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In a Le Monde op-ed, Oman's Badr al-Busaidi argues the West's decades-long policy of "containing" Iran was always misguided, and that the true threat comes from Tel Aviv. Al-Busaidi pushes for a new security order built around regional states.
Mondoweiss, July 19, 2026
Donald Trump has agreed to supply Saudi Arabia with nuclear technology while also agreeing to remove most of the standard safeguards that ensure that such tech can't be used to create a nuclear weapon. Even for Trump, this is reckless, short-sighted, and stupid.
YouTube, July 22, 2026
The White House announced an agreement to supply nuclear material to Saudi Arabia, and then killed its own deal by linking it to normalization with Israel under Israeli pressure. But even if the deal fails, it will significantly impact Gulf politics.
Mondoweiss, July 25, 2026
The war in Ukraine has reached a pivotal moment. On this week’s Globalists, Josh White and I discuss what Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s dismissal of military head Mykhailo Fedorov means for the conflict, the political stakes, and why a negotiated peace remains as distant as ever despite Donald Trump’s promises.
The Battleground, July 26, 2026
The hysteria around New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reached a point of such extreme absurdity that it must be confronted directly and forcefully.
It is not only racist and Islamophobic in nature, it is in fact also incredibly antisemitic and poses a direct danger to every Jew, not just in the city but across the country.
It all comes back to the fact that Jewish community leaders have no sense of Judaism beyond a cultish, one might even say idolatrous, passion for the State of Israel. Their zeal, blindness, and hate is matched and often even surpassed by some of their Christian religious cohorts, racist haters of Arabs and Palestinians, and ultra-nationalists who see in Israel the focal point of the “clash of civilizations.”
If this were only a matter of ideological debate or even political jockeying, we might simply engage in a battle, as we must do in any case. But there is more here than a mere difference of ideology or political positioning. What is happening right now in New York around Zohran Mamdani is a distortion of reality that threatens not only to unleash a wave of hate even more powerful than that which has turned a blind eye to a genocide in Palestine; it threatens to undermine the very effort to fight the increasingly barbaric and authoritarian nature of our country.
You’d never know there were two separate stabbings in New York
On Thursday afternoon, a man named Raul Morales stabbed two men on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The press has overwhelmingly focused on the second man he stabbed, Moshe Grunhaus, who was visibly Jewish, wearing a kippah, when he was stabbed.
Morales had stabbed another man just minutes earlier a short distance away, named Chok Sung, of obvious Asian descent and not apparently Jewish in any way. According to witnesses, Morales was heard to yell Allahu Akhbar during the attacks, though so far, there is no report that he is Muslim.
Before anything was known about the attack, the howls went out that Mandani had provoked the attack because he had called Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal.
These are acts of antisemitism by fanatical supporters of Israel under the guise of both legitimate political discourse and a phony defense of Jewish people.
The first bit of antisemitism is also mixed with the erasure of anti-Asian racism. Mr. Sung has gotten little of the attention, sympathy, and outrage that was, quite justifiably, given to Mr. Grunhaus. Indeed, the attack on Mr. Sung was not classified as a hate crime at all.
But along with that erasure is the reduction of Moshe Grunhaus to nothing more than his Jewish identity.
A Jewish man was viciously and senselessly attacked, but do we know for certain that he was attacked because he was Jewish? Was Mr. Sung attacked because of his Asian identity? Perhaps, but the reaction that insists that it must be the case and the focus on it being primarily an antisemitic attack reduces Mr. Sung to invisibility and Mr. Grunhaus to nothing more than a Jewish person.
It is certainly likely enough that these were hate crimes and certainly that is first avenue that bears investigation under the circumstances. But it is also possible, until we know otherwise (which, perhaps we do by the time you are reading this) that both men were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and ran into a man who wanted to cause mayhem. While only 10% of New Yorkers are Jewish, the Upper West Side is home to a very substantial modern orthodox Jewish community.
The second act of antisemitism that was committed by Israel’s defenders was the ongoing conflation of Israel with Jews. Worse, in this case, it is the conflation of a horrific war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, with all Jews.
They did this by blaming Mamdani’s recent video where he called for Netanyahu’s arrest on charges of war crimes, charges that, while they need to be adjudicated in a court of law, are very clearly substantive enough to warrant arrest.
Even before Thursday’s stabbing, Mamdani was being attacked for “singling out the world’s only Jewish state,” and even for antisemitism in the message. The United Jewish Appeal (UJA), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC), and others were lying in wait for any incident they could pounce on to blame Mamdani’s allegedly “inflammatory rhetoric” for stoking antisemitism.
Most egregiously, Mamdani’s statement was focused squarely on the person of Benjamin Netanyahu. Mamdani didn’t even mention Israel, much less Jews.
What he did do was call for the United States to renounce its position as a rogue state that places itself and its selected allies above international law and comply with an ICC warrant.
Was it a political stunt? Of course. Mamdani knows very well that the U.S., under any president, is not likely to submit to international law. Although Bill Clinton initially signed on to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, it was never ratified and George W. Bush rescinded the U.S. signature less than eighteen months later. Congress subsequently passed a law restricting American cooperation with the ICC.
It’s not inconceivable that someday an American president could reverse that stance, but such a day is very far off, and is certainly not going to be seen under a man like Donald Trump.
The lies of the anti-Mamdani campaign
Mamdani has become a major focus of the effort to both conflate antisemitism with all criticism of Israel and to try to redeem Israel’s image in the wake of its genocide in Gaza. It’s not going well, as Mamdani remains a very popular figure in New York City and beyond.
But these groups are playing the long game, and the key strategy they are employing is to claim that Mamdani is stoking antisemitism and that it is growing to terrifying proportions. Without a doubt, these groups have succeeded in their antisemitic mission of terrorizing Jewish people, not only in New York, but all over the United States.
They use specious claims and unverified “facts.” For example, in the wake of the stabbing, the UJA put out a statement, saying, in part, “Words have consequences. Particularly, words from the Mayor of New York City. These attacks came soon after Mayor Mamdani once again used his official platform to viciously attack Israel, the only Jewish state. We cannot ignore the dangerous climate created when elected leaders relentlessly portray Israel — and, by extension, the many Jewish New Yorkers who feel a deep connection to it — as uniquely evil and illegitimate.”
From listening to the UJA and other aging Jewish organizations and media outlets that New York has become a hotbed of antisemitism. Here’s the reality, from the NYPD:
As the chart above makes perfectly clear, there has not been a rise in antisemitic attacks in New York. There was a rise, and it occurred largely under that famed lover of Israel, Eric Adams. Indeed, his tenure marked a major upsurge in antisemitic attacks, continuing a trend that began in the final year of Bill de Blasio’s term.
Yet somehow, we never heard that Adams’ oft-stated and fawning devotion to Israel was the reason. In a similar vein, we hear a great deal about how much attention Mamdani pays to the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, but we heard precious little about Adams’ pilgrimages to Israel for his own prurient political interests. Mamdani reflects the values and priorities of his constituents and supporters. Adams was in it for himself. But no one complained because he was pro-Israel. The double standard isn’t even barely hidden.
Hate crime statistics are notoriously difficult things to get right, in part because many targeted groups are afraid to call the police. If you are Black, Muslim, Latino, visibly queer, among other potentially targeted minorities, you are often as afraid of the police as of violent racists.
On the whole, though, Jews do rely on the police and do not have much fear of them, unless they are not white. Most Jews in New York, however, are (some 75% as of 2024). Still, there can be little doubt, in a city with as large a Jewish population as New York, that antisemitic attacks would be most common there.
But that did not start with Mamdani, and it didn’t rise because of him. Indeed, from the available evidence, it hasn’t risen at all.
This goes beyond scapegoating a Muslim Democratic Socialist who is the extremely popular and articulate mayor of New York. This is all about terrorizing Jews.
It is about demanding that people who care about a safe world for Jews can be recruited to support apartheid and genocide, not only maintaining the “progressive except for Palestine (PEP)” crowd but even using these terror tactics to frighten Jews and others into abandoning other progressive beliefs rather than trying to reconcile their views on Israel with their otherwise liberal values.
It is an effort to push back not only on the rapidly vanishing support for Israel’s war crimes and its very existence as an apartheid state, but on the progressive values that opposition to genocide has come to typify: universal health care, affordable rents and food, childcare for all, workers’ rights, an immigration policy that respects the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, and, above all, peace, justice, and human rights.
These are things that are anathema to the right-wing forces that are allying themselves with legacy Jewish organizations, even while many of the hawks on Israel who support the UJA, ADL, et al would agree with real progressives on some of those other issues.
Indeed, right wing groups are not just targeting anti-Zionists, but even liberal Zionist groups such as J Street or New Jewish Narrative. They target the groups for their criticism of Israel while also trying to pull their members away from any such criticism by making them feel that they are contributing to a wave of antisemitism that is growing at an exponential rate.
All Jews, like everyone else, have the right to their political views, and to hold them without fear of physical assault. Supporters of Palestinian rights must have the same protection. If the legacy Jewish organizations believe that talking about Israel’s crimes increases antisemitism, they should be opposing those crimes, not defending them and attacking those who try to stop them.
Instead, they are lying to Jews and those who care about Jews to protect Israel from the consequences of its crimes. They are terrorizing Jews on behalf of Israel and telling the rest of the world that Israel is committing those crimes in the name of all Jews. Short of physical violence, I can’t imagine anything more antisemitic than that.
By Fayha Shalash, Middle East Eye, July 26, 2026
Al Jazeera, July 26, 2026
By Shatha Yaish, +972 Magazine, July 24, 2026
By Matthew Hoare, The New Arab, July 25, 2026
Amwaj Media, July 24, 2026
By Biplob Kumar Das, Drop Site News, July 25, 2026
Palestine Chronicle, July 26, 2026
By Elie Mystal, The Nation, July 24, 2026
By Noah Hurowitz, The Intercept, July 26, 2026
Naharnet, July 26, 2026
By Jordanna Yochai, Responsible Statecraft, July 24, 2026
Al Arshaq Al Aswat, July 26, 2026
By Namita Singh, Maira Butt, and Rebecca Whittaker, The Independent, July 26, 2026
For professional information and contact:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchell-plitnick-616ba5
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