The Unending Goal to Eradicate Israel - and Jews

Here's the great writer Brendan O'Neill with another column about the mission to eradicate Israel.

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The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel

The third anniversary of 7 October made it crystal clear: the Western left and Hamas both want to destroy the Jewish nation.

Brendan O'Neill, Chief Political Writer, Spiked, 12th October 2026

"If Zohran Mamdani had a functioning moral compass, Wednesday would have been the wake-up call of this life. There he was in Union Square being heckled by a feral mob. Their faces hardened into snarls of hatred, they barked ‘Shame on you!’ at the New York mayor. And they were radical leftists, the kind of people who normally gush over Mamdani’s reactionary Third Worldist guff. What sin had he committed to irk his erstwhile fawners? He commemorated Jewish suffering.

"That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. He attended an Israelis for Peace vigil on the third anniversary of the 7 October pogrom to pay tribute to the men, women and children slaughtered by Hamas. For that he was damned as a stooge of a genocidal regime. ‘Zohran you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide!’, howled the mob. Some chased him, screaming: ‘Traitor!’ To a Jew hater, sympathy for Jews is high treason.

"There’s no denying it now: the Hamasniks of the Islamo-left enjoy Jewish suffering. They crave it. Indeed, some of Mamdani’s scolds waved the Hamas flag and hollered, ‘We support Hamas’. They were mad at the mayor because he had the temerity to look sad about the slaughter of Jews. To these keffiyeh Nazis, when Hamas kills Jews it’s ‘resistance’, and when Jews fight back it’s ‘genocide’. They call themselves anti-fascists yet hail from the same violent, vomitous gutter as the mobs of Kristallnacht.

"And yet, even the mockery of Jews at a commemoration for dead Jews is unlikely to wake Mamdani to the horrors of the Gaza cult. Indeed, that mob in Union Square was a monster of his own making. He has made anti-Israel hate respectable in New York City. He refuses to call Hamas terrorists. His own statement on the third anniversary of 7 October spent a few poxy lines condemning Hamas’s ‘crimes’ before raging at length against Israel’s ‘devastating, ongoing genocide’. He had no right to look shook when the keffiyeh fash turned a commemoration of the slaughter of Jews into a Two Minutes Hate against the Jewish nation – he did it first.

"For the rest of us, though, it’s time to get real. That crowds feel confident to gloat over the mass murder of Jews is the clearest sign you could ask that a spiritual sickness ails the West. And it’s not just NYC. Across the West last Wednesday, there were orgies of ecstasy over the butchery carried out by Hamas three years ago. In Amsterdam a mob marched with a banner saying ‘We support Hamas’. They screamed ‘Long live 7 October’. In Edinburgh, they marched behind a banner saying ‘Glory to our martyrs’. The martyrs they were referring to were the Islamofascists who invaded Israel to rape and annihilate Jews.

"In London, keffiyeh-adorned lowlifes gathered on 7 October to fume against the Jewish nation. Some made an inverted triangle with their fingers – a sly expression of support for the murderous violence of Hamas. In Italy, a mob celebrated 7 October as ‘one of the most significant [acts] of Palestinian Resistance’. Across the West there were scores of anti-Israel gatherings on the day Israelis mourned the rape and destruction of more than a thousand of their citizens. There’s an all-out effort to redefine the day that Hamas unleashed genocidal violence on the Jews of the Holy Land as the day ‘Israel’s genocide’ started. The old Nazis stole Jews’ property – the new ones steal their days of commemoration.

"Meanwhile, the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the annihilation of the Jewish homeland. They are morally as one with Hamas, which is likewise fuelled by a genocidal urge to scrub Israel from the face of the Earth. The Green Party member who put forward this racist proposal to erase the Jews’ homeland has been exposed as a one-time ‘good friend’ of the al-Qaeda freak who plotted to make a rucksack bomb full of shrapnel dipped in rat poison and then blow himself up at Heathrow Airport with the aim of massacring passengers from Israel. Can we talk about this? The fact that a mainstream party in the UK is taking its moral cues from a member who was mates with an Islamist terrorist who dreamt of murdering Jews? The fact that the ‘anti-fascist’ left is lining up with a party that wants to destroy Israel, and which has members who called Jews cockroaches, and whose deputy leader celebrated the Jew-murder of 7 October with cackles of ‘Allahu Akbar’? 

"At least they can deny it no longer – their aim is not to end the war in Gaza but to end Israel. Their dream is not peace but annihilation. If the keffiyeh classes got their way, and Israel was dismantled, the consequence would be an extermination of Jews that would make 7 October look like a tea party. To Israel’s south is an army of anti-Semites (Hamas) that openly says it wants to cut off the heads of Jews. To its north is an Islamofascist outfit (Hezbollah) that calls Jews ‘apes and pigs’ and says they should fuck off ‘back to Germany, or wherever they came from’. And to its east is the Islamic Republic, a nation that entirely defines itself by its cosmic hostility to Jewish nationhood. To agitate for the dismantling of Israel in such circumstances is to agitate for the mass expulsion and the mass murder of Jews. Own it.

"The longed-for erasure of Israel is justified through the erasure of Jewish history. Owen Jones spent last week arguing that Israel was ‘carved out of a land that was 90 per cent Arab Muslim and Christian’. He’s referring to 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration. To single out that year without mentioning what preceded it or what followed it is one of the most sinister acts of Orwellian obfuscation I have ever seen from a mainstream journalist. 

"The reason Jews made up just 10 per cent of the Holy Land in the 1910s is because for centuries they had been violently expelled and violently converted by everyone from the Romans to the Arabs to the Ottomans. And to fail to mention the Fifth Aliyah of 1929 to 1939, when hundreds of thousands of Jews returned to Israel, is criminal. These were not ‘invading Zionists’ but Jews fleeing their ghettoisation, enslavement and burning to death by Nazis. Does Jones think they should have stayed in Europe? The depiction of Israel as a product of ‘Zionist invasion’ is the great lie of our times. In truth, Israel is a wholly anti-colonial enterprise born from the stirring refusal of Jews to be world-scattered targets for Nazi scum and peasant pogromists.

"Last week, the mask – or the keffiyeh – truly slipped. Some of us have known since 8 October 2023, and earlier, that the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is a regressive, bigoted crusade devoted less to the liberation of Palestinians than to the annihilation of Israel. That this is less about making a homeland for the Palestinians and more about dancing on the ashes of the homeland of the Jews. Surely now others can see it too? Anti-Semitism is always a catalyst for civilisational collapse, said Hannah Arendt, as it opens the doors to totalitarian movements. So it is today. Everyone who values reason, truth, liberty and basic human decency should stand with their every fibre against the bourgeois war of annihilation against the Jewish State."

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Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.

A Great Column by Natan Sharansky

This is about the endless, obscenely hateful libel against the Jewish people and against Israel. 

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Is the Whole World Wrong?
Yes. We should stand firm in the conviction of what we know to be true.

Natan Sharansky, 10-9-26, Tablet Magazine

"This morning the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. This appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.

"As Jews around the world react with despair, I am reminded of an excellent article by Ahad Ha’am, written in 1892 and titled “Half Solace.” Observing the renewal of the ancient blood libel in his own time, the great cultural Zionist notes that “philosophers know that there is no lie and no evil that cannot obtain ‘general agreement’ if only the conditions of existence are suitable to it.” Unfortunately, however, “only philosophers know this, and in the eyes of the masses, even now there is no greater authority than ‘consensus.’”

"It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. In Russia, for example, in the so-called Velizh affair of 1823, 43 Jews were arrested and interrogated over a period of 12 years on charges of killing a 3-year-old Russian boy. Many spent almost a decade in prison, and some died there. Of course, the accusation was a lie, and those who survived were eventually released without guilt. But what is particularly interesting about this episode is that even the Tsar Nicholas I, who personally signed their release, remarked in a postscript to his signature that he was not fully convinced these men were innocent, because there were so many similar Jewish crimes throughout history. How could all of these reports be wrong, he asked?

"Or take another example, from a very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend. He told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be?

"Ahad Ha’am concludes his essay with the same question. Is it really possible, he asks, that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right? “It is possible,” he answers, “and the blood libel proves it.” It is therefore precisely here, he says, that Jews can find a useful lesson and some consolation. We can free ourselves from the power of false prejudices and find strength in the conviction of our own moral cause.

"As I write, Israelis and Jews around the world are marking the genocidal campaign waged against us on Oct. 7, 2023, and mourning the thousands of innocent lives taken that day. A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do that day.

"Yet at this very moment, the masses are busy accusing us of genocide against our enemies. On university campuses and in the streets of capital cities, protesters used our day of somber remembrance to amplify the growing consensus that we are the ones committing unspeakable atrocities.

"Although the conviction that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is not new, it has garnered strength and legitimacy since the beginning of this war. In March 2024, the U.N. special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report alleging that the Israeli war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In December of the same year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did the same. Then in July 2025 came both Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, followed almost immediately by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. A resolution from the latter organization requires a two-thirds vote of its members, academics in the field of genocide studies, to pass. One would be hard-pressed to find a more reputable source for the libel.

"The charge gained even more momentum in September 2025, with the conclusion of an independent commission of inquiry of the United Nations, chaired by this year’s Nobel laureate, and has continued since, with the leaders of Brazil, Turkey, Colombia, Spain, and even some American politicians joining the chorus.

"To understand what is going on, we need only recall Ahad Ha’am’s observation that there is no lie that cannot obtain universal acceptance if the circumstances favor it. In our time, it was the combination of Islamism, neo-Marxist ideology, Western apathy and appeasement, and primitive antisemitism—combined with Israel’s need to fight for its very existence—that created the perfect soil in which the new blood libel could grow.

"Jews throughout history knew that the blood libel was false because everyone had the experience of participating in the Seder. The same is not quite true for the war in Gaza, but because Israel has a people’s army, practically every family or community includes soldiers who have served there. These brave men and women come back every few weeks and share their experiences. They confirm they never received orders to kill or harm innocent Palestinians (as we know, genocide requires intent). They report how much time and energy they spend on mitigating civilian harm: messaging and emailing about impending attacks, knocking on doors, halting strikes, and transporting people from one part of the Gaza Strip to another to separate them from the terrorists in their midst. Some speak about all of this with pride, some as a matter of fact, and some with indignation that we are risking Israeli lives to protect Palestinians.

"Of course, the sight of Gaza in ruins is horrific. But every Israeli understands how and why we got here. We remember how the Oct. 7 terrorists returned to cheering crowds as they paraded the bodies of their victims in the streets. We recall who hid our hostages and protected themselves in tunnels intentionally placed under hospitals, schools, and homes, thereby using millions of civilians as their shields.

"We also know the numbers. What kind of genocide is it when the population of Gaza is larger today than it was three years ago? And how could it be that Israel is trying to kill innocents when the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties is lower than that of other urban wars fought in even less-difficult conditions?

"But the general consensus does not care about facts. What it cares about are accusatory movies that show no faces, reveal no names, and offer no verifiable information, as well as articles in major newspapers sourced entirely from terrorists who want to destroy the Jewish state.

"What, then, are we to do? Returning once again to Ahad Ha’am, we should first of all remember that just because the entire world believes something does not make it true. Only once we have internalized this can we find some consolation in our situation. Only then can we continue to fight and demand from ourselves the same high moral standards while shutting out the voices of those who would use our misfortunes to their benefit. This includes some of our own politicians, who are using irresponsible rhetoric to either criticize the government or defend it. What these “useful idiots” say has no bearing on the practice of our army in Gaza, but it does provide fodder to our enemies and should be discredited.

"Our goal should not be to convince the rest of the world that we are right. Our existence does not depend on a vote in the United Nations. It depends on our own belief in the righteousness of Jewish civilization. Of course, we are not above criticism, and we must acknowledge and correct course when we deviate from our own standards. But remaining vigilant about our shortcomings is not the same as accepting guilt we don’t deserve. And so, when our children and grandchildren ask us how the whole world can believe there is a genocide if, in fact, there is no genocide, we should stand firm in the conviction of what we know to be true. In other words, it should be as easy for us to proclaim the charge a lie as it was for me when I answered my Christian friend in the Soviet camp.

"Only through such conviction will we outlive those who believe Israel is the closest evil to Satan (to borrow a phrase from Sartre)—just as we outlived those in the past who believed Jews were the closest evil to Satan."

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Natan Sharansky is a former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, former minister in Israeli governments, former Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Chair of the Advisory Board of ISGAP (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy) and CAM (Combat Antisemitism Movement), and founder and Chair of the Adelson Shlihut Institute of the Jewish Agency. 

 

 

 

 

Measles & Dangerous Anti-Vaccine Advocates

This is so outrageous! The U.S. has over 4,000 measles cases now. Instead of facts and science, you have anti-vaxxers making the measles outbreak much worse and causing needless deaths.  What kind of people are these?!  They ought to be prosecuted for interfering with proven medical recommendations and vaccines.

(These are the same delusional people that thought ingesting horse paste during COVID was preferable to getting a vaccine. And I've seen that "Dr." Peter McCullough on TV commercials plugging some quack remedy that supposedly gets rid of the COVID spike protein left in your body from the COVID vaccine.)

Let them not get vaccinated. But they shouldn't attack doctors, lie about deaths from measles and the good that vaccinations do, and prevent others from getting vaccinated. 

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Walker Bragman and Melody Schreiber, The Guardian, UK, 10-12-26

Anti-vaxxers target Texas measles doctors to cast doubt on deaths amid outbreak

Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say

"The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

"But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.

"Yet some anti-vaccine activists soon began claiming that the girl died from medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a playbook that they are now running in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak – a message taken up by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly disputes the rising death toll.

"The deaths in the US from measles – now numbering eight in less than two years – are a political minefield for Kennedy, centering him in a public backlash after years of his false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

"The deflection campaign is already having real-world consequences beyond the rising body count. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group previously led by Kennedy, claims to have sparked malpractice investigations into the doctors who treated the two young unvaccinated girls who died from measles amid last year’s outbreak in west Texas, which infected at least 762 people.

“At first they were going to throw out the complaints,” Brian Hooker, CHD’s chief scientific officer, announced in a recent video. “But they have, upon further review … decided that they’re going to let their own medical expert look at the records for those particular deaths. Because in each case, inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to both girls’ deaths.”

"Paul Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician and internationally recognized vaccine expert, said “it’s not a good look” for Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers for so many cases and deaths to rise. “So they’re trying to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t measles.’” 

"Katherine Wells, Lubbock Public Health’s director, agreed. “It’s their playbook,” she said. “It’s just another tactic by them to disrupt or to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. The issue at hand is that we’re having these large measles outbreaks, and they’re not stopping.”

"It’s not just the deaths – it’s also the severe disease, Wells said. The “massive” outbreaks affect “families and communities and disrupt lives”, Wells said. About one in five unvaccinated measles patients are hospitalized. Measles erases immunity to all other illnesses for years, putting patients at risk of other serious infections. And survivors may years later develop severe measles complications such as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is fatal and untreatable.

"Last year, Hooker traveled to Texas to interview the deceased six-year-old’s parents, who said they still would not have vaccinated their children. A second child, aged eight, soon died from measles at the same hospital.

"Hooker asked to see the children’s medical records, and he shared them with Pierre Kory, a critical care physician with no pediatric training who lost his board certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, heavily promoted the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a Covid treatment, and claimed that polio paralysis is caused not by the virus but by pesticides. Kory, who himself escaped legal liability in a malpractice lawsuit brought by the estate of a Covid patient who died as a result of his treatment plan, concluded that the measles deaths were actually the result of medical error.

"Kory claimed the first child was prescribed “a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for a bacterial infection she developed because of measles, adding that “she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination,” but rather she died of pneumonia and medical mismanagement. He also attributed the second child’s death to “medical malpractice” because of her antibiotic regime. Secondary bacteria infections are very common with measles, which can create a cascade of deadly complications.

"Privately, Kory reportedly said that he suspected the two deaths in young girls in Texas were caused by a weaponized version of measles.

"Hooker and a colleague both submitted complaints to the Texas medical board alleging that the antibiotics were given improperly to the sick children. In the video, he said the medical board is reviewing the complaints. The Guardian and Important Context were unable to confirm Hooker’s claims. The identities of the doctors are not public.

"Anyone can file a complaint with a state medical board, and boards take complaints seriously. Several leading anti-vaccine figures have received medical board complaints about their own conduct.

“The physicians went above and beyond, and the hospitals went above and beyond,” Wells said. Pediatricians in hospitals work with the sickest children, with high stress and relatively low pay. “It’s so hard to be told that you either wanted to hurt them or didn’t want to give the best care you could,” Wells said. Now, with the CHD accusations and possible medical board reports, “I think it’s in the back of everybody’s minds,” she said.

"Hooker’s remarks about the Texas complaints followed the measles deaths of two unvaccinated infants in Pennsylvania. Hooker vowed to “get boots on the ground” in the state to “make sure that if it was a hospital error that it doesn’t happen again”.

"Other anti-vaccine activists are helping to fuel the narrative. Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist whose board certification were revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, noted on X that there was “no mention of antivirals, antibiotics, or steroids” in the case of the third measles death in Pennsylvania, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman. Yet the county coroner said the woman was not able to seek healthcare before she took a turn for the worse, so she would not have received medications for her illness.

"Kennedy has suggested that Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, made up the measles deaths for political reasons. The message was echoed by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, who claimed in a Fox News interview that Shapiro was “playing this out over the airwaves for political purposes, just like what happened during Covid”, adding: “And this is why there’s such deep distrust in public health.”

"Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a Fox Business interview: “We don’t know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them and they happened to get measles at the same time.” The CDC has also called the deaths into question, only listing two of the five deaths this year in Pennsylvania. Officials in Pennsylvania have been clear that the deaths were because of measles.

"Anti-vaxxers have long vilified and targeted physicians. In Texas, attorney general Ken Paxton has launched investigations into doctors who vaccinate children, alleging a conspiracy with drug companies. And CHD has funded numerous lawsuits against pediatricians over alleged side effects from vaccines. In January, the group launched a Rico suit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, which had sued Kennedy over changes to the vaccine schedule.

"Despite no longer leading CHD, Kennedy still appears to enjoy close ties to the organization. At their Washington DC conference in September, he said they had “a friend in the White House”.

"Advocates say the group appears to be running interference for Kennedy amid the ongoing resurgence of measles, which was previously declared eliminated in the US but has made a comeback with rising anti-vaccine sentiment. CHD and Kennedy have been top promoters of vaccine misinformation, according to a 2021 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

"Kennedy has been “a very successful anti-vaccine activist”, which has resulted in the largest outbreak of measles in three decades as well as the resurgence of other preventable illnesses, Offit said. “Now we have more children dying of flu and measles and whooping cough – and Haemophilus influenzae type B meningitis is now coming back.”

'Anti-vaccine activists want to “distract, distract, distract” from the damage they have caused, Offit said. He believes the tactic will not be successful, pointing to pushback from leaders including Shapiro and from pediatricians. “I think pediatricians will continue to move forward as they have,” Offit said. When Kennedy attempted to slash vaccine recommendations in January, “pediatricians ignored him”, Offit said. “I think most people are ignoring him.”

"The efforts to spread misinformation and mistrust about pediatricians may take a toll, especially on people who already doubt vaccines, Wells said. “It just further divides us. It sticks with the people who want to believe that narrative, and I think it adds to the doubt that they have.”

"Yet when the outbreaks worsen, people who were previously vaccine-skeptical choose to get them, she said.

“During our outbreak, all the parents that were hesitant came forward as soon as they heard there were cases,” Wells said, “and they got their kids vaccinated.”

This article was written in partnership with Important Context

Now THIS Was a NYC Mayor - And A Mensch!

My Brooklyn-born parents loved Mayor LaGuardia - and the fact that he could speak Yiddish!

Now compare and contrast this great man with the imposter who currently is Mayor of NYC.  There is no comparison.

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From Aish: 

Fiorello La Guardia’s Jewish Roots. 

The former New York City Mayor was one of Hitler’s most outspoken critics. 

Long before New York’s La Guardia airport was built, Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York, was an American icon. What many don’t realize is that the maverick leader was Jewish and his family’s Holocaust experience impacted his vociferous response to Hitler.

The Little Flower

La Guardia, c 1915 - 1920

Born in Greenwich Village, New York, Fiorello Enrico Raeffaelo La Guardia was the son of Achille La Guardia, a lapsed Catholic native of Cerignola, Italy, and Irene Luzzatto Coen, a Jewish native of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Enrico was eventually anglicized to Henry. Fiorello is Italian for little flower which is how the great leader was often referred.

Through his mother, La Guardia was a descendant of Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto, a famous Italian leader of the Neo-Orthodoxy movement¹ and a collateral descendant of the great kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto.² Neither parent practiced their religion, but a Jewish pride was instilled deep inside. Little La Guardia was even taught to recite Shema Yisrael before bedtime by his mother³. La Guardia’s Jewish roots would not be widely known to the public until after he was elected Mayor of New York. No matter what his parents practiced, Fiorello Henry La Guardia was born a Jew.

After having trouble securing steady work in New York and then Arizona, Achille La Guardia moved the family back to Europe. It was here that young Fiorello would get his first taste of government, working in the US Consulate in Budapest. With higher ambitions, the little flower left his family behind and returned to his native New York in 1906 with an eye on politics.

Coming To America…Again

After graduating from NYU School of Law in 1910 and a failed bid for US Representative in 1914, La Guardia was appointed Deputy Attorney General of New York in 1915. The next year, a second congressional bid would prove successful. In 1919 he narrowly won victory in a special election for President of the New York City Board of Aldermen, New York City’s unicameral legislature that was active until 1937. He resigned from Congress to take this position. In 1921 he made his first bid at the mayorship, but lost in the Republican primary.

In 1922, he ran again against Henry Frank, a Jew, in a bid to return to Congress in Washington. In classical political mudslinging, Frank accused LaGuardia of being an antisemite. La Guardia responded by dictating an open letter to the Jewish community in Yiddish, and challenged Frank to a debate in the mama lashon. La Guardia was fluent in Yiddish; Frank wasn’t. He declined the invitation⁴. Fiorello won and returned to Congress where he served until 1933. In 1929, he won his party’s nomination for Mayor of New York, but was defeated in the general election⁵.

At this time in American politics, the rock-solid association of Republicans as Conservatives and Democrats as Liberals had not yet taken place. This realignment would not happen until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition which would become the dominant force of the Democratic Party until the 60s.⁶ The Conservative Coalition would take the reins of the Republican Party during the same time.⁷ During the realignment, many personalities moved back and forth between and within the parties. While La Guardia was a card-carrying Republican his whole life, he was so deeply allied with the President that he even held a quasi-cabinet level position for some time as the Director of the Office of Civilian Defense⁸. He entered congress at the end of the Progressive Era of American politics and worked to keep the candle burning until it was championed by President Roosevelt in 1933.⁹

La Guardia with FDR

The Fusion Candidate

La Guardia finally made it to City Hall propelled as a “Fusion Candidate” with the support of Republicans, reform minded Democrats, and Independents. He appealed to previously underrepresented groups in New York such as Italian Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Backs.¹⁰ Through his three terms and 12 years in office, La Guardia’s fingerprints are all over New York City until this day. As an architect and champion of the New Deal, he oversaw $1.1 billion pumped into the city. These funds led to the building of The West Side Highway, East River Drive, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Triborough Bridge, both of the city’s airports, and to major improvements in the city’s subway system.¹¹

Standing Up Against Nazism

The Mayor of New York City

At the same time that America was trying to climb out of the Great Depression, many were alarmed by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, but few raised their voices. A noted exception was Fiorello Henry La Guardia. The US Secretary of State at the time of the Nazi ascent was Cordell Hull¹² who, until Kristallnacht,¹³ tried tirelessly to reconcile the differences between Germany and America. La Guardia was a frequent thorn in the side. In June 1933, six months before assuming the mayorship, he was a keynote speaker at the National Conference Against Racial Persecution in Germany. In his speech he called Hitler “a perverted maniac” and that “part of his program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany.” He even came out in favor of a boycott of German goods in New York.

La Guardia was first publicly “outed” as a Jew by the Nazis just before his swearing in as Mayor.¹⁴ His Jewish roots had not been publicly known or discussed. The Mayor-elect shrugged off the event saying, “I never thought I had enough Jewish blood in my veins to justify boasting about it.”¹⁵ Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the US, regularly visited the Secretary of State and demanded that the “troublesome mayor” be silenced.¹⁶ The little flower would continue to put the full weight of City Hall against the Nazis long before most others in America were ready to do so.

UNRRA Director General Fiorello LaGuardia delivers a speech at the Berlin-Schlachtensee displaced persons camp, 1946.

La Guardia stood up to the Nazis long before anyone else was ready to. In July 1935, a German immigrant named Paul Kress applied for a masseur’s licence in New York. Under America’s “Treaty of Friendship” with Germany, the craftsman’s German licence should have been recognized in the US. La Guardia reduced the licence. “Treaties are based on reciprocity. It is well known that American citizens of the Jewish faith have been discriminated against in Germany. That being the case, I cannot see how the German Government can insist upon alleged rights contained in the treaty on which they now rely.”

Nazi propaganda depicting Fiorello H. La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945 and an outspoken critic of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

The Jewish community saw a Mayor who was standing up for their European co-religionists—not because they were Jews, but because it was the right thing to do. They loved him for it, and would continue to vote for him again and again.¹⁷

La Guardia’s Sister Was Sent to a Concentration Camp

When La Guardia returned to New York as a young man, the rest of his family remained in Europe. His sister Gemma married a Jewish man named Herman Gluck. The couple settled in Hungary. Anti-Jewish laws predated the Nazi invasion by six years. After the Nazi takeover in 1944, Gemma and Herman were rounded up by the Gestapo. Eichmann and Himmler knew that Gemma was the sister of the troublesome mayor and had the couple sent to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp where she was held as a political prisoner for ‘eventual political use.’ She was later transferred to Ravensbrück. Unbeknownst to Gemma, her daughter and baby grandson were prisoners in the same camp.

When the Germans abandoned the camp upon the Soviet’s advance, Gemma was able to reconnect with her daughter and grandson. Both her husband and son-in-law had been murdered. The three had a terrible time in postwar, Soviet-controlled Berlin living as displaced persons. Eventually, Gemma was able to get a message to La Guardia who was now the Director General United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). While he got them on the immigration list, he made it clear that no nepotism would be used and no exceptions would be made.

Gemma Gluck and La Guardia

That being said, he used his knowledge of the system and did whatever a brother could do to get them out. The family was finally united in New York in May of 1947.¹⁸ Before Gemma’s imigration, LaGuardia had signed an affidavit that he would take care of her and her family financially. It was not to be so.

Upon Gemma’s landing, La Guardia was already quite sick and frail. He passed away just four months after his sister arrived, never having the opportunity to truly take care of her financially. She lived as an impoverished immigrant in Queens until her passing in 1962.

The Little Spark

Although La Guardia stood a mere 5’2, in some ways he was larger than life. What possessed him to leave his family behind to pursue a higher calling? Why did every minority love him? In the messy field of politics, how did he maintain such a clean reputation? Why did he take such a strong stand against Hitler, years before everyone else was forced to pivot away from appeasement?

Our tradition teaches that every Jewish soul stood at Mt. Sinai and experienced the giving of the Torah, the source of the aforementioned characteristics that La Guardia exemplified. Even if that soul does not have the privilege to be raised as a proud Jew with a proper Jewish education, there still burns inside a Jewish spark that often pushes through. Perhaps it was that Jewish spark that nurtured the little flower who became Fiorello Henry La Guardia. 

----------------- 

1. Rudavsky, David. “Samuel David Luzzatto And Neo-Orthodoxy.” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 7, no. 3, Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), 1965, pp. 21–44
2. Luzzatto Jewish Encyclopedia Vol 8 p 220
3. Gemma La Guardia Gluck, Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story 20 n.1 (Rochelle G. Saidel ed., 2007 expanded ed.)
4. Roberts, Sam (July 20, 2009). "Yiddish Resurfaces as City's 2nd Political Language". The New York Times. May 10, 2019
5. Williams, M. B. (2013). City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York. United States: W. W. Norton.
6. Robert C. Benedict, Matthew J. Burbank and Ronald J. Hrebenar, Political Parties, Interest Groups and Political Campaigns. Westview Press. 1999. p. 11
7. Mack C. Shelley, "Presidents and the conservative coalition in the U.S. Congress." Legislative Studies Quarterly (1983): 79-96
8. Kessner, T. (1993). Fiorello H. LaGuardia. The History Teacher, 26(2), 151–159.
9. Zinn, Howard. LaGuardia in Congress. Italy: Cornell University Press, 2018.
10. Katz, Elizabeth, "Racial and Religious Democracy": Identity and Equality in Midcentury Courts (June 30, 2020). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 72, 2020
11. Williams, M. B. (2013). City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York. United States: W. W. Norton
12. Cordell would ultimately be the one who pushed FDR not to accept Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and to turn away all ships of refugees without the proper papers. One such ship was the St. Louis.
13. November 9, 1938
14. LaGuardia Is Jewish, Budapest Nazi Paper Says, WIS.JEWISH CHRON., Dec. 1, 1933, at 7
15. Arthur Mann, LaGuardia: A Fighter Against His Times 1882-1933 (Chicago: 1965)
16. Esposito, D. M., & Esposito, J. R. (1988). LaGuardia and the Nazis, 1933–1938. American Jewish History, 78(1), 38–53.
17. Cypkin, Diane (2011) "Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and His Rhetoric Vis-à-Vis the Jews, 1934-1945," Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association: Vol. 2010, Article 5. Available at: http://docs.rwu.edu/nyscaproceedings/vol2010/iss1/5
18. Gluck, G. L. G. (2007). Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story. United States: Syracuse University Press

"Moral Obscenities" Against Israel and The Jews

This an excellent article by Bret Stephens, which I obtained via Elder of Ziyon's 10/10 Links section. I had to paste this without formatting and links in order to make it come out legibly.

Mamdani wasn't the only one  committing a moral obscenity. Everyone celebrating and supporting Hamas, and everyone marching against Israel being forced to defend herself, is committing a moral obscenity.  The only genocide is the one against the Jews.

This piece should be required reading. 

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Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

Bret Stephens, NYT Opinion
Oct. 9, 2026

"Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

"In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

"It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

"It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

"It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood. 

"It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.

"It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence. 

"It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.

"It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.

"It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.

"Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.

"It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day."

"Barbaric"?

Sorry, I don't see what's "barbaric" about livestreaming the execution of mass-murdering terrorist Nidal Hasan, as some U.S. lawmakers are saying.  What's truly barbaric is that this extremist murdered 13 and injured at least 30 at Fort Hood Army base. That's 17 years ago, and he has been given 17 extra years of life that he didn't afford his victims.

You don't want to see the execution? Then don't watch.

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Fort Hood survivor wants to face Nidal Hasan at execution, opposes public livestream

By

Meagan Harris

Updated on: October 9, 2026 / 5:40 PM CDT / CBS Texas

"Former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan will die by firing squad in December, barring any legal action. The Pentagon plans to livestream his execution, something that's never been done in the United States.

"Hasan's execution is scheduled for 1 p.m. Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, the same Army post where he killed 13 people on Nov. 5, 2009. The execution is set for the same time of day as the shooting, nearly 17 years later. 

"For survivors and family members of victims, it's deeply personal.

"I want to be in the room where I can see him, and he can see me," said former Army Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who survived Hasan's attack. 

"Lunsford was shot seven times that day, including in the eye. He was among 32 injured in November 2009.

"For Lunsford and those affected by the shooting, the idea of a livestreamed execution is too much.

"People have to be held accountable for their sins, but I don't want this to be some pay-per-view event, like some John Wick movie," Lunsford said. 

"Lunsford said he worries about children's ability to watch. "As a country, we're better than that."

"Hasan was paralyzed from the chest down before being arrested. During his court-martial, he needed a wheelchair.

"The military hasn't executed anyone since 1961. That execution was by hanging. The last execution by firing squad happened in 1945. Private Eddie Slovik was tied to a post and shot for desertion. Military officials have not provided details on how Hasan's execution will be handled, beyond the method of firing squad.

"I don't know that that's actually going to happen," Vice President JD Vance said on Friday, adding that if it were, he wouldn't watch it.

"Organizers with the Texas Defender Service called the livestream execution announcement "unconscionable," noting the U.S. hasn't carried out a public execution since the 1930s.

"This is behavior that is reminiscent of terrorists, and not what you want to see in a functioning justice system," said Burke Butler, co-executive director of the Texas Defender Service.

"Butler said Hasan could still delay the execution by filing a habeas corpus petition.

"His lawyers are likely looking at all possible avenues to raise in the habeas corpus petition to argue why his upcoming execution would be unconstitutional," Burke said. "And I imagine one of the issues they will look at is whether it's cruel and unusual to conduct a public execution of a human being in this modern era."

"The Death Penalty Information Center said, "Public executions are typically held in authoritarian countries to instill fear in the population, and to show the power and control of the government."

"Meanwhile, for many survivors and victims, an execution isn't necessarily closure. Many of the wounds from that day never heal. In an interview on Friday, Lunsford said, "This will not be closure for me," adding that his closure comes from helping others.

"Lunsford carries the bullet that was pulled from his body with him every day. A reminder of what he survived. 

"I still have the slug of one of the bullets. Everywhere I go it goes," Lunsford said. "Whenever I'm having a bad day, I rub on the bullet. This is what keeps me balanced."

"He went on to say that he "loves living". 

"Since the shooting, he's become a basketball coach and mentor. 

"Closure, he says, comes on the court when he forgets all his pain and can focus on building up those he coaches."

Political Correctness Continues Unabated

Daniel Greenfield reports on more insanity by the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Why do crazy people always have the last word?

Besides, they didn't have such a thing as "transgender surgery" during the American Revolution. But that doesn't stop the seriously woke from attempting to destroy history and  destroy tradition.

Let the "transgender" people start THEIR own chapter (Pretend-Daughters of  the American Revolution), and leave the real Daughters alone!

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Daughters of the American Revolution Disbands Chapter for Trying to Keep Trannies Out.

Now it's Transgenders of the American Revolution.

October 11, 2026 by Daniel Greenfield

"Woke 1 was so crazy? No, Woke 1 is still so crazy. It’s so crazy that not only did the Daughters of the American Revolution accept transgender men as members (that is men who falsely claim to be women), but that the organization leadership threatened and has now moved to disband the Martha Laird Chapter which was fighting to keep men out. 

A DAR chapter in Texas recently sent a letter to its national leadership pushing back against their decision to allow biological men who identify as transgender to participate in the DAR. On Saturday, however, the DAR National Board of Management (NBOM) rejected the proposal. In an email sent to the Texas chapter, they were informed that NBOM “found the proposed amendment” to bar trans-identifying men from the DAR “not to be suitable for inclusion in the bylaws and not to be in the best interest of the Society.

"A DAR chapter in Texas recently sent a letter to its national leadership pushing back against their decision to allow biological men who identify as transgender to participate in the DAR. On Saturday, however, the DAR National Board of Management (NBOM) rejected the proposal. In an email sent to the Texas chapter, they were informed that NBOM “found the proposed amendment” to bar trans-identifying men from the DAR “not to be suitable for inclusion in the bylaws and not to be in the best interest of the Society.”

"The Martha Laird Chapter has now reportedly been disbanded by the national organization which chose to crush it rather than actually restrict membership to women. The online page to the Martha Laird Chapter now produces a 404 error.

"The DAR has become such an establishment that simply fighting for the organization’s basic name, daughters, is now something to be suppressed."

Rewarding Antisemitism

The Nobel Prize Committee needs its head examined.  Maybe I'm dense, but can anyone explain to me how accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza is considered worthy of a PEACE prize?!?

There really is genocide -- but it's been committed against Israel!

So maybe there ought to be a new award, The Anti-Israel Prize, for those hateful antisemites who insist on obsessively blaming Israel for everything. 

------------------------------------------

A ‘peace prize’ for the vilification of Israel

Honoring Navi Pillay highlights the moral rot of the United Nations and Nobel Committee.

By Ruthie Blum

(Oct. 9, 2026 / JNS) "T

here are bad decisions and disgraceful ones. And then there’s the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay.

"The choice is hardly out of character for an award whose history has repeatedly shown that its name guarantees nothing about its recipients’ merit. Indeed, this isn’t an aberration for the Norwegian committee. But it’s an especially egregious example of a familiar pattern: an international establishment congratulating itself for advancing peace while rewarding people whose records make a mockery of the concept.

"Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has become a symbol of the double standards permeating the global system. The woman now being feted in the name of peace presided over a more aptly dubbed “inquisition” whose whole purpose was to brand the Jewish state with a bloody—blood libelous—stain. Like an irremovable tattoo.

"The term “genocide” has a specific legal definition, including the requirement to establish intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It’s laughable to suggest that Israel’s behavior even remotely fits that description, as it took great pains to avoid civilian casualties and flooded Gaza with humanitarian aid.

"That Hamas kept stealing the food and medicine, and prevented anyone other than its goons from entering the hundreds of miles of tunnels, was never of interest to Pillay and her ilk. Nor did they ever note that the population in Gaza has grown in the past three years. Some genocide.

"Though her commission’s report wasn’t a judicial verdict, the force of its accusation was unmistakable, and Pillay was gleefully instrumental in promoting the lie for pernicious purposes. Which we now see has paid off, big-time.

"This was hardly the first time her commission helped fuel the campaign to portray Israel as uniquely depraved. Pillay, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014), was appointed to her latest post in 2021. That was when the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council to concoct a report to vilify Israel.

"And, boy, did she ever come through for her anti-Israel colleagues, producing a mendacious paper on Israeli “crimes” in Gaza. Its allegations reinforced a false narrative depicting Israel not as a country at war with sadistic barbarians—thousands of whom breached the border on Oct. 7, 2023 to rape, maim and slaughter 1,200 innocent Israelis, and abduct 251 others—but as a sexually abusive state.

"Nothing new about the turpitude of the U.N.’s endless attempts to demonize Israel. So, Pillay’s having been selected to head the commission wasn’t surprising.

"Ditto for her winning an award transformed long ago into a vehicle for leftist virtue-signaling. In his 1895 will, Swedish scientist/businessman Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, bequeathed most of his immense fortune to establishing prizes in science, literature and peace.

"The latter was intended to recognize efforts toward fraternity among nations. Its subsequent history, however, has repeatedly exposed the gulf between those ideals and the eponymous committee’s selections. Rather than consistently rewarding meaningful contributions to peace, the prize has served as a platform for globalist ideology involving the inversion of right and wrong.

"Pillay epitomizes this moral rot. Her new laureate status is less an honor than a mark of Cain.

"To add to this blot, her prize was announced on Oct. 9, two days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust. The timing highlights the perversity of the prize and its recipient."