Three years ago, Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. They raped, burned and filmed themselves doing it. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the most thoroughly documented massacre in history, recorded by its own perpetrators.

Yet the world is already being taught to remember it as something else. Murderers become “militants,” then “the resistance.” Gaza, which Israel left completely in 2005, is called “occupied” and “blockaded.” And the effort to rescue hostages who were being tortured, starved and abused is slandered as “genocide.” Even Gaza photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who spread the genocide lie for years on American speaking tours, now admits that Hamas could have ended the war within days by accepting terms it agreed to two years later.

“The Torah commands, ‘Distance yourself from a false matter,’ and our Sages taught that ‘falsehood has no legs,’” said CJV President Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld. “Those who called it ‘genocide’ to work to free tortured and abused hostages and end the genocidal danger posed by Hamas are accomplices in the terrorists’ horrific crimes. No decent person learns moral judgment from murderers, rapists, and torturers.”

Israel has the right and responsibility to defeat those who threaten its citizens and to ensure that October 7 can never happen again. Leaders who condemn antisemitism must back their words by protecting Jewish communities, confronting intimidation and holding perpetrators accountable — and by backing the appropriate and moral efforts by Israeli leaders to bring Hamas and its vile barbarism to an end.

The Jewish community will continue to build, teach our children, and practice our faith openly and without fear. We pray for the safety of all who defend us at home and abroad, and for lasting peace. Our answer to October 7 is a stronger Jewish future, rooted in Torah, sustained by faith, and defended with resolve.

Photo: Damaged building in Kibbutz Be’eri after October 7 by Kobi Gideon, Israel Government Press Office, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians: in their homes, on their kibbutzim, and at a music festival. They raped, they burned, and they dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and it was documented in more detail than any massacre in history, by the perpetrators themselves: they livestreamed every atrocity they could.

Yet here is how Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” chooses to introduce this macabre topic: “On October 7, 2023, a series of coordinated armed incursions from the blockaded Gaza Strip into the Gaza envelope of southern Israel were carried out by Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups.”

“Armed incursions.” “Militant groups.” Not a word about murder, rape, or kidnapping until later. But the word that does the heaviest lifting is “blockaded” — because it supplies, in the very first line, the excuse. The reader learns that the people of Gaza were besieged before he learns what they did.

It’s worth pausing to admire this blockade. This was a “blockade” through which Hamas imported enough cement and steel to build hundreds of miles of tunnels, the largest underground military network in the world. This blockade somehow let in the pickup trucks, the motorcycles, the paragliders and the thousands of rockets that were fired at Israel that morning. Note, also, that Gaza remains the only “besieged” territory in history whose besiegers supply it with electricity, water and fuel, while sending in hundreds of trucks of goods every day. Prior to that day, roughly 18,000 of its residents were issued work permits to cross into Israel and earn Israeli wages.

Ordinary Israelis, meanwhile, volunteered with groups like Road to Recovery, driving Gazan patients — children among them — from the border crossing to Israeli hospitals for treatment. One of those volunteers, Vivian Silver, a lifelong peace activist, was murdered in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. That is what the “blockade” looked like from the Israeli side of the fence.

What Israel actually restricted was weapons. The reason was not theoretical. In 2002, the Israeli Navy seized the Karine A, a ship carrying some 50 tons of Iranian arms bound for Palestinian terrorists. After Hamas seized Gaza in a bloody coup in 2007, Israel — and Egypt, which also borders Gaza, and whose role Wikipedia’s first sentence somehow neglects — limited what could come in. Calling that a “blockade” in the opening line of an article about a massacre is like opening the entry on a bank robbery by noting that the bank had locked its vault.

But “blockaded” is not a stray adjective. It is one brick in a wall of falsehoods that has been under construction for decades, and every brick rests on the one beneath it.

At the foundation of this wall is the name itself. After the Romans crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, they declared that Judea would henceforth be called “Syria Palaestina,” after the Philistines, the Jews’ ancient enemies. Palestine, in other words, exists as a deliberate attempt to erase the Jewish connection to the land — though it is identified repeatedly by the God of the Bible as the “Land of Israel,” as well as the Promised Land, the Holy Land, the Land flowing with milk and honey, and simply “the Land” given, like the Torah, to Jews.

Nearly two thousand years later, under the British Mandate, the “Palestinians” were still, as always, the Jews. The Jerusalem Post was the Palestine Post, just as the Jerusalem Talmud is still identified as the Palestinian Talmud. The Israel Philharmonic was the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Bank Leumi was the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The Arabs of the region rejected the label; they considered themselves Arabs, part of the greater Arab nation.

It was only in the 1960s that the Arab League, with backing from the KGB, founded the PLO and repurposed “Palestinian” as the name of a newly-invented Arab people with an “ancient” claim to the land. PLO executive committee member Zuheir Mohsen explained the purpose candidly to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.” Only “for political and tactical reasons,” he added, “do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.”

Once one accepts the nonsensical idea that the land is “Palestine” and the Jews are foreigners upon it, everything else follows. Jews living in Judea, the place from which the word “Jew” derives, become “occupiers.” The Arabs who left in 1948 and every one of their descendants, four generations later, become “refugees” — the only refugee population on earth whose status is inherited forever, with its own UN agency to make sure it never ends. Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every soldier and every Jewish family in 2005, becomes “occupied” anyway, and then “an open-air prison,” and then “blockaded.” Murderers become “militants,” and then “the resistance.”

And at the top of the stack sits the biggest lie of all: “genocide.”

That charge was hurled at Israel to cover for Hamas since 2007, and accelerated while hostages were still in Hamas dungeons — and it should be judged on that basis alone. While hostages were being tortured, starved, sexually assaulted, and murdered with bare hands, someone slandering their rescuers as “genocidal” is a barbarian, a deviant, a monster. These labels apply, with neither exaggeration nor apology, to every miscreant who has called Israel’s rescue efforts and military pressure on Hamas a “genocide.”

The Torah commands, “Distance yourself from a false matter” (Exodus 23:7) — not merely “do not lie,” but keep away from falsehood, because one lie draws in the next. Our Sages also taught that “falsehood has no legs” (Shabbos 104a): a lie cannot stand on its own. That is exactly why these lies are stacked. Each one is propped up by the one beneath it, and none of them could survive alone.

The Torah also commands us to remember — “Zachor.” Remember what Amalek did to you, and remember it accurately. On this third anniversary, the most important thing we can do is refuse to let history be rewritten while the survivors are still alive to correct it. Pull out the bottom brick, call the land and its people by their true names, and the whole tower falls.

Photo: Burned home in Kibbutz Be’eri after October 7 by Kobi Gideon, Israel Government Press Office, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I believe our community is now operating through four ideological policy camps: the Far Right and the Far Left, along with the Center Right and the Center Left. Employing the two central issues facing America’s Jews, Israel/Zionism and Antisemitism, I have constructed this evaluative model.

Labeling the numerous organizations and placing them into their respective spaces, based on their Zionist credentials and antisemitism alignment (identified with a specific definition), is of course problematic. Obviously, introducing other “policy items” will no doubt change the positioning of some of these institutions. I take responsibility for possibly mislabeling some of the 40 organizations that have been examined, with many more to be inputted. For purposes of this article, only some of the organizations included in this study are referenced.

Assigning an organization to an “Ideological Camp” applies only where an organization regularly takes public-policy positions in connection with these two overarching themes reflecting a particular stance or viewpoint. There are numerous organizations that can be defined as “Non-Combatants” meaning such groups can be identified as primarily operating in other “neutral” policy or content areas, such as religious, social service, philanthropic, educational, security or health, and only on occasion may address one or both of these issues.

Examples of Current Intra-Camp Coalescing:

Right: Republican Jewish Coalition functions as the partisan hub linking Jewish conservatives and Republican officeholders. ZOA has assembled pro-IHRA and campus-enforcement coalitions in defense of Israel, while CJV (Coalition for Jewish Values) connects Orthodox social conservatism with pro-Israel advocacy. Other organizations that are identified with this ideological sector include Betar US, Americans for a Safe Israel, Religious Zionists of America, and American Friends of Likud.

Read the full article at The Times of Israel

Photo: Members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations meet with President Reuven Rivlin by Zoom, May 2021, by Mark Neyman (Israel GPO), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A co-founder of the parental rights group Moms for Liberty is urging parents to look closely at the politics of Ms. Rachel, the children’s YouTube star known for early-learning songs and speech lessons.

Tina Descovich said in a Fox report that Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, is using her influence for political activism. Descovich said parents who trust the channel with toddlers should know that before they press play. She suggested each show open with a label noting that Ms. Rachel was a finalist in StopAntisemitism’s 2025 “Antisemite of the Year” contest. According to the report, the group accused her of promoting Hamas-aligned messaging in posts about Gaza, while other Jewish organizations have defended her advocacy for Palestinian children.

Her Gaza posts have drawn the sharpest criticism. The Coalition for Jewish Values’ Rabbi Yaakov Menken criticized the proportion of her attention that goes to Gaza compared with other humanitarian crises. Ms. Rachel has said the backlash no longer fazes her, per the same report.

Read the full article at The Washington Times

Photo: Rabbi Yaakov Menken, courtesy of Coalition for Jewish Values

Rabbi Steve Leder, a technical advisor behind Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This,” called out the series star Adam Brody on Tuesday for saying he believes Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

“Hi Adam, you might not remember me. My name is Rabbi Steve Leder, and I was the technical advisor for Season 1 of ‘Nobody Wants This,'” Leder began in an Instagram video to the actor.

“My job was to make sure that your character was authentic and that everything in Season 1 about Judaism was authentic.”

Leder criticized Brody and called his comments “ignorant,” arguing that Brody had mischaracterized the situation in Gaza and treated the issue flippantly.

“Your pronouncement the other day about a ‘genocide in Gaza’ was truly shocking,” Leder said. “Not only because of your misuse and mischaracterization of your use of the word genocide — there is no genocide in Gaza, there are genocides in other countries happening, but you failed to mention any of them.

“You, by your own admission, are a relatively ignorant Jew, and your ignorance really showed the other day.

“If you’re going to use a word like ‘genocide,’ you ought to know what it means,” he added. “And, by the way, being so flippant about a word like ‘genocide’ — ‘Hey, put me down for genocide,’ like you’re asking for a table for two at Craig’s — is disgusting. Here’s some more technical advice: If you know nothing about something, you should say nothing about it.”

Brody, who plays a rabbi in the series, recently suggested in an interview with GQ magazine that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide,” Brody said. “Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Brody’s representatives for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

In a comment to Fox News Digital, Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, also called out Brody as “ignorant” for calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.”

“One of the hallmarks of antisemitism is to irrationally regard Jews as a threat. While Hamas was holding, torturing, raping and murdering hostages, only a bigot would call the effort to free those hostages ‘genocide.’ An ignorant Jew is no less likely than anyone else to fall prey to hateful indoctrination,” Menken said.

“As even photographer Motaz Azaiza now admits, Hamas could have ended the conflict in Gaza at any moment, simply by releasing the hostages,” he added. “In no genocide in history have the victims controlled the off switch. On roughly a daily basis, a prominent Jewish leftist goes on X (formerly Twitter) to say ‘As a Jew’ and then follow it by expressing antisemitic nonsense.”

In another comment from the Israeli-American Council, the organization expressed “revulsion at the ignorant and harmful statement” made by Brody.

“Lies like this are not just fake news, they incite violence that can lead to the murder of innocent Jews. Just today, Israeli passengers narrowly escaped death from what is being called an attempted terrorist attack on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. That’s the reality Israelis and Jews live with every day,” the organization said.

Photo: Adam Brody by Kevin Paul, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has joined a Senate resolution that would designate Sept. 27 through Oct. 3 as “Religious Education Week.”

Senate Resolution 891 was introduced Sept. 23 and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The resolution has not yet been adopted by the Senate.

The measure was introduced by U.S. Sen. Darline Graham of South Carolina and is backed by Tuberville and more than two dozen other senators, including Alabama Sen. Katie Britt.

The proposal is supported by School Time Bible Ministries, the Foundation for American Christian Education, Agudath Israel of America, the Association of Christian Schools International, the Coalition for Jewish Values and Catholic Education Partners, according to Tuberville’s office.

Read the full article at Wiregrass Daily News
Photo: Official Senate portrait of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons