The catalyst was Riz Ahmed’s 2017 speech in the UK House of Commons, where he argued that if a Muslim does not see a positive representation of people like himself in film, he may turn to ISIS.

One of the first and most famous analyses using the test was the BBC series “Bodyguard” (2018), which became a textbook example of failing all the criteria within its first 12 minutes.

A film fails the test if a Muslim character is:

1. Presented as a victim or perpetrator of terrorism.

2. Presented as irrationally evil or fanatical.

3. Presented as a threat to the “Western way of life.”

4. Portrayed as an “oppressed woman” who needs to be saved by a white man.

“Ms. Marvel”: The First Muslim Superhero at Marvel

“Ms. Marvel” introduced Marvel’s first Muslim superhero. Family, the mosque, and religious traditions are portrayed as a cozy and normal part of American life.

Today, major platforms such as Netflix and Amazon use such criteria during the script-development and script-doctoring stages. If a screenplay suggests that a Muslim character is a threat, the project is either rewritten or abandoned.

The Initiator

The MPAC Hollywood Bureau — the Hollywood branch of the Muslim Public Affairs Council — became an official “watchdog” over the representation of Muslims in film.

Without its approval, a major studio project dealing with Islam reportedly risks being labeled “Islamophobic” even before its release.

The “Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion”

“The Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion” is a comprehensive practical guide for film studios developed by Riz Ahmed’s own production company, Left Handed Films, together with the Pillars Fund and the Annenberg Institute at USC.

At its core are precisely the principles behind the Riz Test.

Streaming Deals

Riz Ahmed’s company has a first-look deal with Amazon Studios. When projects are developed for the platform, these criteria are taken into account by default as early as the screenplay-drafting stage.

Complaints from Action-Film Directors

Producers on X — often anonymously or through insiders such as Puck News — claim that it has now become impossible to make a realistic film about geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East.

“If the villain is a radical Islamist, the studio requires the addition of a ‘good’ Muslim partner to balance the portrayal, even if it damages the logic of the story.”

“Burden of Representation”

Muslim filmmakers — for example, the creators of the series “Ramy” — complain that they are now expected to tell only “positive” or “educational” stories.

They are effectively discouraged from showing the darker sides of their own communities because this can be interpreted as “playing into Islamophobia.”

Cannes and Venice

Cannes and Venice have introduced support programs for “Voices of the Islamic World.”

As a result, having a film from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt in a festival’s competition programs has become almost a mandatory condition for a “healthy” festival.

Who Is the MPAC Hollywood Bureau?

The MPAC Hollywood Bureau is the Hollywood division of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), an American nonprofit organization engaged in public, political, and media activities on behalf of American Muslims.

The bureau was established in 2011 and specializes in working with the film and television industries.

Its main objective is to influence how Muslims and Islam are portrayed in films and television series.

To achieve this, the bureau:

1. Advises studios, screenwriters, producers, and directors.

2. Reviews scripts for stereotypes and “authenticity.”

3. Helps promote Muslim screenwriters, directors, and actors.

4. Conducts training on inclusivity and cultural representation.

According to information provided by MPAC Hollywood Bureau itself, it has worked with or consulted on projects and companies including The Walt Disney Studios, Disney/ABC Television, Paramount Studios, Amazon, Hulu, Legendary TV, Nickelodeon, CBS, NBC, Fox, FX, NatGeo, Starz, BBC1, and Participant Media, among other major studios and television networks.

The list shows that MPAC’s influence extends even to content intended for children.

But Who Are the Judges?

Maher Hathout

Maher Hathout was one of the founders and key leaders of MPAC. He died in 2015.

Critics point out that Hathout openly praised Hezbollah terrorists, referring to Hezbollah as a “freedom-fighting” movement.

He also had close ties to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. From a young age, Hathout studied the writings of and followed the teachings of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the organization, as well as other Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

MPAC and Hollywood

“24” and other shows such as “Bones,” “Lie to Me,” “Saving Grace,” and “7th Heaven” were among the productions on which MPAC consulted regarding episodes featuring Muslim characters.

In the early 2000s, particularly after 9/11, the organization helped correct stereotypes.

“Grey’s Anatomy” and other series produced by Disney/ABC, Paramount, NBC, and others were also subject to MPAC’s efforts to improve representation.

The Riz Test is used to analyze completed films and television series. Failing the test often results in public criticism in the media and on social networks, forcing studios to take such criticism into account in future projects.

Examples of films that have faced criticism under the Riz Test and similar metrics include many post-9/11 blockbusters such as “American Sniper” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” in which Muslims are portrayed predominantly as antagonists.

The Rejection of Reality in the Film Industry

Once again, we can remember the Soviet Union, where you were forced to create Potemkin villages on screen, while things were not nearly as smooth out on the streets.

In Britain’s grooming gangs, Pakistani Muslims are overrepresented, according to various commissions.

But this raises several questions:

• Could you make a film about this after such standards have been adopted by various studios and production companies?

• Could you obtain government funding for it?

According to research by the French Fondapol foundation, 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks have been recorded worldwide since 1979.

They have claimed the lives of at least 249,941 people.

No other religious group comes remotely close to these figures.

But if you want to make a film about this as well, in some cases you will have to pass the Riz Test.

How This “Kills” Art

A “script paralysis” sets in.

Writers become afraid to create ambiguous characters. If a character belongs to a “protected group,” they cannot be stupid or evil.

As a result, conflict disappears.

Characters turn into “cardboard saints” who are simply boring to watch.

And that is how the era of good cinema disappears — the kind of cinema in which an author could bring any idea to life without censorship.

#cinema #Disney #Netflix #Amazon #DEI #Hollywood

The scandal erupted in March 2022, when conservative activist Christopher Rufo published leaked video recordings from a closed internal Disney online meeting called “Reimagine Tomorrow.”

The leak triggered a massive wave of outrage among audiences and parents, leading to accusations that the studio was aggressively indoctrinating children and promoting a “hidden agenda,” while also triggering a mass boycott of the company’s products and subscriptions.

Facing a sharp decline in box-office revenues, billion-dollar streaming losses, and a civil-rights complaint filed with the EEOC by America First Legal, the conglomerate’s management was forced to retreat.

Disney quietly wound down the Reimagine Tomorrow brand, removed DEI goals from the conditions governing executive bonuses, and shifted its focus away from blind adherence to quotas and back toward profitability and content quality.

But first, the leaks.

Vivian Ware — Diversity & Inclusion Manager

Vivian Ware stated that the company had removed the terms “ladies,” “gentlemen,” “boys,” and “girls” from all its theme parks in order to create “that magical moment” for children who do not identify with traditional gender roles.

Allen Marsh — Production Coordinator, Disney Television Animation

“I’ve had a lot of open conversations with my leadership team about, like: ‘Hey, where can we put trans characters? Where can we put queer characters? Where can we put gender-nonconforming characters?’ <...> And right now we’re working on a show called Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, where we’re trying to implement this.”

IN CARTOONS, PEOPLE!

From the same Disney leak in March 2022, during the “Reimagine Tomorrow” meeting.

Martsch was a production coordinator at Disney Television Animation.

He said they wanted more trans and gender-nonconforming characters, especially at the center of the story rather than merely in the background.

Nadine Smith of Equality Florida, a Disney activist partner, told LGBTQ+ employees that Ron DeSantis and Christina Pushaw wanted to “erase you,” “criminalize your existence,” and “take your children.”

This was an extreme conspiracy theory suggesting that Republicans wanted to take children away from gay people.

In reality, DeSantis never had a policy aimed at the mass removal of children from same-sex couples simply because of their sexual orientation.

There were disputes surrounding legislation on gender-affirming treatment for minors and custody issues in cases involving transgender children, but that is not the same thing as saying that “Republicans want to kidnap children from gay people.”

But there is a very important detail here for understanding what kind of people were shaping all of this.

Karey Burke — President, Disney General Entertainment / 20th Television

Disney president Karey Burke told employees during one of the meetings leaked online:

“Actually, I’m here as a mother of two queer children. One is a transgender child, the other is a pansexual child. And also as an executive.”

Burke then said she supported the inclusion of “very, very many” LGBTQ characters and was shocked to discover that Disney content contained only a “small number” of major queer characters.

“When I worked at Freeform, the desire to be at the forefront of inclusivity was an integral part of the brand. Nobody stopped us, and it was wonderful. I think partly because we were targeting Generation Z and millennials. And this morning my son texted me: ‘Mom, Gen Z is 30–40% more queer than previous generations, so it’s time for Disney to catch up...’”

Burke told Disney employees that she hoped the time would come when their representation would be “at least 50%.”

In any society, if you combine all LGBT categories together, they account for no more than 10% of the population.

Having two children herself, she decided to artificially increase that figure on screen fivefold.

You will see the result below.

Let’s continue.

Latoya Raveneau — Executive Producer, Disney Television Animation

“I had queerness [in my shows] everywhere. Nobody stopped me, and nobody told me ‘don’t,’ which I thought they would... I just added queerness everywhere I could. Nobody checked me.”

She worked on The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.

Private studios — Disney, Pixar, and others — have broad rights to release such content.

However, they face serious criticism for intervening in the sphere of sexual and gender education, which has traditionally been considered the prerogative of the family.

Essentially, many parents and lawyers view this as a form of state-corporate intervention in the natural process of a child’s sexual maturation and identity formation before the age of 18.

They argue that normalizing trans identities and queer themes at preschool and elementary-school ages is ideological indoctrination rather than neutral “representation of diversity.”

A Little Statistics from Research

Gallup polls in the United States, 2012–2025: the share of adults identifying as LGBTQ+ increased from approximately 3.5% to 9.3%.

Among Gen Z — ages 18–27, the generation targeted by the Disney executive — the figure is 23%, with some data showing as high as 31% among young women.

Heterosexual identification among adolescents is declining: one analysis found a decrease from 84.5% in 2019 to 74.7% in 2021.

A study of 1,655 cases supports the role of social factors.

Contemporary research analyzing the growth in the number of LGBTQ people over the past decade increasingly points to a significant role played by cultural factors.

Increased public visibility and normalization of LGBTQ identities are accompanied by more young people beginning to question their sexual orientation and identify as bisexual, queer, or pansexual, whereas many of them in the past would probably have considered themselves heterosexual.

Full Essay

How systemic racism, the indoctrination of children, and DEI killed artistic freedom in Hollywood.

1. How “Affirmative Discrimination” Was Introduced into Films and Children’s Animation

In 2024, conservative activist James O’Keefe conducted an investigation to examine hiring practices at Disney. Through a dating website, he arranged a series of fake dates at restaurants, where a hidden camera recorded candid admissions from Michael Giordano, a senior vice president at 20th Television, about systemic racism within the corporation.

In the video, published on June 20, the top executive directly stated that “Disney definitely will not hire a white man for this role,” revealing the existence of unofficial racial quotas in the hiring of actors and employees. The episode ultimately cost him his career and his job at the company.

On hiring

“They [Disney] are very careful with the wording because they don’t want to get sued for discrimination in either direction. But there have definitely been cases where it was, ‘We will absolutely not hire a white man.’”

The reporter suggested that this was an unspoken agreement, but Giordano replied that such statements had actually been made out loud in his presence.

The “not Black enough” candidate

“We wanted to hire someone in the department who was half Black, but didn’t look half Black — and the creative director said, no, that’s not what we need. They needed someone who would look a certain way in meetings, and he didn’t fit that.”

In other words, a candidate of the desired background was rejected because his appearance did not sufficiently express that background.

About himself

“I have friends in HR and in other divisions. And they say: listen, Mike, nobody else is going to tell you this, but white men are not being considered for this position at all.”

He also said that being a white man limited his own career advancement within the company.

The role of the DEI department and Iger

“We have an entire Diversity, Equity, Inclusion department that is very actively setting standards, making sure there is diversity in shows.”

In another excerpt, Giordano said the directive came personally from CEO Bob Iger.

Financial incentives

Giordano confirmed that Disney pays executives bonuses for DEI practices, agreeing with the statement that “diversity helps with financial incentives.”

Consequences

When O’Keefe personally approached Giordano for comment, Giordano silently walked to his car and drove away. Giordano deleted his LinkedIn account and, according to reports, Disney placed him on “leave” after the video was released.

In the comments on YouTube, people point out the obvious: such a policy is also insulting to members of minorities themselves, because they begin to be perceived as tokens, hired to satisfy quotas rather than for their merits.

The encounter is cited as evidence that Disney’s corporate structures have adopted approaches associated with “progressive ideologies,” thereby intensifying social divisions and hostility between groups.

BFI — Britain

Projects are oriented toward achieving the following minimum figures in the composition of the crew, cast, and story:

• Gender balance: 50/50 (men and women).

• Ethnic minorities: at least 20% in the UK (up to 30–40% for projects based in London).

• LGBTQ+ representation: at least 10%.

• People with disabilities (D/deaf & disabled): 7% to 18%.

• Additional categories: working-class / low socioeconomic-status representatives (up to 39%).

In the UK legal framework, the word “quota” is prohibited by the Equality Act 2010, so BFI uses the terms Inclusion Targets and Diversity Standards.

How it works in practice

To receive funding from BFI or Film4 / BBC Film, a project does not necessarily have to reach exactly 50% / 30% / 10% in every department simultaneously.

Applicants must earn “points” in at least 2 of 5 main sections (Standards A, B, C, D or E).

Meeting the percentage targets for the cast (A) or crew (B) is only one way of satisfying the standard.

The BFI states on its website:

“The BFI Diversity Standards have been adopted by BBC Film, Film4 and Screen Scotland, making them mandatory for the majority of public film funding in the UK.”

Paramount Pictures also seeks to comply with the standards for its feature films in the United Kingdom.

WarnerMedia

On September 5, 2018, WarnerMedia — the parent company of Warner Bros., HBO, and Turner — announced the adoption of an inclusion rider at the company-wide level.

This made Warner Bros. the first major Hollywood studio to make such a company-wide commitment.

Then-WarnerMedia CEO Kevin Tsujihara said:

“I am also pleased that we were able to work with Michael B. Jordan to create a meaningful policy and framework that will apply to all of our productions, across all of our divisions, starting now.”

Regarding the policy itself, he said:

“Our policy requires us to take concrete action to achieve our goals, measure the results, and publicly share that data.”

The meaning is clear: actively change hiring and casting processes; measure the results by counting the percentages of women, Black people, LGBTQ+ people, and so on in each project.

Essentially, this is systemic discrimination based on sex, race, and sexual orientation in favor of “underrepresented” groups.

Formally, these are not quotas. In reality, they represent a strong institutional bias in the selection process designed to shift the statistics in a desired direction.

Imagine Tarantino in 2006 bringing in the screenplay for Inglourious Basterds. Someone reads it — whether mechanisms or actual people — notices that there is one character from an underrepresented group (Black), and recommends adding the “necessary characters.”

Or they tell him:

“Listen, you won’t make it into Best Picture because we have clear requirements. Yes, the film is good, but what can we do? We are part of the system. We have to comply.”

This reminds me of a story about my grandfather.

During the Soviet era, he wrote a wonderful story about the Holocaust that an editor really liked. But after the manuscript went through review, a commission concluded that it lacked a “positive Soviet character.”

The story was never published.

That is how Soviet — left-wing — censorship worked.

But you cannot distinguish it from modern — left-wing — censorship.

As Zhvanetsky once brilliantly observed about the nature of socialism: if someone grew a little and stood out from the crowd, the lawnmower immediately came through, trimmed them down, and made everyone equal again.

Examples analogous to the cultural departments of the CPSU Central Committee

Disney and Netflix

Mechanisms have been introduced inside these companies that are supposed to take diversity into account as early as the development stage of a film or piece of content.

Disney and the “GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias” tool

Disney officially partnered with the Geena Davis Institute, with the partnership announced in October 2019.

The technology, developed using machine learning by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, literally “scans” the screenplay.

What does it check?

• the number of lines given to women and minority characters;

• screen time;

• the social status of characters.

How does it work?

Geena Davis herself describes the tool as a way of identifying unconscious imbalances.

The goal is to “show patterns that can be corrected.”

The AI produces statistics so that writers can see their “blind spots.”

For example:

“Oh, in my hospital scene all the doctors who speak are men, while the nurses are women. Let’s switch the dialogue around.”

Netflix and the “Inclusion Lens”

Since 2021, Netflix has released an Inclusion Report together with USC Annenberg (Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) every two years.

“Inclusion Lens” is not an automated system for evaluating projects, but rather a corporate principle: employees are asked at every stage to consider questions such as:

“Whose voice is missing? Is this portrayal authentic? Who is excluded?”

The Netflix Created By Initiative (2023) involves direct contracts with creators exclusively from “underrepresented groups.”

How This “Kills” Art

“Script Paralysis”

Writers become afraid to create ambiguous minority characters.

If a protagonist belongs to a protected group, they cannot be weak, stupid, or evil.

The result: conflict disappears.

Characters become “cardboard saints” who are boring to watch.

The priority becomes the agenda over the story, and the practical implementation of critical race theory.

Academy Official Press Release — September 8, 2020

“We must broaden the scope of our perception so that it reflects the diversity of the world’s population — both among filmmakers and among the audiences who engage with them. The Academy intends to play a key role in helping to make this a reality.”

The Oscars go further and take away the possibility of winning Best Picture based on talent alone.

Starting in 2024, with the 96th Academy Awards, a film must meet at least two of four inclusion standards to qualify for a Best Picture nomination.

The requirements include:

• Standard A: at least one lead actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group; or at least 30% of the cast from at least two underrepresented groups; or a storyline centered on such a group.

• Standard B: at least two key creative personnel, one of whom must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group; or six crew members from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups; or 30% of the entire crew from at least two such groups.

• Standard C: paid internships or professional-development programs for members of these groups.

• Standard D: at least two executives or consultants from underrepresented groups in development, marketing, publicity, or distribution departments, one of whom must represent an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

2. Antisemitism Is the Biggest Problem Statistically. But Have Jews Become an “Oppressed Group” According to Hollywood DEI?

When the Academy published its official list of “underrepresented groups” — which included Black people, Latinos, Asians, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and women — Jews were not included.

Under DEI rules, Jews are simply classified as white / Caucasian.

After all, even in Israel, Mizrahi Jews — Middle Eastern Jews — make up as much as half of the Jewish population, and they cannot in any meaningful sense be classified as white.

Nobody takes this into account. Many people are not even aware of it.

Moreover, how can Jews, after the Holocaust and amid the current level of antisemitism, be excluded from “oppressed groups” — or have never been included in the first place?

But that is a separate conversation about antisemitism within left-wing communities that formulate all these inclusion rules.

After October 7, the overwhelming majority of them remained silent about the rape of Jewish women.

More than 260 prominent Hollywood figures, including actors David Schwimmer, Debra Messing, Julianna Margulies, and others, signed an open letter to the Academy.

The letter stated that the absence of Jews from the inclusion lists “erases Jewish identity, fuels the myth of overrepresentation, and ignores the real rise in antisemitism.”

They also pointed out that Jewish characters on screen are still frequently played by non-Jewish actors — a phenomenon known in the industry as Jewface — which violates the principles of “authentic casting” applied to other minorities.

All of this was ignored.

Despite the wave of outrage, no systemic measures were adopted at the industry or Academy level, and “Jewface” remained a complicated and unresolved issue.

And here we need a little clarification.

According to the FBI, eight times more hate crimes are committed against Jews than against Muslims — an oppressed group — and hate incidents against Jews are 3.6 times more common than those against Black people, supposedly the most oppressed group.

There is, of course, a nuance here: the overwhelming majority of murders and violent crimes against African Americans are committed by other African Americans.

Jews account for almost 70% of all religiously motivated hate crimes.

Another important detail:

Black people were oppressed in the past, and this has been transferred onto generations that were not responsible for those crimes.

Muslims were never oppressed.

Mosques today are hardly protected, while synagogues, which are constantly being set on fire, are forced to maintain enormous levels of security.

And there is no irrational “phobia” — Islamophobia — toward Islam.

There is a rational fear based exclusively on empirical experience, when terrorists once again carry out an attack accompanied by characteristic chants.

3. Discrimination Against White People. Double Standards as Evidence of Racism

Have you ever wondered why nobody has ever been bothered by the overrepresentation of Black people in the NBA?

And it is perfectly normal.

Black people today are better at playing basketball, and nobody can do anything about it.

And most importantly, nobody is trying to fix it.

Nobody is trying to balance them out with white people on defense or offense.

Because that would be absurd.

If a talented team naturally ends up being made up predominantly of Black players, there is nothing that needs to be corrected.

Let them play.

That is meritocracy.

The NBA is itself a textbook example.

Black Americans make up approximately 13–14% of the U.S. population, but according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (Richard Lapchick), in 2023 they represented 70.4% of league players.

White players accounted for 17.5%, Latinos 2.2%, and Asians 0.2%.

The NFL shows a similar picture: approximately 53–57% of league players are Black, compared with their 13–14% share of the population.

But in Hollywood today, if you assemble a cast based exclusively on people’s talent rather than their skin color, your film simply will not pass the censorship filter.

Richard Dreyfuss on the Oscars’ DEI standards

In The Guardian:

“They make me sick. Because this is a form of art... Nobody should tell me as an artist that I have to comply with the latest, most current idea of what morality is. What are we risking? Are we really risking offending somebody’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life... It’s so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treats people like children.”

Dreyfuss continued:

“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black person? Is someone else being told that if they are not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Have we gone crazy? Don’t we know that art is art?”

Think this is an isolated case?

Not even close.

What Is Allowed for Black People Is Not Allowed for White People

If a public figure today tries to say that blackface is “normal” or “just fun,” the industry reaction is immediate.

A well-known example is television host Megyn Kelly.

In 2018, on her NBC show, she casually remarked that when she was growing up, dressing up as Black people for Halloween was not considered racist.

A huge backlash followed.

Kelly publicly apologized, but the show was nevertheless cancelled and she was fired from the network.

Many popular comedians and actors performed blackface sketches in the 1990s and 2000s, when public sensitivity to the subject was lower.

The Black Lives Matter movement brought the issue back into the spotlight in 2020.

Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel

Both popular television hosts wore blackface in the early 2000s while portraying Black celebrities — Chris Rock and Karl Malone.

They were forced to issue profound public apologies.

Fallon was targeted for cancellation on social media, but was saved by support from colleagues, including Black comedians such as Jamie Foxx, while his apology was considered sincere.

Television shows cut

Streaming platforms chose to play it safe and simply removed blackface episodes from cult television series such as The Office — an episode involving Dwight dressing as Belsnickel and a colleague portraying a Black assistant — Scrubs, Community, and 30 Rock.

Doesn’t this remind you of anything?

Remember the idea that “racism can only be white because oppressed groups are a constant”?

This is precisely critical race theory in action.

When a Black racist killed Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska, did you see the full video in any major left-wing media outlet?

After her killing, with an apparently racist motive, he said:

“I got this white girl.”

If you did not see it, ask yourself why you do not know about it.

Later, a fundraiser was launched on GoFundMe in support of the killer, portraits of Iryna were painted over with images of her killer, and the BLM Instagram account even reposted the video in its Stories with the words:

“We have a right to violence.”

Black Actors on the Discrimination of “Diversity” Policies

Morgan Freeman — 2005

A famous and uncompromising exchange with journalist Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the longest-running American television program.

Mike Wallace:

“How do we get rid of racism if we don’t...”

Morgan Freeman:

“Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m asking you to stop calling me a Black man. I know you as Mike Wallace, and you know me as Morgan Freeman. You don’t say, ‘I know a white guy named Mike Wallace,’ do you? You understand what I mean?”

Denzel Washington — 2022

In January 2022, during the promotional campaign for The Tragedy of Macbeth — in which Denzel played the lead in a cast with a very diverse ethnic composition — NBC BLK journalists asked him about the importance of such casting.

Washington replied that emphasizing this during promotional campaigns was fundamentally wrong:

“Obviously, our cast is diverse. [But] we should get to the point where diversity doesn’t even have to be mentioned, as if it’s something special. These young people — Black, white, blue, green, whatever — they’re just highly talented and qualified. That’s why they’re here.”

In another interview, discussing the film business in general, Denzel Washington expressed the same point about money:

“You can’t legislate love or business... At the end of the day, it’s a business. No matter what color you are, if you don’t bring good revenue to the business, you’re not going to get new opportunities.”

They are both absolutely right.

People who still believe that what matters most is not talent but a person’s skin color are obviously racists.

They introduce quotas and treat people differently based on their color, considering them unequal, less capable, and less talented — people who need to be forcibly pushed through the system.

That is pure, unadulterated racism.

4. Children. Disney Imposed Its Radical Sexual Agenda on Minors

The scandal erupted in March 2022, when conservative activist Christopher Rufo published leaked video recordings from a closed internal Disney online meeting called “Reimagine Tomorrow.”

The leak triggered a massive wave of outrage among audiences and parents, leading to accusations that the studio was aggressively indoctrinating children and promoting a “hidden agenda,” while also triggering a mass boycott of the company’s products and subscriptions.

Facing a sharp decline in box-office revenues, billion-dollar streaming losses, and a civil-rights complaint filed with the EEOC by America First Legal, the conglomerate’s management was forced to retreat.

Disney quietly wound down the Reimagine Tomorrow brand, removed DEI goals from the conditions governing executive bonuses, and shifted its focus away from blind adherence to quotas and back toward profitability and content quality.

But first, the leaks.

Vivian Ware — Diversity & Inclusion Manager

Vivian Ware stated that the company had removed the terms “ladies,” “gentlemen,” “boys,” and “girls” from all its theme parks in order to create “that magical moment” for children who do not identify with traditional gender roles.

Allen Marsh — Production Coordinator, Disney Television Animation

“I’ve had a lot of open conversations with my leadership team about, like: ‘Hey, where can we put trans characters? Where can we put queer characters? Where can we put gender-nonconforming characters?’ <...> And right now we’re working on a show called Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, where we’re trying to implement this.”

IN CARTOONS, PEOPLE!

From the same Disney leak in March 2022, during the “Reimagine Tomorrow” meeting.

Martsch was a production coordinator at Disney Television Animation.

He said they wanted more trans and gender-nonconforming characters, especially at the center of the story rather than merely in the background.

Nadine Smith of Equality Florida, a Disney activist partner, told LGBTQ+ employees that Ron DeSantis and Christina Pushaw wanted to “erase you,” “criminalize your existence,” and “take your children.”

This was an extreme conspiracy theory suggesting that Republicans wanted to take children away from gay people.

In reality, DeSantis never had a policy aimed at the mass removal of children from same-sex couples simply because of their sexual orientation.

There were disputes surrounding legislation on gender-affirming treatment for minors and custody issues in cases involving transgender children, but that is not the same thing as saying that “Republicans want to kidnap children from gay people.”

But there is a very important detail here for understanding what kind of people were shaping all of this.

Karey Burke — President, Disney General Entertainment / 20th Television

Disney president Karey Burke told employees during one of the meetings leaked online:

“Actually, I’m here as a mother of two queer children. One is a transgender child, the other is a pansexual child. And also as an executive.”

Burke then said she supported the inclusion of “very, very many” LGBTQ characters and was shocked to discover that Disney content contained only a “small number” of major queer characters.

“When I worked at Freeform, the desire to be at the forefront of inclusivity was an integral part of the brand. Nobody stopped us, and it was wonderful. I think partly because we were targeting Generation Z and millennials. And this morning my son texted me: ‘Mom, Gen Z is 30–40% more queer than previous generations, so it’s time for Disney to catch up...’”

Burke told Disney employees that she hoped the time would come when their representation would be “at least 50%.”

In any society, if you combine all LGBT categories together, they account for no more than 10% of the population.

Having two children herself, she decided to artificially increase that figure on screen fivefold.

You will see the result below.

Let’s continue.

Latoya Raveneau — Executive Producer, Disney Television Animation

“I had queerness [in my shows] everywhere. Nobody stopped me, and nobody told me ‘don’t,’ which I thought they would... I just added queerness everywhere I could. Nobody checked me.”

She worked on The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.

Private studios — Disney, Pixar, and others — have broad rights to release such content.

However, they face serious criticism for intervening in the sphere of sexual and gender education, which has traditionally been considered the prerogative of the family.

Essentially, many parents and lawyers view this as a form of state-corporate intervention in the natural process of a child’s sexual maturation and identity formation before the age of 18.

They argue that normalizing trans identities and queer themes at preschool and elementary-school ages is ideological indoctrination rather than neutral “representation of diversity.”

A Little Statistics from Research

Gallup polls in the United States, 2012–2025: the share of adults identifying as LGBTQ+ increased from approximately 3.5% to 9.3%.

Among Gen Z — ages 18–27, the generation targeted by the Disney executive — the figure is 23%, with some data showing as high as 31% among young women.

Heterosexual identification among adolescents is declining: one analysis found a decrease from 84.5% in 2019 to 74.7% in 2021.

A study of 1,655 cases supports the role of social factors.

Contemporary research analyzing the growth in the number of LGBTQ people over the past decade increasingly points to a significant role played by cultural factors.

Increased public visibility and normalization of LGBTQ identities are accompanied by more young people beginning to question their sexual orientation and identify as bisexual, queer, or pansexual, whereas many of them in the past would probably have considered themselves heterosexual.

5. The Inevitable Turnaround of the Industry

In the spring of 2022, users dissatisfied with the corporation’s actions launched a viral social-media campaign under the hashtag #CancelDisneyPlus, calling for a mass boycott and cancellation of streaming subscriptions.

Against the backdrop of the leaks and employees’ conspiracy theories, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis initiated the removal of the company’s privileges.

In April 2022, the state legislature officially voted to revoke Disney’s longstanding special tax and self-governing status in the Reedy Creek district.

This prolonged cultural and legal scandal, combined with a broader cooling of investor sentiment toward the streaming market, led to a prolonged decline in the company’s market capitalization.

Over the course of 2022, Disney shares fell by more than 40%, one of the worst financial performances in the company’s modern history.

Former Walt Disney Television executive Monica Harris blamed DEI requirements specifically for Hollywood’s quality crisis.

Studios were forced to hire people according to quotas rather than talent, resulting in lower-quality content.

In 2025, Disney officially wound down the Reimagine Tomorrow program and removed diversity criteria from executive performance evaluations.

This occurred after pressure from conservative activists and a decline in streaming-service stocks.

Disney also faced a civil-rights complaint over a DEI goal calling for 50% representation from “underrepresented” groups among actors and crew.

David Mamet: DEI Initiatives in Hollywood Are “Garbage”

“DEI is garbage,” the Pulitzer Prize winner said before a packed audience at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “It is fascist totalitarianism.”

The idea that:

“I can’t give you the stupid statuette unless you have 7% of this and 8% of that...”

is an intrusion into creativity, Mamet said.

“[The film industry] has no more reason to improve racial understanding among everyone than a fire department does,”

Mamet said, prompting several loud laughs from the audience.

He argued that his colleagues would be better off selling popcorn than trying to improve the representation of marginalized groups.

“They earned it on merit,”

he said of his daughter Zosia Mamet, who appeared in Girls.

They received no privileges, he said, and he believes DEI initiatives take deserved opportunities away from others.

“Nobody ever gave my children a job because of who they were connected to.”

Joseph Kahn

The well-known music-video and film director openly stated in an interview with Film Threat in May 2026 that DEI initiatives had produced segregation rather than diversity.

“Suddenly there was such a push toward diversity that it turned into division rather than diversity.”

Kahn said that he stopped being perceived as a universal director.

After the success of his work, he began receiving offers only for projects with an Asian flavor — such as pitching Shang-Chi — while his artistic vision was ignored and he was evaluated primarily through the lens of ethnicity.

He noted that “bad work is simply annoying” and does not sell the idea of diversity, citing Crazy Rich Asians as an example, which he considers a boring reworking of old plots.

Rob Schneider — in an interview with FOX

“Hollywood used to be about what unites us. Now it’s about what divides us. They traded the Dream Factory for the Indoctrination Laboratory... If we want to save art, we have to return to the universal. We have to remember that we are supposed to be entertainers, not high priests of a new religion nobody asked for.”

“The rot in Hollywood’s soul... Today’s blacklist of conservatives is the same thing. I think, at its core, it contributes to its destruction.”

David Zucker — director of Airplane! and The Naked Gun

“Comedy is in trouble... I would just like comedy creators to be able to make comedies without fear [of offending someone].”

He gave FOX an extensive interview about why Airplane! would lose 90% of its jokes if it were made today.

Rowan Atkinson — actor, Mr. Bean

In an interview, he called cancel culture “the digital equivalent of a medieval mob” looking for someone to burn.

Helena Bonham Carter — actress

In an interview, she said:

“I hate cancel culture.”

She called it a hysterical “witch hunt” and defended Rowling, saying that she had been “hounded.”

Ralph Fiennes — actor, Voldemort

He called the harassment of J.K. Rowling “disgusting” and “outrageous,” lamenting the “age of accusations” and the absence of nuance.

John Cleese — actor, Monty Python

He has called wokeness an enemy of creativity and cancel culture an “organized... totalitarian” movement.

He refused to cut the “Loretta” scene from the stage version of Life of Brian.

He also gave an interview about “how wokeism is killing free speech.”

6. The Mechanism Was Robust — and the Positions Were at the Highest Level

At the same time, a whole series of senior positions were introduced to create barriers within the filmmaking process.

New positions responsible for censorship or additional hiring

SVP & Chief Diversity Officer — Latondra Newton, The Walt Disney Company, 2017–2023

SVP & Chief Diversity Officer — Tinisha Agramonte, The Walt Disney Company, 2023–present (or until reorganization)

Global Chief Diversity Officer — Paul Martin, Sony Pictures Entertainment, approximately 2020s–present

EVP & Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer — Tiffany R. Warren, Sony Music Group (associated with Sony), 2020s–present

Vice President of Inclusion Strategy — Vernā Myers, Netflix, until 2023

Global Head of Inclusion / equivalent — Marva Smalls, Paramount (Paramount Global), 2020s

These departments often had considerable autonomy and influence for several reasons.

High status of executives

Chief Diversity Officers and equivalent executives usually held the rank of Senior Vice President or Executive Vice President and had direct access to the CEO.

During 2020–2023, many of them had real power to influence hiring, project greenlights, scripts, and marketing.

The “sacred cow”

After 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, criticism of DEI within a company could cost someone their career.

Therefore, top management often preferred not to interfere in order to avoid accusations of racism or sexism.

External pressure

These departments actively interacted with external activist groups, the media, and investors such as BlackRock, giving them an additional lever of influence.

Lack of strict oversight

Many initiatives — including script checks through GD-IQ, hiring quotas, and Inclusion Lens — were launched relatively independently by DEI departments, while studio management often simply rubber-stamped them in order to avoid conflict.

They Didn’t Even Hide It in Their Reports

From Netflix’s report:

Inclusion in Netflix Original U.S. Scripted Films & Series

Racial and ethnic diversity

In 2023, more than half of original content — 53.3% — featured members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in leading roles.

However, this success was extremely uneven.

In television series, the figure reached a record 71.4%, while in feature films it fell to 31.4%.

The report emphasizes the importance of intersectionality — the overlap of identities.

In series, the number of leading female characters who were women of color rose significantly to 73.8% in 2023, while in films it fell sharply to 14.3%.

As with gender...

2023 was a record year for the company:

32.5% of projects were led by LGBTQ characters.

But this impressive progress was almost entirely driven by television series, where the figure reached 52.4%.

A note

The white population in America ranges from 59% — approximately 200 million people — to 75% if people of Latino origin who identify as white are included.

At the same time, television series achieved figures of more than 70% non-white people.

Why?

Just because.

In pursuit of “equality.”

And here again, I am reminded of the Soviet Union.

I’ll End with a Quote from Margaret Thatcher

“The one big intellectual mistake of my entire political career was to identify freedom with equality. In reality, equality is an unnatural condition that can exist only through state coercion and often becomes the enemy of freedom.”

7. The Price of Abandoning Meritocracy

Industry Analysis and Criticism — “Woke Fatigue”

The Spectator Australia

“Woke fatigue: why audiences reject Hollywood”

An analysis of how studios trapped themselves in a cycle of “over-feminization” and ideological clichés.

The article examines the box-office disasters of projects such as Strange World, Wish, The Marvels, Lightyear, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — the losses from the latter estimated at $143 million.

The author argues that accusations of “toxicity” against fans became a convenient way for producers to justify creative bankruptcy.

Crisis Magazine

“The Death of Woke Hollywood and the Impoverishment of Our Culture”

An essay about the tectonic shift taking place in the industry.

The author explains how replacing original stories with racial and gender activism — race/gender-swapping — led to failures.

The examples cited are the phenomenal successes of traditional films free of lectures, such as Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, and Inside Out 2.

These films forced Hollywood to acknowledge that audiences had grown tired of being lectured to in movie theaters.

Michigan Journal of Economics

“Disney’s Recent Resurgence”

An economic analysis of the media giant’s declining performance.

The article cites data showing that the corporation’s market share of the global box office fell by half, from a peak of 33% in 2019 to 16% in 2023.

It was these catastrophic losses from “gargantuan flops” that forced company head Bob Iger to announce a change of course and a return to a strategy of “quality over quantity.”

MPM Acting / Michael McCaffrey

“The Disaster That is Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’”

A critical piece by an industry expert examining how the once-unsinkable Marvel franchise (MCU) entered a steep decline.

The author links this to top executives consciously eliminating popular lead characters in favor of virtue signaling, replacing them with less-developed inclusive copies.

The result was billions of dollars in lost box-office revenue.

Finish.

#woke #hollywood #dei #Diversity #disney #netflixmovies #discriminación #racismo

In contemporary discourse, the term “Islamophobia” continues to function as a powerful shield: any attempt to analyze Islamic doctrine or political structures associated with it is automatically labeled as prejudice. To understand why this strategy is so effective, we need to trace the entire path, from the moment the key organizations were created. It is a sequential process in which religious ideology, organizational discipline, and the skillful use of Western narratives of oppression merged into a single system.

In March 1928, in the Egyptian city of Ismailia, schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Six workers from a British camp became its first members. Al-Banna saw colonialism, secularism, and Western culture as threats to Islamic identity. His project was not merely religious: it was a total system — from raising children to political power. The Brotherhood quickly spread throughout Egypt, creating schools, hospitals, sports clubs, and cells that appeared to be social welfare organizations but served a single goal — the restoration of the caliphate. By the 1940s, the movement had hundreds of thousands of members and was already involved in political intrigue.

In parallel, in 1930, in Detroit, Wallace Fard Muhammad (also known as Wallace Dodd Fard) founded the Nation of Islam (NOI). It was an American adaptation: a mixture of Islamic rhetoric with Black nationalism and overt racism. Fard preached that whites were “devils,” created by an evil scientist named Yakub, while Blacks were the original people of God. After his disappearance in 1934, leadership was taken over by Elijah Muhammad, who built an empire through strict control, economic enterprises, and the paramilitary group Fruit of Islam. By the 1960s, the NOI already had dozens of mosques and tens of thousands of followers. Later, under Louis Farrakhan (from 1977 onward), the organization retained its antisemitism and began actively aligning itself with the Palestinian narrative, seeing it as a continuation of the struggle of the “oppressed” against white imperialism.

These two structures — the Sunni political machine of the Brotherhood and American Black Islamism — set the tone for decades to come. In the 1950s and 1960s, persecution of the Brotherhood began in Egypt. They survived through underground networks and by exporting themselves to other countries. Saudi Arabia, enriched by oil after 1973, began massively funding Wahhabi schools and mosques, using the Brotherhood as conduits. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 became a turning point: Ayatollah Khomeini (and later Khamenei) turned Shia Islam into a state ideology for exporting revolution. Khamenei’s public lectures and programmatic writings explicitly called for fighting “infidels” and supporting the “axis of resistance.” By the 1980s, secular regimes in the Middle East began losing ground.

It was precisely in the 1970s and 1980s that the visible Islamization of the region took place. Until the 1960s, middle-class women in Cairo, Beirut, and Tehran wore miniskirts and did not cover their hair — this was a symbol of modernization. After 1979, the hijab became mandatory by law in Iran, and refusal could lead to arrest. In Egypt, where the Brotherhood gained strength under Sadat and Mubarak, social pressure and Saudi money made covering the hair the norm by the mid-1980s. In Algeria, Sudan, and Pakistan, a wave of Islamism swept through the streets. By the 1990s, in most Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, a woman without a hijab was perceived as a challenge to tradition. This was not an organic process: Saudi petrodollars, the Iranian model, and the Brotherhood’s discipline created a network of madrasas, media outlets, and charitable foundations that reshaped the culture within a single generation.

At the same time, a second stage was underway — the development of a strategy for penetrating the West. The document “The Project” is dated December 1, 1982: a 12-point plan for civilizational jihad, instructing its adherents to create front organizations, penetrate the media, universities, and politics, and use international conflicts for mobilization. The document was discovered on November 7, 2001, when Swiss authorities, at the request of the United States — as part of a terrorism-financing investigation following 9/11 — searched the villa of Brotherhood leader Youssef Nada, director of Al-Taqwa Bank. Nearly two decades passed between the writing of the document and its discovery.

A similar story concerns another key document. In 1991, Mohamed Akram wrote the “Explanatory Memorandum” for the Brotherhood: a program of “the great jihad” aimed at destroying Western civilization “from within by the hands of the unbelievers themselves,” in which the Palestinian cause is described as a key lever for mobilization. The document was seized in 2004 during a search of the home of Ismail Elbarasse in Virginia, as part of a case involving the financing of Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation. Thirteen years passed between its writing and its discovery. If previously one could speculate, now it became clear — this was a strategy.

In 1978, Edward Said published “Orientalism,” a book that became the bible of postcolonial theory. Said, a “Palestinian” Christian by origin but close to Arab nationalists, argued that any study of the East by the West was a form of racism and colonial domination. Criticism of Islam automatically became “Orientalism,” that is, oppression. Left-wing intellectuals embraced the idea: Islam became a “religion of the oppressed,” while Palestinians became analogous to Black Americans or the Vietnamese.

The chronology of the rapprochement with the left can be clearly traced. In the mid-1960s, Soviet propaganda and Chinese Maoism began positioning Palestinians as part of the “Third World.” After the 1967 war, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) published a bulletin in June–July 1967 containing an article titled “Third World Round-Up: The Palestine Problem,” in which Israel was characterized as an instrument of colonial expansion, while Zionist actions in the creation of the state were described as “terror, force and massacre.” The Black Panthers and radicals within the Nation of Islam saw the Palestinian cause as a continuation of their own struggle. On November 1, 1970, The New York Times published an advertisement by the “Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East,” calling for an end to U.S. military support for the “Zionist government of Israel” and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as part of a broader struggle against racism and imperialism. In 1975, the UN adopted Resolution 3379, “Zionism Is Racism,” lending legitimacy to the narrative. The resolution was revoked only in 1991, but during those sixteen years it became deeply rooted in rhetoric and institutions.

By the 1980s, the Palestinian cause had become part of the anti-apartheid movement. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, Palestinians filled the vacuum of the “last struggle of the oppressed.” BLM in the 2010s–2020s fully integrated Palestinian imagery and rhetoric: slogans such as “Palestinian Lives Matter,” and accusations of an “exchange of lethal tactics” between Israel and American police. Organizations linked to Hamas — the Holy Land Foundation, American Muslims for Palestine, and Students for Justice in Palestine — as shown by reports from university research centers, worked for decades on American campuses under the cover of “civil rights.”

By the 2000s, they were already forming “red-green” alliances: the Stop the War Coalition in Britain, where the Brotherhood collaborated with socialists and communists. A new generation of Islamists adopted the language of intersectionality, decolonization, and “Islamophobia” as structural racism. In the 2000 book “Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase,” Yusuf al-Qaradawi explicitly called for building “our own little Muslim ghetto” — a separate community with its own religious, educational, and recreational institutions within a non-Muslim society.

Returning to America, it is worth noting how exactly the Nation of Islam became woven into the fabric of the country. Malcolm X, who left the NOI and broke with it in 1964, became one of the most quoted voices of the 20th century: his autobiography, according to many researchers, brought more Americans to Islam than the Quran itself. Muhammad Ali, another product of the movement, brought the NOI’s name and rhetoric into the mainstream of American sports and public life. Louis Farrakhan, who took over the organization in 1977, remained for nearly half a century a figure around whom both the 1995 Million Man March and ongoing controversies over antisemitism in American political discourse were built — the Anti-Defamation League calls him one of the most prominent antisemites in the country. Thus, the NOI influenced America as a node through which some of the most recognizable figures of 20th-century Black America passed — and as a channel through which the idea of solidarity between the “oppressed” and the Palestinian cause, discussed above, first became firmly embedded in the rhetoric of part of the American left.

Part 1. This is only the beginning. There will be several more parts. Part 2 — the role of Al Jazeera.

With the arrival of the Barack Obama administration, the U.S. approach to combating extremism changed dramatically. The administration adopted a policy of “Engagement,” which envisioned cooperation with supposedly “moderate” Islamist groups, allegedly as a way to counter al-Qaeda.

But there was one problem: almost all of these groups had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Libya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Yet it was not banned... in the United States or the EU.

In practice, representatives of CAIR, ISNA, and the ADAMS Center gained direct access to policymakers and the formation of government policy.

In 2010, Imam Mohamed Magid joined the CVE working group of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The group had been created by then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano at the direction of the Obama administration.

He met repeatedly with Obama and members of his administration. In March 2013, he participated in a meeting of religious leaders discussing immigration reform.

Magid served as president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) from 2010 to 2014, having previously served as its vice president.

In United States v. Holy Land Foundation (2007–2008), the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in U.S. history, the Department of Justice listed ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator / joint venturer.

In court documents, the government explicitly placed ISNA, together with NAIT, in the category of “persons/entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.”

Thus, a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood gained access to the presidential administration and began influencing domestic security policy.

The Turning Point

The turning point came in 2011–2012.

After information was leaked to the media that the FBI Academy in Quantico was teaching about the relationship between fundamentalist Islamic movements and terrorism — in September 2011, Wired journalist Spencer Ackerman published a series of reports on FBI training — a coalition of Islamist NGOs led by ISNA president Imam Mohamed Magid and CAIR leadership secured a closed-door meeting with President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan.

The leaders of these Islamist organizations argued that linking terrorism to Sharia law or to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood was “Islamophobic.”

The result of this meeting was a sweeping “purge” of U.S. training and analytical materials.

John Brennan ordered the removal of more than 800 training documents and hundreds of slides from FBI, DHS, and Pentagon programs.

Terms such as “jihad,” “Sharia,” and “Islamic extremism” were removed from the official lexicon, while religious ideology itself was excluded from the list of radicalization factors under the new CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) program.

Imam Mohamed Magid joined the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory structure, gaining a role in evaluating national-security experts for their “acceptability.”

The precise list of materials removed was never made public. Similar reviews affected DHS, the Pentagon, and other agencies.

Under Trump, all of these individuals lost their positions. They were also no longer invited to White House and DHS advisory councils.

But then the Democrats returned to power.

Biden Returns to “Engagement”

On October 14, 2020, during his presidential campaign, Joe Biden delivered a prerecorded address to the virtual ceremony “Muslims Making Change: National Honors,” organized by Muslim Advocates to mark the organization’s 15th anniversary and honor American Muslims for their contributions to issues including racial justice, civic engagement, and the fight against COVID.

In his speech, Biden acknowledged the continuing hatred, discrimination, and Islamophobia faced by the Muslim community, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. He praised the community’s longstanding role in building America and promised that, if elected, his administration would reflect America’s diversity and that American Muslims would serve at every level.

He pledged to repeal Trump’s “unconstitutional Muslim ban” on his first day in office and to pursue stronger hate-crime legislation.

November 2020.

Palestinian Arab Hady Amr was appointed to Joe Biden’s State Department Agency Review Team during the presidential transition.

After 9/11, Amr wrote: “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.”

He also worked at USAID. As we would later learn from investigations, $2 billion was allegedly directed to the Taliban, with some of the funding reportedly used to build a tunnel-production facility in Gaza.

Maher Bitar — who had served as a director at the National Security Council under Obama — was appointed by the Biden administration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council.

Bitar had been an activist in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and had also headed Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Georgetown University.

Just three minutes before the October 7 Hamas attack, the organization’s Instagram page posted: “We’re back! Follow for updates,” after six months of silence.

The organization once led by the Biden administration’s senior intelligence official appeared, at least from the timing of the post, to have known about the planned October 7 attack.

Robert Malley, who had compared Jews to Nazis and whose father was a friend of Yasser Arafat, was appointed by President Joe Biden as the U.S. Special Envoy for Iran.

He was tasked with managing U.S. and Iranian compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement.

In late 2023, reports emerged alleging that Malley had been loyal to Tehran rather than Washington, based on a joint investigation by Iran International and Semafor drawing on a large cache of emails exchanged by Iranian diplomats between 2003 and 2021.

In 2023, Malley’s security clearance was revoked, and he was placed first on paid and later unpaid leave pending an investigation into the mishandling of classified information.

The case was subsequently referred to the FBI.

The Finale

Do you remember Mohamed Magid?

On May 2, 2023, Imam Mohamed Magid participated in a White House listening session on Islamophobia alongside representatives of CAIR — the same organization that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case involving the alleged transfer of funds to Hamas.

In 2022, President Biden appointed Magid as a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, placing an alleged “representative of the Muslim Brotherhood” in a position on a federal commission dealing with global religious freedom — while, at the level of government policy, he and figures like him were allegedly helping create an environment in which criticism of the reality of Islamist terrorism was increasingly treated as unacceptable.

During Trump’s second term, all of the above individuals again lost their “access to the inner circle” and their positions.

To understand the reasons, I am publishing the testimony of Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, before the Parliament of the Netherlands on June 20, 2024: “The Role of UNRWA in Gaza.”

Chairman: Welcome, Mr. Neuer. The floor is yours.

Hillel Neuer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee.

I came to The Hague to appear before your committee with a message: if we want to support peace and human rights in the Middle East and, indeed, throughout the world, it is time to find a replacement for UNRWA.

If, on the other hand, we want to continue funding an agency whose very purpose is to instill a sense of grievance, injustice, and to support war, then I suppose this country and other countries should continue supporting UNRWA.

Committee Member (interrupting): Excuse me, Mr. Chairman...

Chairman: Yes?

Committee Member: I simply want to raise a procedural objection. I find it outrageous to claim that the organization and its purpose are to instill hatred and support war. Such words have been used before. So I object to that kind of language. In my view, it is unfair, it is untrue, and I consider such language unparliamentary.

Chairman: Yes. But, Mr. ..., the committee decided by majority vote to invite three guests, and he is one of our guests. He will now make his opening statement, and we are giving him five minutes to explain his position on the role of UNRWA in Gaza. Then it will be your turn to ask questions and receive answers.

Mr. Neuer, please continue.

(You can listen to the lengthy account of UNRWA and how entire European ministries covered for the organization for years via the link in the comments. I will go straight to the question that Hillel himself described as follows:)

“Radical left members of the Dutch Parliament, in close coordination with UNRWA, came to a committee hearing in The Hague in order to attack me. It didn’t quite work out as they planned.”

Sarah Dobbe, Socialist Party of the Netherlands:

Our guest is making some fairly serious allegations, for which I myself have not found any evidence. And I would like to ask: are these allegations you are talking about published on your website? Do you contact UNRWA before publishing these allegations?

In other words, do you try to verify these allegations with UNRWA before publishing them? Because if they turn out to be untrue — and, as I understand it, sometimes that is indeed the case — the information and the accusation have already been published.

Hillel Neuer:

First of all, let’s clarify this. In most cases, the allegations we publish are publications by UNRWA employees themselves.

For example, the report on terror that we published in January was based on publicly available posts. We didn’t hack anything. It was a public post in a group of UNRWA teachers in Gaza, which has thousands of teachers in it. Some work full-time, some part-time. And they were celebrating the October 7 attacks.

So we didn’t publish that. They published it themselves. We simply provided a link to something that was publicly available.

When I posted a link today to the page of Fathi al-Sharif, the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union, I am not publishing this — he is publishing these photographs himself. (Shows his Facebook page.) This is Fathi al-Sharif.

And I’m glad you asked. Here is a huge photograph of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the founder of Hamas. Here are photograph after photograph in which he glorifies terrorists.

So we are not publishing this. And we don’t need to contact UNRWA, because do you know what UNRWA will do?

I’ll let you in on a secret. As soon as we contact UNRWA, they will call Facebook and have the page removed. The page will disappear within 24 hours.

They don’t want us to talk about this. They don’t want Dutch citizens to know that there are hundreds and thousands of UNRWA teachers.

The head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, Fathi al-Sharif, is an active supporter of Hamas — as evidenced by his page.

Tomorrow, that page will be gone. Of course, we’ve taken screenshots of everything.

So I know that you want us to pass this information on to UNRWA so that everything can be deleted.

But let me say this: since you asked, we have contacted UNRWA, and we documented this in our report and in the evidence submitted to Catherine Colonna.

We documented every instance in which we contacted UNRWA, because the honorable member of the committee asked whether we had contacted UNRWA.

We did contact UNRWA.

In August 2015, we contacted UNRWA. There was no response.

In September 2015 — no response.

November 2015, 2018, 2021, 2023 — we contacted UNRWA again and again.

Once, we received a response from Mr. William Deere, their representative in the United States. He responded to our letter but declined my request for a meeting.

I live in Geneva. I am again offering to meet, and I hope you will ask your friends at UNRWA to meet with me.

I will meet Mr. Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, in Geneva. He will be there in a few weeks, and he has already been there. He refuses to meet with me.

I will meet him in Amman. I will meet him in Jerusalem. Those are their headquarters. I will meet him anywhere.

They refused to meet with me when I was invited to a panel discussion at the Stimson Center.

A few weeks ago, there was a panel discussion in Washington featuring William Deere, UNRWA’s representative in the United States, a former Jordanian official, and a representative of the Stimson Center.

I was an officially confirmed participant on that panel. I was invited by Barbara Slavin, a well-known supporter of the Iran nuclear deal from the Stimson Center.

She wrote back to me:

“I’m sorry, Mr. Neuer. You were a confirmed participant, but I have to withdraw your invitation.”

I asked: “Why? Why are you withdrawing my invitation?”

And she said:

“Yes, that’s true. William Deere, UNRWA’s representative in the United States, said that he would not participate in the panel if you were there. So I am withdrawing your invitation.”

So you ask me why we don’t engage with UNRWA.

The truth is the opposite.

We have approached UNRWA again and again and again.

Not only do they refuse to meet with us anywhere — they even refuse to participate on the same panel with us and have me removed from it.

So I invite you to ask your friends at UNRWA: meet with us.

We have hundreds of pages of evidence, and if we are wrong, let them show us exactly where.

Thank you.

1. Status of the Territories and the Legality of Settlements

Opponent’s question: Why do you dispute the international consensus? The International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion, and almost every country in the world recognize Israeli settlements as illegal under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Natasha’s answer: The correct legal term for these territories is “disputed territories,” not “occupied territories.” Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits a state from forcibly transferring its civilian population, whereas Israelis move there voluntarily, of their own free will. Distorting a provision created in the aftermath of the Holocaust specifically to protect people from Nazi deportations to death camps in order to prohibit Jews from living in certain territories simply because they are Jewish is morally unacceptable. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion is not legally binding, does not create international legal obligations, and contains serious errors of law and fact due to the absence of proper fact-finding. UN Security Council resolutions are likewise political declarations without binding force when they are not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. References to an “international consensus” are political statements, not law. Similar accusations of occupation are never applied consistently to other disputed territories around the world, such as Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Cambodia, Crimea, or Abkhazia.

2. The Analogy with Russia and Ukraine

Opponent’s question: Norway consistently opposes all forms of occupation. Isn’t the situation with the settlements analogous to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Crimea, which we rightly consider an illegal occupation?

Natasha’s answer: The comparison is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent. Crimea is recognized as Ukrainian territory based on the principle of uti possidetis juris — the preservation of existing administrative boundaries upon independence. If Ukraine were to regain Crimea, Norway would presumably not call that an “occupation” by Ukraine. In 1967, Israel returned to Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem, which had previously been illegally occupied by Jordan following its invasion in 1948. Israel’s sovereign borders, under the principle of uti possidetis juris, were established in 1948 and corresponded to the borders of the British Mandate. It is impossible to occupy one’s own sovereign territory. Denying Israel’s sovereign rights to these territories while recognizing the same principle in Ukraine’s case regarding Crimea represents an extreme double standard that undermines confidence in the international legal order.

3. Palestinian Rights and the Oslo Accords

Opponent’s question: If this is not an occupation, why are Palestinians denied voting rights, basic rights, and subject to a separate criminal code? Israel is trying to have it both ways: claiming there is no occupation while governing Palestinians without giving them rights.

Natasha’s answer: The Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s, provide the answer to this apparent contradiction. They established a clear administrative framework, granting Palestinians self-government under the Palestinian Authority in Areas A and B. Article 17 of the Oslo II Accord explicitly excludes Israeli settlements from Palestinian jurisdiction. It is unclear why Norway is attempting to “throw out the window” an international agreement whose legal validity was reaffirmed as recently as 2020 by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As for claims about the “terrible situation” of Palestinians, a poll by a Palestinian news agency found that 93% of Arab residents of East Jerusalem would prefer to remain under Israeli rule, while data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics indicate that 86% are satisfied with their lives.

4. Violation of Trade Obligations and WTO Rules — and Sanctions on Goods from Judea and Samaria

Opponent’s question: Our free-trade agreement with Israel applies only to the pre-1967 borders. Moreover, we do not consider the proposed ban a violation of WTO rules because we are not required to grant trade rights to an occupying power in occupied territories.

Natasha’s answer: The proposed ban would directly violate Norway’s existing international obligations, including the 2021 Agricultural Agreement with Israel, the 1993 EFTA–Israel Free Trade Agreement, and WTO rules under GATT/GATS. Trade agreements approach questions of sovereignty neutrally: they are based on who actually administers the territory and collects customs duties — in this case, Israel — a reality that even the Palestinian Authority recognizes. Moreover, Norway’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs effectively acknowledges in its consultation document that the proposed measure raises WTO compliance issues. Norway is being inconsistent. In the well-known WTO dispute concerning EC — Seal Products, Norway itself argued that a European import ban justified on public-morality grounds constituted unlawful and arbitrary discrimination. Finally, such a move could expose Norway to the application of U.S. anti-boycott laws, potentially causing serious damage to its trade relations with the United States.

5. Vague Legislation and the Consequences for Palestinian Workers

Opponent’s question: Why are you concerned about Palestinians? The legislation contains a specific “carve-out” to ensure they are not harmed. And the technical difficulties of distinguishing settlement goods from other Israeli goods will be dealt with by our law-enforcement authorities.

Natasha’s answer: Introducing criminal liability on the basis of legislation that is so vague, convoluted, and unclear that even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cannot explain how goods involving partial production should be classified is an extraordinary precedent that should concern every Norwegian citizen. No international business will want to operate in Norway under such legal uncertainty. The notion of “settlement businesses” is misleading. These are private companies where Jews, Arabs, and Christians work side by side. Discriminating against businesses based on the ethnicity of their owners or employees is morally objectionable. The people who could ultimately suffer the most from this legislation are Palestinians themselves. Tens of thousands of Arab workers are employed by these Israeli businesses and depend on these jobs to support their families. Taking those jobs away as a result of a Norwegian boycott would undermine their economic well-being.

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The campaign to free Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti has been actively gaining support since late 2025 — much like the campaign featuring red handprints that came before it.

More than 200 cultural figures have signed an open letter calling for Barghouti’s release.

Among them:

Film & TV: Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Ian McKellen, Javier Bardem, Josh O’Connor, Cynthia Nixon, Hilary Swank, Gustaf Skarsgård, and others.

Music: Paul Simon, Sting, Annie Lennox, Brian Eno, Charlotte Church, Jarvis Cocker.

Literature: Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, Arundhati Roy, Colm Tóibín, Hisham Matar.

Public figures: Angela Davis, Richard Branson, Gary Lineker, Ai Weiwei, and many others.

In 2026, more than 20 actors from the Marvel universe joined the campaign.

The campaign was launched in 2013 in Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell on Robben Island in South Africa by Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa Barghouti, and Ahmed Kathrada. In 2025–2026, it was relaunched under the hashtag #FreeMarwanNow and the “Free Marwan” brand.

In 2014, the municipality of Valenton, a suburb of Paris, named a street after Marwan Barghouti. The decision sparked protests and legal challenges from organizations fighting antisemitism.

That same year, the Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel and Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy awarded Barghouti honorary citizenship. The decisions were later overturned by French courts.

Who Is Marwan Barghouti?

Marwan Barghouti was arrested by Israeli forces in Ramallah in April 2002. In 2004, an Israeli court convicted him on five counts of murder and sentenced him to five consecutive life sentences plus 40 years.

During the Second Intifada, which he led, the terrorist groups under his command carried out attacks primarily against civilians in crowded public places: buses and bus stops, restaurants and cafés, nightclubs and discos, shopping centers, markets, pedestrian streets, and hotels.

Among the best-known targets were the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv, the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, Café Moment in Jerusalem, the Park Hotel in Netanya during a Passover seder, the Matza restaurant in Haifa, Sheffield Club in Rishon LeZion, the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, buses in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, and the Frank Sinatra cafeteria at the Hebrew University.

British musician Brian Eno told The Guardian:

“History shows us that cultural voices can change the course of politics. Just as global solidarity helped free Nelson Mandela, we can all hasten the day when Marwan Barghouti is released. His release would mark a turning point in this long struggle and bring so much hope to us all.”

Selma Dabbagh told The Guardian:

“Marwan’s release would be a critical step in allowing Palestinians to determine their own leadership, whatever form that may take.”

In other words, they apparently do not care whether he becomes the next Sinwar.

Their philosophy seems to be: the worse it is for Israel, the better it is for us.

Barghouti is portrayed as the only leader capable of uniting Palestinian factions — Fatah, Hamas, and others — and advancing a peace process.

Surreal.

Supporters of the campaign call him the “Palestinian Mandela” and a political prisoner, challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli court that convicted him.

But Nelson Mandela did not participate in terrorist attacks against civilians. Barghouti did.

How Do the “Humanitarians” Justify Their Position?

The Lemkin Institute (founded by activists in 2021 and having no connection to Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of “genocide”) writes the following:

The institute called on the Trump administration and the Israeli government to urgently release Marwan al-Barghouti from Israeli prison:

“Despite broad international recognition of his role as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the Israeli government has so far rejected calls for his release, calling him a ‘symbol of terrorism.’ Barghouti is one of the few figures in Palestine who enjoys the public trust necessary to represent Palestinians in the long and difficult political process that will be required to ensure lasting security for both Israelis and Palestinians in the region. Any genuine effort to achieve peace will require Barghouti’s immediate release.”

Amnesty International emphasizes that his family was barred from visiting him for years, arguing that this violates basic prisoners’ rights.

And here is what Amnesty wrote in 2001:

In 2001 alone, a total of 469 Palestinians and 199 Israelis were killed. In its report on the first year of the Intifada, Amnesty International stated:

“The vast majority of unlawful killings and injuries in Israel and the Occupied Territories were carried out by the Israel Defense Forces using excessive force. In particular, the IDF used US-supplied helicopters for punitive missile attacks in cases where there was no immediate threat to life. Israel also used combat helicopters to carry out extrajudicial executions and attacks on targets, resulting in the deaths of civilians, including children.”

And this was despite the fact that it was already known who had initiated the aggression against civilians, as well as the fact that a significant number of Palestinians were being killed by their own side as alleged “collaborators.”

But none of that mattered.

The objective was to shift the focus from the aggressor to the victim.

How a New Reality Is Manufactured

Human Rights Watch and other human-rights organizations wrote in their 2002 reports:

“Marwan Barghouti, Secretary-General of Fatah on the West Bank, wrote in January 2002 that he and the Fatah movement to which I belong ‘strongly oppose attacks and assaults against civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor…’”

All well and good — except that by that point Barghouti himself had given a very different account.

In an interview with the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat on September 29, 2001, Barghouti said:

“I knew that the end of September was the last period before the eruption of violence, but when Sharon came to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it was the most appropriate moment to start the intifada… On the evening before Sharon’s visit, I participated in a local television program and took the opportunity to call on the public to come to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the morning, since it was impossible for Sharon to simply come to the Haram al-Sharif and leave peacefully… After Sharon left, I stayed for another two hours with other people, and we discussed what the response should be and how we could react in all the cities, not only in Jerusalem. We contacted all the Palestinian factions.”

Palestinian Communications Minister Imad al-Falouji, speaking to Al-Safir on March 3, 2001, said:

“Whoever thinks that the intifada erupted because of Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is mistaken… This intifada was planned in advance, from the moment President Arafat returned from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down with President Clinton.”

Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, said the following, according to Palestinian Media Watch:

“On a personal level, I miss him very, very much. (Our daughter) Zahwa misses him too, you can’t imagine. She didn’t know him. She knows that Arafat sent us away from Ramallah. He said, ‘You have to leave Palestine because I want to wage the intifada, and I’m not prepared to defend myself against my wife and little girl.’ Everyone said, ‘Suha abandoned him,’ but I did not abandon him. He ordered me to leave him because he had already decided to wage the Intifada after the Oslo Accords and after the failure of Camp David (July 2000).”

Kant would have turned in his grave when the categorical imperative was broken, and the terrorist became the end while the human being became merely a means to achieve that end.

By playing on the emotions of people far removed from the conflict, modern human-rights activists seek to get every terrorist released, while becoming completely indifferent to the very people who may be killed once the architects of mass terror are set free. And above all, it is the process, not the outcome, that matters — because as long as you keep wearing the white coat of moral superiority, you can continue attracting donor money and donations from gullible spectators.

And all these actors are nothing more than socialites. Why do they support him? Because the lovely human-rights activists have told them — through quotes in the media, of course — how terribly this terrorist is supposedly being treated in prison. And before you know it, they are no longer simply demanding that his rights be respected; they are calling, unconditionally, for the release of a “good man.”

And then you and I will have to live in a world where, thanks to those naive spectators — those very actors — people like Sinwar can end up back on the streets, just as he once did, and go on to organize October 7.

Meet Bashar Masri, a Palestinian-American billionaire and U.S. citizen who serves as chairman of Massar International and the Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO), as well as PRICO and PIEDCO.

In April 2025, nearly 200 relatives of people killed in the October 7 terrorist attacks filed a lawsuit against Masri in U.S. federal court under the Anti-Terrorism Act. The plaintiffs allege that Masri knowingly collaborated with Hamas for years, despite the organization’s designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. government since 1997. These are allegations, and Masri has denied wrongdoing.

The lawsuit focuses on the 480,000-square-meter Gaza Industrial Estate, located across from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of the communities hardest hit on October 7. The estate received funding from USAID, the UN, the EU, and other donors. According to the plaintiffs, Masri coordinated the development of the industrial zone with Hamas, while Hamas constructed tunnels beneath it, used the facility to conduct surveillance of the border, and drew electricity from the site to power its tunnels. The complaint also alleges that a Hamas anti-tank position was installed on the estate’s water tower, within sight of the border barrier.

Masri also oversaw two luxury hotels in Gaza that Hamas, including the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, used for events. According to the lawsuit, Hamas tunnels ran beneath and connected to the hotels. One of them, the Blue Beach, was allegedly connected by tunnel to a Hamas training facility.

Since 2014, the Al-Mashtal Hotel, which displayed UN and EU logos on its roof, allegedly housed part of Hamas’s tunnel network used for launching rockets and served as a command post during that summer’s conflict.

The lawsuit further alleges that Hamas’s tunnel network was not merely located beneath Masri’s hotels but could be accessed directly from guest rooms and other areas inside the properties.

The rebuilt Blue Beach hotel allegedly contained a labyrinth of tunnels and multiple shafts connecting it to the Badr base, a training facility operated by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Harvard

Masri was one of roughly 70 major donors and senior executives who directly advised Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein. He also funded the Rawabi Fellowship for Palestinian students at Harvard Kennedy School, covering tuition, health insurance, and stipends.

Just days after the lawsuit was filed, Masri resigned from the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Council. Harvard confirmed his resignation, while noting that the allegations should be addressed through the legal process.

After the lawsuit was filed, plaintiffs repeatedly attempted to serve Masri at his Washington, D.C., residence. Court records indicate that they believed he was abroad in Israel or the Palestinian territories and sought permission to serve him by alternative means. A federal judge later granted the plaintiffs’ motions to allow alternative service and service abroad.

Shortly before October 7, Masri appointed Khaled Anabtawi, whom the lawsuit describes as closely connected to Hamas, as chairman of one of his Palestinian real-estate companies. The plaintiffs cite this episode as evidence of Masri’s alleged awareness of Hamas’s activities.

Biography

Bashar Masri was born in 1961 in Nablus, into one of the city’s prominent Arab families.

By his own account, as a child he believed in using violence against the “occupation,” referring to Israel. In 1975, at the age of 14, he was imprisoned by Israel for throwing stones at soldiers and was arrested again in 1977, at age 16.

After studying and building a career in Washington, Masri returned to the region during the Oslo years. He went back to the Palestinian territories at the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987, saying that he wanted to participate in organizing it.

In a 2015 interview with TIME, Masri said:

“At that stage, I wasn’t out demonstrating. I was more on the planning side.”

In 1991, Israel’s interior minister deemed him a security threat because of his support for violent activity and barred him from entering the country. He was permitted to return only in 1994, following the Oslo Accords.

Family

The al-Masri clan is one of the most influential families in Nablus.

His father, Dr. Fayez Masri, was a prominent physician, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, and director of the National Hospital in Nablus. He was among the first Palestinian doctors to receive his education in the United States.

His grandfather, Hikmat al-Masri, served as speaker of the Jordanian House of Representatives and as a member of the Jordanian Senate. He also founded An-Najah University, which is now headed by Bashar’s uncle, Sabih al-Masri.

Munib al-Masri, Bashar’s uncle, is a billionaire industrialist often described as the “Palestinian Rockefeller” and a major figure in Palestinian business and politics.

Sabih al-Masri, a grand-uncle, is chairman of Arab Bank and one of the region’s most influential businessmen.

Business Empire

In 1994, Masri founded Massar International to develop the private sector of the Palestinian economy. In 1995, he became a co-founder of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam.

Today, Massar’s portfolio includes more than 30 companies spanning real estate, financial services, journalism, advertising, and information technology.

Masri is chairman of PADICO, one of the largest Palestinian investment companies, and vice chairman of Palestine Telecommunications Company (Jawwal). He also founded the first Palestinian private-equity fund, Siraj Fund, with approximately $90 million in assets.

In 2016, he was listed among the ten wealthiest people in Palestine.

Recognition and Establishment Connections

The World Economic Forum named him a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.”

In 2018, Forbes included him on its list of the 50 greatest leaders in the world.

In December 2019, CBS 60 Minutes devoted a full-length segment to his Rawabi project, titled “Rawabi: One Man’s Vision for a Palestinian Future.”

He has also served on the board of trustees of An-Najah University and on the board of the Palestinian Olympic Committee.

The lawsuit alleges that after obtaining U.S. citizenship, Masri deliberately “reinvented himself,” building an image as a legitimate businessman and visionary while secretly maintaining relationships with Hamas.

According to the complaint, he used his connections in Washington — including the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Council, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s advisory board from 2020 to 2023, and the Middle East Investment Initiative — to obtain financing from USAID, IFC, MIGA, and the World Bank while simultaneously receiving financing from Qatar.

His Own Public Statements

On April 7, 2024, Masri posted a tribute on Facebook to a PFLP terrorist who had died of cancer in an Israeli prison while serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of an Israeli soldier.

After IDF strikes on the Gaza Industrial Estate in May 2021, he publicly blamed Israel for the destruction while, according to the lawsuit, ignoring the presence of Hamas tunnels beneath the site.

Harvard has also faced extensive criticism over antisemitism on campus following October 7, with multiple independent assessments ranking it among the worst-performing universities in this area.

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In 2022, Lorenz tracked down and doxxed the creator of the Libs of TikTok account, Chaya Raichik. In an article for The Washington Post, Lorenz published Raichik’s exact home address, linked to her property records, and made a point of highlighting that she was an Orthodox Jew who had worked as a real estate agent in Brooklyn. The day before the article was published, Lorenz personally showed up at the home of Raichik’s relatives. Conservative media outlets and Jewish organizations, including The Daily Wire and Fox News, accused her of doxxing Raichik and provoking antisemitic attacks against her.

Here are a few of her posts:

May 2024: Lorenz denied that sexual assaults had occurred on October 7, sharing an article titled: “How debunked accounts of sexual violence on Oct. 7 fueled a global debate over Israel’s war with Hamas.”

May 2025: She denied Israel’s right to exist - and, by extension, America’s as well:

“Politico hit piece on Mamdani claims that supporting Israel is an ‘American value.’ Absolutely the fuck not. Israel has zero ‘right to exist’ and neither does the U.S., for that matter.”

July 2025: She defended the chant “Death to the IDF”:

“When people chant ‘Death to the IDF,’ they are calling for the end of the existence of a military structure that is currently committing genocide. It’s not difficult to understand, but all the media continue to deliberately distort the meaning in order to manufacture outrage.”

After October 7, immediately following the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, Lorenz began actively reposting messages blaming the IDF. On her social media accounts, she shared claims describing the incident as an “intentional Israeli airstrike” while ignoring official denials. When intelligence assessments confirmed that the explosion had been caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell in the hospital parking lot, Lorenz did not issue any updates or corrections on her social media pages.

There was not a single post on her accounts explicitly condemning the October 7 massacre or mentioning Hamas atrocities. She systematically reposted content from accounts such as Eye on Palestine, which regularly published fake or misleading material presented as events actually taking place in Gaza.

In her personal livestreams and comments, Lorenz publicly used the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza - something that was expressly prohibited under The Washington Post’s internal rules for staff news reporters, who were permitted to use the term only in opinion columns.

The main trigger for a series of articles in 2024 was a controversy over an Instagram post in which she shared a photograph of Joe Biden with the caption “war criminal” because of his support for Israel. NPR and CNN extensively examined how Lorenz’s social-media activity prompted an investigation by the newspaper’s standards department, which ultimately led to her departure from the staff.

When a screenshot of the post was leaked online by conservative blogger Matt Binder, Lorenz publicly claimed on X:

“This is an edited fake. I never posted this.”

NPR journalist David Folkenflik and The Washington Post’s editorial team conducted a technical examination of the metadata and confirmed that the post was authentic. Lorenz was subsequently suspended from her job.

She has a popular Substack page with thousands of paid subscribers

She has also been promoted by official account

, did you know about this?

James “Fergie” Chambers — heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, the media and cable empire whose family wealth is estimated at $27–30+ billion — has been arrested in Spain at the request of the United States.

Chambers’ father, Jim Cox Chambers, is chairman of the board of Bard College and co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks. He is married to the daughter of Saudi billionaire and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Fergie Chambers himself is a self-described Marxist-Leninist communist.

From a Billionaire Family to Revolutionary Activism

Chambers grew up in Brooklyn. After his parents divorced, he attended Saint Ann’s School before enrolling at Bard College, which he did not graduate from.

He briefly worked for a Cox Enterprises subsidiary and later ran training facilities in Georgia. His involvement in left-wing activism intensified after the Ferguson protests in 2014 and the Standing Rock protests in 2016.

After publicly breaking with his family, Chambers reportedly received a settlement of around $250 million.

In 2019, he founded the Berkshire Communists commune in Massachusetts, where he also operated a gym and published a magazine called Combat Liberalism — because apparently even a socialist has to fight liberalism.

The gym described itself as a space that was “always free for the working class and forever closed to police, military, landlords, and capitalists.” Authorities eventually shut it down over regulatory violations.

From Communism to Islam

Chambers converted to Islam.

In early February 2024, he was photographed in Tunisia presenting himself as a devout Muslim: a Palestinian keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, a Muslim prayer cap, and a short beard in accordance with the Sunnah.

Yet, somewhat unusually for a traditional Muslim, he keeps dogs and continues to smoke.

Fox News has described Chambers as a fusion of socialist and communist activism with Islamist interests directed against the West, free markets, and Israel.

From Activism to Palestine Action

Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, Chambers became one of the most prominent financial backers of Palestine Action, later renamed Unity of Fields.

He also funded legal defense for activists involved in anti-Israel demonstrations and direct-action campaigns in Britain and the United States.

Chambers described the October 7 attacks as a “moment of hope and inspiration.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, he reportedly said that “the most important thing for humanity to thrive is the destruction of the United States.”

He also said:

“I chant ‘Death to America’ every day.”

According to local and national media reports, Chambers was behind the anti-police Stop Cop City movement, financed bail following building occupations and protests targeting Elbit Systems — a company that provides services to Israel — in New Hampshire and the United Kingdom, and continues to provide legal support to networks in the U.S. and U.K. led by the controversial organization Palestine Action.

The $7.5 Million Question

Prosecutors allege that after leaving the United States in 2023, Chambers transferred approximately $7.5 million out of the country, seeking opportunities to provide material support to Hamas.

Chambers’ supporters insist that the money was intended for legitimate purposes — including investments in local businesses and sponsorship of Tunisian football club Club Africain, which became Tunisian champions in May.

Media reports have also pointed to possible links or overlaps between Chambers and Samidoun, which the U.S. Treasury has described as a sham charity raising funds for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as well as the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which has also been linked to the PFLP.

His activities have also reportedly intersected with the network of Marxist activist Roy Singham.

A New Target for Trump’s Counterterrorism Strategy?

The far-left outlet The Grayzone has linked the case to the Trump administration’s new counterterrorism strategy, outlined in May by adviser Sebastian Gorka and reportedly focused on “far-left groups.”

A source in the counterterrorism community told The Washington Post that allegations of links to foreign terrorism “open access to certain investigative tools,” including enhanced surveillance.

Whether Chambers’ case represents a genuine counterterrorism investigation or a politically motivated expansion of those powers is likely to become a major point of contention.

Arrested in Ibiza

Chambers was detained in Spain following a U.S. extradition request and arrested on Ibiza.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a sealed indictment alleging offenses related to providing material support to terrorist organizations, including Hamas.

The central charge is reportedly international money laundering, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison if he is extradited, convicted, and sentenced in the United States.

Spanish National Court Judge Antonio Piña ordered Chambers to remain in custody without bail pending the extradition proceedings.

His partner, Stella Madrid Schnabel, daughter of artist Julian Schnabel, and his lawyer have characterized the case as politically motivated. Their argument is that Chambers is being prosecuted for his public support for Palestine rather than for actually financing terrorism.

The case now presents an unusual picture: a multimillionaire heir who abandoned one of America’s wealthiest families, embraced Marxism-Leninism, converted to Islam, became deeply involved in radical pro-Palestinian activism — and is now facing extradition to the United States on allegations of financing Hamas.

A familiar portrait of the modern far-left radical — except that this time, the radicalism came with a $250 million inheritance.

The conservative position insists that truth exists independently of whoever happens to be in power. Modern left-wing populism, by contrast, uses Foucault’s ideas to undermine the very foundations of civilization — common sense, moral responsibility, and the scientific method.

Foucault argued that knowledge is shaped by power, while relativists took this idea to absurd lengths, claiming that all knowledge is merely a tool of oppression. From this perspective, science, mathematics, and logic are dismissed as Western or patriarchal constructs. The fact that the Earth is round or that two plus two equals four is treated not as objective reality, but as hegemonic discourse. If someone’s opinion or lived experience contradicts the facts, relativists demand that the opinion be respected, replacing truth with the concept of personal truth.

The same approach is applied to morality: the idea of objective good and evil is discarded, and an action is no longer judged on its own merits (for example, violence is bad). Everything depends on who commits the action and what the balance of power and privilege looks like. If aggression is committed by someone belonging to a so-called oppressed group, it can be justified as decolonization or resistance. At the same time, any attempt to defend one’s own borders can be labeled structural violence. This creates a convenient hierarchy of victimhood in which there are no longer any right or wrong sides, perpetrators or victims.

This same logic also undermines the concept of personal responsibility. Drawing on Foucault’s idea that prisons and laws are merely mechanisms of discipline, left-wing sociologists portray criminals as unconditional victims of the system or capitalism. This is where movements for prison abolition and the reduction of penalties for theft come from.

The criminal is no longer seen as an autonomous individual with free will who made a bad choice. Instead, he is declared an unconditional “victim of the system,” capitalism, or his environment. If the “system” is to blame, then the individual who smashed a storefront or committed an assault is not responsible. The conservative idea that every person possesses free will and bears personal responsibility for their sins and crimes is declared outdated and “cruel.” Likewise, people living in ghettos who commit disproportionately more crimes are not held responsible for those crimes because, supposedly, white people created yet another system of oppression of which these people are the victims. Responsibility is constantly shifted away from the individual.

Foucault wrote that the state exercises control over biological life. Modern relativists have turned this idea upside down: they have decided that nature and biology themselves are fascism that must be overcome. Basic biological facts — such as the existence of two sexes — are declared a “medical discourse” imposed on people by doctors as a means of control.

By destroying faith in objective reality, logic, and universal morality, Foucault left behind scorched earth. The logic of modern populists works like this: there is no objective truth, natural law, or universally shared set of facts. All of these are merely “tools of Western oppression.” If objective reality does not exist, then the only things that are real are my personal feelings, my desires, and my grievances.

In a healthy society, subjective experience is corrected by objective reality. Yes, you may perceive the world in a particular way, but there is science, there are laws of nature, and there is mathematics — and you have to contend with them.

The new subjectivism, armed with Foucault’s concepts, works in the opposite direction: it forces reality to bend to subjective feelings.

You can no longer argue with your opponent using logic, statistics, or facts. If they belong to an “oppressed” group, you will be told: “You have no right to argue. You do not share our subjective experience.”

Feelings matter more than intent.

If the fact of a crime and the perpetrator’s actual intent once mattered in establishing guilt or aggression, now a subjective perception may be enough. If someone “feels” that they have been subjected to aggression — for example, because of your words or even your silence — then you are the aggressor. Objective reality no longer matters.

Essentially, left-wing thinkers have used Foucault’s sledgehammer to destroy the foundations of our shared world: objective truth. They promised “liberation,” but ultimately locked every individual inside an isolated subjective chamber — a chamber defined by identity, grievances, and “my truth.”

As a result, politics and society have become a war between these subjective worlds, where there are no longer any shared rules and compromise becomes impossible.

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

In the late 1970s, Foucault traveled to Iran as a journalist. He became a strong supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. Foucault was so hostile to Western civilization, the Enlightenment, and rationalism that he saw radical Islamism as a powerful anti-Western force. He described it as “political spirituality” and admired the way Iranians were rising up against modernity.

When Khomeini’s regime began mass executions of political opponents, persecuting homosexuals, and brutally repressing women, including imposing the veil, European feminists accused Foucault of betrayal. Yet he refused for a long time to acknowledge his mistake. His hostility toward Western institutions was stronger than his sympathy for the actual victims of the theocracy.

Foucault vs. Chomsky

One of the most famous intellectual duels of the twentieth century was the televised debate between Michel Foucault and American linguist Noam Chomsky, a traditional socialist. Chomsky tried to argue that the left should fight for the ideals of humanism, human nature, and objective justice.

Foucault responded:

“The notion of justice functions in a class society as a claim for oppression… The proletariat wages war against the ruling class not because it is a just war, but because it wants to take power.”

Chomsky was horrified. Even he understood that he was facing an absolute moral nihilist. Foucault openly stated that if the oppressed came to power and began carrying out terror and lawlessness, he would support them because “justice” does not exist — there is only a struggle over power.

Later, Chomsky would visit Hezbollah, resulting in an entire report on Lebanese television.

The 1977 Petition to Abolish the Age of Consent

In 1977, Foucault, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and others, signed an open letter to the French parliament. They called for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and children and argued for abolishing the age of consent.

For him, the prohibition of pedophilia was not the protection of an objective good — the safety of children — but merely another “disciplinary mechanism” of bourgeois society. He believed that the state had no right to impose a “power discourse” defining which forms of sexuality were normal and which were criminal.

Foucault’s Final Years

In the final years of his life, Foucault regularly traveled to the United States, where he became a regular at gay clubs and bathhouses in San Francisco associated with extreme sadomasochism. Foucault did not regard this simply as entertainment. He developed a philosophical framework around it: he believed that only through extreme pain, the dissolution of one’s identity, and the violation of every conceivable taboo could a person free themselves from the control of “disciplinary society.”

It was in these clubs that Foucault contracted HIV in the early 1980s. He died of AIDS in 1984, becoming one of the first famous victims of the disease in France. He concealed his diagnosis until the end, and the cause of his death became known only after his funeral.

The British newspaper The Guardian published a piece titled “’White guilt on its own won’t fix racism’: decolonising Britain’s schools” (June 2020). The article discusses a massive influx of white teachers seeking a cure for their guilt following the BLM protests.

The same outlet later published “No more white saviours, thanks: how to be a true anti-racist ally” (September 2021). The author directly criticizes white people who use their Black colleagues as priests in a confessional booth to dump their sins and shame caused by racism.

The Role of NBC News and CNN

American television networks and their digital platforms frequently acted as repeaters for the activist industry by popularizing bestselling authors.

NBC News ran an extensive video segment featuring Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, titled “Robin DiAngelo: Debunking The Most Common Myths White People Tell About Race” (originally published Sept. 25, 2018 — note this is a video segment, not a written article). The content focused on the idea that subconscious racism is inherent to all white people and requires constant self-reflection.

On CNN, the topic of guilt and privilege was frequently presented through the lens of education and parenting, offering instructions for parents on how to discuss white privilege even with preschoolers.

The Al Jazeera Contrast

The approach of the Qatari network Al Jazeera, particularly its English-language edition, contrasts sharply with the American mainstream. While The New York Times treats white guilt as an individual psychological issue, Al Jazeera shifts the discourse into the realm of harsh geopolitics, anti-colonialism, and class struggle.

In Hamid Dabashi’s op-ed “White is not a colour – white is an ideology” (July 2021), the author explicitly labels the white guilt found in American media as a form of false guilt. From the outlet’s perspective, the American obsession with skin color is a dead end. Whiteness is viewed not as biology, but as an ideology of colonial supremacy and a tool used by elites to divide the impoverished population into white and colored factions, thereby obscuring the true battleground: class.

The article “Abolishing whiteness has never been more urgent” (November 2019) criticizes the liberal practice of acknowledging one’s privilege, calling it superficial. It argues that white people are willing to sympathize only as long as it does not threaten their actual economic and social status, such as the redistribution of spots in good schools or workplaces.

In the piece “What is really behind the West’s colonial nostalgia” (February 2026), Al Jazeera analyzes the political backlash in the West, where conservative politicians began building campaigns on the complete denial of white guilt while rehabilitating the imperial past.

Al Jazeera did not attempt to introduce guilt for the sake of psychological repentance. Instead, they operate on the same plane while complementing each other: Al Jazeera criticizes the American culture of guilt for its egocentrism and performative nature, demanding the global dismantlement of capitalist and neo-colonial institutions instead of empty tears. The network simply takes the work to its logical conclusion. What Western mainstream media cannot allow themselves to say, they deliver with ease, especially since part of their target audiences overlap.

Mainstream Dogma and Market Demand

By 2018, the ideas of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality, which had been maturing in US universities since the 1970s and 1980s, educated an entire generation of journalists, editors, and HR professionals. Once they entered major newsrooms, these individuals began sincerely broadcasting their worldview. What was once a radical left-wing theory became the editorial standard and mainstream dogma.

Major media outlets target their urban, educated, and predominantly liberal subscribers. Following the peak of the BLM protests in 2020, a massive social demand for self-reflection emerged among the white middle class. The media simply filled this vacuum, turning the fight against racism into a multi-billion dollar industry of corporate training, lectures, and literature. For example, sales of books like White Fragility skyrocketed.

Taking It to the Absurd

Mathematics as a Tool of Oppression

One of the most high-profile controversies unfolded around the hard sciences. Major publications, including Scientific American and USA Today, seriously questioned the status quo, as seen in the report “Is math education racist?” (deleted from the website).

The progressive organization Equitable Math, which received grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, released toolkits for teachers. They asserted that requiring students to show their work and focusing on finding a single correct answer are manifestations of white supremacy culture because it stifles the self-expression of minorities.

The Colonization of Nature

The Guardian. In a major report titled “Being black while in nature: ‘You’re an endangered species’”, the concept of white spaces in nature is examined in detail. The article argues that racism taints even outdoor recreation, leaving Black Americans feeling unsafe and alienated in forests and parks.

One of the most talked-about publications on this subject was a comprehensive piece titled “Return the National Parks to the Tribes” in The Atlantic, by David Treuer. It argues that American national parks were founded on the colonial displacement of indigenous peoples to create a white Eden for the privileged. The author proposes transferring the management of these lands to a consortium of Native American tribes.

Institutional Capture (2020 to Present)

Following the summer of 2020, major corporations, the state apparatus, and legacy media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post fully capitulated to this agenda, turning it into their official secular religion. From that point forward, facts were routinely adjusted to fit the dogma.

The story of Iryna Zarutska is far from the only instance where the media utilized a blackout mode or distorted reality to save their ideological narrative.

1. The Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack (2021)

Darrell Brooks, a Black man holding radical anti-white and antisemitic views, intentionally drove an SUV into a crowd of people at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing 6 people, including children, and injuring 62 others. The general chronology of this tragedy is documented in the Wikipedia article on the Waukesha Christmas parade attack.

How the media covered it: Mainstream television networks like CNN and MSNBC executed a linguistic trick. In their breaking coverage, such as the initial report on CNN, headlines read “An SUV plows into a crowd,” bypassing any mention of the driver’s motives as if the vehicle were operating on its own. The topic of the perpetrator’s racial hatred was almost entirely ignored by the left-leaning press to avoid disrupting the overarching narrative that positions white extremism as the primary threat to the United States.

2. The Nashville Christian School Shooting (2023)

Audrey Hale, a transgender man (biological female), carried out a massacre at a private Christian elementary school, killing three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members. The details of the attack are preserved in the Wikipedia article on The Covenant School shooting.

How the media covered it: Major liberal publications and LGBT activists instantly shifted the focus away from the murdered Christian children toward the protection of the transgender community. Outlets, including live updates on NBC News, began publishing articles about how this tragedy could provoke a wave of transphobia and how difficult things would become for transgender individuals due to the politicization of their identity by conservatives. In the media landscape, the blame for the tragedy was effectively placed on an atmosphere of hatred generated by the political right.

3. The Anti-Asian Violence Crisis (2020–2021)

During the pandemic, the United States saw a sharp increase in violent street attacks targeting elderly Asian Americans. Liberal media launched a massive campaign, the historical context of which is documented in the Wikipedia article on the Stop Asian Hate movement, blaming the situation entirely on white supremacy and Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding the “Chinese virus.”

The system failure: When law enforcement began releasing surveillance footage and demographic statistics, it became clear that the vast majority of attackers targeting Asian individuals in New York and San Francisco were young Black men from impoverished neighborhoods. As soon as this fact became undeniable, the extensive media campaign practically vanished because it no longer fit the foundational formula of white people oppressing minorities.

Why No “Shift” Occurred After the Murder of Iryna Zarutska

Within the framework of the dominant media model broadcast by the NYT, CNN, and NBC, the story of Iryna Zarutska contained a systemic error that broke the progressive racial narrative.

Iryna was a refugee who had escaped a real war, yet from the perspective of American racial theory, she remained a white woman, meaning she was a representative of the privileged majority. Meanwhile, the attacker, Decarlos Brown Jr., was a homeless African American man struggling with mental disorders and holding 15 prior convictions.

Instead of headlines exploring how to fix a culture of violence, mainstream media outlets began writing about transit safety issues, underfunded mental health care, and the homelessness crisis. The Mayor of Charlotte, a Democrat, went so far as to officially urge the public not to demonize the homeless.

This outcome highlights how the core components of the progressive ecosystem cemented their roles:

• #MeToo cleared the cultural landscape of old elites and established the practice of immediate cancellation.

• BLM provided the emotional fuel, bringing the concept of collective racial guilt to the forefront.

• DEI codified this guilt within employment contracts and corporate codes of conduct.

• Affirmative Action provided the legal framework to redistribute resources and positions in favor of preferred identities.

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The Ideological Bridge: Ali Shariati

The primary ideological bridge between secular socialism and Shia Islam came from the works of the thinker Ali Shariati, whose ideas laid the theoretical foundation for the revolutionary explosion. Shariati developed the concept of Red Shiism, reinterpreting religious tradition through the lens of class struggle, Marxist sociology, and anti-colonialism. He asserted that true Islam is a religion of the oppressed, inherently directed against social injustice and exploitation. His writings enjoyed immense popularity among the student body, enabling Marxists and religious activists to find common ground and employ a shared terminology of Third World liberation.

Michel Foucault and “Political Spirituality”

Michel Foucault emerged as the most prominent figure among European intellectuals to openly support Ayatollah Khomeini. The French philosopher visited Iran twice in 1978 as a special correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. In his dispatches, he expressed profound admiration for the willingness of millions of people to face death for a total transformation of their subjectivity. He introduced the concept of political spirituality to describe the Iranian uprising, arguing that Western civilization had lost this spark after the Enlightenment. Foucault arrogantly brushed aside direct warnings from Iranian feminists and secular leftist exiles in Paris who attempted to explain the despotic nature of the emerging theocracy, dismissing their anxieties as a manifestation of Western orientalism.

The Western Endorsement: Richard Falk and French Asylum

The American left-liberal wing also made a significant contribution to legitimizing the Islamist coup in the eyes of the Western public. Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton University, traveled to Tehran alongside former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and subsequently visited Khomeini in his Parisian exile shortly before the Ayatollah’s return to Iran.

France, led by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, granted asylum to Ayatollah Khomeini in October 1978 following his expulsion from Iraq. He settled in the small town of Neauphle-le-Château near Paris, where he spent about four months and transformed his villa into a fully operational headquarters for the revolution. The French authorities hoped to secure lucrative economic contracts after the change of regime. Under the conditions of European free speech, Khomeini received an ideal international platform, where he freely recorded his fiery proclamations onto audio cassettes for underground distribution in Iran, actively drawing the attention of the Western press and leftist philosophers. In February 1979, immediately after the flight of the Shah, the French side even organized a special Air France flight for the Islamist leader, on which he triumphantly returned to Tehran to establish the theocratic regime.

Following these meetings, Falk published a now-infamous op-ed in The New York Times titled “Trusting Khomeini.” In this text, the scholar flatly asserted that depicting the revolutionary leader as a fanatical and reactionary religious figure was an absolute fabrication, claiming instead that the Ayatollah’s inner circle consisted of progressive humanists capable of creating a new model of humane governance.

• In 2001, he served on the human rights inquiry commission for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Palestinian territories.

• From 2008 to 2014, he held the official post of UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.

• Today, he serves as the chairman of Euro-Med Monitor, alongside the head of the organization, Rami Abdu, an active Hamas member in Europe who is wanted by Israel.

The Existentialist Rift: Sartre vs. Beauvoir

The stance of other icons of French existentialism, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, clearly demonstrated the rift and internal contradictions within the leftist camp. Sartre initially sent a welcoming message to Khomeini, viewing his movement as a powerful anti-monarchical and anti-capitalist alliance uniting socialists and theocrats against the Shah’s dictatorship. Conversely, Simone de Beauvoir displayed far greater political foresight after the new government mandated the wearing of the hijab for women in March 1979. Beauvoir became the head of the International Committee for Women’s Rights in Iran and actively supported the mass protests of Iranian women, while radical Maoists and staunch anti-imperialists continued to justify every action of Khomeini’s regime.

The Oppressor vs. Oppressed Dichotomy

Broad circles of Western radical leftists, including French Maoists and American anti-war university groups, evaluated the situation solely within the framework of a simplistic dichotomy of the oppressed versus the oppressors. For this generation of activists, raised on the 1968 protests, any political force that challenged Washington’s dominance automatically received a progressive status.

Secular values, the rights of sexual minorities, and basic freedom of speech, which these very intellectuals fiercely defended at home, were sacrificed for the sake of anti-Western purity. They deliberately ignored reports regarding the executions of Kurdish rebels, the eradication of activists from the Iranian communist Tudeh Party, and the public executions of homosexuals, effectively acting as an external public relations department for a totalitarian theocratic state.

The foundation for these decisions was provided by multi-year UN reports.

However, today we are talking about a highly important internal investigation that everyone needs to know about.

A report titled “הותר לשיסוי” (Permitted to Incite / Allowed to Target), published by the Regavim movement in April 2025, thoroughly analyzes and refutes the narrative of so-called “settler violence.” The central thesis of the report is that this concept is an artificially manufactured, meticulously planned, and lavishly foreign-funded campaign designed to delegitimize Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, the IDF, and the State of Israel as a whole, with the ultimate goal of forcing the creation of a Palestinian state.

1. Refuting UN (OCHA) Data

The report meticulously deconstructs the UN (OCHA) database, which claims thousands of incidents of “settler violence.” Regavim analyzed a list of 8,332 such incidents spanning from January 2016 to April 2023 and discovered massive distortions:

• Irrelevant locations: 20% (1,704 incidents) occurred entirely outside Judea and Samaria, mostly in Jerusalem, and have no relation to “settlers.”

• Peaceful activities: 16% (1,361 cases) consist of lawful visits by Jews to the Temple Mount or clashes between Muslims and police on the Temple Mount.

• Absence of violence: 19% (1,613 cases) represent general complaints of “trespassing on land” during hiking trips, without any damage to property or health. Lawful state actions—such as road construction, the demolition of illegal structures, and declaring land as state property—were also equated with “violence.”

• Absurdly categorizing terrorists as victims: The UN officially acknowledges that it includes Palestinians who were killed or injured while actively committing terrorist attacks (e.g., attempting to stab Israelis or throwing Molotov cocktails) into its lists of “victims of settlers.”

• Distorting the role of the IDF: Up to 99% of Palestinians listed in the database as casualties were actually injured or killed during clashes with Israeli security forces, not civilian settlers.

• Questionable sources: About 12% of the incidents rely on a single source of information, often UN-affiliated structures or biased NGOs.

After filtering out all fabricated and irrelevant cases, only about 10% of the list remained (833 incidents over 7.5 years, or fewer than 10 per month) that could actually be classified as physical violence.

To reiterate: Up to 99% of Palestinians listed in the database as casualties were actually injured or killed during clashes with Israeli security forces, not civilian settlers.

2. Real Data from the Israel Police

The report draws on official data from the Israel Police spanning 2014–2024. Contrary to the claims of radical left-wing NGOs (such as “Yesh Din”) regarding “insufficient law enforcement” toward Jews, the statistics show the exact opposite:

• Three times as many indictments for nationalistic crimes are filed against Jews compared to Arabs.

• At the same time, the conviction rate for Jews in Judea and Samaria (31% ) is significantly lower than for Arabs (56%). This indicates selective, more stringent law enforcement against Jews, as well as a massive volume of false complaints that never make it to court.

• Specifically, during the onset of the “Swords of Iron” war, police confirmed that 73% of complaints lodged by left-wing organizations and anarchists regarding “settler violence” turned out to be false upon investigation.

To reiterate: 73% of complaints filed by left-wing organizations and anarchists regarding “settler violence” turned out to be false upon investigation.

3. The Mechanism of the Campaign and Its Funding

The campaign is coordinated by the Palestinian Authority, foreign anarchists (such as the ISM), and Israeli left-wing NGOs (including “B’Tselem,” “Yesh Din,” and “Breaking the Silence”). Their tactics involve deliberately instigating provocations and conflicts with the military and settlers, selectively filming the incidents, and subsequently filing complaints with the UN and foreign media.

This activity is sustained by millions in foreign state funding. For instance, the European Union allocated millions of shekels to organizations like “B’Tselem” and “Breaking the Silence” for specific projects focused on gathering allegations of “settler violence.”

4. Consequences for the State of Israel

This manufactured narrative has led to severe real-world consequences on both the international and domestic fronts:

• International Sanctions: Relying on this false data, the Joe Biden administration in the U.S. issued Executive Order 14115, imposing unprecedented economic sanctions against Israeli citizens, activists, and organizations. The UK, France, Canada, and Japan joined the sanctions, freezing the bank accounts of individuals who have not even been charged with criminal offenses.

• Security Threat in Wartime: Due to fears surrounding “settler violence,” the U.S. delayed shipments of small arms, which were vitally necessary for Israeli civilian security squads (emergency response teams) following the outbreak of the war.

• Legal Warfare: The narrative is actively utilized by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for investigations against Israel and for issuing advisory opinions on the illegality of the settlements.

• Domestic Pressure: Inside Israel, the campaign exerted heavy pressure on the defense establishment, leading to the widespread use of administrative detentions (imprisonment without trial) against Jewish youths; Defense Minister Yoav Gallant signed 23 such warrants.

5. Recommendations from the Report

In its conclusion, Regavim proposes a series of measures to counter this phenomenon:

1. Create a unified and transparent database linking the IDF, police, and Shin Bet to display real statistics.

2. Launch a proactive Israeli campaign to refute these lies on an international level.

3. Deport foreign anarchists who manufacture these situations and restrict the operations of biased agencies like OCHA.

4. Pass legislation strictly limiting foreign government funding for organizations engaged in activities aimed at delegitimizing Israel.

Just think about how this scheme works: Using European Union money, left-wing organizations submitted false reports about non-existent incidents, which were subsequently thrown out entirely by the courts. However, these very same fabricated cases were immediately logged into their own statistics and passed on to the UN structure (OCHA), which accepted them completely without verification. (Incidentally, OCHA absorbs and broadcasts data on casualties in Gaza from the Hamas Ministry of Health in the exact same manner—but more on that next time). In the next phase, major human rights organizations blew up international scandals in their reports regarding “settler violence,” completely cutting out Arab terror and using mythical figures. And in the grand finale, the American Democratic administration, blindly relying on this coordinated chain of lies, imposed sanctions against innocent citizens.

From Masha Gessen’s article in The Guardian:

“While Ester (her paternal grandmother) was in Moscow, her parents were arrested; her mother, Bella, was sent into exile in Siberia. She was later amnestied and Ester decided to join her in Biysk. Her father, Jakub, was held in prison in Bialystok; both Ester and her mother presumed he had been executed. In fact he lasted until the autumn of 1943 and the destruction of the Bialystok ghetto, one of the last to be liquidated. The Soviets abandoned the city to the Nazis when war was declared, and Jakub had been serving on the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in charge of rationing and involved in drawing up lists of Jews to be sent to the extermination camps. Ester herself came under pressure in Biysk to become an informer for the NKVD, pressure she stead fastly resisted despite the possible consequences for herself and her mother. Also in Biysk she married Boris.”

It is rather curious that “they” compare Gaza to the Holocaust, yet treat their great-grandfather as a victim.

Great-grandfather Jakub compiled lists of Jews to be sent to the gas chambers in a concentration camp. In her shoes, I would be, to put it mildly, a much more modest anti-Zionist.

All these stories are peddled primarily as part of a persona of hereditary victimhood. Nothing else matters to her beyond her own popularity and public recognition.

The Family Allegations

Her cousin, whom she bullied in her New York Times columns, has shared a drastically different perspective on her career. He publicly described a situation: their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, wrote a book about their two grandfathers who did not survive it. Masha then allegedly appropriated the book and translated it into English, passing herself off as the author. He essentially accused her of “appropriating” the text, and of effectively causing their grandmother’s heart attack that followed as a result.

Weaponizing the Holocaust: Gaza and the IHRA

In the essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” (The New Yorker, December 2023), Gessen explicitly compares Gaza to the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe (including the Warsaw Ghetto):

“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time — in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.
…
The ghetto is being liquidated.”

Gessen harshly criticizes the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism. She believes that this definition — and especially its examples — too broadly interprets criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

In that same essay and in various interviews, Gessen criticizes how Holocaust memory is being “hijacked” to justify current Israeli policies and suppress criticism. She argues that the Holocaust is intentionally framed as “unique” and incomparable to anything else so that people cannot draw analogies with other events (including Gaza). This, in her opinion, prevents us from learning lessons and fighting new genocides.

The “No-State” Solution

She prefers not a two-state solution, but something akin to a “no-state solution” or a confederation — a shared territory without strictly guarded borders between Jews and Palestinians. She is not against Palestinian statehood but considers two separate states unrealistic.

In other words: she is not opposed to Arab statehood (which would be the 23rd such state), but she is opposed to the existence of the single Jewish one.

Defending Zohran Mamdani: The Stalin Analogy

In her column in The New York Times (June 2025) titled “The Attacks on Zohran Mamdani Show That We Need a New Understanding of Antisemitism,” she explicitly draws a parallel between the accusations of antisemitism against Zohran Mamdani (a candidate for Mayor of New York) and the Stalinist repressions during the Great Terror:

“As I watched a grainy Instagram video of Mamdani choking up during his news conference in Harlem, my mind flashed back to an interview I did many years ago with a Russian historian of Stalinism. During the period known as the Great Terror, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were accused of plotting to kill Stalin or overthrow the Soviet government. Surviving transcripts paint a surreal picture of their interrogations. Detainees would be protesting their innocence. Most were true believers in the cult of Stalin, and the accusation itself was unthinkable to them. But to an interrogator who might see dozens of defendants a day, the historian pointed out to me, the idea that so many people wanted to kill Stalin could come to seem perfectly normal”

Gessen uses this analogy to describe Zohran Mamdani’s situation: for his critics (who accuse him of antisemitism), such an accusation has become a routine, everyday norm, while for Mamdani himself, it feels absurd and painful (she specifically notes how he “choked up” during a press conference).

On a less interesting note, they demand to be referred to by “they/them” pronouns, yet say “I” in interviews.

The grandmother survived the Holocaust, the great-grandfather was an accomplice, and the grandchild is cashing in.

The 1956 Sinai Campaign — “Israel as the Aggressor”

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and blocked the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping—an act that under international law constitutes a clear casus belli (a justification for war). Furthermore, Fedayeen terrorists were launching continuous attacks on Israeli communities from Egyptian-controlled Gaza. In response, Israel entered into a secret alliance with Great Britain and France and launched a military campaign against Egypt.

How the NYT Covered It:

The U.S. administration under President Dwight D. Eisenhower was furious with the actions of its allies and demanded their immediate withdrawal. The New York Times instantly became Washington’s megaphone. The paper published scathing editorials condemning the invasion, framing Israel merely as a tool in the hands of fading colonial empires (Britain and France).

Meanwhile, the NYT almost completely ignored years of Egyptian cross-border terror and the illegal naval blockade that had forced Israel’s hand. It was during this 1956 crisis that the narrative linking Israel to “Western colonialism” began to take deep root in the paper’s pages—a narrative that would eventually become the primary ideological weapon used against the country.

The Punch Sulzberger Era (1963–1992)

Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, son of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took the helm in 1963. Under his leadership, the newspaper became a publicly traded company in 1967. However, the family maintained absolute control over the publication through Class B voting shares and a family trust.

Linguistic Amnesty — The Munich Olympics (1972)

In September 1972, terrorists from the Palestinian group “Black September” (a faction of Fatah/PLO) took hostage and brutally murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. This was pure, unadulterated terrorism against defenseless civilians.

How did the newspaper label the killers?

The NYT went to great lengths to avoid using the word “terrorists.” Instead, the murderers were referred to as “Arab commandos” (a term usually reserved for elite units of regular armies) or “guerrillas” (freedom fighters combating regular military forces).

By framing the killers of athletes in military terms, the NYT legitimized their actions. The paper deliberately refused to call things by their proper names to avoid offending the Arab world and to sustain the romanticized image of Palestinians as noble insurgents.

The Ma’alot Massacre and the “Cycle of Violence” (1974)

In May 1974, PLO terrorists seized a school in the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot, taking more than 100 children hostage. The standoff ended in tragedy, leaving 22 children dead.

The coverage of this horrific act laid the foundation for a deeply flawed concept that the newspaper still employs today: false equivalency.

In NYT reports, the Ma’alot massacre was not framed as an isolated, barbaric crime by fanatics. Instead, it was presented as part of a generic “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. The paper immediately began publishing features on the plight of Palestinian refugees, effectively offering a moral justification for the terrorists. The victims (murdered children) and their killers were placed on the exact same moral scale.

Laundering Arafat and the PLO at the UN (1974)

Just six months after the slaughter of the school children in Ma’alot, the United Nations invited PLO leader Yasser Arafat to address the General Assembly. Arafat took the podium wearing a holster on his hip and delivered his famous line: “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

That same year, UN Resolution 3210 officially recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—even though the group had no intention of scaling back its terrorist operations.

Instead of exposing this diplomatic farce—the legitimization of a terror leader with fresh blood on his hands—The New York Times treated Arafat with profound reverence. The paper covered his visit as the arrival of a legitimate statesman. Journalists admiringly analyzed his rhetoric while ignoring the gun on his hip and the fact that the PLO charter explicitly called for the destruction of Israel. The NYT played a pivotal role in transforming Arafat from a gang leader into a “respected resistance figure” for the Western intelligentsia.

Whitewashing the Khmer Rouge: Sydney Schanberg (1975)

This case serves as the bloody twin to Walter Duranty’s infamous coverage of the Soviet Union. In 1975, as the Khmer Rouge communists led by Pol Pot neared the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, NYT bureau chief Sydney Schanberg wrote reassuring dispatches.

In April 1975, just days before the city fell, he penned an article titled “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” He openly mocked warnings from Western intelligence agencies about an impending bloodbath, dismissing them as paranoia.

As soon as the Khmer Rouge seized power, they initiated a genocide that wiped out approximately 2 million people — a quarter of the country’s population. Schanberg later acknowledged his catastrophic error, but the case remains a permanent stain in journalism history, illustrating how the NYT sought to find “good guys” among radical left-wing terrorists.

The Microscope and Obsession Era (1980s–Present)

1. The First Lebanon War and Fabricating Numbers (1982)

When Israel entered Lebanon in 1982 to root out PLO terrorists—who had been shelling northern Israel for years — the NYT began publishing fantastic, unverified civilian casualty figures. The paper uncritically reprinted data from the Palestinian Red Crescent, an organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s own brother.

Front-page headlines blared about “600,000 homeless Lebanese” in the south of the country, despite the fact that the entire population of that region at the time did not exceed 400,000. When the fabrication was exposed, the numbers were quietly corrected on the back pages, but the image of Israel as a ruthless destroyer was already permanently seared into the minds of readers.

Today, They Are Doing the Exact Same Thing, Relying on the Same Sources (2024)

“More than 600,000 people of Lebanon’s 5.4 million have been displaced within the country, threatening to overwhelm shelters, U.N. officials warned, and 300,000 others have fled abroad. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters, the aid group Save the Children said on Wednesday.”

2. The Microscopic Double Standard

Beginning in the 1980s (with Thomas Friedman’s dispatches from Lebanon) and peaking in the early 2000s (during the Second Intifada), the NYT’s fixation on Israel morphed into a full-blown obsession.

• The Outsized Bureau: The newspaper maintains one of its largest foreign bureaus in Israel—a tiny country roughly the size of New Jersey. A minor incident at a West Bank checkpoint receives more front-page real estate than mass slaughters in Syria, Yemen, or Sudan.

• The Double Standard: Israel’s actions are examined under a microscope, searching for the slightest flaw and demanding an unattainable standard of warfare. Meanwhile, the actions of its adversaries (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran) are viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Edges are softened, terrorists are rebranded as “militants,” and the blame for their radicalism is routinely shifted back onto Israel itself.

In 1992, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. took over as publisher (1992–2017), representing the fourth generation of the family dynasty.

The Oslo Accords (1993) and Editorial Blindness

In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, signing the Oslo Accords. The New York Times fell into a state of absolute euphoria. It declared Oslo a historic diplomatic triumph and completely turned off its journalistic skepticism.

Immediately after signing the accords, Arafat began giving speeches in Arabic (such as his infamous 1994 speech in Johannesburg) comparing Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah—a temporary truce signed by the Prophet Muhammad, meant to be broken once his forces gained enough strength. He openly called on Arabs to continue the jihad.

Israeli intelligence and right-wing politicians sounded the alarm, providing English translations of Arafat’s speeches.

The NYT response? The paper systematically withheld these speeches and Arafat’s double-dealing from its readers. On the rare occasions when the PLO’s militant rhetoric was mentioned, it was accompanied by editorial commentary dismissing it as “merely words for internal consumption” and insisting that Arafat “sincerely wanted peace.” In doing so, the NYT lulled both the West and Israel into a false sense of security.

Silencing the Bus Bombings (1994–1996)

When Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched a horrific campaign of suicide bombings targeting Israeli buses, cafes, and markets post-Oslo, the NYT found itself trapped by its own narrative.

The paper bent over backward to argue that Arafat had no control over Hamas and bore no responsibility for the attacks — even as Israeli intelligence proved that the Palestinian Authority frequently turned a blind eye to, or directly funded, the terror.

Following bloody bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, NYT articles regularly insinuated that the blame lay with the Israeli government (especially after Benjamin Netanyahu was elected in 1996), claiming it was “stalling the peace process” and thereby “provoking extremists.”

The Campaign Against Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999)

When Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1996 on a platform of demanding strict reciprocity from Arafat amidst the relentless wave of bus bombings, the NYT declared war on him.

Netanyahu was routinely depicted in the paper’s pages as the primary obstacle to peace, an stubborn radical, and the destroyer of Oslo. Conversely, Arafat—whose apparatus was secretly smuggling weapons and financing terror at that very moment—was portrayed as a pragmatic partner with whom it was “difficult but necessary to work.” The paper openly interfered in internal Israeli politics, attempting to marginalize anyone who questioned the sanctity of the Oslo narrative.

Prepping the Ground for Camp David (2000)

The climax of this era came during the Camp David Summit in the summer of 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat virtually everything: an independent state on 97% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the offer outright, offered no counter-proposals, and left to launch the Second Intifada.

Even when U.S. President Bill Clinton publicly placed 100% of the blame for the summit’s failure on Arafat, The New York Times tried to soften the blow. They began running columns and op-eds by Robert Malley arguing that Barak’s offers “were not generous enough” or that Arafat “could not make concessions due to pressure from the Arab world”—anything to avoid admitting the stark reality: their chosen messiah (Arafat) had never intended to recognize a Jewish state.

Do you remember who Robert Malley is?

Robert Malley, who had compared Jews to Nazis and whose father was a friend of Yasser Arafat. President Joe Biden appointed Malley as the U.S. Special Envoy for Iran. He was tasked with ensuring U.S. and Iranian compliance with the JCPOA, after former President Donald Trump had exited the deal. In late 2023, reports surfaced that Malley was loyal to Tehran rather than Washington, based on a joint Iran International and Semafor report on a trove of emails from Iranian diplomats (2003–2021). In 2023, Malley’s security clearance was revoked, and he was placed on paid, then unpaid leave pending an investigation into mishandling classified information. The case was later referred to the FBI.

Covering Up Intra-Palestinian Terror

During the First Intifada, Palestinians killed nearly 1,000 of their fellow Palestinians (estimates range from 822 to 942 individuals). They were labeled “collaborators” with Israel. In reality, Fatah and emerging Hamas militants used the chaos to settle personal scores: executing business competitors, eliminating political rivals, and murdering women for “immoral behavior.” Victims were brutally tortured, shot in the streets, or beaten to death. Approximately one in five people killed during the early stages of the Intifada died at the hands of their fellow Arabs.

How the NYT Covered It: Shifting the Focus to Excuse the Killers

According to content-analysis data from CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis), The New York Times dedicated over 80% of its conflict coverage to the actions of the IDF, leaving only a tiny fraction for Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence.

When the paper was forced to report on the lynchings of “collaborators,” NYT reporters deployed a specific framework: they avoided blaming Palestinian leadership (like Arafat or Hamas) who ordered the executions. Instead, the paper spun the narrative to suggest that Israel was to blame because its system of informants “forced” Palestinians to resort to vigilantism.

The paper required a pristine “oppressed vs. oppressor” dynamic. The mass internal slaughter within Palestinian society shattered the image of noble freedom fighters, so the NYT simply buried the carnage on its back pages.

Creating the “David and Goliath” Myth

During the First Intifada, there were over 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks and hundreds of assaults involving grenades and firearms, resulting in the deaths of over 100 Israeli civilians. The stones thrown by Palestinians were not harmless pebbles; they were heavy boulders and cinderblocks dropped from rooftops or hurled at oncoming cars, fracturing skulls (including those of infants) and causing fatal car crashes.

How the NYT Processed the Imagery:

The Language: NYT journalists (and later star columnists like Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who would later write a fake story about Israeli military dogs raping Palestinians) systematically began calling rock-throwing a form of “nonviolent resistance.” They seriously compared Palestinian teenagers to followers of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.

The Profiles: The paper published sprawling, sympathetic front-page features detailing the harsh lives of the shabab (the stone-throwing youth), portraying them as desperate romantics. Meanwhile, Israeli civilians burned alive in their cars by firebombs, or children killed by thrown boulders, rarely received more than a dry, statistical line on the back pages. The victims were systematically stripped of humanization.

The Photo Desk: NYT photo editors meticulously curated the visual narrative. The world was flooded with images of slender boys wielding slingshots against massive Israeli tanks. The newspaper intentionally withheld photographs showing the mangled cars and crushed bodies left in the wake of those “stones.”

The photo showed an Israeli policeman with a baton standing next to a bloodied boy. The caption read:

The visual message was clear — the Israeli as aggressor, the boy as victim.

Reality: the boy was Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish-American student whom the policeman was protecting from a lynch mob of Palestinians.

The photo was taken at a gas station, not on the Temple Mount.

Fact: there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount (Google Earth, 2000). The photo was cropped to hide the gas station sign — a classic propaganda technique.

To protect the myth of the Palestinian “David” and the Israeli “Goliath,” the newspaper effectively decriminalized attempted murder—rebranding lethal rock-throwing as mere “protest”—and censored internal Palestinian violence because it interfered with selling the Western public a fairy tale of a noble national liberation movement.

You have read Part 3. To be continued.

PART 1

PART 2

For decades, the halls of academia lived in a comfortable illusion designed by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues: authoritarianism was strictly a right-wing phenomenon. In 2021, psychologist Thomas Costello and his team dealt this myth a devastating, near-fatal blow. Their comprehensive study definitively proved the existence of Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA).

PART 1

The researchers identified three primary pillars upholding this mindset:

• Anti-hierarchical aggression: A deep-seated desire to overthrow established authorities — not to achieve individual liberty, but to transfer power to the “correct” collective group.

• Top-down censorship: A core belief that institutions should actively silence political opponents.

• The conventionalism of the New Norm: A rigid requirement to strictly conform to the latest ideological dictates, where the slightest deviation results in total banishment from the tribe.

This psychological cocktail grants the individual a profound sense of moral purity and a socially sanctioned license for aggression against anyone labeled as “privileged.”

Costello’s research mapped out a distinct psychological profile of the left-wing authoritarian. Its defining features include dogmatism (the inability to entertain alternative viewpoints), schadenfreude (reaping pleasure from the suffering of those deemed privileged), and a latent need for rigid hierarchy — provided that hierarchy is weaponized to punish the ideological enemy. This explains why Western progressive authoritarians are so eager to support radical, oppressive foreign regimes, so long as those regimes are aimed at dismantling the old Western order. Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Dark Triad and Luxury Beliefs

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality accidentally laid the psychological groundwork for competitive victimhood. In a classical liberal democracy, the individual and their rights are the primary objects of protection. In radical leftist ideology, the focus shifts to the collective group and its position within a rigid hierarchy of oppression.

This shift fosters an environment of intense moral narcissism: empathy for the oppressed is generated not out of genuine compassion, but because signaling that empathy elevates one’s status as a saint within the peer group. In this performative system, real-world victims — such as Mahsa Amini in Iran or the preyed-upon young girls of the Rotherham grooming scandal in Britain — become inconvenient noise that disrupts the pristine purity of the ideological narrative.

The Exploitation of Victimhood

A 2021 study by Ok et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed a striking correlation between specific personality traits and the deployment of victim status. Individuals scoring high in Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy — the Dark Triad — frequently signal victimhood to acquire resources, gain social leverage, or justify their own unethical behavior.

Leftist ideology, centered entirely on narratives of systemic oppression, serves as the perfect incubator for these personalities. By appointing themselves the “voice of the oppressed,” the narcissist secures absolute immunity from criticism.

Cambridge-trained psychologist Rob Henderson expanded on this social dynamic through his hypothesis of Luxury Beliefs. He argues that modern progressive ideas — such as the deconstruction of the nuclear family or the defunding of the police — serve as the contemporary equivalents of luxury goods.

Elite classes adopt these radical ideas because they cost them virtually nothing; the wealthy live in gated, secure neighborhoods and can easily afford private therapy. However, when these ideas are translated into policy, they inflict catastrophic, systemic damage on the lower classes who lack those financial safety nets.

Mental Parasites and the Inversion of Guilt

The decision among many radical leftist activists to forego childbearing is frequently justified through the lens of ecological ethics or social instability. However, evolutionary psychology offers a different explanation: under conditions of high stress and an existential sense of impending doom — which climate alarmism constantly feeds — biological organisms naturally curtail reproductive activity.

Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad describes ideologies that suppress the reproductive instinct as mental parasites or a “parasitic mind.” This ideological pathogen survives by hopping from host to host through the education system and mass media, thriving even if the human hosts themselves fail to produce biological offspring.

British psychologist Steven Taylor has explored this phenomenon as a form of collective masochism rooted in Western culture’s secularization of “original sin” — namely, colonialism and historical slavery. For an individual possessing a fragile, unstable ego, the only path to achieving personal validation is to aggressively distance themselves from their own heritage and align with the forces attacking it.

Radical Islamism offers a stark contrast: a rigid, unapologetically masculine, and profoundly self-assured structure. For a progressive activist marooned in a state of chronic anxiety and existential uncertainty — where even biological sex is treated as fluid — submitting to such a resolute force provides subconscious relief. It is an escape from endless self-analysis and psychological chaos.

The Architecture of Modern Guilt

The progressive psyche did not emerge overnight. It is a precise historical and psychological compound, synthesized over two centuries:

Robespierre’s Virtue Through Terror (1793) ─ The moral right to destroy real people for abstract ideals.

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Hegel’s Dissolution of the Individual (1807) ─ The erasure of personal identity within the historical collective.

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Freudian Internalization of Guilt (1930) ─ The redirection of neurosis from personal sin to ancestral existence.

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The Modern Progressive Mind: The Inversion of Guilt

This psychological fusion created a stark inversion of guilt. Historically, individuals felt guilt for their personal misdeeds; today, the progressive feels guilt for their very existence as a member of a successful Western culture. Submitting to the oppressed “Other” acts as a form of moral self-flagellation, relieving the psychological anxiety of unearned success. Because the inner world of this archetype has been entirely hollowed out by deconstruction, they seek a rigid external framework to anchor themselves. This explains the rapid, jarring transition we see among leftists from demanding absolute personal freedom to demanding draconian censorship and backing foreign theocracies. They crave an iron fist from the outside because their internal spine was dissolved by their own ideology.

Institutional Captures and Political Realities

Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of Herbert Marcuse, famously mapped out the strategy for systemic overthrow as the “long march through the institutions.” Rather than fighting on physical barricades, the revolution was to be won by quietly capturing universities, courts, and the press. Today, this march is fully realized within the highest echelons of Western governance.

Germany

The Green Party stands as a direct political continuation of the radical generation of 1968. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s concept of a “feminist foreign policy” is a literal application of intersectionality and critical theory: under this framework, international diplomacy must be geared toward dismantling patriarchal and colonial power structures, frequently sacrificing domestic state interests on the altar of abstract global justice.

Similarly, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, a philosopher by training, has publicly stated that he has always found patriotism “nauseating” and confesses he “wouldn’t know what to do with the concept of ‘the Volk’ (the people).” This is textbook oikophobia, justified by Adorno’s premise that any form of national identity is a stepping stone to fascism. Curiously, this standard is never applied to nationalism in developing or Arab nations; there, due to an infinite sense of Western colonial guilt, everything is permitted.

Spain

The coalition government of Pedro Sánchez alongside the radical left Podemos party has turned the country into a testing ground for fringe social theories. Former Equality Minister Irene Montero acted as a legislative vessel for Judith Butler and Michel Foucault: her signature “Trans Law,” allowing anyone over the age of 16 to legally change their gender via a simple administrative declaration, represents a state-level effort to prove that biology and the nuclear family are merely oppressive social constructs. Concurrently, Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz aggressively pushes for the “decolonization” of national museums, importing American Critical Race Theory directly into Spanish cultural institutions.

The United Kingdom

The current Labour cabinet is deeply steeped in academic leftism. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, a staunch proponent of post-colonial theory, has consistently championed the narrative of Western atonement and reparations to former colonies.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer emerged directly from the environment of Critical Legal Studies — an academic movement that views the rule of law primarily as an instrument of class and racial dominance. His highly publicized reluctance in interviews to provide clear definitions of biological sex categories is not intellectual confusion; it is strict adherence to Butler’s dogma that enforcing biological binaries constitutes an act of systemic violence.

In 2021, Starmer stated it was “not right” to assert that only women have a cervix. By 2022, he publicly declared: “Trans women are women, and that is the law” — a stance that drew sharp, sustained public criticism from author J.K. Rowling.

The “Qatargate” Revelations

The corruption scandal involving European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili and Pier Antonio Panzeri (Qatargate) unmasked the exact mechanism by which progressive ideological rhetoric is weaponized to shield collaboration with conservative Islamic autocracies.

A faction of socialist politicians and their network of NGOs, such as Fight Impunity, accepted millions of euros from Qatar and Morocco to lobby on their behalf. They effortlessly masked these activities using the mainstream vocabulary of human rights and the protection of marginalized groups.

This operation succeeded because, within the progressive hierarchy of victimhood, Islamic states are assigned a higher moral status than the “imperialist” West. Aligning with this hierarchy allowed corrupt actors to operate with impunity for years, deflecting any legitimate geopolitical scrutiny by instantly smearing critics as “islamophobic.”

Conclusion

The politicians and intellectuals engineering these societal shifts are not madmen. They are the highly disciplined products of an elite university system where Critical Theory has long been instituted as the only acceptable orthodoxy.

To this mindset, mass migration serves as a deliberate tool to dilute “totalitarian” national identities. Queer theory serves as the primary mechanism to fracture the patriarchal nuclear family. And the geopolitical alliance with radical Islamists is viewed as a necessary, anti-imperialist united front against their true, ultimate adversary: the traditional Western order.

Left-wing intellectuals successfully manufactured the theory. Left-wing politicians have now transformed that theory into laws, speech fines, and open borders.

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All key leftist theories can be traced back to the Hegelian dialectic of the Master and the Slave. Self-consciousness, according to Hegel, is attained through struggle: the Slave, who transforms reality through labor, ultimately becomes more developed than the Master, who merely consumes. Modern leftists adopted this framework but extracted labor from it. The oppressed now possesses automatic moral superiority simply by virtue of their suffering. This has given rise to the cult of the victim: the weaker and more oppressed a subject is, the greater their claim to the truth.

Hegel also laid the philosophical foundation for the totalitarian mindset. For him, the individual finds meaning only as part of the World Spirit, embodied in the state or the historical process. Equally vital is another aspect of his legacy: Hegelian dialectics taught leftist thinkers to perceive internal contradictions not as logical errors, but as the highest stage of development. This is precisely what gives leftist intellectuals a psychological sense of superiority over those who adhere to simple, linear logic.

The Jacobin Terror of 1793 was the first political manifestation of this logic. Robespierre introduced the concept that a political opponent ceases to be a person with a differing opinion and becomes an enemy of virtue. For the sake of an abstract future humanity, real people in the present can—and must—be destroyed. This was the first attempt to replace traditional religion with a political cult. The psychological mechanism of modern cancel culture is identical: public purification through the punishment of the infidel.

In the 19th century, the British Fabian Society added technocratic arrogance to this mix. The Fabians did not advocate for a sudden revolution, but for a gradual infiltration of power through universities, courts, and the media. Their symbol—a wolf in sheep’s clothing—was programmatic: they genuinely believed that the masses were foolish and needed to be directed for their own good. This is where the paternalism was born, in which an activist knows better than a woman which advertisement is harmful to her.

The Frankfurt School

When Marx predicted a proletarian revolution in developed countries and it failed to materialize, the Frankfurt School found the explanation in culture and the psyche. They realized that as long as an individual has healthy anchors—family, faith, nation, and a clear sexual identity—they will not become raw material for radical remodeling. Critical Theory became a tool for the systematic devaluation of all these anchors. While psychoanalysis had previously helped individuals adapt to reality, the Frankfurt School reversed the objective: reality itself had to be dismantled to liberate repressed impulses.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer reached a shocking conclusion: Western reason, science, and logic inevitably lead to Auschwitz. Any classification of things, including the classification of sexes or races, was declared an act of dominance and proto-fascism. From this assertion stems the modern fear of biological facts; in the eyes of an Adorno follower, an appeal to biology is a form of oppression.

Erich Fromm was the chief architect of the bridge between Marxism and psychoanalysis. In Escape from Freedom (1941), he analyzes why humans, upon gaining freedom, strive to rid themselves of it. Fromm defined masochism not as a sexual deviation, but as a social mechanism: an attempt to dissolve one’s own Self into something larger and more powerful—be it an ideology, a state, or a dominant culture. Freedom imposes a colossal burden of responsibility, and by relinquishing their identity, individuals rid themselves of the anxiety of loneliness, submitting to a rigid collective dogma.

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm introduces the distinction between biophilia (the love of life, growth, and creation) and necrophilia in a social sense (an attraction to all things mechanical and, above all, to destruction). The drive to dismantle one’s own culture, the denial of biological sex by turning the living body into a social construct, and the support of movements that bring death are, from Fromm’s perspective, manifestations of a necrophilic orientation, where destroying a structure is prioritized over life itself.

Fromm was also the first to describe the “marketing character”—an individual devoid of stable values, who changes their views as easily as a clothing brand just to remain marketable in the marketplace of ideas. This explains why the concepts of queer theory and body positivity are instantly adopted by corporations: not out of genuine faith, but as a product adaptation to the demands of the current morality market.

Fromm ultimately parted ways with Adorno and Horkheimer; he believed in humanism and the possibility of a healthy society. Herbert Marcuse went further. If Fromm diagnosed the disease, Marcuse proposed using it as a revolutionary weapon. His concept of “repressive tolerance” became the foundation of modern cancel culture: tolerance toward leftist ideas must be absolute, while tolerance toward right-wing and traditional ideas must be banned. The working class, according to Marcuse, had sold out for refrigerators, meaning the new revolutionary force had to be comprised of marginalized groups, minorities, and individuals with deviant behavior. He explicitly called for “polymorphously perverse” sexuality to break the backbone of the traditional family. Queer theory is a direct offspring of Marcuse.

Michel Foucault attacked the very concept of truth. According to his theory of power/knowledge, truth does not exist; there is only the discourse of power. Psychiatry, biology, and the prison system are merely ways for the strong to control the weak. Crucial to understanding the modern left-islamist alliance is Foucault’s stance on the Iranian Revolution. In 1979, he supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power. A gay intellectual supported a theocracy because he saw in Islamism a new spirituality capable of destroying the hated Western rationality. For Foucault, the “Other”—even if that Other hangs gay people—was better than his “Own,” meaning the European order. This is the philosophical root of the alliance between leftists and Islamists.

Fromm also introduced the term “pathology of normalcy”: an entire society can be mentally ill while considering its behavior to be the norm. When the reluctance to have children or the hatred of one’s own roots become mass phenomena, they cease to be perceived as deviations.

Psychological Mechanisms

Roger Scruton introduced the term oikophobia—the dread or dislike of one’s own home and culture. From a psychological standpoint, this is not pure masochism, but a complex strategy for acquiring social status. In certain intellectual circles, criticizing one’s own culture as oppressive, racist, or patriarchal becomes a marker of high status: the individual signals that they are so enlightened that they can rise above their own group’s instinct for self-preservation.

In psychoanalysis, the urge to submit to another culture is viewed through the prism of atoning for guilt. If a culture is branded as an aggressor through the narrative of colonialism and imperialism, its representatives experience a subconscious sense of guilt. Submission to the “Other”—to the one deemed the victim—becomes a method of psychological self-purification. Queer theory and the deconstruction of traditional norms are aimed at destroying boundaries. For a psyche prone to masochism, the erasure of one’s own boundaries—cultural, sexual, national—brings relief: it removes the responsibility of maintaining a structure.

Anna Freud described the mechanism of identification with the aggressor. When a subject feels vulnerable or undergoes an identity crisis, they subconsciously take the side of the force that appears more viable or authentic, even if that force is hostile to their values. The psychological logic is: if I become part of this rigid structure, I will cease to be a victim and acquire its strength. This is not physical, but moral masochism: abandoning one’s own Self, will, and history brings relief because it lifts the heavy burden of freedom. Freedom is a burden, whereas submission to a dogma—be it queer theory or radical Islamism—is perceived as peace.

Research by Barbara Oakley describes pathological altruism: a state in which a sincere desire to help the oppressed blinds a person, preventing them from seeing the harm inflicted on themselves and those around them. In leftist circles, this turns into a purity spiral. To prove membership in the group of “good people,” an activist must constantly raise the stakes: first the defense of rights, then the prohibition of criticism, then punishment for wrong thought, and ultimately, the denial of biology as inherently unjust.

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory explains why leftists do not perceive the defense of their own culture as something valuable. Haidt identified six moral foundations: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty. Conservatives rely on all six. Leftists rely almost exclusively on Care and Fairness. Because foundations like Loyalty to one’s group and the Sanctity of one’s traditions are weakly developed among leftists, defending their own culture is perceived by them as racism or exclusivity. They literally lack the psychological organ responsible for preserving the boundaries of a community.

The Big Five personality model shows that people with leftist views are more likely to have high levels of Openness to Experience coupled with high levels of Neuroticism (emotional instability). High neuroticism is linked to an increased sensitivity to injustice and pain, which translates into political activism. Leftist ideology, by emphasizing systemic causes for personal failures, correlates with depressive states: an individual feels a lack of control over their own life. This is a direct path to learned helplessness.

Jordan Peterson analyzes radical leftist ideology through the Jungian archetype of the Devouring Mother. This represents pathological compassion: the desire to protect the victim becomes so overwhelming that it destroys the social structure necessary for life. In mythology, this is the mother who loves her children so intensely that she consumes their individuality and destroys everything that represents order and law. Peterson sees the destruction of Western institutions precisely as this archetypal act: an attempt to consume everything structured for the sake of a chaotic equality in weakness.

Ultimately, modern leftist radicalism manifests not merely as a political ideology, but as a distinct psychological and cultural archetype of consciousness. Its core is the rejection of its own foundations: tradition, identity, biology, religion, and national and cultural continuity. Through Hegelian dialectics, critical theory, deconstruction, and the cult of the victim, a worldview is forged in which oppression becomes the source of moral truth, and the destruction of the existing order becomes a sign of virtue.

The alliance of a segment of the Left with Islamism is not a paradox within this logic, but a natural consequence: the radical “Other” is perceived as a tool to destroy the hated Western order. Psychologically, this is expressed in a combination of collective guilt, pathological altruism, a fear of the responsibility of freedom, and a desire to dissolve one’s own identity into a more rigid and total system.

Thus, cultural masochism is not an accidental weakness of isolated individuals, but the outcome of a prolonged intellectual evolution, where the rejection of one’s own home gradually came to be perceived as the highest form of moral superiority.

Part 2 tomorrow.

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