Vance’s relationship with Tucker Carlson is a public and politically consequential alliance, not an obscure association unearthed by opposition researchers. Carlson elevated Vance during his 2022 Senate campaign and pressed Donald Trump to select him as vice president in 2024. Vance calls Carlson a friend, concedes they have disagreements, and argues that a podcaster with millions of listeners cannot be cast outside conservatism merely because people dislike his views.

That proposition is evasive and revealing. The question is whether a movement retains any moral or intellectual boundary at all. Carlson’s popularity does not absolve him of cordially platforming Fuentes, an influencer who makes jokes and remarks about the Holocaust in ways that cast doubt on whether it occurred. It does not erase his hosting of Holocaust apologists or make smears of Jews and conspiratorial insinuations about Israel a mere disagreement among friends. These are judgments about fellow citizens, historical truth, and the legitimacy of hatred.

The vice president’s answer, delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition, was the answer of a man who wishes to preserve every option. Asked where he draws the line on appearing with figures including Carlson, Rogan, and Fuentes, Vance declined to address Carlson. He said he would not speak to a man who had attacked his wife or said Hitler was good, but that, outside a few “bright lines,” he tries to speak to as many people as possible.

This is not moral seriousness. It is moral idiocy, because it establishes a grotesque hierarchy of offense. A personal attack on the vice president’s wife is, rightly, beyond the pale. But a powerful friend can circulate anti-Jewish smears, host Holocaust apologists, and lend credence to the false conspiracy theory that Israel knew of the 9/11 attacks in advance and concealed the knowledge from America, and Vance cannot bring himself to say the friendship has reached a bridge too far. What, exactly, are his bright lines bright enough to illuminate? They appear to become visible only when the insult arrives at his own doorstep.

A national leader should not need a family grievance to recognize a moral obscenity. Fuentes does not become unacceptable because he insulted Usha Vance. He is unacceptable because he makes a political project of degrading Jews, minorities, women, and the constitutional idea of equal citizenship. Carlson does not become beyond criticism merely because he supported the Republican ticket. He becomes a grave problem when he uses a vast platform to dignify the undignified and then treats objections as proof of an establishment conspiracy.

This is where the influencer class deserves the contempt it has earned. Its vice is not that it is right wing, left wing, populist, libertarian, or contrarian. It has made transgression into a business model and cowardice into a pose of bravery. The influencer makes the offense itself the product, converts outrage into attention and subscriptions, then calls the predictable disgust censorship. Every boundary becomes a challenge. Every rebuke becomes content.

It is also a profoundly thoughtless class, one that mistakes risk-free provocation for courage. Most influencers will say the outrageous thing if it flatters their audience or enrages a designated enemy. They seldom take a genuinely controversial stand when the target is a profitable ally, a fellow traveler, or a host with a larger platform. Ben Shapiro, and a small number of others, have been willing to say no to this filth even when doing so risks friendships, bookings, and audience goodwill. That is the exception. For too many of their peers, the money and clout are simply too compelling. Principles are permitted only when they do not endanger the brand.

The result is a politics of permanent adolescence. They demand the privileges of power while refusing responsibility. They want to shape millions of minds, but not to distinguish argument from defamation. They want to be taken seriously as tribunes of the people, yet hide behind irony and questions when their words carry consequences. They invoke free speech as an exemption from moral judgment.

A free society has no obligation to be fooled by this performance. Calling a spade a spade is not censorship. It is civic hygiene. A man who casts doubt on the Holocaust is not a dissident intellectual. An antisemitic conspiracist is not simply an America First patriot with unusual foreign-policy views. A broadcaster who gives such a person a warm, lengthy platform is not practicing fearless journalism. He is granting legitimacy to poison, then charging the public admission to watch it spread.

Too many politicians cannot say these plain things because they are captive to the audience machines that decide their standing. They fear a hostile clip, a viral pile-on, a donor’s displeasure, or lost access to a massive microphone. So they substitute atmospherics for judgment. They praise “dialogue” and invoke “coalition-building.” The euphemism is not sophistication. It is surrender.

Vance faces a straightforward choice, not a complicated balancing act. He can value Carlson’s strategic usefulness over principles Carlson has repeatedly treated as disposable. Or he can say that no political coalition is strengthened by offering respectability to anti-Jewish hatred and racial extremism. He can be grateful for past assistance while refusing present complicity. Adults are capable of that distinction. Presidents must be.

The larger conservative cause also has a choice. It can become a movement in which every moral limit is negotiable if the offender has enough followers, enough clout, or enough willingness to hurt the right enemies. Or it can recover the elemental truth that political power is not an end in itself. A coalition willing to excuse bigotry for reach will eventually discover that the bigot is not joining the coalition. He is consuming it.

Fuentes is right only in the narrow, ugly sense that he recognizes the transaction. Vance wants the energy without the stench. But the stench is not incidental. It is the thing being sold.

Daniel Mael sits down with John Ziegler, host of the Death of Journalism podcast and the investigator behind With the Benefit of Hindsight, to re-examine one of the most infamous stories in sports and media history. Ziegler makes the case that the conventional version of the Penn State scandal is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong - and he walks through why the details surrounding Mike McQueary’s testimony, the date of the alleged incident, and the role of Joe Paterno matter far more than most people ever realized.

You’ll discover:

• Why Ziegler says the famous McQueary shower story collapses under basic scrutiny

• How the alleged date of the incident changed by more than a year, and why that matters

• Why he believes the prosecution, media, and Penn State all got swept into a moral panic

• What he thinks really drove the accusations against Sandusky

• How the Joe Paterno firing changed the entire public narrative overnight

Ziegler also breaks down the role of Aaron Fisher, the Second Mile charity, and victim number 10 Ryan Rittmeyer, arguing that the case was shaped by vulnerable people, questionable incentives, and investigators desperate to build a story that fit the moment. He explains why Penn State folded so quickly, why Paterno’s family has remained divided, and why he believes the true story has been buried under years of public certainty.

If you followed the Penn State scandal, remember Joe Paterno’s downfall, or want to understand how media narratives harden into “truth,” this conversation is essential listening. It’s a provocative re-examination of a case that still shapes how people think about journalism, institutions, and due process.

The commercial showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark knocking golfer Alexis Miestowski down as she moved to touch a co-branded Callaway driver. It was a parody of Obsession, a film about irrational fixation. The result was a joke without wit and an image without judgment. It should never have left the edit. Callaway approved it and later admitted that approval should never have happened.

The ad deserved to be pulled, and both companies owed an apology. But a tasteless skit is not a creed. It proves neither that Clark endorses violence against women nor that Good Good despises women in golf. Those threatening Miestowski in women’s safety’s name are merely bullies with a pretext.

Clark’s response should not be waved away as a satisfactory apology. He called the ad “super dumb,” “terrible,” and “not the greatest idea,” and said he does not support domestic violence or abuse. Necessary words.

The revealing part came when he explained how the catastrophe began:

“Good Good marketing team reached out to us, and they said, ‘We have this idea to essentially recreate or do a spinoff of the movie Obsession.’”

There it is. The obligatory escape hatch. The marketing team had an idea. The marketing team created the premise. The marketing team, apparently, is the real protagonist in the story of how Garrett Clark found himself starring in a Good Good advertisement as Garrett Clark.

That is not accountability. It is accountability in costume.

Clark is not a summer intern handed a script five minutes before filming. He is a co-founder and public face of the company. The spot used his persona, bore his company’s name, and cast him as its central figure. Foolish ideas are cheap. The question is who had the standing and obligation to stop it before it became public.

His own words make the evasion worse:

“Once I watched it back and it got posted, my skin was crawling. I was cringing.”

“It got posted.” As if the video were a thunderstorm. As if no human being chose to release it. As if the co-founder who performed in the commercial had no voice until the internet informed him of its existence.

No one needs to pretend Clark personally pressed the upload button to recognize the absurdity of that posture. Senior leaders do not get to be passengers in disasters built around their own faces. If he saw a finished ad and thought it was, in his words, “the worst ad known to man,” the question becomes sharper, not softer: why did he allow the world to see it before the world forced him to regret it?

Clark eventually said, “Good Good messed up by promoting a very poor taste ad that was not good in any way, shape, or fashion.” Correct. But “Good Good” is not a fog bank. It is people, reporting lines, judgment calls, and leaders. His video asks the public to identify a collective failure, then provides an unmistakable hint about which collective should carry the embarrassment.

The first law of leadership is not complicated. Credit rises; blame rises faster. A leader may praise his team when things go well. When they go badly, he does not point to the people beneath him and call it context. He absorbs the blow. He protects the people he leads in public, resolves personnel questions in private, and says plainly: this happened on my watch, I participated, and I failed to stop it.

Clark did not do that. He offered contrition, but he salted it with alibis. He apologized, but he did not fully own the decision. A real apology does not need a culprit waiting in the wings.

Callaway should be judged by the same standard. It approved the ad, let Good Good take much of the first hit, and only later acknowledged its role. More than one adult can fail at once.

Clark should not be treated as a perpetrator of real violence. Good Good should not be run out of golf. Miestowski should not be harassed for appearing in a bad production. Those are obvious truths.

So is this: a company can survive a bad ad. It cannot thrive for long if its leaders treat responsibility as a burden to be divided downward once the cameras start rolling.

Clark’s problem is not that he made one stupid commercial. It is that, when asked to account for it, he sounded like a man trying to explain why the people behind him failed to protect him from himself.

That is not leadership. It is cowardice dressed up as crisis management.

The children must never disappear from this story. They were innocent. They were entitled to safety in their own home. The manner of their deaths is appalling, and no diagnosis can make it otherwise.

Murder violates the most basic moral law. The commandment not to murder does not come with fine print. It speaks to the gravity of taking innocent life. The law, however, asks a separate question. Did the defendant understand the reality and wrongfulness of her actions, and could she govern her conduct? A crime can be monstrous and still require that inquiry.

Matt Walsh has no patience for it. In an August 12 post, he wrote: “I don’t care if she had postpartum depression. I don’t care how many psychiatric drugs she was taking.” He followed that with: “My sympathy for your depression dries up completely the moment you strangle your child to death.”

He is not asking jurors to scrutinize the defense. He is not weighing competing medical evidence. He is announcing that the state of Lindsay Clancy’s mind is irrelevant. A commentator can have that view. A jury cannot. The entire case turns on it.

Prosecutors say Clancy acted intentionally, rationally, and with planning. They point to her conduct before the killings and to testimony from a treating psychiatrist who did not observe psychosis. Those facts are grave, and the jury has a duty to reckon with them.

Dr. Paul D. Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who evaluated Clancy days after the deaths, gave the jury a sharply different account. Zeizel testified that Clancy had bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. In his opinion, she had “no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act” and was “unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law” because of “a mental disease or a defect.”

Zeizel said he spent more than 35 hours with Clancy over dozens of visits and reviewed her records. He described a woman who had gone to a perinatal clinic believing that her brain was damaged, fearing she would never get better, and feeling she should kill herself. She was paranoid that other people could hear her thoughts. She feared losing her children.

The public picture of psychosis is usually cinematic. Someone must speak nonsense, lose the ability to dress herself, or stare at imaginary figures in a corner. Zeizel told the jury that people suffering psychosis may still carry out ordinary tasks. They can drive, search the internet, speak coherently, and tend to a daily routine. None of that proves a healthy mind.

He testified that psychological testing did not suggest Clancy was pretending or exaggerating. He said he was present when she told Patrick Clancy by phone, from her hospital bed, that she had heard a male voice ordering her to kill the children and then herself.

Prosecutors have every right to challenge Zeizel. They pointed to errors in his report, his work with the defense, and the absence of earlier medical records documenting command voices. Those questions are part of the trial. The fact that they exist does not erase his testimony or permit the public to act as if nothing has been offered in Clancy’s defense.

The testimony of people who knew Lindsay Clancy long before this catastrophe cuts against the easy label of cold-blooded killer. Susan Clancy, her former mother-in-law, told the court that Lindsay was “begging for help.” She described insomnia, anxiety, sadness, and loss of appetite. She said Lindsay was trying to get better and see doctors. She called her “a very nurturing, very loving” mother.

Susan Clancy is Patrick Clancy’s mother. Her son lost three children. Her testimony does not decide the case, but it deserves more respect than the certitude of people who know the family only through grim headlines and viral clips.

Lindsay’s mother, Paula Musgrove, gave similar testimony. Her daughter had disclosed thoughts of harming the children. “This isn’t me. I’ve never been like this before,” Musgrove recalled her saying. Musgrove described paranoia, memory problems, and a daughter who wanted to get well enough to enjoy her children again.

The image that emerges is not of a mother who casually shed the duties of motherhood in pursuit of ease or self-indulgence. It is of someone once described as devoted to her children, frightened by her own deterioration, and reaching for help as her life narrowed into desperation. That does not prove an insanity defense. It makes contemptuous certainty impossible to defend.

Walsh has also treated postpartum suffering as a referendum on character. In another post, he argued that much of the “depression” parents experience after childbirth comes less from hormones than from demanding children who require adults to subordinate their desires. “The more selfish you are,” he wrote, “the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.” He later claimed that the real source of Clancy’s depression was “a selfish hatred of her children.”

Calling a serious medical crisis selfishness is not blunt honesty. It is medical ignorance dressed as moral seriousness. Postpartum depression is not a fashionable term for resenting responsibility. The CDC distinguishes it from the passing turmoil of the “baby blues” and lists persistent sadness, anxiety, anger, and feeling distant from one’s baby among its symptoms. The Mayo Clinic states that postpartum depression is not a character flaw or weakness. Genetics, physical changes, emotional strain, and sleep deprivation can all be part of the picture.

Postpartum psychosis is rarer and more severe. It can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal thinking, and a break from reality. Most women with postpartum mental-health conditions are not violent. The rarity of violence is precisely why the Clancy case should not be forced into a crude story about bad mothers or selfish women.

Clancy had repeated psychiatric appointments, medication changes, intrusive thoughts, serious sleep problems, and a voluntary psychiatric hospitalization shortly before the killings. She and Patrick Clancy have filed lawsuits alleging failures in her treatment. Those claims have not been adjudicated. Her attempts to obtain help are not in dispute.

A jury may decide that Lindsay Clancy retained criminal responsibility. It may decide that she did not. Either verdict must rest on the full evidence, not on a pundit’s claim that the evidence does not deserve attention.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan were the first victims, and no one else’s suffering belongs on the same scale as their lost lives. Their father is a victim, too. Patrick Clancy lost his three children, his marriage, and the family life he believed he had. His parents lost three grandchildren. Lindsay’s parents lost their grandchildren and, in a different but still devastating sense, the daughter they knew before her psychiatric collapse. The families will carry the absence of those children into every birthday, holiday, school year, and quiet ordinary day that follows.

Lindsay Clancy does not escape the consequences of what happened. She is paralyzed from the waist down after her suicide attempt. She is divorced. She remains alive with the knowledge that she caused the deaths of her three children. If the jury concludes that she was not criminally responsible, that finding will not undo any of this or send her back to the life she had. It will determine the setting in which she is confined and treated.

There are punishments that a courtroom can impose, and there are punishments that no courtroom could create. A life spent physically broken, estranged from the life and people one loved, and burdened by the knowledge of having destroyed one’s own family may, in moral terms, be more terrible than a death sentence. It is not mercy. It is tragedy without release.

The deaths of the Clancy children demand more from the public than a quick villain and a louder punishment. A society that refuses to understand how a loving, previously devoted mother could descend into such terror will have learned nothing from their loss.

The directive, Circular 3/2026, replaces a 2017 framework that was supposed to govern how Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah work together in operating Israel’s national first-responder network. What the new circular makes clear, in a way the old one apparently did not, is that MDA runs that network. UH operates within it. Those are not the same thing, and the Ministry has spent seven pages spelling out the difference.

MDA is Israel’s national rescue organization, established by law in 1950. It runs the national dispatch center. United Hatzalah, founded in 2006, operates a network of volunteer EMTs, paramedics, and doctors, along with a fleet of motorcycles. On paper, the two organizations have been cooperating for years. In practice, UH had been functioning more and more like an independent emergency service, advertising its own number, running its own dispatch, and sending out its own volunteers. The new circular puts a stop to that.

On the number specifically: all public emergency calls go to MDA. If someone calls UH directly, UH transfers the call to MDA immediately. UH’s dispatch center stays open, but its job is to support MDA’s operation, not to run a parallel one. The circular is explicit that UH must stop any public promotion of its own emergency line. No exceptions are listed.

The dispatch process itself has been redesigned to make clear who is in charge at each step. When MDA identifies UH volunteers as potential responders to an incident, it sends preliminary information to the UH dispatch center. UH reaches out to those volunteers, gets confirmation they can respond, and tells MDA. MDA then officially dispatches them through a new joint mobile application. Once that happens, MDA tracks the UH responders the same way it tracks its own, as part of its command and control operation.

UH dispatch does get one narrow form of input. If it spots a volunteer closer to the scene or better suited for the call that MDA has not identified, it can flag that person to MDA. MDA then decides whether to dispatch them. That is the extent of UH’s independent authority in the process. Nothing goes out without MDA’s sign-off.

The circular also bans the informal information sharing that has been a persistent problem in Israeli volunteer emergency response. No WhatsApp groups. No mass broadcasts. No passing incident details through any channel outside the official dispatch mechanism. The rule is stated flatly and without qualification.

MDA has six months to build a joint mobile application connecting both organizations’ dispatch systems. After that, there is a two-month pilot under Ministry of Health supervision before full rollout. Until the app is ready, MDA will proactively contact UH dispatch for CPR and unconscious-patient calls, asking them to locate and send up to two responders. UH is responsible for making sure no one else shows up.

The accountability section is where the circular gets pointed. Every six months, UH’s Medical Director and organizational head have to submit a declaration, verified by a lawyer, confirming that their active responders meet all training requirements. If UH’s official list of responders does not match who is actually in the field, or if training documentation is missing or incomplete, the Ministry of Health can pull UH’s operating authorization. Not suspend it. Pull it. That consequence is written into the circular, not implied.

MDA has its own reporting obligations. Monthly reports to the Ministry covering incident volumes, which organization each dispatched responder belongs to, and any other data the Ministry requests. A dedicated Ministry supervisor will oversee compliance. Periodic review meetings will include both organizations.

The circular is signed by Director General Moshe Bar Siman Tov. A copy went to the Minister of Health.

What this amounts to is the Ministry putting in writing something that was always supposed to be the case. MDA is the national coordinator. Every other organization in Israel’s first-responder landscape works within that structure. UH has a role in the system, and the circular defines it precisely. What UH does not get to do is advertise its own emergency line, send out its own volunteers without MDA’s involvement, or present itself to the public as a standalone emergency service. The 2017 circular was supposed to establish that. It clearly did not stick. Whether this one does will depend on how seriously the Ministry’s supervisor takes the job.

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He is right that extremist settlers have committed genuine crimes in the West Bank. Some of it is ugly. Mosques burned. Palestinian property torched. People killed. He is right that Defense Minister Israel Katz has refused to use administrative detention against suspected Jewish extremists, the same legal tool that gets applied to Palestinian suspects without much hand-wringing. These are real failures and no serious person should pretend otherwise.

But Stephens does not stop there, and the further he goes the shakier the ground gets.

He calls what is happening in the West Bank “anti-Palestinian settler terrorism.” He says it threatens not just Palestinian lives or Israel’s reputation but Israel’s security, its statehood, and Zionism itself. He warns of a third intifada. He invokes the specter of Lebanonization. These are not small claims. They deserve scrutiny, not just agreement.

Take the 867 figure. The IDF recorded 867 incidents of “nationalistic crime and settler violence” in 2025. Stephens cites this as evidence of a crisis that has become routine. What he does not tell you is what actually gets counted in that number. The Israeli security establishment’s definition of a nationalistic incident is broad: graffiti, trespassing, grazing disputes, property damage of various kinds, alongside genuine violent attacks. The IDF’s own internal assessment puts the number of hardcore perpetrators at around 70 people. Seventy. In a settler population of several hundred thousand. Netanyahu called them roughly 150 juvenile delinquents, which is politically convenient, but the underlying data is not as far from that description as Stephens implies. This is a fringe. A dangerous, under-prosecuted fringe that should face the law. But calling it a systemic terror campaign is a different claim entirely, and the numbers do not support it.

The terrorism label itself deserves a harder look. Terrorism has a meaning. It is the deliberate targeting of civilians to produce political fear through violence. October 7 was terrorism. The Palestinian Authority’s martyr payment program, which has been sending monthly checks to the families of people who murdered Jewish civilians for decades, is institutionalized terrorism. When settlers burn a mosque or attack a stonecutting factory, those are serious crimes. They are not a terror campaign. Conflating the two does not clarify anything. It erases a distinction that Israel’s defenders have spent decades trying to establish and hands that erasure to people who have been working toward it for years.

Then there is the question of Matan Vilnai. Stephens leans on the letter Vilnai organized, signed by retired senior officers, as evidence that serious security professionals are alarmed. Vilnai was at Entebbe. He served in a previous Netanyahu government. The biography is real. What Stephens does not mention is that Vilnai has spent his post-military career chairing Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization that has been pushing for Israeli territorial withdrawals for years and whose positions, by any honest accounting, track closely with the Israeli left’s platform. These are not reluctant professionals stepping forward with a verdict they wish they did not have to deliver. They are political actors who have been in sustained opposition to the current government and who found in settler violence a cause that gives their opposition a moral weight it otherwise struggles to claim. Read the letter. Do not treat it as an oracle.

Stephens argues that a government capable of assassinating a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse ought to be capable of stopping Jewish thuggery in the West Bank. It is a rhetorically effective line. It is also a false comparison. Covert operations against a foreign terrorist organization operating in a hostile state are not the same instrument as domestic law enforcement in a territory whose jurisdiction, civil administration, and military command are divided by decades of Oslo-era agreements. Netanyahu is not choosing impotence. He is governing a parliamentary coalition under wartime conditions, with real political constraints that did not appear from nowhere. That is not a defense of every choice he has made. It is a description of the environment in which he is making them.

On David Zini’s avoidance of the phrase “Jewish terror,” Stephens treats it as institutional cowardice. Consider a different reading. Zini runs an organization whose operational effectiveness depends on legal and definitional precision. “Terror” carries specific implications for how suspects are handled, prosecuted, and surveilled under Israeli law. Applying it to a category of conduct that ranges from graffiti to arson to murder creates procedural problems that a serious intelligence professional has every reason to avoid. A columnist finds the word “frictions” unsatisfying. A Shin Bet director has to actually manage the problem.

The Lebanonization warning is the most dramatic element of the column and the one that falls apart fastest. The IDF compiled and published the statistics Stephens is citing. Israeli security forces arrested more than 130 people in a single weekend following the most recent West Bank violence. The IDF’s own commanders went on record about their frustration with their inability to contain the problem. That is not what state collapse looks like. That is what a government with real failures looks like when it is still functioning well enough to document and arrest.

Israel spent two years managing a hostage crisis that consumed its government, its military, and its public, while watching Iran close in on a nuclear threshold and facing a Hezbollah arsenal that would test most standing armies. Its real enemies are in Tehran, in Beirut, in whatever is left of the tunnel network under Gaza. A column that frames 70 extremists in the hills of Judea as an existential test for Zionism, while those threats remain, is not warning Israel. It is looking away from what is actually coming.

On July 29, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein issued a 48-page Report and Recommendation concluding that Boteach willfully defied a direct court order by continuing to post about the Fontainebleau Hotel, its owner, and its lawyers on social media for months after being told to stop. Her recommendation: strike his legal defenses, dismiss his counterclaim with prejudice, and enter default judgment against him on the hotel’s claims. In other words, he loses.

The underlying dispute is almost beside the point now. The case began after a December 2024 confrontation in the Fontainebleau’s lobby between Boteach and another guest, Faiz Akbar. Boteach says he was threatened with murder in an antisemitic attack and that the hotel blamed him for provoking it. The hotel sued him for defamation, alleging he made false statements about the incident and the hotel’s response. Boteach filed a counterclaim asserting civil rights violations.

What happened next is where things went sideways.

By February 2026, the District Court had seen enough. The communications between the parties had become “toxic,” the court said, driven in large part by Boteach’s online activity. On February 20, the court issued an order that was hard to misread: it was “deeply disturbed by Defendant’s conduct,” including his “continued social media attacks aimed at Plaintiff and its counsel,” and it expressly directed Boteach to “cease such harassing conduct and social media references to Plaintiff and its counsel during the course of this litigation.”

Six days later, Boteach was back online.

In a video posted February 26, he described himself as a “Mordechai Jew” who would not submit, discussed a “world-renowned establishment” trying to “break” him through litigation, and accused unnamed Jews of being “self-hating” sellouts helping his enemies. The Fontainebleau was not named, but the court found it was unmistakably the subject.

Then came March. The day after his deposition, Boteach filmed himself standing outside the hotel. When a woman in the video said that a visibly Jewish person would be unsafe in London but that things were “completely different here,” Boteach turned, pointed directly at the Fontainebleau, and said: “that hotel — I’m not going to get into it — that would prove otherwise.” He then added, pointing at the building again, “I know it’s here because of what happened to me there and what’s happened to me now because of what happened here.”

The very next day, still in front of the hotel, he told his followers: “I’m here in Miami Beach, where I had business with the Fontainebleau Hotel yesterday. It’s right behind us. You guys all know the story of the Fontainebleau. I’m not going to get into it. Sad story.” He then added: “I had a tough day yesterday. Legal issues. I’m not going to get into them. But I’m a Jew that’s never going to cower or bend to antisemites or those that seek to protect antisemites.”

The judge found this sequence particularly revealing. Boteach acknowledged the court’s restrictions, said he wouldn’t discuss the case, and then discussed it anyway. That, the court noted, “demonstrates Defendant’s contemporaneous understanding of the District Court’s directive.”

It kept going. On March 24, Boteach posted a video ostensibly about a Broadway play on wrongful convictions, during which he asked: “Could you imagine that I’m in court, the victim of an antisemitic hate crime, being sued by people of overwhelming and endless financial power. Is the American judicial system fair? We hope so. But is it really if you’re a billionaire?”

Then came May 24, which the court called “perhaps the most egregious violations.” Boteach named the hotel’s attorney, Sean Burstyn, by name, questioned whether Burstyn appeared in materials associated with Jeffrey Epstein, raised questions about Burstyn’s connection to the death of Virginia Giuffre, and signed off by declaring that Burstyn “is the reason that 84% of Americans believe that attorneys are scumbags.”

Boteach’s explanation for those posts: a technological glitch. He said old drafts accidentally published themselves when he restored data to a new phone. The court wasn’t buying it, noting that even if that were true, it did nothing to explain the dozens of other posts he had deliberately published in violation of the order.

And then, on May 28, the same day his lawyers conferred with opposing counsel about a potential sanctions motion, Boteach posted: “June 29th Rabbi Shmuley’s Trial Against ‘that Hotel’ in Miami Begins. He will absolutely defeat the antisemitism-deniers. We need your support. Shmuley.com.”

At his deposition, Boteach admitted under oath that his posts were intended to cause the hotel and its lawyers to reconsider their litigation strategy. The court called this what it was: using social media as “an extrajudicial litigation tactic designed to influence whether, and under what conditions, Plaintiff continued to prosecute its claims against him.”

Boteach’s lawyers tried a creative legal argument to get him off the hook. The February 20 order used the word “DIRECTS” rather than “ORDERS,” they argued, meaning it was merely a suggestion he was free to disregard. Judge Elfenbein was not impressed. “Let there be no doubt,” she wrote, “that the District Court entered a judicial order on its docket containing a mandatory directive.” The choice of verb, she explained, “did not diminish the mandatory nature of the command or convert an enforceable judicial order into a nonbinding suggestion.”

This is not Boteach’s first sanctions problem in this case. He was previously ordered to pay $15,000 after leaking confidential surveillance footage of the hotel incident to his Instagram followers, who numbered over 90,000. That payment was made by his insurer, Chubb Insurance Company of New Jersey, a fact the court found significant. Because someone else paid the last penalty, the court reasoned, another monetary sanction would not deter him.

That insurance backstop may not be available this time. Liability policies routinely exclude coverage for intentional misconduct, and a federal judge has now found on the record that Boteach acted with “willful and blatant disregard” of a court order and used his violations as a calculated litigation tactic. Convincing an insurer to cover damages flowing from conduct a court has characterized that way would be a very difficult argument to make. He brought this on himself, and the bill may land squarely on him.

The parties have 14 days to file objections before the recommendation goes to District Judge K. Michael Moore for a final ruling.

The probe is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which has already requested documents from the company. Simad also disclosed awareness of a separate civil investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York into potential Paycheck Protection Program fraud. The company says it is cooperating with both.

Michael Shabsels and his wife Alyssa serve on the US National Board of United Hatzalah.

The collapse has been fast and ugly. Simad raised roughly $200 million from Israeli bondholders in December, then missed its first payment in May. It later emerged that about $34 million of that money had been funneled to companies controlled by the Shabsels brothers. The company demanded repayment. Michael Shabsels agreed, then said he couldn’t follow through.

Both the company and the brothers personally filed for bankruptcy in June. Simad, now run by a restructuring officer, is in the process of selling off its camps, including Mohawk Day Camp, Camp Chen-A-Wanda, and Camp Achim.

The Shabselses built their empire almost entirely on borrowed money. They held over 80 real estate assets and structured deals to achieve near-100-percent financing. They also accumulated more than $230 million from merchant cash advance lenders, the kind that can pull funds directly from a company’s bank account if payments stop. The bankruptcy filings stopped those withdrawals. Prosecutors are still piecing together what happened to the rest.

That is what made JD Vance’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s show more than an embarrassing performance. It was an abuse of public trust. Vance used the loose, clown-show atmosphere of the program to make grave claims about Israeli manipulation, divided loyalty and Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed intelligence connections. He spoke with the authority of the vice presidency, then took refuge in the casual evasions of an ordinary podcast guest.

The legitimate issue was foreign influence. Time reported that Israel hired Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X for a $1.5 million monthly digital campaign. Such activity deserves scrutiny, and criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic.

Vance went well beyond the reporting. He described a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” against the administration’s Iran policy. He claimed that American influencers had “quite literally” been paid through an operative funded by elements of the Israeli government. Yet the article said the amount received by creators remained unclear. Parscale denied that Israeli contract money paid influencers or financed opposition to the Iran agreement.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry denied interfering in American policy. Senator Tom Cotton’s response was harder to dismiss. Asked about Vance’s charge, he said, “I’m not aware of any intelligence regarding a secret influence operation aimed at changing American public opinion on negotiations under the MOU.”

Vance named no Americans supposedly purchased by this operation. He relied instead on phrases such as “certain elements” and “some people.” This is the coward’s form of accusation. No name to defend. No claim precise enough to test. Only a cloud of suspicion cast over anyone who disagrees.

Rogan then suggested that Israel spies on American politicians and that some of those politicians are aligned with Israel rather than the United States. Vance said he “definitely” understood the concern. He did not accuse American Jews as a group of disloyalty. He did something more practiced. He accepted the frame of espionage, money and divided allegiance, added a few qualifications and allowed the audience to draw the ugliest conclusion for itself.

At a time when antisemitic incidents remain at historic levels, a vice president should understand the danger of scattering the old clues of secret money, hidden control and dual loyalty. He need not utter the crudest version. The audience knows how the story ends.

When challenged, Vance cast himself as the victim. Accusations of antisemitism were “insane,” he said, because he had “a ton of respect for the Jewish religion.” That is not an answer. It is a gaslight. Jewish listeners are expected to ignore the insinuations they have heard for generations and accept a profession of respect as absolution. Respect is measured by conduct, not by a disclaimer attached after the damage is done.

Defenders said Vance was meeting a conspiracy-curious audience where it lives and guiding it back toward reason. He guided no one back. A vice president may answer foolish questions. He may not validate their premises for political effect. The office demands a clear line between knowledge and suspicion. Vance blurred it because the blur served him.

The Epstein exchange made the method impossible to miss. Vance proudly called himself “one of the OG Epstein conspiracy theorists.” When Rogan said most people believed Epstein was Mossad, Vance answered, “Yeah, Mossad or CIA or some other deep state,” perhaps both. He said Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence” and speculated about a left-of-center “Israeli deep state.”

Epstein cultivated powerful people. His relationship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was extensive and discrediting. Released records document contact with Yoni Koren, an Israeli intelligence veteran. An FBI memo records an informant’s belief that Epstein was a “co-opted Mossad agent.” But the memo records an allegation. It does not establish an FBI conclusion, and none of the millions of released documents proves that Epstein was an intelligence asset.

Vance admitted that he had asked whether there were “documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s.” The answer was no. That should have settled the matter. Instead, he argued that if such proof had existed, “it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

There is no argument that can survive that logic because there is no evidence that can defeat it. Documents would prove the conspiracy. Their absence proves the cover-up. A relationship becomes a connection, the connection becomes an operation, and the operation becomes a “deep state.” When pressed on what his own allegation meant, Vance shrugged: “I don’t know what that means.”

He also reminded listeners that he has “effectively unlimited access to information.” That boast makes the performance worse. He invoked extraordinary access while admitting he lacked direct proof. He could only insist, “I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there.” Belief is not intelligence. Suspicion is not evidence. A vice president has no moral right to pretend otherwise.

Vance’s offense was not criticism of Israel. It was using the vice presidency to launder rumor into something that sounded like official knowledge. He gave prejudice the language of patriotism and conjecture the authority of the state. Then he relied on the podcast’s unseriousness to escape responsibility for what he had said.

He knew where the evidence ended. He kept talking. That is not candor, and it is not courage. It is a failure of judgment unworthy of the office he holds.

His crime, according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, was having a kosher lunch in Miami with a 20-year-old internet personality known as Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” streamer with a large Gen Z following who has been associated with offensive rhetoric, including a “Heil Hitler” singalong. For this, Shmuley declared Farro a “Chabad neo-Nazi whitewasher,” accused him of “stomping on the Rebbe’s grave and the ashes of the six million,” and demanded in all capital letters that Farro be denied a Shabbos meal until a public apology was extracted. His son Mendy piled on via Instagram reel, insisting that Farro and others “cannot host a Shabbos meal” for Clavicular until he grovels sufficiently.

Consider what is actually being proposed here. A young man with millions of followers has somehow found his way into the orbit of someone who keeps kosher, wraps tefillin, and wants to show him a Shabbos table. And the Boteach family’s response is to slam that door shut. To scream at him. To make the price of entry a public act of contrition performed to their satisfaction.

Is he truly better off being screamed at? Is the Jewish community? Is the world?

The answer is no, and the reason is not complicated. Clavicular is, by all appearances, a 20-year-old who has absorbed the toxic meme culture of the internet and has very likely never sat across a table from a Jewish family, shared a meal, or encountered Judaism as a living civilization rather than a caricature. There is a decent chance he has no idea what he is actually talking about. He is parroting edge-lord content for clicks, not reading Mein Kampf by candlelight. The two are not the same, and conflating them is not moral clarity. It is moral laziness.

Farro understood something the Boteach family apparently does not: you do not teach someone by slamming the door in their face. You invite them in. You serve the cholent. You let them see what Jewish life actually looks like. Clavicular has a following (I don’t know why but that’s a different story). If he walks away from a Shabbos table having experienced authentic Judaism firsthand, that experience ripples outward to every one of his viewers in ways no angry Instagram reel ever could. Maybe he learns something. Maybe his followers do too. That is not naivety. That is strategy. It is, in fact, the entire Chabad model that Shmuley now claims to be defending.

I do not agree with everything Yossi Farro does. There are times when his choices give me pause, and I have said so. But when I have raised concerns with him privately, he has always been receptive. He listens. He engages. He does not retreat behind a wall of outrage.

Which brings us to the question of who is lecturing him about moral standards.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who styles himself “America’s Rabbi” and invokes the Rebbe’s legacy with the frequency of a man who has trademarked it, is the chairman of a family-owned company called “Kosher Sex,” which sells adult products including the full range of intimacy toys. It is co-run with his daughter Chana, who operates a physical Kosher Sex storefront in Tel Aviv. Shmuley himself announced the launch of a branded lubricant. This is the man who now thunders from his Substack that Farro is “desecrating the Rebbe’s legacy” by having lunch with a confused young man.

The hypocrisy is not merely ironic. It is disqualifying. This is a man who spent years as Michael Jackson’s close friend and spiritual adviser, insisting he did not believe the abuse allegations against the singer, only to reverse course after watching the Leaving Neverland documentary in 2019 and declare that he believed the accusers were not lying. He co-authored a book lionizing Jackson and released secret recordings of their private conversations. You do not get to invoke the sanctity of the six million in one breath, hawk adult products under a rabbinic brand in the next, and spend years covering for a man credibly accused of abusing children, and then present yourself as the arbiter of who is permitted to sit at a Jewish table.

Shmuley’s Substack piece argues that there is a profound difference between reaching out to the uneducated and rehabilitating those who glorify evil. It sounds serious until you apply it to a 20-year-old whose entire identity is built on internet provocation. Shmuley wants us to believe Clavicular is a hardened ideologue beyond the reach of a Shabbos meal. The evidence suggests he is a lost kid who has never been shown a better way.

Screaming at people does not change hearts. It hardens them. It confirms their worst suspicions about the people doing the screaming and drives them further from any possibility of genuine encounter. The cancel culture that the Jewish right has rightly condemned when practiced by the progressive left does not become virtuous when practiced in a kippah.

None of this means the question is simple. There is a genuine and important line between giving someone a chance to learn and lending them a platform they have not earned. Where exactly that line falls is not always obvious, and reasonable people can disagree. An influencer who has mocked Jewish suffering is not the same as a committed ideologue, but he is also not a blank slate. That tension deserves to be taken seriously, and anyone doing outreach work at this level should be asking those questions constantly.

What is not serious is pretending the line is so clear that it requires no thought at all. The Boteach family has not grappled with that question. They have simply drawn a circle, declared Clavicular beyond it, and attacked anyone who disagrees.

Yossi Farro holds no rabbinic title. He has no institutional backing, no Substack, no branded lubricant. He is a young man with a phone and a pair of tefillin trying to figure out, in real time, how to bring people closer to something worth knowing. He will not always get it right. But he is at least asking the right questions. That is more than can be said for the people screaming at him.

Great copy. The problem is, it completely misses the actual story.

Read the criminal complaint (included in full below) and you realize the Times didn’t just bury the lede. They distorted the charge to fit a sexier narrative. Motovich wasn’t charged with “lending a phone to a sex trafficker.” He was charged with possessing a prohibited object as an inmate and conspiring to obtain another one after being transferred to a different facility. The core of the federal case is about the terrifying ease with which inmates are getting their hands on cellphones inside federal lockups.

The affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Cory O’Donohue is straightforward. Motovich allegedly activated a phone at the MDC with the help of someone on the outside, racking up over 500 contacts with his family and associates. After he was moved to FCI Otisville, he allegedly conspired to get another phone smuggled in, purchased at a Brooklyn store just blocks from his family’s business. O’Donohue explicitly notes that inmates at the MDC “commonly share contraband phones with other inmates.” The FBI knows the phone was passed around. But the federal charge isn’t about who borrowed it. It’s about the fact that the phone was there at all.

The Times zeroed in on a single detail: a photograph showing Motovich grinning next to an inmate whose face was redacted in the court filing. Relying on an unnamed source, the paper identified the redacted man as Oren Alexander and spent the bulk of the article rehashing his trial and the fall of his real estate empire. By framing the story around Alexander, the Times obscured a systemic failure within the Bureau of Prisons that federal judges have been sounding the alarm about for years.

The real scandal isn’t that a disgraced real estate broker made a phone call. The scandal is that the MDC is awash in contraband and the people running the place seem incapable of stopping it. The judges forced to send defendants there have been putting it in writing. In the very complaint against Motovich, the FBI cites a 2024 ruling by Judge Jesse Furman in United States v. Chavez, where he noted that “for years, the conditions in the federal jails that serve this District have been a major, growing, and widely understood problem” and that “contraband from drugs to cell phones is widespread.”

Judge Gary Brown’s memorandum in United States v. Colucci was even more pointed. Brown was so appalled by what he called the “dangerous, barbaric conditions” at the MDC that he threatened to vacate a tax fraud defendant’s prison sentence and replace it with home confinement if the BOP sent him there. He noted that gang members were posting photos to Instagram from their cells, “apparently created using smuggled contraband cellphones,” on the very same accounts they used to sell stolen opioids before their arrest. His conclusion: “The results of such anarchy are predictable.”

Even the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York has publicly stated that “contraband cell phones enable federal inmates to continue committing crimes even while they are in custody at the MDC, which endangers both the jail population and the community at large.”

Inmates are fishing packages of cellphones through windows with ropes. Correctional officers are being indicted for taking bribes to smuggle in chargers and devices. Gang members are running their social media from their cells. That is a breakdown of the federal correctional system, and it is the story the Motovich complaint is actually telling.

When the media turns a story about institutional rot into a gossip item about a boldface name, they aren’t just misrepresenting a court document. They are giving cover to a broken system that needs a spotlight, not a celebrity angle. The feds charged Motovich because the MDC is out of control. The paper of record had a chance to say so.

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The State Comptroller’s review detailed the unprecedented chaos of the attacks and the extreme pressure placed on the national medical system. According to the report, the scale of the emergency meant that during the initial hours, MDA responders often had to make on-the-spot decisions about destination hospitals due to rapidly changing threats, heavy fire, and blocked roads. The report noted that because of these extreme conditions, MDA teams were not always able to reach all casualties at collection points or scene locations in real time, leading some wounded to reach hospitals independently. The Comptroller also concluded that in the earliest stages of the attack, MDA lacked a full real-time operational picture of the scale and distribution of casualties, though it later shifted strategy and stabilized the evacuation effort.

The report shines a light on the extraordinary conditions under which MDA personnel operated that day. Employees and volunteers worked under live fire, at great personal risk, to reach the wounded, administer life-saving treatment, and evacuate casualties under what the organization described as “extremely difficult and unprecedented conditions.” The Comptroller’s findings specifically acknowledged the dedication and courage shown by MDA’s ranks throughout the attack, noting that in some locations, an MDA volunteer provided the sole initial medical response.

MDA used the occasion to pay tribute to those who served. “Their actions during the harrowing hours of the terrorist attack reflect the spirit of the organization and the unwavering commitment of its personnel to saving lives under all circumstances,” an MDA spokesman said. The organization also expressed solidarity with personnel who were injured and mourned those who were killed in the line of duty.

The scale of MDA’s response on October 7 was immense. Throughout that single day, the organization evacuated hundreds of casualties using a combination of standard ambulances, bulletproof ambulances, and helicopters, while simultaneously responding to thousands of additional emergency calls from across the country. It was, by any measure, the most demanding operational day in the organization’s history. The report noted that the heaviest burden fell on hospitals in the south, with Soroka, Barzilai, and Assuta Ashdod handling roughly 70 percent of the wounded who arrived via MDA evacuation.

Immediately following the attacks, MDA launched what it described as a comprehensive process of lessons learned, operational adaptation, and organizational expansion, directly addressing the operational gaps identified in the review. The ambulance fleet was significantly expanded, with a particular emphasis on bulletproof vehicles suited for conflict zones and high-threat environments. The National Dispatch Center was strengthened, command-and-control systems were upgraded to improve coordination and situational awareness during mass-casualty events, and new operational protocols were introduced, field-tested, and refined throughout the Iron Swords War and the emergency incidents that followed.

The breadth of the overhaul is notable not only for its scope but for how it was financed. A significant portion of the force-expansion initiatives, including the procurement of bulletproof ambulances, advanced medical equipment, and protective gear, was carried out without dedicated government funding. Instead, MDA relied heavily on the generosity of donors in Israel and around the world to make those enhancements possible. “MDA deeply appreciates their commitment, the trust they place in the organization, and their direct contribution to saving lives and strengthening the State of Israel’s emergency preparedness,” the spokesman said. The acknowledgment underscores a recurring reality in Israeli civil society: that critical national infrastructure often depends as much on philanthropic support as on public budgets.

MDA framed its response to the Comptroller’s report not as a defensive exercise but as an affirmation of its institutional culture, embracing the hard lessons of October 7. The organization said it will continue working in cooperation with partners across the healthcare and security systems to implement the lessons learned, strengthen national preparedness, and fulfill what it called its central mission: “saving lives anywhere, at any time, and under any circumstances.” The State Comptroller’s report is part of a broader governmental reckoning with the failures and responses of October 7, a process that has touched virtually every branch of Israel’s security and emergency apparatus. For MDA, the review appears to have validated much of what its personnel did under fire, while also pointing toward the vital work that remains.

According to the Israeli State Comptroller, those helicopters transported eight patients.

In June 2026, the Comptroller published a special audit (full document below) of the medical response on October 7, based on data from the Ministry of Health, Magen David Adom, the IDF, and United Hatzalah itself. Since October 7, Beer has appeared on major American podcasts, given interviews to the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, addressed Republican Jewish leaders, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The audit is a dry document. It is also a devastating one.

Take the helicopters. Beer described his two aircraft flying back and forth, rescuing hundreds of people. The Comptroller tracked every civilian helicopter flight that day. United Hatzalah’s helicopters performed three field evacuations and two inter-hospital transfers. Eight patients in total. Not hundreds. Eight. That is not a rounding error or a methodological dispute. It is a gap of two orders of magnitude, and it has been the centerpiece of fundraising appeals to Jewish communities across North America for more than two years.

The patient count has the same problem. Beer told the Jerusalem Post that United Hatzalah treated an estimated 12,000 people on October 7. On a separate podcast, he put the figure at “over two and a half thousand.” The Comptroller’s hospital intake data shows that approximately 1,340 people were evacuated to hospitals nationwide by every organization combined: MDA, United Hatzalah, the military, private vehicles, all of them. United Hatzalah’s own documented contribution was roughly 100 ambulance evacuations. The 12,000 figure, as the Jerusalem Post itself noted, includes panic attacks, heart attacks, and traffic accidents from across the entire country. Those are not October 7 massacre casualties. Presenting them as such is not a misunderstanding. It is a choice.

Then there is the Berdichevsky twins story. On The Ben Shapiro Show, Beer claimed that United Hatzalah volunteers were embedded with Yamam, Israel’s elite counter-terrorism unit, during the rescue of the twins in Kfar Aza. The Comptroller’s report contains no mention of civilian volunteers embedding with Yamam. More tellingly, Beer himself told a different version of the same story on the Inspiration for the Nation podcast, correctly crediting the Golani Brigade with the rescue. Two versions of the same story, one of them told to a much larger audience, and they do not match.

The “before the IDF” framing deserves its own examination because it has become the foundation of how United Hatzalah explains its independent operation that day. The Comptroller’s timeline is not ambiguous. The IDF and security forces were in combat from 06:29. Magen David Adom had volunteers stationed inside the Gaza Envelope communities and had requested helicopter evacuation by 06:57, less than 30 minutes after the attack started. Civilian medical teams were kept out of active combat zones not because the state was absent, but because the IDF told them to stage at perimeter points for their own safety. They were held back not because there was a vacuum, but because there was a war.

The fundraising calls told a different story. On an emergency Zoom call on the day of the attack itself, Beer asked donors for $10 million for an emergency reserve fund: “I need $10 million. I think if we raise more than $10 million it will be blessed.” On that same call, a moderator told attendees that “there really is no alternative that the IDF is using for medical support.” Beer was on the call and said nothing to correct it. Five days later, on a solidarity call with Palm Beach Synagogue donors on October 12, he told the room: “We just ordered $50 million worth of equipment, so we need the funds to pay for it.”

That $50 million figure is worth sitting with. Beer announced it five days after an attack in which, according to the Comptroller, United Hatzalah transported roughly 100 patients by ambulance and 8 by helicopter. Equipment orders of that scale may well reflect genuine operational needs across UH’s broader network of volunteers and communities, and the organization has since grown substantially. But the timing and the framing of the announcement, made on a donor solidarity call built around inflated accounts of what had just happened, raises a straightforward question: how much of that order was driven by actual operational requirements, and how much was driven by the fundraising moment?

None of this is an argument against the bravery of individual United Hatzalah volunteers. People ran toward gunfire. People treated the wounded under impossible conditions. That is true and it matters. But it is a separate question from whether the organization’s leadership accurately described what happened, and the answer to that second question is clearly no. The two things keep getting conflated, and that conflation is not accidental. It is the mechanism by which the inflated numbers survive scrutiny.

The Comptroller’s most pointed finding is not about the numbers at all. It is about how United Hatzalah operated. On October 7, MDA set up a triage point. UH set up a separate one a few kilometers away. Neither knew the other existed. Volunteers drove into active combat zones against dispatch orders. Helicopters flew in violation of a military no-fly order. The Comptroller found that this violated a 2014 memorandum of understanding between UH and MDA, a 2014 Ministry of Health circular, and a 2022 police directive, all of which required United Hatzalah to operate under MDA command during mass casualty events. Beer has held this up as proof of UH’s initiative and readiness. The Comptroller calls it a regulatory failure that fractured the national emergency response at the worst possible moment.

The Israeli state’s own audit has received almost no attention in the English-language press that spent two years amplifying Beer’s version of events. Whatever one thinks of the State Comptroller’s broader role in Israeli politics, the methodology here is not complicated: it examined flight logs, hospital intake records, and organizational communications, and it counted. The count does not match the story. That gap deserves the same platform the story got.

Here’s the full report:

2026 Swords Of Iron 101

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The plaintiff, Doron Shahar, a sitting board member, claims that at least 80 million shekels (roughly $26 million) raised overseas went unaccounted for in ZAKA Israel’s financial records. The suit names director general Dubi Weissenstern, businessman Rafi Manat, and Hizki Farkash, a director and authorized signatory for ZAKA U.S. who until recently served as the organization’s Northern District operations officer, as defendants. Shahar is asking the court to order the return of the funds, remove the current leadership, install a new board, and appoint an independent investigator.

The numbers at the center of the case tell a stark story. For 2023, ZAKA U.S. reported total donation income of about $12 million and said it sent roughly $4 million to Israel, but ZAKA Israel’s own records show only about $2.4 million actually arrived. A subsequent 2024 filing then revised the 2023 income figure upward to approximately $15 million, a change the lawsuit says raises “serious concern about an attempt to make late improvements and data adjustments, after significant discrepancies were revealed compared to the Israeli nonprofit organization’s reports”. For 2024, ZAKA U.S. reported receiving about $8 million in donations, yet ZAKA Israel recorded receiving only $700,000 from it, even as ZAKA U.S. disclosures indicated around $2 million had been transferred. Over the same stretch, fundraising expenses at the U.S. affiliate reportedly jumped from $750,000 to $3 million, and the organization swung from a surplus of more than $6 million to a stated deficit of $3 million.

One of the lawsuit’s sharpest allegations involves roughly $4.2 million transferred from ZAKA U.S. to an American organization called Lehitiv, whose stated mission has nothing to do with identifying disaster victims or preserving the dignity of the dead. Farkash is listed as a trustee of Lehitiv. The organization reported only about $200,000 in turnover in 2023, then saw its finances balloon the following year almost entirely on the back of the ZAKA U.S. transfer. “There is a real concern that Lehitiv effectively served as a dormant shelf entity that coincidentally came to life in 2024 to absorb a sum of over 4 million dollars,” the lawsuit stated. The suit also takes aim at ZAKA’s French affiliate, noting that while the amount donated to it is unknown, ZAKA Israel’s records show it received nothing from France at all.

The financial scrutiny of ZAKA comes alongside a separate controversy that has long shadowed both ZAKA and United Hatzalah. The two organizations are perhaps best known for fabricating atrocity stories in the aftermath of October 7, most notably the claim that a baby had been cut from a mother’s stomach. The story was spread by ZAKA’s Yossi Landau and United Hatzalah’s Eli Beer, who went so far as to say he witnessed it with his own eyes. No evidence for the claim has ever emerged.

ZAKA pushed back through its law firm, Gideon Fisher and Co., which told Haaretz the lawsuit “raises recycled issues that were previously examined by the Registrar of Nonprofit Organizations, by the nonprofit organization’s internal auditor, and by the plaintiff himself, and no substance was found in them”. The firm accused Shahar of deliberately relying on a draft interim report while ignoring the final conclusions, and said the overseas affiliates are separate legal entities operating under their own local laws. The lawsuit, it added, is nothing more than an attempt to seize control of the organization.

Start with the money. When the Trump administration began moving toward rescheduling cannabis, Bruesewitz took to X to advocate for the policy, assuring followers he had “no personal stake” in the debate. What he did not mention was that just fifteen days earlier, his firm X Strategies had accepted $300,000 from American Rights and Reform PAC, a pro-cannabis Super PAC funded by some of the biggest marijuana companies in the country, including Verano Holdings, Green Thumb Industries, and Cresco Labs. Federal Election Commission records confirm the payment, as reported by the Washington Examiner. Bruesewitz was publicly promoting a policy position while on the payroll of the industry that stood to benefit from it, and he told his audience he had no stake in the outcome.

Now consider his conduct during the Iran deal debate. When serious conservatives, Iranian dissidents, and pro-Israel voices raised substantive objections to the emerging agreement, Bruesewitz did not engage with their arguments. Instead, he and his allies promoted a narrative: a coordinated Israeli bot campaign, they claimed, was targeting JD Vance. No evidence was presented. None. Accounts belonging to Iranians with lived experience under the regime, many of them deeply pro-Trump, were reportedly celebrated when they were suspended, according to observers on X. The message could not have been clearer: dissent from the approved line and you will be branded a foreign agent and silenced. This from the man who runs accounts that fly the banner of free speech.

The contrast with his own financial arrangements is worth noting. According to SEC filings cited by Andrea Shaffer on X, Bruesewitz is President of PSQ Impact, part of PSQ Holdings, a company whose investor base reportedly includes 25 percent non-US persons across 434 beneficial owners. His partner in that venture is Donald Trump Jr., as reported by Politico. A man so publicly concerned about foreign influence in American political discourse does not appear to have applied the same scrutiny to his own financial structure.

Then there is his record on Christians and Israel. In April, a photo emerged of a single IDF soldier smashing a Jesus statue in the Christian village of Debel in southern Lebanon. The IDF confirmed the image, condemned the act in the strongest terms, vowed disciplinary action, and pledged to help restore the statue, according to the Times of Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu called it “stunning and saddening” and apologized. The Israeli Foreign Minister called it “shameful.” It was, by every account, an isolated incident that Israel’s own government moved quickly to repudiate.

Bruesewitz was not satisfied with those facts. He declared on X: “The IDF has confirmed that this image is authentic. This is utterly disgraceful. I urge the IDF to take swift and decisive action to hold him fully accountable. The hatred and wickedness being directed at Christians must end now!” Note the leap. One soldier’s act, already condemned by the Israeli government, becomes, in Bruesewitz’s framing, evidence of a broad campaign of “hatred and wickedness being directed at Christians.” No specifics. No acknowledgment of Israel’s swift response. Just a sweeping indictment designed to inflame rather than inform.

And it fits a pattern. Bruesewitz has publicly declared that “only the most radical Christian Zionists are willing to unconditionally defend Israel, everyone else is utterly disgusted,” as documented on X. Tens of millions of American Christians whose support for Israel is rooted in genuine faith and conviction are, in his telling, radical outliers. He offers no argument, no evidence, no engagement with the actual reasons people hold these views. Just a broad dismissal, calibrated to make support for Israel feel socially toxic within the very movement that has been its most reliable American home.

Finally, there is Tucker Carlson, who asked on his program whether Trump might be “the Antichrist.” When pressed, Bruesewitz offered this on X: “Both Megyn and Tucker’s comments are moronic and I hope they apologize to the President for saying that someday.” Someday. He was then asked, day after day, for a direct condemnation of the Antichrist comment specifically, and did not provide one. The same man who attacks Ted Cruz, Mark Levin, and Chip Roy without hesitation cannot bring himself to forcefully condemn a friend who suggested the President is a figure of biblical evil. He once explained his loyalty plainly, in a post documented on X: “Tucker was virtually the only major voice who had my back when the January 6th committee targeted me.” Personal loyalty, not principle. That is the operating system.

Conservatism is not a team sport where the rules apply only to the other side. It is a set of convictions that demand consistency. Alex Bruesewitz has demonstrated, in public and on the record, that he holds himself to no such standard. He is a man who says one thing and does another, who attacks others for conduct he engages in himself, and who wraps it all in the flag of America First. The movement he claims to serve deserves far better.

So yes. Ask the hard questions. Demand accountability. Push back on the official narrative wherever the evidence warrants it.

What you should not do is what Tim Dillon did on the Joe Rogan Experience this week, which is to take that legitimate grievance and drive it off a cliff into a swamp of half-baked conspiracy theory, all while speaking with the unearned authority of a man who has clearly never read a single serious account of what actually happened that day.

Dillon’s contribution to the discourse went something like this: the security failures are “pretty wild,” Netanyahu has “kinda prevented” any investigation, they’ve “kinda made it illegal to question” things in Israel, and then, because no conversation with Tim Dillon can apparently end without arriving at this destination, “Where are the 9/11 docs?” Rogan, performing his usual role as the world’s most influential yes-man, nodded along and compared the military response in Gaza to “the damage of a nuke just spread out over two years.”

This is what happens when people who have never done the reading decide they’ve figured it out anyway.

Start with the claim that Israel has made it “illegal” to question the October 7th failures. This is simply not true. It is not true in any legal sense, not true in any practical sense, and not true in any observable sense. Israeli journalists have published exhaustive investigations into the intelligence breakdowns. The Knesset has held hearings. Bereaved families have sued the government. Survivors have given testimony that directly contradicts the official timeline. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets demanding answers. The idea that this is a society that has criminalized dissent is a fiction that Dillon invented on the spot, and Rogan had neither the knowledge nor the inclination to push back on it.

Then there is the insinuation, never quite stated outright but hanging over the entire conversation like a bad smell, that the security failures were not failures at all. That the delay in the military response was something more deliberate. That the people who died at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim along the border were somehow victims of a scheme rather than victims of a massacre. Dillon notes, with a kind of knowing smirk, that the people killed at the Nova festival “were the ravers, right? The anti-Netanyahu people.” As if that detail, true as it is, points toward something sinister rather than toward the random, indiscriminate horror of terrorism.

Hamas did not check voter registration cards before they opened fire. They murdered elderly Holocaust survivors in their beds. They killed Thai agricultural workers who had nothing to do with Israeli politics. They burned families alive. The political leanings of the people at Nova tell us nothing about who orchestrated the attack. Nothing. Dillon treats it as a clue. It is not a clue. It is a coincidence that he has mistaken for a revelation because he wants there to be a revelation.

The real hard questions about October 7th are the ones Dillon and Rogan are not equipped to ask, because asking them requires actually knowing things. Why did the IDF’s Gaza Division ignore the “Jericho Wall” document, a detailed Hamas battle plan that had been in Israeli intelligence’s possession for over a year? Why were the kibbutz rapid response teams left without ammunition resupply for hours? Why did it take the IDF’s elite units so long to reach Re’im?

And then there is the question of equipment. Soldiers and first responders who rushed toward the fighting on October 7th did so with inadequate gear. Some lacked body armor. Some lacked sufficient ammunition. The people inside the Ministry of Defense and the IDF procurement and logistics chain who were responsible for ensuring those men and women were properly equipped should not be allowed to retire quietly on a pension. They should face criminal manslaughter charges. When soldiers die in part because the bureaucrats responsible for arming them were negligent, that is not an administrative failure. It is a crime. The families of those soldiers deserve to see that argument made in a courtroom.

These are the failures worth talking about. These are the questions worth asking. Not “where are the 9/11 docs.”

Instead, we get vibes. We get the conspiratorial shorthand of a man who has learned that skepticism is a personality and that asking “but what if it’s all connected?” is a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about. Dillon is not a dissident. He is not a truth-teller. He is a comedian who discovered that his audience will reward him for sounding like he sees through things, and he has been cashing that check ever since, regardless of the cost to anyone who actually lived through the events he’s theorizing about.

Rogan’s role in all of this is its own kind of failure. He has built the largest podcast audience on earth on the premise that he is just a curious guy asking questions, a neutral platform for all kinds of ideas. But neutrality is not a virtue when one of your guests is inventing facts about a massacre in real time. At some point, the curious guy has a responsibility to know enough to say, actually, that’s not right. Rogan never says that. He never has. And so the ignorance flows, unimpeded, into the ears of millions.

The failures of October 7th are a serious subject. They deserve serious people. Tim Dillon is not one of them.

Donald Trump stood on the sidelines of the G7 summit and said, “Without me there would be no Israel.” He told Benjamin Netanyahu to be “more responsible.” He warned that if Israel keeps striking Iran, it will be “on your own.” And now a certain class of commentator, in Jerusalem and in Washington, is clutching pearls and demanding an accounting.

Before that outrage hardens into conventional wisdom, someone should ask the obvious question: what do any of these critics actually know about what has been going on behind closed doors?

The answer, of course, is nothing. They know what was said to reporters on the margins of a European summit. They do not know what Netanyahu has been asking for. They do not know what requests have been made, what operations have been floated, what private assurances have been sought, or how many times American patience has been tested in conversations that will never appear in a readout. Great power diplomacy does not happen at podiums. The podium is where the softened, public-facing version of a much harder private exchange eventually surfaces. For all we know, what Trump said at the G7 was the gentle version.

That possibility does not seem to have occurred to the people performing outrage. They are reacting to a fragment of a conversation they were never party to, rendering a verdict on the health of an alliance based on a few sentences, while remaining entirely ignorant of the full picture. That is not analysis. That is theater.

Now consider the actual record. No American president has done more for Israel than Donald Trump. That is not a partisan talking point. It is history. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a step every previous administration promised and none delivered. He moved the embassy. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He brokered the Abraham Accords, dismantling the decades-old fiction that Arab-Israeli normalization required the resolution of the Palestinian question first. He stood with Israel at the United Nations when standing with Israel was diplomatically costly. He did all of this not because it was easy, but because he believed it was right.

One can take issue with Trump’s phrasing. “Without me there would be no Israel” is the kind of line that makes diplomats wince and columnists reach for their keyboards. Fine. Criticize the phrasing. But to treat a single rhetorical provocation as evidence of betrayal, while ignoring everything that preceded it, is not serious. It is the kind of selective memory that passes for analysis only when people have already decided what conclusion they want to reach.

There is a deeper issue here, though, and it has nothing to do with Trump’s choice of words.

For decades, Israel has consciously built its security, diplomatic, and economic strategy around close partnership with the United States. That partnership has delivered real and extraordinary benefits. Advanced weapons systems. Diplomatic cover. Deterrence. But it has also produced a degree of structural dependence that Israeli leaders have never fully reckoned with. And dependence, by its nature, limits leverage.

When a nation relies on another for its essential defense needs, it trades a portion of its sovereignty for security. Israel made that trade, year after year, with eyes open. It accepted billions in military assistance. It integrated its systems with American technology. It leaned on American vetoes when the Security Council turned hostile. There is nothing shameful in any of that. It was rational statecraft. But rational statecraft has consequences, and one of those consequences is that when the patron speaks, the client has to listen. Sometimes the patron speaks bluntly.

The Israelis now expressing outrage over Trump’s comments should ask themselves a harder question: what strategic choices, made over many years by their own leaders, produced this degree of dependence in the first place? Could Israel have invested more aggressively in domestic defense production? Could it have diversified its diplomatic relationships? Could it have built greater self-sufficiency, even at real economic cost? These are not comfortable questions. They are the questions a serious nation has to ask.

And then there is Netanyahu himself. What has he been pushing for in private? What has he asked of this administration, and how many times? Nobody outside a very small circle knows. The critics certainly do not. Yet they render their judgment with complete confidence, based on a press availability at a G7 summit.

Here is what we do know. A president who says “you’ll be on your own” is a president who is still engaged, still in the conversation, still pressing for a particular outcome. That is not abandonment. The truly dangerous signal from Washington is not bluntness. It is indifference. It is the smooth, carefully worded diplomatic language that conceals a complete withdrawal of interest. Trump has never been guilty of that. His frustration, expressed publicly and without filter, is the frustration of someone who is still invested.

Israel is a sovereign nation and must act in its own supreme national interest. Nobody disputes that. But it cannot simultaneously demand the unconditional protection of a superpower and expect to be immune from that superpower’s opinions. The alliance has always had terms, even when those terms were left unspoken. Trump has simply chosen to speak them aloud.

Until the critics can tell us what was said in private, their outrage is not just misplaced. It is uninformed. And until Israel builds the genuine capacity to stand without Washington, the anger over Trump’s remarks is the sound of a nation confronting, not for the first time and not for the last, the price of the dependence it chose.

The story was first reported by TheMarker. A 29-page report by the Registrar of Associations and the Corporations Authority, sent to the organization in recent weeks, recommends dissolution proceedings against both a public benefit company and a parallel NGO controlled by the same two men: Hezi Shabaks, who served as CEO, and Yisrael Morgenstern, who served as chairman. The report accuses them of mixing funds across multiple entities they controlled, filing misleading disclosures, and spending donor money on expenses with no connection to the organization’s stated mission of supporting disaster victims and their families.

The organizations pushed back hard. “We reject the claims with disgust,” they said in a joint statement, calling the investigation a product of a turf war with the leadership of the mainstream ZAKA organization. The wedding payments, they said, covered “a consolidation evening for volunteers held in a wedding hall,” not a private celebration.

The investigation centers on a cluster of payments made on and immediately after October 24, 2021, the date of Shabaks’s daughter’s wedding. The Haredi press had covered the event; photos circulated of rabbis, politicians, and communal figures in attendance. What guests did not know, according to the report, was that the bills were allegedly being routed through the nonprofit. On the day of the wedding and in the days that followed, the public benefit company’s accounts were drawn down by close to half a million shekels. More than 200,000 shekels went to “petty cash.” Another 125,000 shekels were paid to the Dimol Platinum banquet hall in Ramat Gan. Forty thousand shekels went to a sound production company. Twenty-five thousand shekels were paid to an event producer. A recording studio received 5,400 shekels for producing the couple’s wedding video, which the report notes is still up on YouTube. When regulators pressed for an explanation, the organization sent back an invitation to a “ZAKA Israel volunteer graduation ceremony.” That ceremony had taken place more than eight months after the wedding. “There is a suspicion,” the report states, “that these expenses were incurred for the purpose of that wedding.”

The wedding allegation is the most vivid in the report, but it sits inside a much longer story of regulatory failure. Shabaks founded the public benefit company in 2005, after a falling-out with the leadership of ZAKA Tel Aviv, where he had run the telemarketing operation. The broader ZAKA organization he was trading on has its own troubled history: its founder, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, attempted suicide in April 2021 after Haaretz published allegations of rape, sexual assault, and abuse of men, women, and children spanning decades. He died in June 2022, never having stood trial. The organization he built has since been led by Dubi Weissenstern.

Shabaks set up his own entity under the ZAKA name and continued operating alongside his former employer, until 2013, when the Registrar of Associations stepped in and told both organizations they had to separate completely. No joint operations. No shared funds. They didn’t. In 2015, Morgenstern, a Haredi businessman, joined Shabaks to launch a parallel NGO, also marketed publicly as “ZAKA Israel.” A supervisory report that same year found the PBC soliciting donations under another organization’s name and using another body’s receipts. The Registrar gave them a chance to fix it. They didn’t fix it. A second report in 2020 found the organization advertising rescue motorcycles, ambulances, and jeeps in its fundraising materials, none of which it actually owned. By 2022, the Registrar had seen enough and ordered the organization to drop the ZAKA name. They rebranded as Unit 360.

The third and most recent investigation, opened in November 2023, looked at where the money was actually going. In 2021, the PBC took in roughly 14 million shekels. About 12 million of that came from a government contract to run COVID-19 antigen testing. A 2022 investigation by Maariv had already reported that the company was issuing Green Pass certificates to people who hadn’t actually been tested, collecting 20 shekels per test from the state.

Of the funds regulators examined, more than 5 million shekels were transferred to other nonprofits the Registrar identified as connected to the same leadership, without adequate documentation. About 2.7 million shekels went to an NGO called Siman LeChaim, also founded by Shabaks and Morgenstern, which had not filed required disclosures and had no proper-management approval. Another 1.2 million went to Israel Fights for Life, also founded by Shabaks, registered to his home address. A further 1.3 million went to the Sephardic Charity Fund, connected through a shared officeholder. Of the total transferred, roughly 4 million shekels went to NGOs that had not reported to the Registrar at all. “There is a severe suspicion of the NGO’s funds leaking into private hands, and even of prohibited distribution of profits,” the report states.

There were other problems. Legal fees totaling 438,000 shekels were logged as expenses for “advice and exhaustion of rights for families.” In fact, 406,000 shekels of that went to a lawyer who represented the PBC itself in its legal fights against the Registrar and the Ministry of Interior. Salary payments to members of the Shabaks family alone came to 217,801 shekels in 2021, representing 26 percent of the NGO’s total payroll. The NGO bought a family car for 180,000 shekels with no explanation on file. And 118,000 shekels recorded in the PBC as “support for needy families” turned out to include purchases at Zara, Mango, Adidas, and Renuar. The organization said the clothes were for people in need. The Registrar said there were no recipient lists, no distribution criteria, and no evidence the items ever reached anyone.

Both men had, on paper, stepped away from their roles in 2021. Shabaks moved from CEO to secretary. Morgenstern left entirely. Regulators didn’t buy it. The PBC’s registered address was still Shabaks’s house in Bnei Brak. When the Registrar sent a draft of its findings, Shabaks and Morgenstern were the two men who showed up at the Ministry of Justice to push back. Documents the PBC itself submitted in response to the draft confirmed both men were still functioning as senior officeholders. The report also cited a certificate of appreciation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued to both men at the end of 2021, naming them as managers of ZAKA Israel.

The Registrar concluded the step-back was designed, at least in part, to obscure a web of family employment across the two entities. The NGO employed Chaya Shabaks and her daughter Shira Shoten. The PBC employed Chaya’s husband Yehezkel Shabaks, his brother, and Shira’s husband. In June 2023, an application was filed to register yet another entity, “Unit 360 National Assistance System.” The Registrar flagged it as a potential vehicle to absorb the existing organizations’ assets. The application was eventually deleted after the applicants stopped responding, though not before the Registrar noticed it was filed using Shabaks’s personal email address and phone number.

On behalf of Morgenstern, a spokesperson said he “never received any funds or benefits from the NGOs in question” and is “not familiar with or involved in any other activity mentioned in the reports.” He is, the statement said, a philanthropist who has spent time since October 7 trying to broker peace between rival ZAKA factions, with no personal benefit.

The Registrar of Associations and the Corporations Authority concluded jointly that grounds exist for dissolution of both entities. “The conduct of the NGO and the PBC was aimed at evading supervisory procedures,” the summary states. “A mixing of two corporations was found, including joint activity contrary to the law, which includes the transfer of resources and the employment of relatives. In addition, it was found that the NGO’s assets were used not for the benefit of advancing its goals, which raises a suspicion of smuggling assets into private hands and prohibited distribution of profits.” The organizations have not yet been formally dissolved and retain the right to contest the findings before the Registrar.

Within hours, Hezbollah issued its own statement. The organization that has murdered more Americans than any group outside of Al Qaeda praised Iran for its “great achievement,” declared that “there will be no return to the pre-March 2 reality,” and warned Lebanon against any effort to disarm it. The deal, Hezbollah said, was “the fruit of the legendary steadfastness, exceptional resilience and great sacrifices made by the Iranian people and their wise leadership.”

So there you have it. The people celebrating this deal are the people who killed our Marines.

Six years ago, Trump himself wrote something that cut straight to the Iranian strategic character: “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” He was right. The tragedy is that he appears to have forgotten it, because Iran certainly has not.

Something has gone badly wrong in the past eight weeks. Not long ago, Israel was fighting alongside us against an enemy that had launched a direct ballistic missile attack on its territory, was arming and directing Hezbollah from Lebanese soil, and was racing toward a nuclear capability it had spent decades pursuing. The threat was real, the alliance was working, and the mission was clear.

Today, the mission has been quietly shelved. The deal reportedly offers Iran sanctions relief and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for commitments on its nuclear program that are, by the assessment of arms control experts, neither new nor particularly meaningful. Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile goes unaddressed. Hezbollah’s military infrastructure remains intact. Tehran’s funding of proxy forces across the region continues. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman called it “a catastrophe from Israel’s perspective.” A former Israeli national security adviser noted that Iran’s missiles and its support for terrorist proxies do not appear in the framework at all.

And yet the White House is celebrating.

The contrast with how Israel has been treated is something that deserves to be said plainly. When Israeli forces eliminated a senior Hezbollah commander responsible for the execution of five American soldiers, there was no statement of gratitude from Washington, no acknowledgment that an ally had just avenged American blood. What there was instead was a furious phone call in which the President reportedly screamed at Prime Minister Netanyahu, “What the hell are you doing?” and told him, per Axios, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now.” Trump later confirmed to reporters that he was “so pissed off” and that Netanyahu “has no judgment.”

That is how we speak to the country doing our killing for us.

Only Israel has been systematically hunting down the Hezbollah commanders who murdered our Marines in Beirut in 1983, who bombed our embassy, who tortured and killed CIA station chief William Buckley, and who have spent four decades treating American lives as acceptable collateral damage. No other ally has done this. No other country has been willing to pay this price. The administration’s response to that sacrifice has been to publicly humiliate Israel’s prime minister while congratulating the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is worth understanding why. The administration wanted a deal badly enough that it was willing to pressure Israel to stop fighting in order to get one. When Israel struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut, Trump was furious not because the strikes were wrong, but because they threatened to delay the signing by a few hours. “It shook it up,” he said. “It was supposed to be now.” The priority was the deal. Not the security of an ally. Not the destruction of a terrorist infrastructure. The deal.

This is exactly the thinking that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement Trump spent years, correctly, condemning. That deal was also celebrated as historic. It also left Iran’s regional aggression untouched. It also gave Tehran access to funds it used to arm Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Trump was right to walk away from it. The question is whether what he has just signed is different in the ways that actually matter. The early evidence says no.

Nuclear experts have pointed out that Iran’s pledge not to develop a nuclear weapon is not a concession. Tehran has been making that same promise for more than fifty years. The terms governing Iran’s existing uranium stockpile are, according to reporting, still being worked out. And Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional instrument, is not merely unaddressed by this agreement. It is emboldened by it.

That sentence deserves to stand on its own. Hezbollah is emboldened. The group that killed 241 American servicemen in a single morning, that has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, that takes its orders directly from Tehran, is now declaring victory and telling Lebanon not to disarm. It is signaling to every militia and proxy in the region that the formula works: absorb the pressure, hold the line, and let Iran negotiate your way back to relevance.

Every adversary from Tehran to Beijing to Moscow is watching this and drawing conclusions. When the United States leans on its closest ally to stand down while the enemy celebrates in the streets, the message received in hostile capitals is not that America is a responsible peacemaker. The message is that America can be waited out.

The long-term damage from that lesson is hard to overstate. Alliances are not contracts. They are built on trust, and trust requires consistency. Every ally we have, from the Baltic states to Taiwan, is watching what we are doing to Israel right now and asking whether Washington will be there when it counts, or whether they too will get the furious phone call telling them the timing is inconvenient.

And Iran has learned something more dangerous than how to survive a military campaign. It has learned that if it holds on long enough, the United States will negotiate the terms of its own retreat. It has learned that Hezbollah can murder American soldiers, absorb a season of pressure, and emerge with its weapons intact, its ideology unbroken, and a deal brokered on its behalf by the world’s most powerful nation. That lesson does not stay in Lebanon. It travels. It gets absorbed by every rogue regime and terror organization watching from the sidelines, and it shapes their calculations for the next generation.

Israel has not changed. It is still fighting. It is still hunting the men who killed our Marines and our soldiers and our diplomats. It is still the only country in the region willing to pay the full price of confronting Iranian power with something other than words. History will record what Israel did in these months. It will also record how we treated it while it did. That verdict will not be kind. And neither, in time, will be the consequences.