On keeping a packed suitcase
Update (Nov. 6): I’ve closed the comments, as they crossed the threshold from “sometimes worthwhile” to “purely abusive.” As for Mamdani’s victory: as I like to say in such cases (and said, e.g., after George W. Bush’s and Trump’s victories), the silver lining to which I cling is that either I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and things won’t be quite as terrible as I expect, or else I’ll be vindicated.
This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how?
The president of the Heritage Foundation, the most important right-wing think tank in the United States, has now explicitly aligned himself with Tucker Carlson, even as the latter has become a full-on Holocaust-denying Hitler-loving antisemite, who nods in agreement with the openly neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—i.e., plausibly the next President of the United States—pointedly did nothing whatsoever to distance himself from the MAGA movement’s lunatic antisemites, in response to their lunatic antisemitic questions at the Turning Point USA conference. (Vance thus dishonored the memory of Charlie Kirk, who for all my many disagreements with him, was a firmly committed Zionist.) It’s become undeniable that, once Trump himself leaves the stage, this is the future of MAGA, and hence of the Republican Party itself. Exactly as I warned would happen a decade ago, this is what’s crawled out from underneath the rock that Trump gleefully overturned.
While the Republican Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews like me have no place in America, the Democratic Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews have no place in Israel. If these two movements ever merged, the obvious “compromise” would be the belief, popular throughout history, that Jews have no place anywhere on earth.
Barring a miracle, New York City—home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community—is about to be led by a man for whom eradicating the Jewish state is his deepest, most fundamental moral imperative, besides of course the proletariat seizing the means of production. And to their eternal shame, something like 29% of New York’s Jews are actually going to vote for this man, believing that their own collaboration with evil will somehow protect them personally—in breathtaking ignorance of the millennia of Jewish history testifying to the opposite.
Despite what you might think, I try really, really hard not to hyperventilate or overreact. I know that, even if I lived in literal Warsaw in 1939, it would still be incumbent on me to assess the situation calmly and figure out the best response.
So for whatever it’s worth: no, I don’t expect that American Jews, even pro-Zionist Jews in New York City, will need to flee their homes just yet. But it does seem to me that they (to say nothing of British and Canadian and French Jews) might, so to speak, want to keep their suitcases packed by the door, as Jews have through the centuries in analogous situations. As Tevye says near the end of Fiddler on the Roof, when the Jews are given three days to evacuate Anatevka: “maybe this is why we always keep our hats on.” Diaspora Jews like me might also want to brush up on Hebrew. We can thank Hashem or the Born Rule that, this time around, at least the State of Israel exists (despite the bloodthirsty wish of half the world that it cease to exist), and we can reflect that these contingencies are precisely why Israel was created.
Let me make something clear: I don’t focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It’s the universal bad idea. It’s bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview.
As far as I know, in 3,000 years, there hasn’t been a single example—not one—of an antisemitic regime of which one could honestly say: “fine, but once you look past what they did to the Jews, they were great for everyone else!” Philosemitism is no guarantee of general goodness (as we see for example with Trump), but antisemitism pretty much does guarantee general awfulness. That’s because antisemitism is not merely a hatred, but an entire false theory of how the world works—not just a but the conspiracy theory—and as such, it necessarily prevents its believers from figuring out true explanations for society’s problems.
I’d better end a post like this on a note of optimism. Yes, every single time I check my phone, I’m assaulted with twenty fresh examples of once-respected people and institutions, all across the political spectrum, who’ve now fallen to the brain virus, and started blaming all the world’s problems on “bloodsucking globalists” or George Soros or Jeffrey Epstein or AIPAC or some other suspicious stand-in du jour. (The deepest cuts come from the new Jew-haters who I myself once knew, or admired, or had some friendly correspondence with.)
But also, every time I venture out into the real world, I meet twenty people of all backgrounds whose brains still seem perfectly healthy, and who respond to events in a normal human way. Even in the dark world behind the screen, I can find dozens of righteous condemnations of Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation and the others who’ve chosen to play footsie with those seeking a new Final Solution to the Jewish Question. So I reflect that, for all the battering it’s taken in this age of TikTok and idiocracy—even then, our Enlightenment civilization still has a few antibodies that are able to put up a fight.
In their beautiful book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson set out an ambitious agenda by which the Democratic Party could reinvent itself and defeat MAGA, not by indulging conspiracy theories but by creating actual broad prosperity. Their agenda is full of items like: legalizing the construction of more housing where people actually want to live; repealing the laws that let random busybodies block the construction of mass transit; building out renewable energy and nuclear; investing in science and technology … basically, doing all the things that anyone with any ounce of economic literacy knows to be good. The abundance agenda isn’t only righteous and smart: for all I know, it might even turn out to be popular. It’s clearly worth a try.
Last week I was amused to see Kate Willett and Briahna Joy Gray, two of the loudest voices of the conspiratorial far left, denounce the abundance agenda as … wait for it … a cover for Zionism. As far as they’re concerned, the only reason why anyone would talk about affordable housing or high-speed rail is to distract the masses from the evil Zionists murdering Palestinian babies in order to harvest their organs.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that Willett and Gray actually have a point. Yes, solving America’s problems with reason and hard work and creativity, like the abundance agenda says to do, is the diametric opposite of blaming all the problems on the perfidy of Jews or some other scapegoat. The two approaches really are the logical endpoints of two directly competing visions of reality.
Naturally I have a preference between those visions. So I’ve been on a bit of a spending spree lately, in support of sane, moderate, pro-abundance, anti-MAGA, liberal Enlightenment forces retaking America. I donated $1000 to Alex Bores, who’s running for Congress in NYC, and who besides being a moderate Democrat who favors all the usual good things, is also a leader in AI safety legislation. (For more, see this by Eric Neyman of Alignment Research Center, or this from Scott Alexander himself—the AI alignment community has been pretty wowed.) I also donated $1000 to Scott Wiener, who’s running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in California, has a nuanced pro-two-states, anti-Netanyahu position that causes him to get heckled as a genocidal Zionist, and authored the excellent SB1047 AI safety bill, which Gavin Newsom unfortunately vetoed for short-term political reasons. And I donated $1000 to Vikki Goodwin, a sane Democrat who’s running to unseat Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in my own state of Texas. Any other American office-seeker who resonates with this post, and who’d like a donation, can feel free to contact me as well.
My bag is packed … but for now, only for a brief trip to give the physics colloquium at Harvard, after which I’ll return back home to Austin. Until it becomes impossible, I call on my thousands of thoughtful, empathetic American readers to stay right where you are, and simply do your best to fight the brain-eaten zombies of both left and right. If you are one of the zombies, of course, then my calling you one doesn’t even begin to express my contempt: may you be remembered by history alongside the willing dupes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. May the good guys prevail.
Oh, and speaking of zombies, Happy Halloween everyone! Boooooooo!
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Comment #1 October 31st, 2025 at 11:34 pm
Re your comment on the generalization of antisemitism: It was interesting to read Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography and see how similar to it the dynamics of anti-chinese sentiments in Malaysia were, with the Chinese minority playing a similar role to Jews (culminating in them kicking Singapore out of the country for being majority Chinese).
(It may be instructive to learn from Singapore’s success in not only thriving itself, but managing to recover good relations with both Malaysia and the wider world. A lot of this comes from Lee’s ruthlessly pragmatic diplomacy – managing geopolitical and local tensions is hard, and he worked for decades of focused pragmatic diplomacy to make it work, mostly by working around rather than directly against the malay nationalist forces around him. Though it also helped that these societies often empowered more measured elites rather than populists).
Comment #2 October 31st, 2025 at 11:40 pm
Thanks for writing this post. I agree with you that Trump and the MAGA movement pose a threat to our civil liberties, and — much like you — I’m also pretty scared of the far-left. And yeah, I’m really keen on the sorts of center-left policy and pragmatism promoted by people like Klein and Thompson.
Thanks also for talking about Alex Bores and Scott Wiener! I’m really excited about both of them, for the reasons you mentioned — particularly their work on AI safety — and have given $7,000 (the legal maximum) to their campaigns.
A quick synopsis for readers who aren’t familiar with Bores and Wiener: Alex Bores authored an excellent bill called the RAISE Act in New York, which from my perspective is a really sensible bill that addresses the most critical risks from advanced AI without unnecessarily inhibiting innovation. He fought really hard for the bill, spending a lot of political capital on it. He has also been able to answer detailed questions about the bill and its effects, which is really impressive for a legislator. (Much more in my blog post: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2025/10/20/consider-donating-to-alex-bores-author-of-the-raise-act/ )
And I’ve been similarly impressed with Scott Wiener, who spent a huge amount of political capital fighting for AI safety in California with SB 1047 last year and SB 53 this year. Just like Bores, he really understood these bills and was key to crafting them. I’m really grateful to him, and would be excited to see him in Congress. I wrote about him here: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2025/10/22/consider-donating-to-ai-safety-champion-scott-wiener/
Comment #3 November 1st, 2025 at 12:46 am
Just for the argument’s sake, I would like to challenge your claim about no antisemitic regime being positively remembered, how about the Renaissance in Italy?
Comment #4 November 1st, 2025 at 1:30 am
JD Vance did his best to sidestep a bad-faith question from a crackpot Fuentes fan. When dealing with a crazy person, it’s best not to argue. Just nod your head until they go away.
Comment #5 November 1st, 2025 at 2:17 am
scott: you write “While the Republican Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews like me have no place in America”. what exactly is ‘a jew like you’? when i was at teenager, i told my mother that because i was an atheist, i didn’t identify myself as being a jew. her response was that i would know that i was a jew when i was put in a cattle car. are jews identified by what they believe about themselves or by what others believe about them?
Comment #6 November 1st, 2025 at 4:49 am
Man, I really don’t agree with your assessment of Mamdani’s position on Israel.
1) He’s never said what you say he has. Nor has he said anything which I think can be interpreted as implying what you say.
2) This is obviously not his “most fundamental moral imperative”. Where are you getting this? As far as I can tell, this is something you feel without evidence.
3) In fact, he has said *the opposite*. When asked directly about it, he says that Israel is a home for Jews and should remain that way.
4) Likewise, he has never said anything remotely so directly Marxist as “seizing the means of production”.
I think it is important to represent these things plainly. In a world where it is increasingly difficult for me to proclaim my own Jewishness, it is important to say that Zohran Mamdani is not an anti-semite. There are real antisemites, whom you often correctly identify. It does us no good to over-apply the label.
Comment #7 November 1st, 2025 at 5:20 am
Hi Scott,
Might there be other reasons why 29% Jews in NYC are like that? Even only ignorance/superficiality, or maybe they see something else there? I’m not saying this for any provocation, just wondering, given that 29% is a lot of people.
Anyway, as usual I agree with you on the madness of this historical period.
Stay strong, as indeed there are healthy brains around.
Marco
Comment #8 November 1st, 2025 at 6:37 am
alex #6:
A simple Google search for “Mamdani seize the means of production” would’ve immediately shown you that he did in fact say exactly that in 2021. The fact that you haven’t performed such a search implies you’re either technologically illiterate, which seems unlikely for a commentator on this blog, or that you don’t want to face the truth, which would also explain your view of his antisemitism.
Scott:
> […] I’ve been on a bit of a spending spree lately, in support of sane, moderate, pro-abundance, anti-MAGA, liberal Enlightenment forces retaking America.
To what extent are you fighting for your ideals, as opposed to actually trying to achieve a measurably better outcome for yourself, American Jews, and Americans in general? I can certainly sympathize with the former; I’ve only ever voted twice in Israeli elections, both times to libertarian-ish parties which I knew had a low chance of making it to the Knesset (neither did). But I’m not sure American Jews are in a position to be quite that idealistic.
Comment #9 November 1st, 2025 at 7:02 am
alex #6: It’s true that Mamdani is an extremely talented politician—if he weren’t, NYC wouldn’t be at the extraordinary precipice that it’s at right now—and it’s true that as such, he’s put on a big show of “reaching out” to the NYC Jewish community. That, together with all the constraints he’ll be under as mayor, is why I made it clear that I don’t expect Kristallnacht or anything like that the day he gets into office.
But against that needs to be set the following facts:
(1) In his previous life as an activist and NY assemblyman, opposing Israel’s continued existence wasn’t some side interest of Mamdani’s, it was his entire political identity. It was his thing.
(2) Mamdani’s father, the Columbia professor, is much more radical even than Zohran, and supports a worldwide leftist/Islamist revolution (apparently he’s about to publish a new book praising the murderous dictator Idi Amin). Zohran has never really disavowed any of his father’s views, which of course raises the question of whether any expressed moderation is sincere.
(3) Mamdani famously denies that Israel should get to continue existing as a Jewish state, saying when asked only that there should be “a state for all citizens.” The problem with this proposal is that, in any world like our existing one, the Palestinians would slaughter or expel all the Jews as soon as they had the power. We know this not only because they loudly say so, but also because they’ve tried it at every opportunity, which is in fact what led to Israel’s establishment in the first place. Anyone who advocates a “secular binational state” either doesn’t know this and is breathtakingly naive, or else does know and wants exactly that. It would take a generation or more of deradicalization before it even made sense to discuss such possibilities—and if that happened, two states still seems to me like the much better option for both sides.
(4) Lastly, and most tellingly, Mamdani never says that Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq or Yemen or Jordan or Egypt or Qatar or Algeria or Indonesia need to stop being Muslim states, and become secular states for anyone including Jews. He never says that Israel’s Sephardic Jews should get to return to the homes across the Muslim world from which their families were expelled. So, if Mamdani got what he wanted, it’s the Jews and only the Jews who’d be rendered homeless and defenseless, just like they were throughout history. It’s this, more than anything else, that reveals the fundamental insincerity of Mamdani’s position and relieves me of any obligation to pretend it’s in good faith.
Comment #10 November 1st, 2025 at 7:22 am
Marco #7:
Might there be other reasons why 29% Jews in NYC are like that? Even only ignorance/superficiality, or maybe they see something else there? I’m not saying this for any provocation, just wondering, given that 29% is a lot of people.
There’s of course a massive role for ignorance and superficiality. Many young assimilated Jews, of the sort who live in NYC, are so wildly disconnected from their own families’ history that they actually believe antisemitism only exists today because of Israel’s unique evil, and would cease to exist if Israel were eradicated. The worldview of the “Jews for Mamdani” was perfectly expressed in a now-famous tweet by K. W. Bogen:
Like. Seriously. Imagine the reputation of global Jews if Israel didn’t exist. We wouldn’t be “those vicious genocide people.” We’d be little hats and good deli sandwiches and triangle cookies and babka and lox and noodle kugel. I don’t want to be genocide adjacent. I want to be noodle kugel. I don’t even like noodle kugel.
I find it difficult to wrap my mind around the degree of pampering and sheltering that let her wave away 2000 years of massacres, expulsions, quotas, etc. culminating in the Holocaust that led to Israel’s creation in the first place—but that’s obviously what we’re dealing with here. For me the interesting question is: isn’t such an extreme of ignorance and superficiality itself a moral failing?
Comment #11 November 1st, 2025 at 7:29 am
Scott #8:
1) I think this is a gross (in both senses) mischaracterization of his time as an assemblyman. I really need you to cite some sources on this. For my part, both anecdotally (I became aware of him as a vocal opponent of Adams on cost-of-living grounds) and evidentially (looking at his sponsored bills) reveals a reference to Israel exactly once, amid more than 250, the rest of which are entirely consistent with his currently stated political goals. To call it “his entire political identity” is not supported by this!
2) I acknowledge that his father is more radical than he is. I trust we can judge him on what he has said and done.
3) and 4). Fine, then he is naïve. But to paint him antisemitic and to say that he is calling for the eradication of the Jewish state is so extreme that I really think it requires more evidence than you have layed out. He says that his opinions on Israel follow from the values he holds about how we should structure society more broadly. By this logic, he would say the same things about the other countries if anyone asked him. Has anyone? Every single time I’ve seen him say something, it is in response to being asked about Israel.
I truly believe that if he were a man motivated by such hate as you describe, his words and behaviors over his years as a public servant would have looked different.
Comment #12 November 1st, 2025 at 7:30 am
Vladimir #8:
To what extent are you fighting for your ideals, as opposed to actually trying to achieve a measurably better outcome for yourself, American Jews, and Americans in general?
I find it hard to disentangle the two. Obviously I want better outcomes for my family, my country, and the world, but I lack the omniscience to be a very effective utilitarian, so I do the best I can by trying to act consistently with my ideals.
Comment #13 November 1st, 2025 at 7:51 am
Scott, you are being overly paranoid. Tucker is not an anti-semite. Neither is Vance. Nor the Heritage Foundation. Nor the vast majority of Americans.
People are anti-zionist right now because of what’s going on in Gaza and the influence the Israel lobby has over the USA government. This is not the same as anti-semitism. Even while Israel support is at an all time low, this does not translate to people hating jewish people in any kind of numbers that justify your paranoia. Most people are sane and differentiate the 2. As someone who has found themselves more an more appalled by the actions of Israel, and who talks to like minded people, I can assure you your anti-semetic fears are misplaced and the result of your conflation of anti-Israel with anti-jewish person.
Comment #14 November 1st, 2025 at 8:47 am
Scott,
As your post veiling hinted there is a disconnect between social media and the “real world”. Unfortunately that disconnect is slowing eroding and the former is expanding into the latter which is obviously horrible.
I am much less optimistic than you are and I believe that our efforts should be towards eradicating social media, in addition to randomly supporting the few sane people left. I mean, what sort of levy do you need to stop the tsunami that is coming?!
Even though that looks like an impossible feat, I see eradicating social media as the only thing that can save us. Without that, we are all doomed. Given my age, I should probably say “our children and grandchildren” are all doomed, since I’m doomed anyway, but I digress.
Comment #15 November 1st, 2025 at 8:48 am
I think First Nations of America should man up, and throw off over the big, beautiful ocean all those who’s there illegally since 1492.
Comment #16 November 1st, 2025 at 9:08 am
Anon1 #13: I’d like to believe you, but Tucker believes Hitler was the misunderstood hero of WWII and Churchill was the villain, and he continues to platform Holocaust deniers on his show, while propagating a ridiculous narrative about Israel oppressing Christians (!). If that’s not antisemitism, what exactly is?
Vance probably isn’t personally antisemitic but he wants the groyper antisemites’ votes and is happy to employ them in his administration, normalize them, and accept their framing of reality. Similarly for the Heritage Foundation, whose more principled members are now quitting in disgust.
Sorry, but I have to be paranoid about the thing that’s statistically overwhelmingly the likeliest to kill my family, if we treat the last century as the relevant reference class.
Comment #17 November 1st, 2025 at 9:09 am
It is complicated but I don’t have my bags packed yet. And yes having a Muslim man as mayor is unsettling but perhaps not as much as having an addled delusional psychopath as President.
But nothing in the screed about Israel and it’s behavior over the years? About the West Bank (manifest destiny-like) mostly violent and cruel land seizures, the ghetto creation in Gaza and Israel’s river to the sea aspirations?
Supporting Charlie Kirk because in addition to being a racist and misogynist, he was a zionist of sorts.,….a Jewish people hating zionist. Maybe you should have also told us what you think about Charlie’s rationale, the rapture?
Opposing Mamdani as mayor of New York because he’s muslim and thinks Israel has done evil things…as most countries and I would guess most people in the world also think.
Yes these are troubling times but not only for Jews.
Comment #18 November 1st, 2025 at 9:26 am
Richard Gaylord #5:
“Who is a Jew” depends to some extent, but not completely, on who you ask.
Everyone pretty much agrees that a person with a Jewish mother is a Jew. This is the orthodox Rabbinical definition. It also is the definition of the State of Israel.
All Rabbis agree, whoever converts to Judaism through the orthodox-approved process is a Jew. This also is the definition of the State of Israel.
Reform Rabbis also believe that persons they convert to Judaism are Jews. But neither orthodox Rabbis nor the State of Israel accept them for religious purposes, though there is some political pressure to admit Reform conversions. The State of Israel may indeed permit some Reform converts to become Israelis.
To some extent, persons with Jewish fathers but not Jewish mothers can be considered Jewish, or “Jew-affiliated.” The orthodox Rabbis and the State of Israel do not accept this. Reform Rabbis generally do accept them as Jews. (I suspect that the Rabbis hope such men will marry Jewish women and father more Jews.)
Individual persons may begin to consider themselves Jewish for various reasons, familial or theological, even if their mother was not Jewish. Also, even orthodox Jews may convert to another religion or become atheist and cease considering themselves to be Jewish (although both orthodox Rabbis and the State of Israel will continue to identify them as Jews).
The historical enemies of the Jews have tended to consider all persons with Jewish mothers or even just fathers to be Jews. They also have tended to be extraordinarily suspicious of conversions away from Judaism; e.g. the Spanish Inquisition was largely intended to identify insincere conversions, not only of Jews but also of Muslims.
Comment #19 November 1st, 2025 at 9:33 am
Scott #11
I don’t think it takes omniscience to figure out which of the two parties is more hostile to Jews like you (by which I mean more than simply being Jewish). For example, here’s a tweet by the president of the Heritage Foundation from yesterday:
https://x.com/KevinRobertsTX/status/1984335805192532265
Whatever the combination of personal convictions and backlash he received for his original statement that made him publish this, the fact remains that he did. Has any prominent Democrat been anywhere near as critical of Mamdani (other than Fetterman, who might lose his seat for it)?
Now, one can reasonably argue that while the Democratic Party is worse at present, it has better guardrails against a takeover by its antisemitic wing, plus its antisemites have more modest maximalist demands than the unapologetic neo-Nazis on the Republican side. That is, life in the US might be socially and professionally impossible for you if Mamdani has his way, but at least he wouldn’t literally revoke your citizenship and deport you or worse, like Fuentes would. But isn’t that all the more reason to focus your efforts on stopping the antisemites from taking over the Republican party while they’re still relatively weak? Vance in particular strikes me as an unprincipled pragmatist. He may or may not end up taking a stronger stand against Tucker than he has so far, but that’s certainly significantly less likely to happen if US Jews keep supporting the Democratic Party while it spits in their faces.
Comment #20 November 1st, 2025 at 10:04 am
So, I have to admit that I’m not intimately aware of broader US political trends rights now, but I am reasonably connected to some far-left people, and this is what I observe:
…so I’m a little skeptical of this claim that the Democratic Party is being taken over by people who want to kick the Jews out of Israel. I suspect the prevailing sentiment is instead a vague gesture towards a one-party solution, with no idea of exactly how that would work. I don’t know if that counts as anti-Zionist, but I definitely don’t think that’s antisemitic.
Comment #21 November 1st, 2025 at 10:06 am
Cycledoc #17: There are Muslim Zionists, and I could’ve been perfectly happy to vote for one as mayor. The issue with Mamdani is specifically that he’s never renounced the concept of a global intifada — ie a war against the Jews, at least until they accept the subservient status that Islam has traditionally been willing to afford them. Well, that plus the more prosaic stuff like plunging NYC into economic catastrophe with rent controls, dismantling its magnet programs that Mamdani himself benefitted from, etc. 🙂
Yes, in the course of building a new nation where Jews could govern and defend themselves from persecution for the first time in 2000 years, Israel has committed evils — as did the Allies during WWII, as has every nation in history. But Hamas’s evils are much more like those of the Nazis, who indeed directly inspired Hamas’s predecessor the Muslim Brotherhood. I.e., the evils are Hamas’s entire program; if you removed them, nothing else would be left.
Comment #22 November 1st, 2025 at 10:49 am
Tim McCormack #20: What’s tricky is that, in principle, there’s certainly a distinction between antisemitism and antizionism. In practice, however, antizionism now involves, at the least, taking a breathtakingly cavalier attitude toward the survival prospects of half the world’s remaining Jews—something you don’t really have the luxury of doing if you count your family members among those 7 million. Also, again and again over the decades, “antizionists” have turned out to be just regular antisemites once you scratch the surface. It’s become a running joke at this point that, whenever Palestinians are on camera screaming about their holy war to kill all the “Yahud” (Jews), the BBC and Al Jazeera need to render “Yahud” in English as “Israelis” or “Zionist occupation forces” or whatever, because the literal meaning of the Arabic word would be too jarring and unsympathetic to Western ears.
Having said that, I’ll concede to you that, among those antizionists who really don’t have an antisemitic bone in their body, the vast majority are progressives. It’s totally within their power to be that detached from reality.
Comment #23 November 1st, 2025 at 10:55 am
Hey Scott
A lot of jewish people whose opinions I respect have similar sentiments as you and I assume I’d feel similarly if I was in your shoes. There must be a big difference between interpretating events when you feel like your minority group is being attacked vs being outside that group. That’s not to say one group is right or wrong, but I just wanted to offer my opinion as someone from an group with a different perspective. I hope I’m right and you’re wrong.
Comment #24 November 1st, 2025 at 11:24 am
Tim McCormack #20:
“What I do see is discomfort with the idea of religion and government being closely intertwined. (Any religion, but mostly people are talking about the Abrahamic ones.)”
Israel is not a state of the Jewish religion, it is the state of the Jewish people. “Jewish” is more of an ethnicity than a religion, which is why there can be Jewish atheists, but not Christian or Muslim atheists.
Also, I am not that really connected to far-left circles, but from what I noticed, the far-left does not care at all about Islamic fundamentalism and Muslim theocracies. The general tendency is actually to support the Islamic theocrats, provided that they are anti-American and anti-West (and of course genocidally anti-Israel, that almost goes without saying). So Saudi Arabia is out, but Iran and its network of terrorist proxies is in, and the far-left frequently makes excuses for Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.
So, in short, I don’t buy the claim that leftist antizionism is a principled stance against religious fundamentalism and fascism.
“The idea of ‘Jews don’t belong in Israel’ is pretty damn rare, and is about on par with the belief that the descendants of European colonists don’t belong in the US.”
The Westerners who cheered the October 7 massacres were overwhelmingly far-left. They explicitly said that the Israeli civilians murdered on that day were not innocent victims, because all Israeli Jews are settler-colonists on Arab land. I think that this is a mainstream opinion in the far-left. Again I don’t travel in far-left circles, so I cannot be absolutely sure, but this is what I heard them shouting to the rest of the world in the weeks following October 7.
Comment #25 November 1st, 2025 at 12:55 pm
Scott, Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I admire your struggle with retaining your own enlightenment liberalism even as your physical safety is at risk. I agree with you that Mamdani’s position on Israel is fundamentally insincere. Clearly, with the exception of the USA and maybe a very small handful of others, the vast majority of nation states in existence today are rooted in some type of ethnic/religious/tribal construct and no one who does not strongly object to the existence of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and so on should open their mouth regarding Israel. Empirically, it is also obvious that even today, land rights exist only to the extent that you can defend them by force (see Ukraine). So liberals cannot object to the existence of Israel as a purely Jewish state any more or any less than they object to the existence of Saudi Arabia etc.
But I disagree with your contention that “the Democratic Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews have no place in Israel”. In the medium term, most US left-liberals would be fine with a Jewish-supremacist state in the Middle East as long as it is on par with Saudi Arabia/Pakistan in terms of its foreign policy relevance and it sits along side a Palestinian state which also would be nothing special relative to most other ethno-religious middle eastern states. All of the difficult questions, contradictions and hypocrisies are regarding the path on how exactly to get there and what role US military power should play.
Comment #26 November 1st, 2025 at 2:13 pm
DP #25: Thanks. But I never said that my physical safety is at risk right now and I don’t think that it is. I’ll even still visit NYC!
If people want an example of something related to this post that will immediately get worse under Mamdani … well, just today he announced that he’s going to try to destroy Cornell Tech, because of its partnership with the Technion in Haifa. I don’t expect such an act to help a single Palestinian. It makes sense only under a model of reality where anything connected to Israel needs to be boycotted, until Israel is eradicated from the earth. (But the boycotters never fully think this through! International isolation will just make Israel hunker down all the more, because once more, (1) the Israelis have no other place to go and (2) their neighbors want to slaughter them, because of the Jew thing.)
Comment #27 November 1st, 2025 at 2:56 pm
> Has any prominent Democrat been anywhere near as critical of Mamdani (other than Fetterman, who might lose his seat for it)?
Well, that was timely:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-barack-obama-election.html
Comment #28 November 1st, 2025 at 2:59 pm
Scott, regarding Mamdani and BDS, firstly I concede that I have the luxury of having no skin in the game. I also concede that Mamdani is very likely not a good faith actor on BDS. However, many progressive-liberals wanted to sanction Saudi Arabia during its US funded bombing campaign in Yemen. We wanted to sanction MBS for his butchering of Jamal Khashoggi. We condemned the Saudi attempts at reputation laundering in the US by spending huge sums of money to buy up sports leagues and other cultural institutions.
US Presidential candidate Biden who was running to be the commander in chief of US armed forces and not just a lowly city mayor ran on the explicit pledge of making Saudi Arabia a “pariah” in 2020. Of course Biden was forced to make nice with MBS because of oil prices etc but US liberals have always been open to sanctions against foreign actors they perceived as engaged in human rights violations. Whether sanctions work in any situation or not is a very complex question and I do not pretend to know the answer although I wholly concur that a lowly mayor sanctioning one University is little more than an idiotic act of protest.
I personally have since come to terms with the fact that what “third party” liberals think in any situation is irrelevant, those with skin in the game will use any method liberal or illiberal to gain an advantage and it would be a rational act to do so in what they perceive is a zero sum situation. So at the end of the day, whether Mamdani succeeds as NY mayor or crashes and burns is not going to be a function of whether he is a principled liberal (which he probably is not, at least on Israel) but of his skill at navigating NY power dynamics without flying too close to the sun.
Comment #29 November 1st, 2025 at 3:17 pm
Scott,
Did you get a chance to watch Nick’s interview on Tucker?
I’m not a “groyper,” and I’m not here just to defend him. I don’t doubt that he’s said nasty, edgy stuff online. But, during the interview, he came off articulate, well-spoken, and not “crazed” or antisemitic at all.
All he was saying is that he’s “America First,” not “Israel First.” That doesn’t mean he want the state of Israel to be destroyed or anything like that, he just thinks America should solve our own problems before we help other countries around the world. He doesn’t object to Israel’s right to exist, he just objects to America paying for their defense. He thinks they should be self-sufficient. Hamas are horrible yes, but in his and Tucker’s view, they aren’t America’s problem.
Mainstream Republicans spend a huge amount of time heaping praise on Israel. Sometimes it seems even more than they praise America. It used to be that CPAC looked more like an Israel rally than an American rally. Of course there will be America first conservatives like Fuentes who question this. Why do they spend so much time talking about and praising Israel? Why do we spend so much time and money on their problems when we have our own problems at home?
America First means America first, not Israel first, not Britain first or Canada first or Japan first or China first or any other country first. America first. That doesn’t mean we hate those other countries! It just means we have enough problems of our own to focus on.
And I’m a fan of Tucker, the guy is not an antisemite. He explained in that interview that he has many Jewish heroes. He just wishes America would be less involved helping other countries including Israel, and the GOP shouldn’t spend so much time praising other countries.
Comment #30 November 1st, 2025 at 3:20 pm
Scott #22: I absolutely agree that antizionism is often a cover for antisemitism. It makes it very difficult to express distress at Israel’s military actions without being taken for an antisemite! :-/ Not really sure how to navigate it.
AF #24: To be fair, I can also well believe that there are many different groups of people called the “far left”. I’ve never met anyone who cheered for the October 7 massacre, but I know that such people exist. The people I know have expressed their horror at it, and as far as I know aren’t in favor of any of the Islamic theocracies. (Some are tankies, but that’s… a different problem.)
Comment #31 November 1st, 2025 at 4:55 pm
Scott #10:
“Many young assimilated Jews, of the sort who live in NYC, are so wildly disconnected from their own families’ history that they actually believe antisemitism only exists today because of Israel’s unique evil, and would cease to exist if Israel were eradicated”.
Channeling some Freud here. Could some of the unhinged antagonism towards Israel amongst some individuals who publicly identify as Jewish be rooted in complex identity issues and feelings of rejection?
A not insignificant number seem to have Jewish fathers/grandfathers (hence a Jewish last name) and non-Jewish mothers and therefore are not halachically Jewish.
Rightly or wrongly, I wonder whether some of these people harbor, potentially subconsciously, feelings of resentment towards the Jewish community. These feeling may stem from not feeling fully accepted members of the “tribe” due to their non-halachic status. Perhaps any feelings of rejection manifest as deep antagonism towards Israel – a stance which is more socially acceptable than expressing antagonism to the (orthodox) Jewish community itself?
Comment #32 November 1st, 2025 at 6:15 pm
Ty #31: I suppose that’s possible, although
(1) I have no idea whether people with Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers are actually antizionist at a higher rate than the reverse … are they??
(2) if it mattered that much to them, it’s totally doable to undergo an Orthodox conversion,
(3) Reform and Conservative Judaism will gladly accept them as Jews basically as-is, and
(4) they’re even eligible to move to Israel under the Law of Return.
Comment #33 November 1st, 2025 at 7:19 pm
Tim #30:
“I absolutely agree that antizionism is often a cover for antisemitism. It makes it very difficult to express distress at Israel’s military actions without being taken for an antisemite! :-/ Not really sure how to navigate it”
Even the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which some criticize as being too restrictive, makes it abundantly clear when it says:
“…criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.
Amongst others, it goes on to say contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
– Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
– Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
– Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Can you give an example of a statement you wish to make that expresses your distress against Israel military actions that would fall foul of the above despite it being legitimate criticism in your view?
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
Comment #34 November 1st, 2025 at 9:38 pm
It’s nice to see David’s name mentioned in this. I can still hear my dad speaking fondly of David. And I can hear his voice saying, “Good old David.” David was one of just a handful of people outside our immediate family that my dad still wanted to stay in touch with after he got sick. I was lucky that when I lived in Israel, David’s mother would sometimes invite me to her brother’s kibbutz, Ma’agan Michael, for tea when she would visit. I always say that the storks that feed at Ma’agan Michael in the winter are the ones that brought my son to me because he was born a few hours after I went for a walk there, among the storks.
Comment #35 November 1st, 2025 at 11:29 pm
““I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion,” he [Zohran Mamdani] said in the first mayoral debate when, on cue, Cuomo trotted out the “right to exist” line. “And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” He has also said he does not support the right of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan to exist as countries that prioritize Muslim citizens.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/26/zohran-mamdani-jewish-voters-new-york
Comment #36 November 2nd, 2025 at 12:09 am
Scott, for someone who so deeply understands the sophistication and subtlety needed to correctly understand the physical world, your analysis of the human, social world is astonishingly simple. In particular, you can’t seem to discuss those of us who are passionately opposed to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank without assuming we either want to see Israel and Israelis destroyed either by slaughtering them all or by driving them out of the Middle East, or are too naive or stupid or misguided to understand that we are implictly calling for that. It is, you know, possible that we of course oppose both slaughtering Israeli Jews and driving them out of the Middle East, but we have a different analysis of the situation — in fact many different analyses — that have depth and are based on real knowledge and come to honest conclusions different from yours. I don’t want to get into an argument about those different analyses, but to even begin to talk about them, you have to acknowledge their existence and not just cast us into the two simple buckets you have, those who want the Jews of the Middle East slaughtered and expelled and the dupes, who are too stupid or naive to understand that is what they are calling for.
In particular, I’ll just point out that those who have come to the conclusion that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide include 86% of the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars, including in particular Israeli scholars Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, Shmuel Lederman, and Omer Bartov; the Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and 40% of American Jews. (Also, 60% of American Jews think Israel is committing war crimes). And those who consider Israel an apartheid state — that the state of Israel in its current state, in which it controls all the land “from the river to the sea”, is governing that land as a racist, apartheid state in which Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens are subject to a completely different set of laws than Israelis living next to them, and have little to no rights — include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli Human Rights organizations B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Adalah, HaMoked, Peace Now Israel, and Combatants for Peace. Do you really think all these individuals and organizations and people who constitute these organizations are either rabid anti-semites or dupes? Is there not a possibility of a more sophisticated and subtle understanding of what is going on there, one that you could actually engage with intellectually rather than sweeping it into your two boxes? It is an understanding that demands at the least that Israel be stopped from its current actions in Gaza and the West Bank and more generally that Palestinians as well as Jews must have full human rights and dignity for any sane, peaceful resolution of the situation there to ever arise, and that the current Israeli state and, apparently, much of the society, is violently and aggressively pursuing quite the opposite.
Let me say one more thing. I come from the progressive Jewish tradition. For me, the core of Judaism is in “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice …”, as stated by Albert Einstein; the Hebrew Bible’s “Justice, justice you shall pursue” and “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”; the simple summary of Jewish teaching by Rabbi Hillel, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary”; and the basic principle that the highest value is human life – in Jewish law, any rule (except the banning of murder, incest, or idolatry) can be broken when a life is at stake, and as the Talmud says, “whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved a world”. We (meaning progressive Jews, tho obviously I can’t and don’t speak for all of them) judge Israel against these core values in the same way as we do any other state. If we believe Israel is committing oppression and injustice, let alone war crimes or genocide, we will speak against it. And we will speak with particular passion, because Israel claims to be speaking for Jews yet, if this is true, is violating what we see as the core values of Judaism.
I believe you would do much better to respect the sincerity and depth of thinking underlying these positions that you now caricature so badly, and maybe, maybe even intellectually engage with that depth of thinking.
Thank you.
Comment #37 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:01 am
Michael Gogins #18:
>The historical enemies of the Jews have tended to consider all persons with Jewish mothers or even just >fathers to be Jews.
It’s amusing that the conversation has gone in that direction (I guess people need someone to blame, and if it is an out-group they can single out, especially for reasons rooted in religion, so much the better), but I don’t know of a single antisemitic regime that has hated or singled out people who descend from Jews on the maternal line more than people who descend from Jews on the paternal line. (Of course the latter are actually easier to single out, due to naming conventions.) Nazism was perfectly egalitarian in this respect (it considered such people to be not quite Jews, but Mischlinge of first, second, etc. degree regardless of the bloodline) – and I don’t think this was an innovation.
Must be really frustrating for people who like wielding the cattle-car argument, as Richard Gaylord, #5, put it. “You are a Jew because a Nazi would consider you to be one, so shut up and play along, but no, *he* or *she* are definitely not Jews even though a Nazi would also consider them to be Jews, because of course we will not let Nazis dictate what we are, and they are silly people who don’t know a thing” is not a coherent viewpoint, as any child can tell.
Comment #38 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:06 am
Ken: I acknowledge that your position has depth in the same sense that I acknowledge that Marxism-Leninism has depth, that postmodernism has depth, that Biblical fundamentalism has depth. That is: I acknowledge that one can generate arbitrarily erudite analyses, and attract hundreds of prestigious names, for positions that from my perspective are egregiously wrong in ways that a few sentences (or paragraphs to be generous) suffice to explain.
There’s one thing in my post that I do regret and retract, and that’s my claim that Jews who vote for Mamdani are all doing so “believing that their own collaboration with evil will somehow protect them personally.” On reflection, hard as this is for me to swallow, there are probably tens of thousands of New York Jews who really are this gobsmackingly ignorant of their own families’ history, of the immense sacrifices that the majority of Israelis were willing to make for peace, and of what Israelis learned when those sacrifices were answered with, in effect, “no, we just want to drive you out or slaughter you all, because you’re Jews.”
Of those well-meaning but ignorant Jews, probably a few could be won back by explaining the realities to them. I should not have driven them away unnecessarily.
I regard the claim that Israel committed “genocide” as now fully debunked, unmasked as the blood libel it always was—now that Israel has ended its operation in exchange for its 20 hostages and vague promises (which Hamas has already violated), and now that we have reliable data showing that the civilian:combatant fatality ratio of Israel’s operation was ~1.5:1, better than most other wars fought in dense urban environments even though the circumstances (civilians above the ground, combatants in tunnels underneath them) were vastly more difficult here. But we’ve already debated this in other threads and I have no interest in reopening it.
I’m glad that Mamdani acknowledges that, by his own stated principles, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the other Muslim nations have no right to exist in their current form either. That updates me in a positive direction.
But in that case, why did he focus so obsessively on Israel, in his previous career as a BDS activist? The Muslim world is hundreds of times larger than tiny Israel. The Muslim world’s human rights abuses, and violations of civil liberties and religious freedom, are by any sane measure hundreds of times worse. Israel should barely even be an afterthought, if you actually started from the principles that Mamdani himself has enunciated—rather than starting from hatred of the world’s only Jewish state, and then working backwards to find principles that would justify that hatred while also sounding acceptable to Western ears.
Comment #39 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:14 am
Ken #36:
“In particular, I’ll just point out that those who have come to the conclusion that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide include 86% of the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars…”
Just taking your claim above, it is clear you have:
– not carried out any critical analysis of the IAGS resolution
– not investigated who the IAGS is and how people could become a member
– not interpedently investigated how many “members” of the IAGS supported the resolution (Hint: “86% of the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars” did NOT vote to support the resolution as you claimed)
– are not aware that the IAGS vote was carried out anonymously so it is not possible to determine who supported it and what their credentials are.
Perhaps you might like to undertake a critical analysis of your supporting material, as well as read some alternate views before forming an opinion, rather than, as it appears to me, first forming an opinion and then seeking information to support it.
https://x.com/IzaTabaro/status/1964924326630785277
https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1963252885266862469
https://www.scholarsfortruthaboutgenocide.com/
https://x.com/DrSaraEBrown/status/1962611572762910940
https://quillette.com/2025/09/11/the-genocide-scholars-who-cant-define-genocide-iags-israel/
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-genocide-scholars-who-cannot-define.html
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2025/09/genocide-scholars-or-activists-sham.html
Comment #40 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:28 am
Scott #9:
> Lastly, and most tellingly, Mamdani never says that Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq or Yemen or Jordan or Egypt or Qatar or Algeria or Indonesia need to stop being Muslim states
In his criticism of Israel-as-a-Jewish-state, he has in fact specifically invoked Saudi Arabia, for example in the first debate:
> I’ve said time and again that I recognize Israel’s right to exist. I’ve said that I will not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. I have made that very clear and part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country whether we’re speaking about Israel or whether we’re speaking about Saudi Arabia.
If the office Mamdani were running for had anything to do with foreign policy, I would hope he would criticize Saudi Arabia more often (not just in comparison to Israel), especially given all of Trump’s corrupt dealings with the Gulf states. But there is no hypocrisy in the standard which he applies.
Also, you list majority-Muslim states, but Indonesia is (at least officially) a secular state. Israel is also officially religiously secular, but in my very uninformed opinion, I’d argue that Indonesia does a much better job of pretending to be secular than Israel does. In any case, Indonesia’s status as a secular state is of little geopolitical relevance.
No matter how anti-Israel the Democratic party becomes, the idea that “Jews have no place in America” belongs to the right. If the idea that “Jews have no place anywhere on earth” becomes mainstream in the United States, it will be a movement led by Christian nationalist MAGA/Groyper types, and would never be supported by someone like Mamdani. It is not a “compromise”. There is no compromise with Nazis.
Comment #41 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:30 am
Hi Scott, sorry for posting something offtopic, but every time the topic of P vs NP gets brought up in some online discussion, there are an innumerable number of people who always feel the need to point out that P vs NP does not matter since what if P = NP but the exponent ends up being _huge_?
Do they not realize everybody in the world already knows that? If we can’t even distinguish P and NP (or P and PSPACE, for that matter), how in the hell is anybody supposed to distinguish between more fine-grained notions of tractability? Do they not realize how well P maps onto the class of problems we generally consider to be tractable? Do you have a good, canned response to shout against those comments?
Before you mention it, they’re never convinced by the response in your P vs NP survey.
Comment #42 November 2nd, 2025 at 3:25 am
Ben #40:
If the office Mamdani were running for had anything to do with foreign policy, I would hope he would criticize Saudi Arabia more often (not just in comparison to Israel), especially given all of Trump’s corrupt dealings with the Gulf states. But there is no hypocrisy in the standard which he applies.
Please see my comment #38, where I respond to this in detail.
No matter how anti-Israel the Democratic party becomes, the idea that “Jews have no place in America” belongs to the right.
Well, with one enormous caveat. The radical left in America (e.g., the DSA Liberation Caucus) has shown over the past two years that it’s perfectly happy to terrorize, blockade, and vandalize synagogues, Hillel centers, Hebrew day schools, kosher markets and restaurants, etc., and to defend those who do those things, as long as the Jewish institutions in question have any connection to the State of Israel. But OK, pretty much every mainstream Jewish institution has some connection to the State of Israel! So, exactly like the 1970s USSR, the radical left today wants to set renouncing Zionism as the price of accepting Jews as equal citizens, even when they live in the Diaspora. I reject their offer with extreme prejudice.
Comment #43 November 2nd, 2025 at 3:28 am
L=NEXP #41: Sorry, it seems like you’re trying to get a rise out of me in some weird way. If not, what I have to say about this I said in my survey.
Comment #44 November 2nd, 2025 at 5:46 am
Scott #42:
Apologies, I started writing my comment before your exchange with Ken.
However, it is disingenuous to act as if Israel is tiny and insignificant. It is an incredibly important regional power, in large part thanks to the backing of the United States. Israel has relied on US defense and economic ties in an effort to ensure the safety of the Jewish people through force of arms, ethnic cleansing, and weak and destabilized neighbors. In my view, US-Israeli policy in the middle east has ultimately made Jews less safe, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Of course at this point, it’s not a simple thing to fix, but I digress.
Personally, I don’t think ranking human rights abuses by how bad they are is a particularly productive exercise, but even if I were to accept that Israel’s crimes are relatively tame (I don’t), if you care about these issues from a completely detached objective perspective (no one does), I think it still makes sense to focus on Israel if only because Israel is more susceptible to international pressure than many other countries due to its dependence on the US. Having priorities is not a sign of ulterior motive.
Comment #45 November 2nd, 2025 at 7:30 am
Garald #37: It seems trivial to resolve all these things by simply saying that there are those who the Orthodox consider to be halakhically Jewish, and then there’s the broader category of everyone who identifies with the Jewish people—for example, because they have a Jewish father or spouse, or because they underwent a non-Orthodox conversion. I care about the latter category much more than the former, and it seems most of the antisemites do as well, so I’m glad that Israel’s Law of Return includes provisions for them, and I’d like to see those provisions strengthened.
Comment #46 November 2nd, 2025 at 8:06 am
Scott #45
> I’m glad that Israel’s Law of Return includes provisions for them, and I’d like to see those provisions strengthened
I don’t mean to bum you out further, but the way things are going both in Israel and in the US, the opposite is far more likely. Vance won’t be the only one to notice that US Jews chose the Democratic Party over their people. The likes of Ken and Ben might well find Israel’s doors closed to them if/when the time comes.
Comment #47 November 2nd, 2025 at 8:28 am
Scott #45: That sounds like a consistent point of view to have. At the same time
a) please update me, as I’m mildly curious, but your point 3) surprised me – my understanding is that the Conservative movement’s official position on the matter is identical to the Orthodox one; that was certainly the case in my student days, when there were enthusiasts in dorms and cafeterias ready to explain the true position (and the gulf that Reform had created by their radical innovation) to everybody;
b) more importantly, attitudes such as that apparently evinced or reflected by post #31 (“we have an out-group here, defined by descent; when we disagree with someone, check whether they are a member of the out-group – ha, another one, wouldn’t you guess it; that invalidates that person’s opinion, as they are no longer an individual, but a resentful member of that outgroup – resentful as proved by the fact that it is, obviously, an outgroup”) have long been common,
c) more importantly, the “cattle-car” argument (which also seems very common) coexists with attitudes such as those in (b) (expressed in more or less colorful ways) in some peoples’ heads. That is peculiar, though consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and so forth, so what do I know.
Comment #48 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:23 am
Garald #47: Conservative is certainly more lenient than Orthodox in these matters, and is used to dealing with all kinds of mixed families.
In any case, I’ve never said anything like “anti-Zionist Jews aren’t real Jews anyway, ergo their arguments are wrong.” Many of them are real Jews, and even if they weren’t, that argument would be dumb.
I do confess to having been amused by the “anti-Zionist Passover Seders” held in the tentifadas where the Hebrew on the Seder plates was written from left to right (!), and other howlers abounded. Like, if people find it so important to appropriate a 3000-year-old culture to remove its connection to its original land, couldn’t they at least bother to research it better?
Comment #49 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:32 am
Vladimir #46: Oh, I definitely want Israel’s doors to remain open for the anti-Zionist Jews, if and when they need to flee there—so they can arrive and then spend the rest of their lives being reminded of how wrong they were. 😉
Comment #50 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:36 am
Scott: my suspicion here is that it’s another case where a random element of Conservative laity has beliefs (and beliefs about what his beliefs ought to be) that are completely out of line with what the Conservative movement stands for; it’s trivial to check (I just did) that the official position of the Conservative movement (and Reform in Israel, Canada, etc.) on the matter is very different from yours. Apparently, there’s also no shortage of recent posts by very annoyed Conservative and Orthodox Jews online making that very clear. At any rate, that was very much a side point, and one that the very annoyed are far better positioned to make.
Also: anti-Zionists are not exactly the out-group I meant.
Changing subjects: how do you *manage* to write Hebrew from left to right?
Comment #51 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:38 am
Garald #50: I can tell you from personal experience that major Conservative synagogues have policies on these matters that the Orthodox would reject.
Regarding the anti-Zionist Seder with mirror-reversed Hebrew, see here.
Comment #52 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:43 am
What surprises me the most, is the hyperfixation of the U.S. on Palestine, while an even worse war is happening in Europe. Ukraine is a democratic nation-state that embraces Western values, idologically much closer to the American left than Palestinians.
The enemy here is the imperialistic, totalitarian cleptocracy that undeniably commits genocide by stealing children, and forcing them to fight against their peers. Russia banned LGBT+ on federal level, and is very famous for being racist, sexist, and a bunch of other -ist characterisations that the left fight against. The scale of war is much bigger than Palestione-Israeli war, and more people die.
Yet the left choose to align with Palestinians, that after two years of war support HAMAS (over 40%). Choose to align with deeply antisemitic, sexist, homphopic society. And choose to hate a reasonable Western democracy.
This is truly the paradox that US sociologists have to explain
Comment #53 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:50 am
Oh, I have no doubt that some people in the universe don’t know how to write a semitic language. But how do you actually make that mistake? If you cut and paste, you’ll get it right.
Comment #54 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:57 am
PS. And by all means, post a link to the policies. Always glad to be informed.
Comment #55 November 2nd, 2025 at 10:03 am
“the Democratic Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews have no place in Israel.”
Where do you get this stuff? Are you staying up all night lurking lurking in weirdo corners of the internet?
Nutcake leftists (some of whom might hold such views) are rarely Democrats, and in fact spend most of their time insulting Democrats and anyone who actually tries to make things work.
Comment #56 November 2nd, 2025 at 10:34 am
Ben #44:
“I think it still makes sense to focus on Israel if only because Israel is more susceptible to international pressure than many other countries due to its dependence on the US.”
What you and other leftist activists call “Israeli crimes”, Israelis themselves see as vitally necessary security measures. Israel for decades made overly magnanimous gestures for peace (the Oslo Accords, the 2005 Gaza disengagement), only to be met with ever more extreme levels of violence directed at Israeli civilians (the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza, the October 7 massacres). Measures such as military patrols, checkpoints, Jewish settlements, raids on terror infrastructure, and the Iron Swords War are how Israelis remain alive. Neglecting security measures, in the vain hope of international recognition or Palestinian reciprocity, is how Israelis find themselves victims of massacres.
So, I have hope that anti-Israel “human rights activists” will be disappointed when they apply their theory of change. They, and apparently also you, think that Israel can be singled out, alone among the world’s countries, for “human rights abuses”, and that this pressure will cause Israel to break and sacrifice its own people for the activists’ sense of self-righteousness.
I find it shameful that this tactic worked before, and that prime ministers such as Rabin and Barak and Sharon really did sacrifice Israel’s vital security interests for the sake of pleasing foreign powers.
My hope is that, thanks to the Palestinians’ own actions, the power of this tactic is waning. Already the Israeli left has declined from being at parity with the Israeli right to holding only 3.3% of seats in the Knesset. Sharon had to split from the Likud to pull his Gaza outrage, and the pro-appeasement party he set up for this, Kadima, went electorally extinct over a decade ago. Israelis have slowly gotten wise to the costs and benefits of appeasement, and are not as willing to bend to pressure. And all of that was before the October 7 massacres, which illustrated with the blood of thousands of Israelis what are the consequences of allowing the Palestinians autonomy and self-rule.
So, if pressure no longer works on Israel, what will be your new excuse? If future Israeli governments respond to Western threats of sanctions by deepening trade and cultural ties with Africa and India and maybe even China, how will you sell boycotts of Israel and only Israel as totally-not-antisemitic measures against the one pro-West country susceptible to pressure? If Israel responds to Western threats of military embargoes by finally onshoring military production, will you and other activists focus on other countries, or tacitly admit that you have a special hostility against Israel specifically?
“US-Israeli policy in the middle east has ultimately made Jews less safe, both in Israel and in the diaspora”
I know you are not referring to Israel’s appeasement policies when talking about this. I know you are referring to the exact security measures that have, in fact, kept Israeli Jews safe, at least as long as those security measures were in place. When the security measures were withdrawn, it has made both Jews and Arabs less safe. Unless you want to tell me that Gazans were better off in the 20 years after the 2005 Gaza disengagement than in the 20 years before it? Even if we just count deaths, I think that the Gazans were better off when Israel occupied Gaza and 8000 Jewish settlers lived in the strip than they were under Hamas rule with ever more deadly Gaza wars happening every few years. A similar analysis of Jewish casualties would also show that it was appeasement, not occupation or “human rights abuses”, that made the lives of Jews unsafe in Israel.
Also, saying that Israel’s middle eastern policy made diaspora Jews unsafe is just pure victim-blaming. What other ethnic or religious diaspora was made to go through terror for the actions of a far-away government they don’t control? Were ethnic Russians forced to endure hate mobs on the streets and campuses because of Ukraine? Were Chinese cultural centers picketed because of the oppression in Tibet and Xinjiang? When diaspora Jews are the only minority hounded and spat upon for their homeland’s government’s actions, I think we are dealing with antisemitism. Also, to blame Israel for the hate mobs’ actions in making diaspora Jews less safe is to essentially hold the Jewish diaspora hostage: “Do what we tell you to do, or we will inflict suffering on your brothers and sisters living in our country!”
I think it is better to put the blame for making diaspora Jews less safe on the actual perpetrators of outrages against diaspora Jews. This means the “great replacement” Nazis on the right, and the anti-Israel activists like Mamdani on the left. I very much doubt you are in the former camp, but what you wrote makes me suspect that you are in the latter camp. If you are, then you are part of the problem in making Jews less safe. Whether or not you are Jewish yourself is irrelevant, and likewise it does not matter if your stance on Israel comes from ignorance rather than malice.
Comment #57 November 2nd, 2025 at 10:56 am
I do not have a sense that the extent of being “Mischlinge” has much of an explanatory power in understanding the split within the American Jewry with respect to Israel (as exemplified by the degree of the Jewish support for Mamdani in NYC). It seems to me that the following might be one contributing factor: expressing pro-Israel view in progressive milieu is apt to lead to social ostracism bordering on ex-communication (and it might have become even more difficult — now that being pro-Israel and pro-Trump became conflated, especially in the context of Trump’s assault on the elite universities). So for those Jews who wish to remain “members in good standing” among their progressive friends and colleagues the internal (informed by their own genuine and deep commitment to the progressive worldview) as well as social motivation to adopt a public “anti-Zionist” stance is not insignificant.
Comment #58 November 2nd, 2025 at 12:06 pm
Raoul Ohio #55:
Where do you get this stuff? Are you staying up all night lurking lurking in weirdo corners of the internet?
Umm, yes?
Nutcake leftists (some of whom might hold such views) are rarely Democrats, and in fact spend most of their time insulting Democrats and anyone who actually tries to make things work.
If we learned anything from what happened to the Republicans over the past decade, surely it’s that nutcake views no longer stay confined to the Internet, any more than a novel coronavirus stays confined to the Wuhan Seafood Market? With the collapse of all traditional gatekeepers, the nutcakes of left and right have triumphed, and now define the reality that everyone else has to suffer in.
Like, have you seen the opinion polls among 18-to-29-year-olds? Have you seen the audience lately of Hasan Piker, compared to any non-nutcake media source?
We’ll need to pull out all the stops over the next few years for the abundance agenda, peeling off as many moderates and independents and anti-Trump Republicans (do those still exist?) as we possibly can, to have a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating the ascendant party of Tlaib, Mamdani, and the DSA Liberation Caucus, with Bernie Sanders and AOC representing its conservative wing. The latter, given the numbers and momentum right now, would seem to be what wins the Democratic future by default.
Comment #59 November 2nd, 2025 at 12:09 pm
If anyone here is looking to emigrate from the US, or just to pick up a backup residence permit, many commenters here would qualify for Taiwan’s Gold Card on the basis of educational credentials and/or employment in the fields of science or technology:
https://goldcard.nat.gov.tw/en/qualification/
You can qualify for permanent residence after three years of residence, or one year if your income is above NT$6 million (US$195,043). President Lai recently stated that “Israel’s determination and capacity to defend its territory provides a valuable model for Taiwan”:
https://english.president.gov.tw/News/7029
I can’t speak for the academic job market though and the reputation Chinese has for being a difficult language to learn for native English speakers to learn is well-deserved.
Comment #60 November 2nd, 2025 at 1:18 pm
Sadly, while I oppose Mamdani (and being residents of NYC, our family have voted for Cuomo), I believe that your beliefs about “AI safety” are also the equivalent of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, or at least its modern equivalent, safetyism, which demands incontrovertible proof of safety (and which is never satisfactory when offered) before any new undertakings are permitted. The plutonium batteries on the Cassini probe, GMOs, vaccines, now AI – all things that are of immense benefit, all things opposed in the name of safety, ironically mostly by the woke left whom you also oppose. I would even argue that the left’s hatred of Israel is just another version of such cancerous safety culture – that Israel as currently constituted is too dangerous to be allowed to exist.
Comment #61 November 2nd, 2025 at 1:19 pm
Comments such as #56 are priceless: they give a reality check on how a median university-educated Israeli really thinks. As he says, Israeli liberals (not really even ‘left’ in international terms) are now 3.3% of the population.
Comment #62 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:29 pm
Hyman Rosen #60: It amuses me to think of my friends in the AI safety research community—who are some of the most thoughtful, cosmopolitan, scientifically literate, technologically savvy, future-oriented, politically moderate people you could possibly meet—in the role of pitchfork-wielding medieval peasants. 😀
Comment #63 November 2nd, 2025 at 2:37 pm
Everyone: The other thing that amuses me, but shouldn’t have surprised me, is the feedback I’ve gotten on this post (not all of which appears here) sharply divided into two categories:
(1) While Scott is of course correct about the grave threat to Jews from the antisemitic, Hitler-loving Groypers, why did he have to ruin his post by talking about the harmless Zohran Mamdani, who loves Jews just as long as they don’t demand the continuation of their state?
(2) While Scott is of course correct about the grave threat to Jews from anti-Israel radicals like Mamdami, why did he have to ruin his post by talking about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, who just want to put America First and ask some provocative questions?
I suppose I should be grateful both sides agree that not all my fears are paranoid fantasies… 😀
Comment #64 November 2nd, 2025 at 3:14 pm
Scott #38:
Well, I agree, and I have spent countless hours defending Israel from what you correctly describe as a libel. But during these countless hours I have realized that one should perhaps be a bit generous towards people who believe in this accusation. This has been a very common experience for me: I say Israel is not committing genocide because claims X, Y, and Z are lies. And then the person says, ‘But I trust the UN. I can’t verify the facts you are throwing at me and even if I could when the UN says it’s a genocide I assume there are further facts I’m not aware of.’ Then I’ll bring up more facts about how biased the UN is, and they’ll respond, ‘What about Amnesty International?’ So I need to throw them additional facts about Amnesty International. And the conversations goes on and on without resolution. And I feel that, even if I can make my case to them, they won’t easily accept it, because every authority they trust is saying the opposite. (The situation may be similar to mine if someone tried to argue to me that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Even if their argument seemed sound, I’d assume there was a flaw in it that my limited knowledge of medicine and statistics couldn’t detect—not that the entire medical establishment was wrong about the issue.) My point is that those spreading this libel have so deeply infiltrated tens or even hundreds of institutions that many people all over the globe trust deeply, that it may take a lot of time and effort for people to see through the matter.
Comment #65 November 2nd, 2025 at 5:46 pm
Imagine investing all that time in “Nadertrading” and anti-Trump screeds when Trump increasingly looks like the geopolitical protector of whatever safety Jews have and will have in our lifetime.
Comment #66 November 2nd, 2025 at 6:10 pm
Garald #61:
The 3.3% figure is for Knesset representation, not percent of the population. This refers to the four seats won by the Labor party in the 2022 election. The other main left-wing party, Meretz, fell below the electoral threshold and the votes for it went to waste. Since then, Labor and Meretz merged into a new party, the Democrats, which now holds those four seats.
Also, if we define liberal in the sense of agreeing with Enlightenment classical liberalism, then you should include voters for centrist parties like Yesh Atid, Blue and White, and Yisrael Beitenu. I think maybe even many Likud voters agree with Enlightenment classical liberalism, and simply got suckered into voting for Netanyahu (he ran in the election on cost-of-living issues, which he refused to address when he got back into power).
Labor/Meretz/the Democrats are leftists in international terms, or at least they were prior to October 7 2023. The international left sucked before that day, but became far worse afterwards.
Comment #67 November 2nd, 2025 at 6:57 pm
Blowback #65: I mean, I’ve just consistently opposed every form of antirational populist authoritarianism, whether fascist-flavored, Communist-flavored, Islamist-flavored, or anything else, and expect to continue doing so until the day I die.
Comment #68 November 2nd, 2025 at 7:22 pm
Having bags packed ready to go is nice and all, but is there a destination? If the US hits the fan, will they invade Israel? Or just bomb? Canada and Europe would not hold out for long. Chinese ethnic policy is homogenity. Remote places like Australia might survive or be overrun by refugees.
Please don’t end up on the MS Saint Louis.
Comment #69 November 2nd, 2025 at 7:27 pm
AF #66: I’ll accept the first point. We should be counting 3.69% for Labor, 3.16% for Meretz (RIP), and since you consider them to be leftist (does anybody in Labor still have a leftist self-image?), we’ll even add a few non-Arab Hadash voters to keep them company and bring the total up to 7%.
“If we define liberal in the sense of agreeing with Enlightenment classical liberalism” is something that, in the known universe, is often followed a couple of sentences later by a declaration of love for Margaret Thatcher. More charitably: this is not a liberal as the word is used in the US – this is someone who still has liberal democracy as an ideal, rather than an enemy.
What is amusing, and very common, here is that one kind of talk (it was you who brought up that 3.3%) is used to belittle dwindling internal enemies, and that suddenly the discourse softens when people realize they are being watched from the outside, so to speak.
Comment #70 November 2nd, 2025 at 7:32 pm
I’m not sure how much value the words of a random commenter will have but hopefully showing you that at least some people admit to mistakes might provide some infinitesimal measure of comfort. I never thought it could happen here, but I was wrong. I always thought that regardless of what happened in the middle east, New York would be the true safe haven for Jews. I never thought that honest-to-goodness antisemitism could take over the US, but I was wrong.
Comment #71 November 2nd, 2025 at 8:41 pm
Scott #62: Sincere people never see themselves as the pitchfork-wielding peasants. They always see themselves as rational, clear-sighted, cautious, and wise. (Not counting the grifters who leap at opportunities to turn fear mongering into cash.) That doesn’t make them any less wrong. After all, the antizionist academics have written volumes excoriating Israel, explaining why Israel does not deserve to exist, why all of history shows that Jews have no right be where they are, or anywhere, why Jews are uniquely evil. They can make it all sound reasonable and believable. It’s not easy to separate yourself from your motivated reasoning, to truly try to understand whether your worries have a basis in reality, or whether you are searching for evidence to confirm your biases.
As I’ve said many times, I do not believe in AI doomerism at all. If we’re talking about AI safety in terms of making self-driving vehicles less likely to get into accidents, for example, sure, no problem. If we’re talking about AI safety in terms of guiding a singularity-evolved AGI not to turn Earth into a paperclip factory or executing Yudkowskian tortures on models of ourselves, then no.
Comment #72 November 2nd, 2025 at 9:15 pm
Garald #69:
Yes, saying that about 7% of the Israeli electorate was leftist in late 2022 sounds about right.
Scott regularly declares his love for Enlightenment classical liberalism, and is not known to be a Margaret Thatcher fan. I think that pro-Enlightenment and pro-classical liberalism is a broad tent, encompassing both FDR-loving New Dealers and Reaganite neoliberals. The crisis of the past 10 years is that classical liberalism is on the decline on both the right and left, replaced by competing fascist, religious, woke, and socialist authoritarianism movements.
Yes, I stand by my putting down the Israeli left for having only 3.3% of the Knesset (more if we count Hadash, which I didn’t). I do not consider the Zionist Israeli left to be enemies, but I do think that their policies of appeasement have been ruinous for Israel over the last 35 years. Even then, my problem is not with the Israeli left in and of itself, but rather the policies of appeasement that the left embraced. This was not only a problem of the left; there were non-leftist appeasers such as Sharon, and the entire “far-right” Netanyahu government that tolerated Hamas’s rule of Gaza before October 7. I would be more supportive of the Israeli left if it did not invest all of its political capital in appeasement.
Also, I don’t see why clarifying my views should count as “softening the discourse”, especially since I stated that I stand by my comment #56. I already knew that comment was being watched from the outside, since I wrote it in a public forum.
Comment #73 November 2nd, 2025 at 10:59 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYzPVKg3wyo
Leonard Cohen – the Future
Comment #74 November 3rd, 2025 at 12:36 am
Scott #38: well I set myself up by summarizing to “depth” later in my comment, but earlier I said “that have depth and are based on real knowledge and come to honest conclusions different from yours.” I would guess you are aware of the many many different accounts of the history of this conflict and of negotiations within it. You believe in the purely Israeli account, in which there are absolutely clear good guys and bad guys at every point in time, in which the entire history of negotiations over 77 years or more is “the immense sacrifices that the majority of Israelis were willing to make for peace, and of what Israelis learned when those sacrifices were answered with, in effect, “no, we just want to drive you out or slaughter you all, because you’re Jews.”” You’re entitled to believe what you want, and you’re smart enough that I have to guess you’re aware of all the other accounts of the history that are not nearly so simple and straightforward? For example, the works of the Israeli “new historians” (not so new anymore), or Nathan Thrall’s book The Only Language They Understand. Or even this short summary of negotiations, https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/israel-palestine-history-peace/, which I would guess you will dismiss as absurd propaganda, but digest the quotes and the links backing the account, e.g. from Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. And consider that many people consider Marwan Barghouti, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marwan_Barghouti, to potentially be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, the one person who could unite the different Palestinian factions and negotiate a two-state solution, and Israel has kept him in jail since 2002, refusing to release him in the recent prisoner release, and to me it’s obvious this is because Israel does not want a Palestinian leader who could actually unite Palestinians and negotiate a peaceful two-state solution. Israel has also treated him very brutally, as the wikipedia article relates, including most recently – tho Israel denies it – on Sept 14 of this year, when he was beaten brutally, left unconsious for hours, bleeding and badly injured (eg, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwvr2xpkz0o), Anyhow, my point is not really to argue, as I don’t expect to get anywhere; it is to point out that from a lot of complex information and accounts you have chosen to believe a very simple Israel good/Palestinians bad narrative, and the points of view that disagree with you are, as I said, based on real knowledge with very different interpretations or accounts of the history. When you dismiss all others as anti-semites or dupes, you are saying “my narrative is true and all other accounts are false, period”, rather than acknowledging the complexity of the situation and that others have valid points of view based on different well-founded and well-supported narratives, narratives that you reject, but that are not the narratives of anti-semites or of dupes.
I’ll say more generally that you have an incredibly simplistic take on the complexity of Palestinian society: that they all simply want to slaughter or drive out all Jews because they are Jews. It paints them as a cartoon or video-game villian, one dimensional and without ordinary human feelings. What might they have experienced that would make them want to take back the land they were driven out of, other than the current occupants being Jews? What other experiences have they had of oppression and denial of the most basic human rights? What aspirations do they have to live ordinary lives with basic rights and self-determination like every other human being and family? Have you noticed that, at least since the 1973 war, Palestinian negotiating positions have largely focused on a state within Gaza and the West Bank, not on getting back Israel, certainly the Palestinian Authority positions and at least in recent years the Hamas positions as well. It’s true that many Palestinians, including Hamas’ official position, want the full right of return to Israel proper, but the negotiating positions have more and more accepted the reality of Israel’s presence. It’s a tangled tangled web of endless wrongs done by each side to the other, and to see this and arrive at the simple cartoon villian/cartoon hero version is kind of amazing to me.
Finally, on genocide: the reasons for calling it this go beyond the civilian:combatant ratio, to the systematic destruction of the medical system, educational system, agricultural and food-producing system, water systems and sanitation systems, and of civilian housing, systematic targeting of journalists, medical personnel, writers, human rights workers, professors, and others (most often targeted at home at night with their entire (often extended) families), as well as the many statements by Israeli leadership showing intent to destroy Gaza and Gazan society. You no doubt will believe that this was all just fighting Hamas, but those are some of the issues up for discussion in resolving the genocide issue. Have you read any of the accounts documenting the case for genocide, just to challenge yourself with evidence conflicting with your beliefs? But as for the civilian:combatant ratio, Israel and Israeli supporters have argued for 1.5:1, and you take this as a proven established fact. Far from it. Chatgpt is hardly the final authority, but just as an assay of the state of the discussion or evidence, I asked chatgpt 5:
Can you summarize the evidence on the civilian:combatant ratio in Israel’s war on Gaza since Oct 7 2023?
and it responded:
Here’s the short version, with what different credible sources say and how they got there. I’m using figures current through Oct–Nov 2025.
What’s the civilian:combatant ratio?
• Implied 72%–81% civilian (range from U.S./IDF militant counts + Gaza total deaths):
By May 5, 2025 Gaza’s Health Ministry (as relayed by major outlets) reported ~52,600 total deaths. U.S. intelligence estimated 10k–15k militants killed as of Jan 2025; the IDF claimed “nearly 20k Hamas fighters” by Jan 2025 but hasn’t updated since. Those combinations imply civilians are ~62%–81% of the dead; using the U.S. range gives ~72%–81% civilian. 
• Leak-based estimate: ~83% civilian:
A Guardian/+972/Local Call investigation of a classified IDF database (May 2025) found 8,900 named fighters listed as dead/probably dead when total deaths were ~53,000, implying ~17% combatant / ~83% civilian. (The IDF did not publicly release this database.) 
• Methodological estimates (independent analysts): ~74%–84% civilian:
Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) and economist Michael Spagat derive ratios from gender/age patterns and other proxies; they converge on ~74%–84% civilian for 2023–24 depending on assumptions. 
• UN/WHO proxies and breakdowns:
UN OCHA’s Oct 7, 2025 breakdown attributes ~30% children and ~16% women among the dead (IDs-based subset), a 46% women+children proxy often used to gauge civilian share; OHCHR previously reported “nearly 70%” of verified deaths were women and children (note “verified” is a smaller subset than the total). 
• Incident-level documentation (Airwars):
Airwars’ investigations show exceptionally high-casualty events and extensive civilian harm—especially in Oct–Nov 2023—but do not publish a single war-wide civilian:combatant ratio; their records support large civilian tolls in mass-fatality incidents. 
What drives the different numbers?
• Different denominators: Gaza’s Health Ministry reports total deaths (combatant + civilian) but generally doesn’t classify by combatant status; analysts then combine those totals with separate militant-killed estimates (IDF or U.S. intel) to infer ratios. If the militant count is higher, the civilian share looks lower, and vice-versa. 
• Verification subsets vs totals: UN “verified” fatalities are a vetted subset and skew toward cases with full documentation; the verified share of women/children has been high, but the verified denominator is much smaller than Gaza’s overall tally. 
• Proxy methods: Independent studies often use women/children proportions as a proxy for civilians and/or statistical techniques (e.g., capture-recapture) to adjust for undercounting; those typically yield civilian majorities. 
• Indirect deaths not in many tallies: Malnutrition and disease deaths have mounted and are often excluded from “violent deaths” counts; WHO and academic work indicate substantial additional mortality, which would raise the civilian share further. 
Bottom line (as of Nov 3, 2025)
• Across reputable approaches, most fatalities appear to be civilians. Reasonable, source-dependent ranges for the war-wide ratio cluster around ~70%–85% civilian (i.e., ~3:1 to 5:1 civilian:combatant), with a lower bound near ~60% if you take the highest IDF militant figure against mid-2025 totals. Exact figures depend on which militant count and which methodology you accept. 
If you want, I can put these into a small table with sources and the exact assumptions used for each estimate.
Comment #75 November 3rd, 2025 at 6:12 am
Well said. I second every word, Scott.
There is an interesting though expected convergence of both the right and left towards antisemitism. The right is naturally adapting to Nazi-like race driven antisemitism we’ve seen during the 20th century. The left on the other hand, is driven, through figures like Mamdani, to the 1960s Soviet-concocted antisemitism in the form of Anti-Zionism–a hate movement driven by ideological dogmas about obscure “Western colonialists” clumsily though cunningly projected on to Jews, so to exploit historical anti-Jewish sentiments.
The driving ethos behind the right’s antisemitism is the “globalist elite Jews controlling our government” trope (literally Hitler, now Fuentes, tacitly Tucker et al.).
While the driving ethos of the left’s antizionism hate movement is the “settler-colonialists Jews living on stolen Palestinian land” (historical fabrication; Mamdani, Naomi Klein, etc.).
The antisemitic “genocide” blood libel, perpetuated by many on the left, and now on the right, has become a new dogma. Indeed, without centuries of antisemitic indoctrination and folklore it would be impossible to pretend the war in Gaza, literally instigated by the Palestinians in a horrific deliberate massacre, is actually a “genocide by evil Jews”. The number of casualties does not add up at all, the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio is low, all legal measures have been taken to follow international law, and clearly no intent has been even mildly substantiated. Yet the antisemites keep weaponizing the loaded “genocide” term in the hope that smearing Israel enough would eventually stick somehow.
NB the antisemite Zohran Mamdani just declared he is going to shut down Technion’s New York campus “over IDF ties”. This hate movement is directly damaging our field.
Comment #76 November 3rd, 2025 at 8:01 am
#74:
So, it looks like most of GPT’s sources use methodologies that significantly overestimate the number of civilian casualties. Then I’d guess the true figure is more like 60% to 75% (1.5:1 to 3:1) rather than 70% to 85% as GPT suggests.
Of course, I don’t know what the normal rates are for this sort of war (guerilla warfare in an urban environment).
By the way, you can rest assured that Aaronsen has read several of the accounts documenting the case for genocide, because that’s generally how he operates.
Comment #77 November 3rd, 2025 at 8:12 am
I urge every Jewish New Yorker to back Cuomo.
The definitive evidence that Mamsani is nothing but a Hamas manchurian candidate:
https://youtube.com/shorts/LmqLZzRegVY?si=zF13e1dmm4Cw0J88
Comment #78 November 3rd, 2025 at 9:08 am
Cria #15:
Sure. and given that for each tribe, there is often enough known history of what tribe they eliminated to obtain that land, there can be a succession of tribes also thrown into the ocean, until …
Comment #79 November 3rd, 2025 at 10:59 am
Hi Scott,
I think you have a view of the NYC mayoral election which is typical of non-New Yorkers. It seems like you see the Adams/Cuomo faction as basically moderate Democrats and Mamdani as radical. As a Zionist Jewish New Yorker (I was at your talk in the CU philosophy dept the other week), my view and I think the widespread view in the city is quite different.
Cuomo and Adams are not moderates. They are radicals in the service of corruption and self-aggrandizement. Adams is a reflection of Trump, everything he does is for gain. Cuomo is cut from the same cloth and showed many times as Governor that he is immoral and feels no sense of duty or responsibility for his actions. Those who endorsed Cuomo are not innocent moderates trying to keep the ship steady. They want a corrupt Democratic party and believed that NYC Jews like me would throw away good governance because we were afraid of Mamdani. Those who endorsed Cuomo in the primary, like Espaillat and Latimer, are tainted by their willingness to put another corrupt mayor at the head of NYC.
I want a mayor that 1. loves New York City, 2. is not corrupt, 3. is basically an ok person. Cuomo has plenty of time in politics and has showed us he does not like NYC, he is corrupt, and he is a bad person. By contrast, Mamdani went to daycare at the same place my son now goes to daycare, and the director tells me he is a good person, so there’s hope. I ranked Mamdani last in the primary but I did rank him and did not rank Cuomo.
If the so called moderates had lined up behind Zellnor Myrie (my #1) or Brad Lander, I think either of them (especially Lander) might have won the primary. My personal opinion? They didn’t endorse Lander because they don’t like Jews.
P.S. I really enjoyed your talk and would love to host you for Shabbat if you return to NYC. I’m a systems guy so it’s always fun to hear about a completely different area of CS.
Comment #80 November 3rd, 2025 at 11:40 am
Ty #39: rather than argue about the IAGS, perhaps it would be worthwhile to see what some specific genocide scholars have to say:
https://archive.md/20250515110623/https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/05/14/zeven-gerenommeerde-wetenschappers-vrijwel-eensgezind-israel-pleegt-in-gaza-genocide-a4893293
[requires google translate, unless you can read Dutch]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html
[with followup in https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-scholar-response.html%5D
Also former Prime Minister Olmert, who does not say ‘genocide’ but speaks of war crimes:
https://archive.is/20250527124746/https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-27/ty-article-opinion/.premium/enough-is-enough-israel-is-committing-war-crimes/00000197-0dd6-df85-a197-0ff64a5c0000
Of course I’m sure you can line up statements from many specific named people arguing the opposite. FWIW, the genocide scholars above seem to distinguish between genocide scholars, who they say are in very strong agreement that it’s genocide; and holocaust scholars, who they say largely reject that idea.
Comment #81 November 3rd, 2025 at 12:09 pm
I think that your assertions about Mamdani are highly misleading.
In particular, Mamdani has floated eliminating *kindergarten* gifted admissions, and even many supporters of such programs believe that you cannot evaluate 4 year olds.
Mamdani supports the specialized high schools and using tests to determine admissions (and he himself went to Bronx Science). Many on the extreme left would scrap Stuyvesant and Bronx Science (despite their world-famous successes) because of perceived unfairness in access for all New Yorkers. But he is not one of those as far as I can tell.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/06/25/every-question-zohran-mamdani-meet-your-mayor-answer/
10. What’s the best way to admit students to specialized high schools?
Why we asked this question: State law requires three coveted specialized high schools to admit students based solely on a single exam’s scores. (Five other schools have adopted the same admissions procedure.) But the results are inequitable: less than 5% of offers last year went to Black students, while 7.6% went to Latino students, far lower than their population share.
Mamdani’s answer: Maintain the SHSAT as the exclusive test for all of the eight schools where it’s currently used for admission.
Comment #82 November 3rd, 2025 at 1:21 pm
Ken #74:
Marwan Barghouti is a mass murderer, responsible for planning and orchestrating the Second Intifada, which was the biggest wave of murderous terrorism against Israel before the October 7 massacres. Israel has really good reasons to keep him in prison, and portraying him as some kind of peace activist, let alone a “Palestinian Nelson Manedla”, is completely absurd. But perhaps not as absurd as your fantasy that him or anyone else could “unite the different Palestinian factions and negotiate a two-state solution”.
The biggest and most important Palestinian faction is undoubtedly Hamas. Unlike the PLO, Hamas never even pretended to be interested in a two-state solution. They are only interested in the mass-murder of Jews, the destruction of Israel, and the establishment of a totalitarian Muslim theocracy on Israel’s remains. In poll after poll of Palestinains, Hamas has either majority support or comes close to it. In any civilized society, Hamas would poll in the low single digits at best. Also, when Palestinians are polled with the question of how they want the final status of the land to look like after the conflict, they overwhelmingly pick an Arab state from the river to the sea. The “moderate” Palestinians want to accomplish this via first making Israel into a binational state with an Arab majority, via the “right of return”. Your assertion that any of the Palestinian factions have “largely focused on a state within Gaza and the West Bank, not on getting back Israel” is a ridiculous absurdity. If nothing else, if Hamas was no longer interested in Israel, why did they brutally murder 1200 Israelis in an invasion from Gaza, which they already controlled at the time? Also, why did the PLO keep insisting on the “right of return”, of all 5-6 million (or more) descendants of refugees into Israel, if they merely want Judea and Samaria and Gaza? The “right of return” is what led to the breakdowns of every peace negotiation since 1991. Also, your belief would not withstand even a passing glance at what the various Palestinian factions are teaching their people in the territories they control, as exposed by groups like MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch, and IMPACT-SE. Palestinian media and educational curricula treat Israelis and Jews in much the same way that the Nazi media treated Jews. Just look it up.
The most famous of Israel’s New Historians, Benny Morris, is now a hardline right-winger, and his position evolved as a direct response to seeing the evidence of Palestinian intransigence and violence vs. Israel’s outstretched hand for peace.
My main hope is that Israelis as a whole stop being so gullible and accept that the Palestinian leadership really are like a “cartoon or video-game villian”, as you put it. It may be an offensive view, but it has a much better track record of predicting what they would do in any situation than the “they are people just people like us who want the same things in life” approach. Given opinion polling, I believe that it is not just their leadership: the people, too, really are like that. You may call this a biased, one-sided narrative, but it also happens to be the truth.
Regarding the blood libels you repeat about the current Israel-Hamas war:
The genocide case is absurd, and the so-called “systematic destruction” of Gaza’s infrastructure is simply what happens in an intense urban war where Hamas uses hospitals as military bases and stores weapons and hides tunnel entrances under every residential building. I wonder why no one accused Allies of genocide against Germany and Japan given the extensive destruction inflicted on those countries in 1944-1945, or why no one accused the anti-ISIS coalition of genocide given the widespread destruction in Mosul and Raqqa?
“systematic targeting of journalists, medical personnel, writers, human rights workers, professors, and others” – where did you find these lies from? In truth, many “journalists” and “human rights workers” were active members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and were killed for that reason alone. Many others died as collateral damage, or cases of mistaken identity, which also regularly happen in war. Israel does not have a policy of deliberately targeting uninvolved civilians, and the narrative that it does is calculated to make Israel seem like a “cartoon or video-game villian”, as you put it earlier.
Regarding your AI-generated civilian-combatant ratios: nearly all of your sources are either leftists, the UN, or the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. In sum, totally compromised and untrustworthy. You can read a debunking of the Gaza Health Ministry’s ratios here: https://fathomjournal.org/statistically-impossible-a-critical-analysis-of-hamass-women-and-children-casualty-figures/.
Finally, to Scott: why do you allow zombies like Ken to keep posting anti-Israel screeds in your comment section?
Comment #83 November 3rd, 2025 at 1:22 pm
Ken #74
Hamas has the support of majority of palestinians. How do I know? Because if there was no such majority, the PA would have had elections in the past 20 years.
The PA itself publishes textbooks dehuminizing Jews. Christians (i.e. white/west) did nothing to stop this from happening for the past 30 years because of the law of Nature stating that Palestinians have to be paid to keep their failing economy running. No one is accountable for that.
Regarding the number of civilian casualties ratio – I think that once you lose 1k civilians in less than 10 hours, not by bombing, but by burning and raping, you just need to make this never happen again no matter the cost in both sides. You see, when the Allies reached the borders of Germany, they didnt stop to let Nazism recover and strike again. They would not have cared if.Hitler hides under a hospital or an orphanage.
Finally, you really don’t understand the mosters that are out there. I highly recommend memri.org.
Comment #84 November 3rd, 2025 at 1:42 pm
Sorry for comment spree.
What really amazes me is how weak Christians are, and how they are so unaware of it. Think about it – the Houties attacked European ships on a vital trade route and they could not be defeated. Hamas have shown that tunnels can stop a modern army. These moral dilemas Israel is facing are coming to your doorstep sooner than you think. And you better show that you are willing to get your hands dirty if you want to keep war away from you.
Comment #85 November 3rd, 2025 at 2:37 pm
Y:
“What really amazes me is how weak Christians are, and how they are so unaware of it”
Weak?
It’s all going according to the plan:
In Christian eschatology, the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 is often seen by some as a fulfillment of prophecy indicating that Jesus’ second coming is near. Many believe the modern nation of Israel is central to the second coming, with events in and around Jerusalem, including the final battle and the final conversion of the Jewish people to Jesus as their Messiah, being part of the prophetic timeline
Comment #86 November 3rd, 2025 at 3:35 pm
There are plenty of bummer things going on in the US to worry about, and it is reasonable to rank them by both How Bad and How Likely. On the HL ratings, let’s consider the probability of: R (nutcake Republicans taking over US and ending democracy) and L (nutcake Leftists taking over Democratic party and maybe be able to do something). My guess is P(R) > 0.5 and P(L) < 0.001.
On the P(R) front: anyone giving betting odds that tomorrow is the last election ever held in the US? Or, how about Trump actually becoming king? Don't laugh, who would have thought that the top of the US military would be replaced by doofuses and nuclear bomb testing restarted? So, yeah, P(R) is plenty big to be concerned about.
On the P(L) front: I live near a largish midwestern university, and socialize with 18 to 29 year olds a lot more than anyone my age ought to, and can report back that the antisemitic buzz level in these parts is near zero.
Comment #87 November 3rd, 2025 at 9:35 pm
https://x.com/DavidMKeyes/status/1952349304397717686
Comment #88 November 3rd, 2025 at 10:30 pm
In comment #80 I posted a link to an in depth Dutch article on what many genocide scholars have to say about the war on Gaza. The link I posted went through archive.md, and seems to be down. However the original article apparently is no longer paywalled, so anyone wanting to read the article (requiring google translate if you can’t read Dutch) can use the original address:
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/05/14/zeven-gerenommeerde-wetenschappers-vrijwel-eensgezind-israel-pleegt-in-gaza-genocide-a4893293
Comment #89 November 4th, 2025 at 1:38 am
I know many Jews are concerned about the rising tide of anti-semitism.
I don’t see Zohran as one of the anti-semites. Bernie is a pretty reasonable person and he seems to be fully supportive of Zohran.
Zohran opinions on Israel and Palestinian conflict are simplistic, but I don’t think he believes in eradication of Israel. If pushed, he will likely end up saying something like two states on UN borders.
It is important that the actions of the current right wing Israeli government is actually a major driver of antipathy y towards Israel. They are trying to resolve all problems by force.
I wouldn’t count on Israel being a safe place without the US support. So if the US attitude towards Israel changes, Israel by itself cannot stand up to its enemies. It is important for Israel to pay attention to what its friends are telling him, and act on more measured ways. The attack on Qatar was beyond stupid and it was the action of an arrogant unhinged leadership acting with extreme impunity.
Jewish people being concerned for another Holocaust is justified, but one should acknowledge that for the past year Israeli government was committing war crimes against civilian population of Gaza, and Jewish settlers continuing to illegally occupy the West Bank.
Some of the fat right politicians in Israel are literally comparable to Hitler and Nazi Germany and that is a very sad thing. You would expect that people who have suffered so much would be more sympathetic towards the suffering of others.
Many Israelites are opposed to the current right wing government, but Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack seems to have led to surge of extremism in Israel as well. And hard power has limits, as we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. The smart leaders turn military wins into political ones opening a new chapter with peace. Stupid leaders, whether Napoleon or Hitler or Sadam or the ayatollahs in Iran, over do military and then lead to a overwhelming reaction that erases their previous military wins.
I am hopeful that Trump’s pressure on Israel to allow the Gaza to be run by Palestinian technocrats and with order enforced by friendly Muslim countries might finally lead to a peaceful end to the current phase of hostilities and replace Hamas with more moderate people.
The ball is too a large extent is in the hands of Israel at this point as it has the upper hand.
And let’s not forget that Texans Gazan civilians are also humans who deserve safety and prosperity and dignity. If Germans post Hitler can be rehabilitated, it should be possible to rehabilitate Gaza post Hamas.
The only way to marginalize Hamas is to have a better alternative to it for the population, who can put their aspirations into it.
Comment #90 November 4th, 2025 at 5:09 am
Anon #89:
“The attack on Qatar was beyond stupid and it was the action of an arrogant unhinged leadership acting with extreme impunity.”
Some might argue the Israeli leadership made a mistake in NOT going after the Hamas leadership in Doha much earlier. It’s quite possible a ceasefire deal might have happened a lot sooner if they had, saving many lives in the process.
Some analysts suggest Qatar was miraculously suddenly able to exert more pressure on Hamas to sign up to a ceasefire following the strike as there was real fear the war might come to Doha. Amit Segal called it the “most successful failed assassination in history.”
Comment #91 November 4th, 2025 at 8:38 am
comment #90
I think that position is beyond stupid. You don’t attack a US ally.
The current government is turning the situation from everyone against Iran to everyone against Israel. If Israel is going to have peace, it needs to pay attention to not just its own needs but also the needs of friendly Arab governments on the region.
Israel’s current course is turning friends and allies who helped Israel defend itself against Iranian attacks into enemies.
It is time to move on from military action and turn into strengthening relationships with its Arab neighbors.
Israel is not a super-power and without the support of the US it would have very very difficult time.
The reaction that we see in some right wing MAGA circles is mostly driven by the feeling that the junior friend is abusing their relationship with us and not respecting our interests.
I repeat it: Israel without the US support would have extremely hard time. The idea of military self relience is a pipe dream, Israel does not have the resources, like most other countries, to defend itself against other powers. It is highly dependent on the US’s good will towards itself. It should learn that its safety is dependent on the US support and in building alliances and friendly relationships with its neighbors.
Throwing a few things that would allow its Arab and Muslim friends to say they influenced Israel to their population would go a long way.
The biggest threat to Israel is not external but the right wing extremists inside Israel.
Comment #92 November 4th, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Hi Scott,
The end of representational democracy, war/genocides, and biosphere collapse are all very interesting … but let me try to get you back on topic for this blog.
Has it been proven that we do not live in a simulation, or not proven?
Cheers!
Comment #93 November 4th, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Clint #92: Even that essay doesn’t claim to prove that we don’t live in a simulation (unless I missed it), and it reads like it may have been written under the influence of powerful psychoactive substances! 😀
Comment #94 November 4th, 2025 at 1:38 pm
#91:
>The biggest threat to Israel is not external but the right wing extremists inside Israel.
Agreed, except they are extremists only from our perspective; in Israel, they are mainstream. Plenty of people abroad, including liberal apologists for Israel, haven’t updated their database – what they see as the “peace camp” is fringe now, and people they dismiss as the irrelevant right-wing fringe are mainstream and dominant – their values are often normative, and their influence is ever-growing.
Comment #95 November 4th, 2025 at 2:34 pm
Dear Scott,
I agree with many things you said, except that it seems to me that antisemitism comes mostly the from the Democrats, from progressive and socialist Left. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tliab, and now Zohran Mamdani – they were elected and endorsed by Democrats. Most universities in US, the ones that rioted in favor of Hamas for two years – they are being run predominantly by Democrats.
You explained very well the reason why socialist views correlate with antisemitism and anti-asian racism. This correlation pretty much implies that the party most prone to “expropriate and redistribute” is also more prone to antisemitism.
Today, MAGA worries me much less than progressives.
Comment #96 November 4th, 2025 at 3:27 pm
Scott #93:
Sorry, I grabbed a preprint … explicit claim … here in the published paper.
I had the same record-needle SCREEERWLRTCK!!! reaction I had when Penrose used Godel’s theorems to make claims about the computability of consciousness …
Comment #97 November 4th, 2025 at 7:01 pm
Clint #96:
My main comment about that paper, is that I don’t see any arguments in it which actually depend on the topic being fundamental physics. It could be about the theory of accounting practice rather than the theory of everything, and the arguments would still go through.
Claude agrees: https://claude.ai/share/ae956595-0ddb-4948-a216-49ffe9095e4f
Comment #98 November 4th, 2025 at 8:17 pm
Garald #94: I consider myself a liberal and view many an action of the current US and Israel governments as deeply problematic. The difference is that in the case of the United States the criticism of the current US government seldom leads to the calls for US to be dismantled as an illegitimate state (nor have I heard calls for, say, the Russian Federation to be dismantled from my progressive anti-war anti-Zionist friends).
Comment #99 November 5th, 2025 at 1:21 am
Raoul Ohio #78,
The point is: to the same extent that Jews are entitled to claim their native land as they have no other place to flee to, and are determined to do whatever it takes in pursuit of self-preservation, so the First Nations of America should man up and do the same.
Comment #100 November 5th, 2025 at 2:23 am
Anon #90
I’ll try to give you the Israeli perspective.
Israelis grow on the epic capture of Adulf Eichmann by the Mosad in Argentina. Clearly this was not something Argentina agreed to or got an approval from the UN. For us, “never again” doesn’t mean we wait for someone to save us. It is in the Israeli DNA that anyone that murders hundred of Jews should never be safe. Not if they hide in Qatar, under a Gazan hospital, or in Guterres’s office.
Regarding *why* the US has a defense treaty with the funnder of ISIS, the host of Hamas leaders? Well that’s something you need to ask yourself. In my eyes, Trump just needed to tell US forces to march to the palace in Doha and the war would end in 24 hours.
Comment #101 November 5th, 2025 at 4:34 am
Chris DeWitt #34: The three physicists are Henri Abraham, Eugène Bloch, and Georges Bruhat. Interesting. But who is David?
The late BT was also fond of David Deutsch: “I can’t tell whether he (Heisenberg) is in favour of “explanations” in the simple(-minded?) Deutsch sense or not.” BT summarized that simple Deutsch sense as follows: “In Deutsch’s philosophy of science he regards (in simplified form) the true purpose of science, including quantum physics, as being not MERELY the prediction of results and testing them, but also that of EXPLANATION of the topic, that is, “what there is, what it does, and how, and why”.”
To me, this reads mostly like an observation, together with a prediction derived from it. The “blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life” could be interpreted as part of an explanation, but not necessarily as David’s explanation of his prediction.
Comment #102 November 5th, 2025 at 5:36 am
Hey, look on the bright side. At least we won’t have to listen to people sanctimoniously declare “there’s no room for antisemitism in New York City” anymore.
Comment #103 November 5th, 2025 at 9:29 am
#100
I know what Israelis are thought from young age. I am not saying the danger of another Holocaust is fake, it is real. There are significant number of anti-semites around the world.
What I tell you is that if you think you can guarantee your safety independently, you are dead wrong about it.
You are a pretty small country, you have a pretty small population, you are highly dependent on the good will of other Western nations. The self-reliance for survival is a pipe dream. You never had it, you will never have it. That is just a lie that you are thought from early age and has become a dogma.
Face the reality. Without the US support, you wouldn’t even be able to finish the current war with Iran. Without the US support, you would still be at war with Egypt and Jordan. Without the US you’re economy would fare no better than many other undeveloped countries. Respect what America has done for you.
You disrespected the US by attacking openly a US ally where the US has a major military base. Your government has known since the failed attempted at Hamas leader Mashal’s life where you were forced to give the antidote to Hamas that Qatar is off limits. But the current government ignored that.
If you want to be at war with all your neighbors, be mindful that in the US we have no interest in that, nor do Europeans. If you want to be alone and think you can survive without our support waging war endlessly with your neighbors go ahead, but be aware we might not come to rescue you if you keep repeating stupid strategy.
Your prime minister was humiliated by Trump to directly apologize to Qatar’s leader and promise it will never happen again. That is a lesson for you that most of your politicians despite whatever they tell you about acting with impunity actually understand they cannot act that way.
If you want never again, learn to build alliances and respect your allies. Going alone against the world will do the reverse and ensure that it will definitely happen again.
Comment #104 November 5th, 2025 at 11:45 am
On Jews in general and Zohran Mamdani in particular:
https://www.danisch.de/blog/2025/11/05/wer-steckt-hinter-zohran-mamdani/
(Just ignore the German part and focus on the embedded X tweets in English)
tl;dr: M. was (probably) financed by (jew) Soros and endorsed by a multitude of jews/jewish “N”GOs.
At the very least “interesting” …
Comment #105 November 5th, 2025 at 12:00 pm
It all goes to show that when you’re a small nation relying on a big ally for its security, you really have to be extremely careful with your soft power and public relation approach.
Blunt tactics to try and mask a tsunami of bad publicity may well work for a short time, but it just won’t cut it as a long term strategy to keep your ally’s citizens on your side.
You can’t act like a bull when you’re a frog.
Comment #106 November 5th, 2025 at 12:46 pm
“gentil gentile” #105: While of course I want the US/Israel alliance to continue, I want that more for the US’s sake than for Israel’s.
Israel did pretty well from 1948 through 1967, before it had any US government support whatsoever. Even today, while the US protects Israel in the UN Security Council and gives it useful weapons,
(1) the security assistance is just a tiny percentage of Israel’s budget (Israel could afford to pay full market price for the weapons it gets),
(2) the alliance benefits US defense companies at least as much as it benefits Israel, and
(3) the alliance involves the US restraining Israel at least as much as helping it.
Comment #107 November 5th, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Anon #100:
You disrespected the US by attacking openly a US ally where the US has a major military base.
Just to clarify, you are talking about this ally right?
Comment #108 November 5th, 2025 at 1:40 pm
Republicans wiped out across the country the same week they’re debating how much Holocaust denial is acceptable.
Comment #109 November 5th, 2025 at 3:33 pm
One thing I’d like to kindly point out about this NYC mayor election.
I hear this a lot:
“Zohran won by 50.4%, which is really weak compared to Adams and De Blasio winning at 66% back in 2021 and 2017”.
But, for Adams and De Blasio, the general elections were actual “proper” general elections, i.e. a Dem vs a Republican, each selected in the primaries, as it’s supposed to be.
This time, Zohran actually beat Cuomo cleanly in the primary, but then Cuomo decided to void the choice of the NYC Dem voters to run again as an independent in the general, turning it into a redux of the primary, with a Dem against a Dem.
If the general had just been Zohran vs Sliwa, most Cuomo voters wouldn’t have bothered to vote for either, and Zohran would have won with a massive margin compared to prior elections.
Comment #110 November 5th, 2025 at 5:43 pm
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-vanishing-middle-how-jews-are-being.html
Comment #111 November 5th, 2025 at 7:26 pm
Scott #38: I’ve been trying to avoid arguing about substance and just point out instead how, given the complexity of the situation, including the many learned narratives and histories based on real scholarly work and real facts that come to very different conclusions, that even though you have settled on one interpretation (that strikes me as both extreme and stunningly simple for a mind of your complexity and power), there is room for understanding other points of view as serious and well grounded in reality and not simply as anti-semites or dupes.
But I realize there is a genuine question you asked that I did not respond to:
I have to admit I don’t have deep knowledge of the oppressions by the Muslim world, though I am aware for example of the Saudis’ repression and executions of those who criticize the regime, the horrid treatment of women there, etc. and of at least some of the human rights abuses and repressions in other countries in that world. (“Aha!” someone will say. “He doesn’t even know about Muslim oppression yet is so focused on Israel. What an anti-semite/self-hating Jew.” To which I respond, (a) as a Jew, Israel is of importance to me. I fell in love with the place once, and there are many aspects of its culture that I still love. I have many Israeli friends, perhaps a few fewer than I used to. I hate to see the place going fascist, just as I hate to see the US going fascist. So I feel real pain when I see the wrongs it carries out, beyond the pain I feel at seeing any systematic repression, abuse, oppression, suffering. (b) Israel’s war is/was utterly dependent on US funding, and I am a US taxpayer.) But, I am not aware of an apartheid-like, South-Africa like ongoing repression and abuse and stripping of essentially all rights of an entire people like what I and I assume Mamdani and many of us see there, not to mention the mass expulsion from their land once and the continuing expulsion out of what’s left of their land now. Now you don’t think there is apartheid-like, South-Africa like ongoing repression and abuse of an entire people, fine. But understand that those of strongly focused on stopping Israel from its offensive actions against Palestinians (I understand there is also a need for defense, and that we will disagree on what is offense rather than defense) do see such a situation, as well as at least massive war crimes, and for many, genocide in the Gazan war. And if that is the situation you see, that is a reason why you will be focused on securing the rights of the Palestinian people. Understanding that point of view will give you a much better, and much more accurate, picture of what is behind the focus of many activists, and in particular of Mamdani, on Palestine and Israel, than your hypothesis that it starts with a fundamental Jew-hatred that then works backwards to arrive at a position.
Comment #112 November 5th, 2025 at 7:29 pm
Scott #38: I also didn’t respond to your saying that you thought the accusation of genocide was debunked both by the civilian:combatant ratio, which I addressed, and also It’s true the war is at least momentarily mostly ended under tremendous pressure on Netanyahu from Trump/Witkoff, tho I don’t think that negates the claim of genocide while the war was ongoing. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that they did so for release of 20 hostages — Netanyahu had long made clear that he would not stop the war if the hostages were freed but would continue until what he called the complete defeat of Hamas. They stopped the war because of Trump/Witkoff pressure and whatever they felt they were promised and/or threatened with by Trump/Witkoff. But understand that Israel continues to block aid despite its promise to allow in 600 trucks/day during the ceasefire, allowing on average less than 100 trucks per day for the first two weeks and now averaging perhaps 130 trucks/day; Israel continues to occupy 53% of Gaza (not a ceasefire violation, just a fact of the agreement), and is unlikely to relinquish any of that without more tremendous continued Trump/Witkoff pressure; and that Israel is engaged in massive military ceasefire violations, including constant shellings, shootings, and bombings that have killed an average of 9-10 Palestinians/day since the ceasefire started, as well as continuing destruction of civilian structures. If you think the violations are heavily weighted towards, or all on the side of, Hamas, you can get a more detached overview — not the final word, of course — by asking your favorite non-Grok LLM
Comment #113 November 5th, 2025 at 9:15 pm
It’s a funny thing about As-A-Jews; they often say their Jewishness is important to them (though this is my first time seeing one claim to care about Israel), yet their talking points are lifted straight from Hamas’ press releases. Sometimes they even go beyond them, e.g. “Israel continues to block aid despite its promise to allow in 600 trucks/day during the ceasefire, allowing on average less than 100 trucks per day for the first two weeks and now averaging perhaps 130 trucks/day”, which not even Hamas claims:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/1/israel-still-blocking-most-gaza-aid-as-military-carries-out-more-attacks
Comment #114 November 5th, 2025 at 9:48 pm
Until a few days ago I had no idea who Nick Fuentes was. His videos were among the disturbing things I’ve ever seen. A few days ago my friends daughter said on finding out she was part Jewish said “Yuck. I don’t want to be be Jewish”. She is a left university student. She has no idea I’m Jewish I imagine. But worse, my friend said nothing. Neither did I.
What is the saying? “This is as dumb as AI will ever be”. So too, Mamdani is as reasonable as the antisemites will get. Mamdani is the lit match playing in a powder keg.
Within 25 years most of us will be living in Israel. Whether we’ll be any safer I don’t know.
Comment #115 November 5th, 2025 at 10:10 pm
#107
yes, I am taking about that Qatar.
Deny as you please but you know as well that Israel was forced to save former Hamas leader Mashal after trying to kill him in Qatar, and Qatar was off limits for Mosad since then, and this time Israel was forced to apologize to Qatar.
It is the same one that Trump signed as executive order to defend if it is subjected to any external attack.
So whether you like it or not, it is our ally, and by attacking it you show disrespect to the US.
Comment #116 November 6th, 2025 at 12:16 am
Anon #115:
“Deny as you please but you know as well that Israel was forced to save former Hamas leader Mashal after trying to kill him in Qatar, and Qatar was off limits for Mosad since then…”
Except it didn’t. The assassination attempt happened in Jordan, not Qatar.
Comment #117 November 6th, 2025 at 6:20 am
Ken,
“But understand that those of strongly focused on stopping Israel from its offensive actions against Palestinians (I understand there is also a need for defense, and that we will disagree on what is offense rather than defense) do see such a situation, as well as at least massive war crimes, and for many, genocide in the Gazan war.”
Can you please spare us these obnoxiously long winded posts bereft of real content? It shouldn’t take so many words for you to declare yourself. Make no mistake, Scott knows full well you accuse of Israel of “South Africa-like apartheid”, genocide and all manner of other crimes. We don’t need so many words obsessively repeating the same.
Comment #118 November 6th, 2025 at 7:07 am
I just want to thanks Ken for explaining the position that here in europe is the one hold by almost everyone. Of course we could be ignorant, who isn’t, but we don’t think we are.
Comment #119 November 6th, 2025 at 7:44 am
one note of hope for any US religious minorities that may feel a wave of persecution coming their way:
millions of muslims have managed to survive in the US inspite of the long and proudly assumed islamophobic stance of the GOP/MAGA base.