in some cases, even fabrications). All true.

But, in the end, those cases do not justify “retaliations” against random Arab families and fields that have unarguably taken place.

Back in May, when an “activist” flotilla was intercepted by the Israeli navy, Mr. Ben-Gvir posted a video mocking captured flotilliacs bound and forced to kneel on the ground. The posting sparked (as its poster intended) outrage from abroad and even from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who call his minister’s actions “despicable.”

Mr. Huckabee’s reaction at the time was that the “Flotilla was [a] stupid stunt, but Ben Gvir betrayed dignity of his nation.”

That latter phrase said much. And still does, today.

At a time when Israel is ridiculously but widely vilified as racist and genocidal, preserving the dignity of the nation is more important than ever. And provocative anti-Arab rhetoric, not to mention violence perpetrated against Arab civilians, promote anything but dignity.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

Preposterous Pollsters

The results of its survey “should not be treated as genuine polling data,” announced Median Strategies last week.

For good reason. As the organization went on to say, the poll it released earlier, showing how well candidates were faring in several races, was fake.

Median Strategies admitted that it had fabricated the polling results as part of a “short-term social experiment” meant to expose how quickly false information could spread.

(Some creative vandal might want to try using “just a short-term social experiment” to excuse his breaking a neighbor’s home’s window and scrawling graffiti on its front door. I’m guessing it wouldn’t work out well for him.)

What the pollster at issue evidenced (though probably not the best word to use here), before the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor took place, was that Francesca Hong was leading her opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, by more than 20 percentage points.

That would have meant that the “progressive” Ms. Hong’s victory would surpass even that of fellow radical Abdul El-Sayed in neighboring Michigan’s U.S. Senate race. Which, were it reality, would surely further energize the radical part of the Democratic party.

Thankfully, Ms. Hong went on to lose, although by less than one percentage point. Six days later, Median Strategies owned up to its subterfuge.

Another “survey result” by the firm showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading her opponent Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff. Repeated inquiries by the Los Angeles Times about the methodology of that claim were what led the polling group to come clean.

And to explain that the fabricated results were intended only to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Unsurprisingly, the false polls, particularly the one from the California race, spread widely through social media. The much-maligned “major media,” to their credit, largely ignored the purported polling results, since Media Strategies did not respond to any of their questions about the supposed survey’s methodology.

Even traditional surveys conducted by experienced pollsters have gotten things wrong many times. A week before the aforementioned Michigan Senate Democratic primary election, legitimate polls showed Mr. El Sayed leading by a large margin; his victory, in the end, was a very narrow one.

But a totally phony survey released as real into the mediasphere is something new, and bound to add to public distrust of polls.

The reaction to Median Strategies’ “experiment” was predictably, and rightly, negative, with many pundits accusing the firm of election interference. And, indeed, fictitious “results” presented by pollsters can easily lead to voters either being complacent or feeling hopeless, and, in either case, not bothering to vote. It can also lead some people (and they are both many and mindless) to vote for whomever they perceive as “a winner.”

My personal reaction to Median Strategies’ is less a feeling of outrage than of puzzlement.

If there were a rating system for utterly pointless experiments, at the very top of the heap would be one designed to show “how purported… information could enter and spread through the.. information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Uh, have the folks at Median been following what regularly enters and spreads through the information ecosystem without independent verification… about Israel? Or Jews?

Like the widespread contention that Israelis celebrated (or were behind) the 9/11 attacks; or that the “Zionist war-machine” (i.e. Israel) forced President Trump to attack Iran; or that Israel seeks to exterminate the residents of Gaza. Or that shark attacks in the Red Sea were remotely controlled by Israel to harm Egypt’s tourist industry.

Or that “the Jews” created COVID-19, orchestrated the assassination of JFK and the murder of Charlie Kirk or used their “space lasers” to create hurricanes. Or that Jews were behind the wildfires that plagued Europe this summer.

And so, Median Strategies’ seeking to ascertain if falsehoods can find a fertile growth medium in the muck of the internet – the source of “information” for countless people with strong typing fingers but weak mental faculties – is a little (no, a lot) like seeking to ascertain whether apples grow on trees, hens lay eggs or the sun rises in the east.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

Canards on the Quad

There was a time, dear young’ns, when academia – the world of universities and professors – was the gold standard, the go-to place for ascertaining truths. A time when scholarship was objective and reliable; and scholars, the same.

The most recent reminder that things have changed arrived recently in the sad saga of Jason Arday, one of Britain’s most prominent young academics, who, in 2003, rose to become Cambridge University’s youngest black professor at just 37.

He was renowned for having been mute until he was 11, illiterate until he was 18 and yet later completed a PhD and published widely-praised sociological research. When he was hired by Cambridge, the head of its department for education told him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

Professor Arday also wrote about running marathons, and that he ran 600 miles in six days.

Sound too amazing to be true? Well, it was.

Mr. Arday stood accused of not only falsifying his life story and academic credentials, but also of having plagiarized his PhD thesis. He canceled a series of events promoting his memoir “Great and Unfortunate Things,” and resigned from Cambridge, because, he explained, the public scrutiny had been bad for his mental health.

It clearly was, since he was discovered on erev Shabbos to have died.

Mr. Arday’s field of academic endeavor was sociology, and it wouldn’t have been wrong to characterize him as woke. In a keynote speech at the British Sociological Association, he contended that white conservative activists target black academics and are a “cancer” to be “eradicate[d] from academia.” He did not write or speak about Jews or the Middle East, but his wokeness and fabulism was very much of a kind with that of other professorial prevaricators who did.

Like former Harvard University dean of social science Claudine Gay, who famously, at a Congressional hearing, said that calling for the genocide of Jews might perhaps violate the school’s code of conduct, “depending on the context.”

Dean Gay later was later accused of, in the delicate words of The New York Times, “using material from other sources without proper attribution.” The plagiarism allegations totaled almost 50 instances spanning eight of her academic works, including her dissertation and five of her 11 published articles.

Ms. Gay resigned, saying that having “doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor” has been “distressing.” Understandably.

Back in 2005, Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, who calls Israel a “colonial” project and ignores Jewish historical ties to Eretz Yisrael, was accused of plagiarizing significant portions of another writer’s 1994 article.

While it’s interesting that plagiarizing and vilifying Israel and/or Jews seem to enjoy a cozy relationship, there are all too many academics who, even if they haven’t been caught stealing from others, are nevertheless guilty of another, even worse, academic sin: Bias.

Two Anti-Defamation League reports that just came down the pike reveal rising levels of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in university classrooms. Some instructors are assigning readings by terrorist groups and – not a joke –  offering extra credit for attending anti-Israel protests.

One of the reports cites incidents of professors presenting one-sided narratives, framing lectures around a single political view and treating contested claims as settled fact. Criticism of Israel without presenting counterarguments is worse than plagiarism; it is educational malpractice.

Stanford University, for one example, offers a course called “Palestine Across Disciplines: An Introduction” and asks in its description, “How do we talk about Palestine and Palestinian life in the midst of devastation and genocide?” Somehow, one imagines, the true genocidal actors in the Middle East are untalked about in the course.

And at the University of California, Berkeley, history students were reportedly assigned to read a book by a former spokesperson for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, alongside materials on plane hijacker Leila Khaled. (Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel” did not appear on the reading list.)

According to Gallup, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they have “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has fallen 19 points since 2015 to just 38 percent.

For good reason.

© 2026 Ami Magazine

Power to the People

“Death to the Dictator!”

“Death to Khamenei!”

“This is the final battle! Pahlavi will return!”

“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran!”

Those are a sampling of slogans chanted earlier this year during gatherings of Iranian citizens advocating the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

(“Pahlavi” refers to Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince of Iran, son of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran who was deposed in 1979 by supporters of what became the Islamist government of Iran today.)

And the gatherings were not small.

Nationwide demonstrations against the government began during the final days of December, 2025, and spread to more than 200 cities across the country. Within days, millions had taken to the streets in protests across all 31 provinces. Iranian security forces gunned down thousands of protesters and arrested thousands more.

By late January of this year, media like Time, The Guardian and Iran International, citing local health officials, reported that between 30,000 and 36,500 protesters were killed over a two-day period.

February saw a second major wave of protests, these at Iranian universities. Government forces held their fire then, and only one student, at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, died – according to Iranian state media, due to a “sudden health incident.”

But security forces nevertheless searched student dormitories and arrested suspected participants; and volunteer paramilitary militia members physically attacked student protesters.

Even after the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, when a coming together of Iranians to support their government might have been expected, protests continued across Iran, these, largely in the form of nightly rooftop chants from residential buildings. Videos showed security forces firing towards people who were chanting from windows.

It has become hard to deny that the on-again, off-again, bomb again, negotiate again, threaten again U.S. war with Iran is not yielding the goals set forth when the first attacks against the mullocracy unfolded.  Nor is it likely that the American public will be willing to back continued war until the Iranian government totally collapses economically. Time is, unfortunately, on Iran’s side.

The solution to the standoff is regime change. And that can only happen when the Iranian populace is able to fight back against the government – and that can happen only when the citizenry is armed.

GAMAAN (a Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran) conducted a survey among Iranians and found that roughly 70% to 81% of respondents inside Iran reject the continuation of the Islamic Republic, with support for the ruling system dropping as low as 11%.

Last year, Rouydad24, a reformist news service inside Iran, claimed that its confidential surveys revealed that more than 90% of the population harbors deep dissatisfaction with or outright opposition toward the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

90%.

Whatever the numbers and despite the tens of thousands of anti-regime Iranians who have been murdered or are imprisoned, there can be little doubt that there is a critical mass of Iranians who, if they could, would rise up in revolution.

During the first mass wave of anti-regime protests that swept Iran, President Trump vowed that “help was on the way” and urged protesters to take to the streets and seize institutions. But, after the regime began its crackdown, he opted for the military attack instead.

Then in April, the U.S. attempted to arm Iranians via weapons supplied to Kurdish separatists in Iraq and western Iran. The arms were meant to be passed on to Iranians, but never reached their destined recipients. Mr. Trump said that the Kurds decided to keep them for themselves.

I don’t claim to know if putting boots on the ground is the only way to provide arms to Iranian citizens or if there are less literally invasive means of getting weapons into the right hands.

And no one can know which of the various Iranian factions – monarchists, secularists, Muslim reformists, the Artesh (Iran’s conventional armed forces) – would emerge as controlling a renewed Iran.

But the goals of eliminating Tehran’s ballistic missile infrastructure, halting its nuclear development, and cutting off its support for terrorist proxies will only be even potentially achievable with the removal of the malignant mullahcracy.

© 2026 Ami Magazine

Whose Nation is it Anyway?

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently rejected Vice President Vance’s notion that America is, conceptually if not legally, a Christian nation.

If there’s any point in an academic dialectic about the role of religion in our country’s founding, the most cogent case that can be made is that the spiritual engine propelling the establishment of the United States was.. Judaism.

To read what that’s so, please click here.

Sad People in Dearborn

Leaked recordings of private conversations and “hot mic” moments – when a politician or other public figure doesn’t realize that his microphone is still on – offer the best evidence of the true character and positions of the speaker. And, sometimes, those of others.

Last week, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was confronted with words he didn’t expect would become public. But they did, and revealed something about the candidate’s assessment of a bastion of his strongest supporters, and likely about himself.

On audio obtained by The Washington Free Beacon website from an event that Mr. El-Sayed held shortly after the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the candidate told staff that he wasn’t going to comment on the mullah’s death, and shared his feeling that the dictator’s demise had resulted in “a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad.”

Dearborn, of course, is a Michigan city that has the largest Muslim population in the U.S. It is the only Arab-majority city in the country.

CNN reporter Jake Tapper asked Mr. El-Sayed about his remark, prefacing his question by explaining that he “thought that quote was interesting, because the ayatollah has killed tens of thousands of innocent Iranians, not to mention the proxies that Iran has funded that have killed innocent civilians all over the Middle East.”

And then, the question: “Why were you worried about offending people who support the ayatollah?”

Mr. El-Sayed’s response to the question was revealing in itself: He tried to change the subject, citing the then-recent deaths of two American soldiers in an Iranian attack on a military base in Jordan.

“Jake,” he said, in a patronizing tone, “on a day where we’re mourning the loss of two more service members in a war we never should have fought, I think all of us ought to step back and ask whether or not everybody in Michigan, frankly, everybody in America, shouldn’t be sad.”

Funnier moments in recent politics are few. Mr. El-Sayid couldn’t deny what he had said about bereaved Dearborners – which revealed his recognition that the Arab, mostly Muslim, population of the city were sitting shiva for a mass murderer. So he pivoted to to a non sequiter, in the hope that no one would notice.

Mr. Tapper, however, tried to steer things back, “I was specifically asking you,” he said, “about comments you didn’t want to make because you didn’t want to offend people in Dearborn, which is in Michigan.”

Alas, Mr. Tapper, gentleman (or weakling) that he is, didn’t press the issue further.

In truth, though, he didn’t have to. The reality was all too apparent. The candidate had revealed the disturbing, demented and dangerous mindset of a subset of the citizenry, perhaps of himself as well.

Michigan is an imporant “swing state,” and a politically “purple” one too, neither reliably Democrat nor Republican. It voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and has a Democratic governor. It has flipped between parties in recent elections.

Mr. El-Sayed is a Muslim progressive, pursuing the Democratic party’s nomination to succeed retiring Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat. Earlier this month, Mr. Sayed refused – repeatedly – to say whether he believes that Israel “has a right to exist.”

“Nobody’s ever asked me whether I believe Palestine has a right to exist,” he huffed. (Maybe, Abdul, because the answer is obvious?)

Among his endorsers are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Rashida Tlaib and Elizabeth Warren. Enough said.

His opponent in the August 4 primary is Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who supports a strong U.S.-Israel alliance and strongly opposes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The race is currently too close to call.

If Mr. El-Sayed should, chalila, win the Democratic nomination, he will face a highly competitive general election matchup against presumed Republican nominee Representative Mike Rogers, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Mr. Rogers considers Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to be an existential threat. And he is a steadfast defender of Israel and her right to attack Iranian proxies like Hamas.

Michigan state law provides for “open” primaries, contests in which any voter, regardless of party affiliation, can cast a vote.

And so, all Michiganders who were not saddened by the demise of Ayatollah Khamenei need to turn out and vote their consciences on August 4.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

World War III

Much of the Western world is suffering from a dangerous lack of imagination, choosing to see the “conflict in Iran” as something less than a simmering Third World War.

To read why I feel that way, please click here.

DSA VS. USA

There’s no way to put a gloss on the ugliness of Darializa Avila Chevalier’s and Melat Kiros’ sentiments about the US and Israel. Even more disturbing is the reluctance of saner Democratic leaders to criticize the corrosive candidates.

To read more about the implications of the above, please click here.