The aphorism that “every war is preceded, accompanied and followed by psychological warfare” is based on the work of Paul M. A. Linebarger, leader of U.S. Army anti-Japanese propaganda initiatives in Asia during World War II and author of the 1948 work, Psychological Warfare.
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A relentless, ever-expanding cognitive war is being waged against an American ally. Unlike most psychological warfare campaigns, it is less about dividing a country’s domestic public opinion than it is about alienating that ally from the United States and rest of the West. It means to transform that partner into an international pariah.
Moscow and its Syrian and Egyptian clients had been humiliated by Washington-supported Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. So, the Soviets reemphasized psychological warfare. They instigated, and the Arab League promoted, the 1975 United Nations’ General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism—the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, embodied by the state of Israel—as racism. Though this libel would be repealed in 1991, its influence continued to spread. Hence, the title of Joshua Muravchik’s 2014 book, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.
This global cognitive warfare, focused initially on a country of barely 10 million people and the size of Wales, ultimately aims at America itself, a superpower of 340 million and larger geographically than any other nation except Russia and Canada. Among the causes of this intertwined hostility:
- Israel is the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East, prosperous and technologically advanced despite being under constant siege;
- the United States is the world’s longest running, most successful experiment in self-rule and backstop of democracy and prosperity internationally;
- by example and action, Israel’s “Little Satan” and America’s “Great Satan” (in the words of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Republic) obstruct utopian autocrats—religious, secular, or ideological—from Gaza City through Tehran and Pyongyang to Moscow, Beijing and Western faculty lounges, newsrooms and entertainment studios. Anti-U.S.? Then also anti-Israel; and
- in a world in which the citizens of most modern countries live on land previously occupied by others, Israel represents the disturbing, ahistorical return to sovereignty of an indigenous people in part of its ancient homeland.
By their very existence, Jews and their state pose a problem. After al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center and Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001, journalist Jonathan Rosen, writing in The New York Times Magazine [November 4, 2001], apprehended the problem in the renewed “are you people still here?” challenge. It came from all those who tell themselves only they are on history or God’s “right side.”
The reference to faculty lounges, newsrooms and entertainment studios was not an aside. The primary charges against Israel—colonialism, racism, starvation, genocide—in its wars for survival are easily falsifiable (more below). But their global spread deepened in response to the Jewish state’s conflict with Hamas (Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement), Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others in the Gaza Strip. Epitomizing this cognitive warfare campaign, only two days following the massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 more in Israel on October 7 by Hamas et. al.—the largest one-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust—31 student organizations at Harvard University declared Israel solely responsible for the death and destruction. Some terrorists videoed their gleeful slaughters and uploaded them for wide dissemination. Hamas’ spokesman Ghazi Hamad promised many more massacres. But instead of condemning Palestinian savagery, countless demonstrators in Europe and North America shouted: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” and “Globalize the Intifada!”—meaning “kill Jews wherever they are!”
Western academia helped pave the way for this factual and moral inversion. It did so by deriding objective history as a tool of white patriarchy to be discarded in favor of subjective “narratives.” “Discourse” sidelined factual debate. Journalism’s “who, what, when, where, why and how?” reporting could not stand against post-modernism’s erasure of context and substitution of “textual indeterminacy.”
Primary responsibility for news media’s obsessive-compulsive Israel derangement disorder—which afflicts academia in general and thereby seeps into popular culture—lies with French critical literary theory or deconstructionism. It spread from literature departments through the humanities. In Middle East studies it fixated on Israel. It used the “three D’s” identified by Natan Sharansky—Double Standards, Delegitimization, and Demonization—to socially-culturally ghettoize the renewed Jewish state as medieval Jews had been theologically and then physically ghettoized, labeled a threat and rendered vulnerable.
French critical literary theory sprang from the need to rationalize failure during World War II of both an intellectual elite and largely a nation to resist Naziism. According to Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, leaders of French post-modernism included Jacques Lucan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Paul DeMan. Hanson explained that
[T]hey refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. … The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the shame that most of the nation was either passive or collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially bitter pill to swallow for the post-war French post-modernists.
Since, as Hanson observed, “every bad new idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university” and “it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture” the lie of Palestine replaced the truth of Israel. No self-proclaimed revolutionary movement benefited more from the devaluation of truth than the Soviet-backed, anti-Israel terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and later competitors like Iranian-funded Hamas.
After World War II, the aforementioned DeMan emigrated to the United States, taught at several universities and promoted post-modernism among American literature faculty. But it was Edward Said who became the spider at the center of post-modernism’s much larger intersectional web. A Palestinian American and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Said captivated late 20th and early 21st century intellectuals, diplomats, journalists and students. A member of the PLO’s national council, Said—a virtuoso of abstruse academic jargon—dealt less in facts and truth and rather more in theory and polemics. In doing so, he produced the holy grail of the pseudo-religion of “Palestinianism.” This was his hugely influential 1978 work of Middle East revisionism, Orientalism.
As journalist Lee Smith, a former student of Said’s, has written, the professor became “one of the early Anglophone advocates of French post-structuralism.” In Orientalism, Said asserted that every European 19th century scholar of the Middle East had held stereotypical views of Arabs as “the Other,” and so must have viewed the latter through racist, imperialist and ethnocentric lenses. Talk about stereotyping. Nevertheless, as Smith also noted, Said’s work helped undergird a new academic field, “post-colonial studies.” Decades before President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo pledge to “fight against” derogatory portrayals of Islam, the post-colonial mindset dismissed as negative stereotyping Western concern or criticism over reaction or violence in Arab-Islamic lands. Thanks to Said and his acolytes, one person’s terrorist indeed could be another person’s resistance fighter.
This academic sleight-of-hand justified for many Palestinian terrorists of the 1970s and ‘80s. And that violence would serve as the entre’ to Islamist terrorism of al-Qaeda and ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in the 1990s and beyond. Simultaneously, Israeli resistance was delegitimized. The U.N.’s “Zionism-is-racism” resolution had roots going back to the Bolsheviks. This was a compulsion to smear and eliminate Jewish nationalism. As Juliana Geran Pilon, a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western civilization has shown, this campaign underpins today’s red/green or leftist/Islamist alliance against Israel and the United States. Zionism-as-racism sanctified anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism became the gateway drug that re-energized and renormalized antisemitism.
The cognitive warfare marriage of literary deconstruction, Marxist anti-Zionism and anti-Western Islamism may sound abstract. If so, consider an example at first glance far removed from the academic-news-entertainment industrial complex’s double standards, demonization and delegitimization applied to the Jewish state. In 2006, the same techniques were applied by academics and journalists in a briefly sensational American case. A strip-tease dancer (and student at North Carolina State University) who worked an off-campus party hosted by members of the Duke University lacrosse team accused three players of raping her. The dancer being black, the athletes white, 88 Duke faculty members attacked the lacrosse team in the campus newspaper. Mobs gathered outside the party site, home of the team captains. A national news media circus ensued, baying about racism. The county prosecutor charged the three team members with rape.
A year later, the case collapsed due to lack of evidence. The prosecutor was disbarred. Duke reportedly paid millions of dollars to settle the players’ lawsuit out of court. But the professors never apologized. And, facts be damned, academia and news media never have apologized to Israel, the Duke lacrosse team of the Middle East.
Those indoctrinated by Said and his disciples remain vulnerable to accusations of Israeli colonialism, racism and genocide against Palestinian Arabs. Regardless of their repeated acts of sadistic terrorism, Palestinians stand as poster children of post-colonial victimization. Less than a month after the October 7 killings, tens of thousands marched through Washington, D.C. protesting, as did mass marches in Paris, London, and Berlin, Israeli “genocide” in its Gaza Strip counterattacks. And since then, reported antisemitic incidents in the United States jumped to record levels, reaching 9,354 in 2024.
Providing apparent justification have been countless images of the devastated Gaza Strip. Broadcast not only by network television but also uploaded from omnipresent cell phones to inescapable social media, these videos seem to “prove” allegations of Israeli-caused famine and genocide. Yet, according to John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies in the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Hamas spent 20 years preparing Gaza for war. It stored weapons in mosques, schools, and residences; installed combat positions throughout civilian areas; and placed command posts under hospitals. It spent more than $1 billion building 350 miles of tunnels to shield itself, but not non-combatants. Each such act violated international rules of war. So did every launch of the tens of thousands of rockets from the Strip at Israeli civilian targets.
Spencer noted Hamas’s use of Gaza’s non-combatant population in a “human shield/human sacrifice” strategy. The Israel Defense Forces, on the other hand, “implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban war.” Among other actions, it sacrificed the element of surprise by warning civilians with phone calls, text messages, and leaflets in Arabic to vacate target areas. No matter. Images of destruction in Gaza necessitated by Hamas’ militarization of the Strip, and general news media parroting of unverifiable casualty figures from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Health Ministry, helped turn Western public opinion and governments against Israel.
By Oct. 9, 2025, when the ceasefire and Israeli hostage-Palestinian prisoner release mediated by the Trump administration took effect, Hamas and its Western echo chamber claimed 67,000 fatalities in the two-year war. Proof of genocide? The Gaza Health Ministry number likely counted all Gazans who died during those 24 months. This would have included thousands who perished from natural causes, those who died when terrorist rockets fell short (as much as 20 percent of launches), and all those murdered by Hamas and its allies while attempting to flee terrorist-controlled areas, reach humanitarian aid confiscated by Hamas, or perceived by the jihadis as opponents.
Regardless, accept the Hamas Health Ministry’s number. Accept then too the IDF estimate that it killed at least 22,000 terrorists. Subtract the latter figure from the former. That leaves 45,000 non-combatant deaths, or a ratio of roughly one combatant killed for every two non-combatant fatalities. Col. Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, has pointed to United Nations’ estimates of one combatant killed for every nine non-combatants in all post-World War II conflicts. Kemp noted that estimates for allied forces in Iraq were 1:3, and in Afghanistan from 1:3 to 1:5. In Gaza, the IDF ratio ranged between 1:0.6 and 1:2, he said. But Hamas fights “from within the civilian population” and “deliberately tries to force the IDF to kill as many of their civilians as possible.” As a result, a credulous (when not Jew-hating) world “turns on Israel and falsely condemns it.” The Gallup organization reported than by early 2026, 41 percent of Americans sympathized more with Palestinian Arabs than the 36 percent who supported Israelis. This was a reversal from more than 50 percent pro-Israeli and less than 20 percent pro-Palestinian in 2002.
As with the genocide indictment, so too with the related “starvation” allegation. Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York City in November 2025, is a Democratic Socialist who pushed the genocide libel. One of his supporters was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist who caucuses with Senate Democrats. Sanders in mid-2025 declared that Israel “literally starved the people of Gaza.” At the time more than 100,000 trucks with humanitarian aid had entered the Strip. Nevertheless, Sanders already had won support of 26 Democratic senators for his proposal to ban certain U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
The starvation libel, like the genocide allegation, proved resistant to facts. Months after the October 2025 ceasefire and hostage release, journalists in the Strip having uncovered no evidence of Israeli-caused starvation, The Washington Post was still referring to “famine in Gaza last year.” But there had been no famine. Instead, Gazans suffered from a food distribution problem caused by Hamas seizing aid shipments to support its personnel, resell on the black market and failure of international aid organizations to forthrightly confront the difficulty.
By early 2026, South Africa, acting as lawyer for the Iranian-backed Hamas, had hauled Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide in the Gaza Strip war. Washington sided with Jerusalem, calling the ICJ case false and warning a verdict against the Jewish state could undermine international law.
If “Christ-killer!” was the ultimate medieval malediction against Jews, often leading to their murder by enraged mobs; and “racism” the chief 20th century indictment of the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial Jewish state; then “genocide” amounts to today’s sanction to finish Israel and its supporters “by any means necessary.” This phrase, from anti-colonial and Marxist-aligned theorist Frantz Fanon, proclaimed on banners at anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe and North America, exemplifies the totalitarian influences on those who march against Israel and its backers.
Because many news media no longer practice basic journalism, the anti-Zionist, antisemitic war against the Jews and their state expands. Sebastian Junger, writing in the March 2024 issue of National Review, asserted that “a journalist is a person willing to destroy his own opinion with facts.” To the extent that beau ideal was once true, or at least aspired to, it is no longer. How could it be, when academia, including journalism schools, insists we live in a “post-truth” world in which “narratives” trump objective reporting?
Objectivity as an attitude and facts as tools enabled the pursuit of truth. The historian John Dahlberg Acton famously observed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But Lord Acton also insisted that “truth is the only merit that gives dignity or worth to history.” In which case news media, and the universities from which contemporary journalists issue, are too often worthless.
Associated Press’ reporters and editors produced the gold standard of American journalism for a good chunk of the twentieth century. Their work rested on the 1914 commitment by AP’s legendary general manager, Melville Stone. He put it this way: “I have no thought of saying the Associated Press is perfect. The frailties of human nature attach to it.” But “the thing it is striving for is the truthful, unbiased report of the world’s happenings … ethical to the highest degree.”
Truthful. Unbiased. Ethical. How quaint. AP, one of the world’s two largest news providers—the other being Reuters—continues citing Stone. But the wire service has ditched Stone’s words when it comes to deeds. Since 2013 AP has refused to describe migrants unlawfully in the United States as “illegal aliens” and, helping establish general media practice, pretends biological males competing in women’s athletic competitions are “transgender women.” As for its coverage of the Arab-Islamic war against Israel, former AP correspondent Matti Freidman forecast the association’s failure to accurately report the post-October 7 Gaza war in an oft-cited 2016 expose. Freidman documented a news media tilt toward the Palestinian Arabs so obsessive it bordered on ludicrous. Or would have, were it not simultaneously an example of and fuel for antisemitism.
According to Friedman, a reporter in AP’s Jerusalem bureau from 2006 to 2011, coverage of the 2014 Hamas-Israel war “laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” In his view,
[T]he world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring … here in Israel.
This “malfunction” rested on a fiction, Friedman said. That is that Palestinian Arabs lacked agency. The narrative’s script features them as passive victims, martyrs even, to Israeli aggressors. This outlook, quite uniform across mainstream media in Friedman’s view, results from newsrooms’ embrace of what the late historian of antisemitism Robert Wistrich termed a secular religion of “Palestinianism.”
Its worshipful nature could be seen in Friedman’s tally of news staffing and coverage. When he worked at AP, “the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India” and “higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ eventually erupted.”
Skewed personnel deployment produced skewed coverage. Friedman counted “the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth” in one seven-week period in 2011. There were “27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.”
Friedman’s reflections on media bias in reporting the 2014 Hamas-Israel fighting would be confirmed by coverage of Israel’s post-October 7 war against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups:
Hamas’ decision in recent years [pre-2016] to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.
Hence, the attention to Hamas-controlled Gazan health ministry’s inflated civilian death counts and nearly immediate media pivot from the bestiality of the October 7 attacks and continued war crimes of hostage-holding to Israeli-military caused destruction as it fought the terrorists in the Strip.
Much of the bestiality had been recorded by Hamas members on Go-Pro body cameras. As Indiana University Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld writes, “in addition to the merciless torture, killings, slashings, burnings, beheadings, mutilations, dismemberments, and kidnappings, there were gang rapes and other forms of sadistic sexual assault—including, according to some reports, the cutting off of women’s breasts, nails driven into women’s thighs and groins, and bullets fired into their vaginas. What took place on October 7, therefore, was far less an act of Palestinian ‘resistance’ than it was an elaborate killing orgy.”
Palestinian sadism was not resistance but anti-Jewish pathology. And what Friedman termed a journalistic “malfunction” in news media coverage was worse, propaganda masquerading as reporting.
In 2002—the depth of the Palestinian second intifada terror war that eventually would murder 1,100 Israelis and visitors—Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Cable News Network of a mass grave near Jenin on the West Bank, allegedly containing the bodies of 300 of the 500 Palestinian Arabs murdered by Israel in a counter-terrorism battle in the city. In keeping with Mark Twain’s observation that a lie flies around the world while the truth gets its boots on, Erekat’s fabrication did so. The reality? Fifty-six Arabs, nearly all combatants, killed in house-to-house fighting during which 23 Israeli soldiers also died, partly because Israel avoided aerial bombing in the built-up neighborhood.
The subsequent 24 years have featured virtually endless additional examples of similar mis-coverage. Call it pro-Palestinian, or better, anti-Israel information dominance because few media ever campaign for Palestinian freedom from corrupt and brutal PLO or Hamas rule. On December 23, 2023, The Washington Post published a lengthy report headlined “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza; The damage in Gaza has outpaced other recent conflicts, evidence shows. Israel has dropped some of the largest bombs commonly used today near hospitals.” The Post asserted that Israel had “destroy[ed] more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria in 2017.”
By comparison, on December 12, Reuters reported that Russia’s war against Ukraine had resulted in an estimated 315,000 Russian troops killed or wounded, and between 25,000 and 70,000 Ukrainian dead, combatants and non-combatants. Of course, Israel’s counterattack to destroy Hamas looked more destructive: It was confined to the Gaza Strip, an area only twice the size of Washington, D.C., but with nearly three times the latter’s population. And Hamas had turned the Strip into its de facto fortress.
Ukraine, on the other hand, had a pre-war population estimated at 44 million spread over territory nearly the size of Texas. But Palestinianism afflicting its editorial judgment, The Post counted Gaza buildings, not casualties.
That mattered. Throughout the conflict, as analysts such as Spencer and Kemp (see above) have noted, the non-combatant to combatant fatality ration among Gaza Strip Arabs has been close to 1.5 to 1. This is remarkably low for warfare in urban areas, especially when one side in violation of the rules of war has used its civilians as shields. But that is merely an objective truth, a category much of the news media no longer recognizes in an era highly favorable to cognitive warfare.
In World War II, enemy radios’ “Tokyo Rose” and “Axis Sally” played a psychological warfare role. Their purpose, as Micha Danzig writes in “The New ‘Tokyo Roses’: How Social Media Influencers Amplify Authoritarian Propaganda,” “was to undermine morale, spread disinformation and convince American troops their cause was hopeless. The technology has changed, but the tactic hasn’t.
“Today, the propaganda battlefield is on social media, and the new ‘Tokyo Roses’ are often Western influencers with enormous audiences.” Their lies, often recycled clips from earlier events, sometimes bolstered by artificial intelligence, spread quickly and globally. Rhetoric “moves from distortion into outright antisemitic conspiracies.” Intentionally or not, “these narratives mirror themes long promoted by state-controlled media in Iran and Russia.”
Today’s “Israeli genocide” mantra, fueled by communications media inversion, updates the more than 2,000-year-old original blood libel. This was the accusation that Jews kidnapped and murdered Gentiles to use their blood in religious rituals. It was not only false, it inverted reality. The Torah commanded Israelites to shun the practice of some of their neighbors and not consume animal blood. But the libel endured. Why not, since it proved so useful against a stubborn little minority that insisted on proclaiming ethical monotheism to the world?
Today’s blood libel condemns Israel and its supporters for occupation, racism and genocide. In 2025, Ireland elected Catherine Connolly president. She believes Israel and the West should have not have “any say about Hamas,” which she endorses as a “fabric of Palestinian life,” in a post-war Gaza government. As for the October 7 massacres, Connolly instructs that “history did not start on 7 October” but with “many, many atrocities committed by the Israeli government through their army.”
Dissecting Connolly’s rise, Brendan O’Neill wrote that “she has become the patron saint of Ireland’s cult of Palestinianism. … It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which Ireland has been consumed by the religious fervor of Israelophobia.” In the Irish parliament,
[T]hey are hell-bent on seeing that dastardly Jewish nation be arraigned for ‘genocide’—so much so that the Irish government proposed that the International Court of Justice ‘broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of a genocide’ in order that Israel might finally be found guilty of that crime.
In the United Kingdom, Jew-hatred mainstreamed by a leftist-Islamist alliance in reaction to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip has resulted in Jewish emigration. Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and New York University law school’s Classical Learning Institute, focused on the genocide charge in a Wall Street Journal commentary: “That one word, more than any other, is killing the Jewish way of life in Britain.”
In the United States, early in October 2025, the National Education Association—the country’s largest teachers union—sent its nearly three million members a Middle East map that erased Israel. Part of NEA’s “Indigenous Peoples Day” (Columbus Day) instructional material, the graphic labeled the Jewish state, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip as “Palestine” in English and Arabic.
Four months earlier, NEA had released its handbook of teaching priorities for the coming school year. The guide expunged Jews from the Holocaust. It called instead for promoting International Holocaust Remembrance Day by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” The handbook also falsely alleged Israel was founded by “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.” In fact, approximately 600,000 Arabs fled what became Israel as a result of the 1948 war launched by five Arab countries and Palestinian Arab terrorists against the new Jewish state. Meanwhile, a total of 820,000 Jews fled or were expelled from centuries’-old communities in Arab lands, nearly 600,000 settling in Israel.
The long cognitive warfare against Israel erases such facts. A parallel cognitive war against the United States, epitomized by the highly influential, historically false The 1619 Project, alleges that a racist America was founded to protect slavery, not to advance liberty. It arises from similar sources and ultimately to the same end as the cognitive war against Israel, delegitimization and then destruction first of the Jewish state, later of a democratic-capitalist United States. In the first three weeks of the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, CNN, the BBC, NBC, The New York Times and Washington Post used the term “war crime” 32 times, according to the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis. Twenty-eight applied to America and Israel, none exclusively to Iran—though Iran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon fired hundreds of missiles and rockets at civilian locations in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, each such attack a war crime.
Five months before the outbreak of World War II, George Orwell finished the novel Coming Up for Air. In it he warned of “streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets.” Slogans, bald or sophisticated, are the bullets of cognitive warfare. Defeat the slogans or succumb to the bullets.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin
Eric Rozenman is the author of The David Discovery, A Novel of the Near Future (Academica Press, 2025), and the non-fiction From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling: Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, The Supremes and Barack Obama! and Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question (New English Review Press.
His commentaries have appeared in outlets including The Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Times of Israel.
He worked for the Jewish Policy Center, edited B’nai B’rith’s International Jewish Monthly and the Washington Jewish Week. Rozenman served on the 2022 Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism and participated in the 2009 U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Implementation Seminar.