Former Vice President Mike Pence poached over a dozen senior officials from the Heritage Foundation to join his own conservative think tank in the latest sign that all is not well in right-wing politics. The Heritage Foundation is arguably the most prominent conservative think tank in America. Pence, meanwhile, started his competing think tank, Advancing American Freedom, to promote “exactly what the Trump-Pence Administration did every day.” Many prominent Republicans framed this to the Journal as a return to conservative fundamentals, blocking out “what they see online.”  As my colleague Anna Merlan recently reported, MAGA is eating itself alive. Pence’s move came after the Heritage Foundation’s leader, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson for hosting white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his show, according to the Wall Street Journal.  The Heritage Foundation notably published Project 2025, the policy document that detailed Trump 2.0’s slash-and-burn approach to governance. But this specific beef dates back to October, when Carlson, a high-profile conservative political commentator, interviewed Fuentes. Fuentes asserted that we need “to be pro-white,” promoted conspiracy theories of “organized Jewry in America,” and decried Christian Zionism. There was immediate outrage within the right: US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to name a few. Roberts disagreed, describing the criticism as an attempt to cancel Carlson.  “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington,” he said.  Roberts’ remarks led to further fallout. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) countered, “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.” That’s when top Heritage Foundation members began resigning. John Blackman, who stepped down on Sunday, wrote that the think tank had abandoned its principles and conformed to President Trump and a coalition of the right’s “rising tide of antisemitism.” “Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable,” Andy Olivastro, the foundation’s chief advancement officer said in a statement to the Journal. “A handful of staff chose a different path.” All of this calls into question what the future of the Republican Party will look like after Trump. Turning Point USA, which showed signs of unraveling during this past weekend’s convention, has its hopes pinned on JD Vance, but other factions of the political party may have a different idea come 2028. 

Phillip Abram, a Jewish Bondi resident, places flowers at a growing memorial near Bondi Beach following the Bondi Hanukkah terror attack.James West/Mother Jones

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen were hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration.  One gunman has been killed and a second suspect is in custody and in critical condition, police said.  The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world. “This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.” At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to The New York Times.  Emergency workers transport a shooting victim on a stretcher after an attack at Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach. Mark Baker/APMark Baker/AP A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, said, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.” Mal Lanyon, police commissioner for New South Wales, said there were also two improvised explosive devices found at the scene that were “active,” the Times reported. He described them as “rudimentary” and “fairly basic” in construction. Police offices around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.”  A rabbi lights a menorah during a vigil outside the Australian High Commission in central London, following the terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday. James Manning/PA Wire/APJames Manning/PA Wire/AP The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023, massacre and the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire. The attacks continued in 2025. One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time.  These incidents, according to Daniel Aghion, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, are at “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.”  According to The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, the Bondi Beach shooting is the deadliest attack on Jews in the diaspora since the October 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life building in that city left 11 people dead. This past October, two people were stabbed to death at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur. Sunday’s shooting is the deadliest in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the countryessentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities alsoimposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.  Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia. In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the per-capita number of gun-license holders has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.”  Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invite to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream. Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration, according Chabad. This is a developing story.

THE GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA ARE PRETENDING TO SUPPORT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY—BY OBEYING THE FAR RIGHT ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been rioting in Tel Aviv itself, with the match banned as a result. For the previous 72 hours, the British public were once again instructed, by the media and politicians, not to believe their lying eyes. Forget videos of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters running riot in Amsterdam in November, or of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters beating someone in Athens unconscious in March last year: banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a game at Aston Villa is, according to the UK’s prime minister, antisemitic. It did not need confirmation from the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs that the British government is now entirely obeying the diktats of the State of Israel. “A line must be drawn” Gideon Sa’ar reports having told foreign secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday (19 October), listing the measures necessary further to spread fear among, and alienate, British Jewish people. This included the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Sa’ar: “expressed our clear and unequivocal expectation that this disgraceful decision be revoked and that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be allowed to attend the game”. The resulting campaign is just the most recent in a redoubled wave of attacks on fact and community, clearly at the Israeli state’s behest. It is worth examining the run up to it. At the start of October, thirteen UK citizens were among those kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli military. Millions of people worldwide had been watching live-streamed footage from the Global Sumud Flotilla; around 50 small, civilian boats on a humanitarian mission to break Israel’s 17 year-long blockade of Gaza. By 2 am on Thursday 2nd, around 13 of the boats had been boarded and seized by Israel, with the rest still under pursuit. In total, 462 peaceful flotilla activists, from around 45 countries, were eventually taken hostage. Many would later report being tortured. By Thursday evening, emergency protests in support of the flotilla crew had erupted across the world, through the whole of Europe through to Dhaka, Rio and beyond. The UK public’s response, while comparatively muted, was no different. Earlier that day, the British Transport Police had issued a warning. Protests were expected “in response to Israel detaining activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla in the early hours of this morning”. Emergency gatherings indeed sprang up that evening around the country, from Edinburgh to London Piccadilly. Later that morning, in Manchester, two Jewish people had tragically been killed, and others injured, after a terrorist attacked a synagogue. The feelings of shock, dismay and horror across the population were heartfelt: condemnations of the act, and support for the victims and the wider Jewish community poured in from across all spectrums – religious, political and communal. And then one of the largest of disinformation campaigns slammed into action. It was spread by a variety of actors with a variety of motives, but the strategy was the same. To start with: tell people that the UK flotilla protests were not protests in support of the flotilla. Tell them they were protests in celebration of the Manchester terrorist attack. The flotilla protests were “a shameful response to the Manchester attack” according to The Spectator. “Vicious Jew-hatred was indulged, yet again” agreed the Scotsman. “They weren’t demonstrating. They were, actually celebrating. I can’t even imagine whoever’s seen such vile scenes on our streets” Farage told his followers. “I could not take it that after such a horrendous terrorist attack, I could see marches of celebrations in London and other cities that celebrated this murderous attack”, Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel said, on Good Morning Britain. The next immediate target was larger; hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people: those who had marched peacefully through London, month after month,  against their government’s complicity in genocide. Suddenly, once again, the marches were “hate marches”, specifically a mass of “Jew hate”, and directly linked to the Manchester terror attack. “Everyone on pro-Palestine marches this weekend is complicit” threatened the Express. Social media was bombarded by posts from right wing accounts: “Anti Semitic mobs have been allowed to march through our streets, waving their terrorist flags and shouting Death to Jews” was one exemplar. “People like killing Jews” the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges clarified. Until now, coverage of the silent, seated, placard-holding Palestine Action protests had been sympathetic. It would, you would think, from the footage of priests, pensioners, Quakers and disabled people being arrested under the Terrorism Act, and carried off by reluctant police, be difficult to sell this as an antisemitic hate event. But not this time. “We’ve had Swastikas, pro-Hamas posters, pro-terror posters and calls for Intifada”, Dan Hodges asserted, of the most recent Palestine Action protest in Trafalgar Square on 4 October, which he does not appear to have attended. The supposed evidence for this came from three photos of people on the fringes of the protest: a grey-haired man with a t-shirt which compared the Israeli government to Nazis, and one person with a placard saying they supported Hamas’ right to resistance. A banner from Cage, the campaigning civil rights organisation demanding that the government “Abolish terror laws” was presumably “pro terror”. The Times’ Matthew Syed, wandering around the sombre square on Saturday, was asking people, there to protest their government’s support of an ongoing genocide, whether “Hamas were partly responsible”. Told to piss off with his stupid questions by women there to witness the protest, Syed extrapolates this into a “hatred of Jews”. Many participants in the protest were Jewish and the protest itself was supported by Jewish organisations, including Jewish Voice for Labour and Na’amod. There were placards affirming the general grief for Manchester, but Syed comes away with “the pervasive view that the Manchester atrocity was not a heinous attack but righteous comeuppance for an evil people”. The protestors, from priest to Quaker, were “almost gloating over the Yom Kippur attack” the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews later told his Jewish audience. Coasting on the back of this, like a surfer upon sewage, was the British government. Naturally they wanted to end the protests; the public accusations of their engagement in the mass slaughter of defenceless people. And yet, interviewed by Owen Jones and Rivkah Brown at the Labour Party conference last month, it was clear that they were not about to do this by stopping their diplomatic and military support for the current Israeli government. Indeed, the government can do nothing to go against the Trump/Netanyahu axis, or so it has persuaded itself. Consider the haunted grey face of Yvette Cooper, questioned by Jones over Gaza. Or Jess Phillips, pursued by an incredulous Rivkah Brown with questions about the proscription of Palestine Action. “We’re just doing what we’re told” shrugged Phillips’ body language. “Are you daft, or something?” “I just do as I’m told, you know”, Labour’s Peter Prinsley confirmed to Declassified UK outside the conference. So this ideologically authoritarian, blindly in thrall government doubles down. The Prime Minister told the country that there are “people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people”. He did not mean the threat, to all people, of insane extremist violence; he meant what Gideon Sa’ar has instructed him to mean: the schoolgirls, students, pensioners, white and brown, singing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. According to Sa’ar, and the right wing press, and their supporters, this calls for “the elimination of the State of Israel” – and is therefore antisemitic. Legislation, said Sa’ar, was needed. And thus the UK’s right wing, and its convenient dupes, flog the fallacy that the majority of the country who demanded arms sales to Israel be suspended, or who think banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is a good idea, simply hate Jewish people. Meanwhile, the Israeli state not only invites in, but parades, a man known as one of the UK’s most unwanted Nazi-adjacent mortgage fiddlers. The shock among the British Jewish community when Tommy Robinson’s trip was announced was palpable, including from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, which described him as a “thug” who represented “the very worst of Britain”. Robinson was urging supporters to rally at the Maccabi Tel Aviv/Villa game, where the Prime Minister and his accomplices are simultaneously attempting to expedite, as directed by Sa’ar, an influx of notoriously violent foreign race-haters, screaming “antisemitism” if challenged. If there were a better way to spread fear, division and hatred among our Muslim and Jewish communities, it is difficult to think of one. “If Tommy Robinson wants to show he’s a friend of Jews I urge him not to go after Jewish journalists just because they happen to disagree with him” pleaded one Jewish journalist. It is a terrible and damning game that this government and its allies are attempting: pretending to support the Jewish community by obeying the far right. Meanwhile, excluding figures from London, religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19% in the year before March, including direct attacks on mosques and Muslims themselves. Communities are standing up to this, as they have, and they can, and they will.  The government, clearly, will not. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Israel Police / Sports5. Maccabi Tel Aviv banners read “We’re back from reserve duty” and “Harbu Derby“ The post Red card for reality appeared first on Freedom News.

A COUNTER-DEMO BY CORNWALL RESISTS FACED OFF AGAINST THE FAR-RIGHT IN TRURO FOR SEVERAL HOURS ~ Scott Harris ~ Mylor Councillor, Peter Lawrence, was caught on film yesterday (24th May) delivering a blatantly antisemitic, holocaust denying rant at the far-right Great British Strike event in Truro, Cornwall. Lawrence represents the British Democrats on Mylor Council after he took the seat unopposed earlier this year. Video footage shows Lawrence answering “technically no” when asked whether antisemitism exists. It then captures him saying: “World Jewry declared war on Germany in the Second World War. They were bankrupting them from the Treaty of Versailles, they were blockading the food and everything. They were  starving them. The Jews, who are communist, were responsible for a lot of  problems in the Weimar Republic, were frustrating the efforts of the restoration of the German people to have self-determination…Hitler didn’t have a beef with the Jews. He just didn’t want them to disrupt what was going on.” When asked whether “Hitler was right to kill so many Jews”, Lawrence replied: “I – and from what I’ve read and the revisionist historians I have read cannot find a single order from Adolf Hitler calling for the execution of the Jews”. Lawrence was then asked whether he believed in the Holocaust. He replied: “The Holocaust has been massively over-exaggerated”. While Lawrence himself represents the British Democrats, the crowd was chanting “Reform UK” just moments before. An unannounced counter demo, co-ordinated by Cornwall Resists, faced off against the far-right for several hours, standing their ground and outlasting the fascist presence in Truro, whilst doing successful outreach with shoppers out in town.  The Great British Strike participants, meanwhile, did nothing other than shout at counter protesters. They didn’t have any placards, any leaflets, they didn’t make any speeches and they didn’t march. Had they not draped themselves in Union Jacks, no-one in Truro would have known why they were there. A spokesperson for Cornwall Resists said: “The mask is off. This is the true face of Reform supporters. This is the ugly and dangerous racist hatred that was on display in Truro today. No-one in the crowd challenged or disagreed with Lawrence’s antisemitism. It was truly sickening and it was particularly sickening for the Jewish members of our group.  This is fascism on our streets. The Great British Strike has tried to co-opt the language of working class solidarity for a racist, far-right agenda”.  The post Councillor’s blatant antisemitic rant at “Great British Strike” event appeared first on Freedom News.

BURLEY AND LORBER’S PROJECT IS BOTH HONOURABLE AND NECESSARY, BUT WHY DO THEY LET MARXIST ANTISEMITISM OFF THE HOOK? ~ Jay Arachnid ~ Poor timing or perfect timing? Re-centring American Jewish voices crying out against the weaponisation of Jewish trauma by extremist right-wing/quasi-fascist Israeli politicians while at the same time deflecting and minimising the homicidal oppression of Palestinians (and now Lebanese)? I ordered this book prior to the audacious October 7 Hamas attacks; the authors had to scramble to incorporate something about it in their introduction and toward the end of the text. Sadly, their attempt to acknowledge the shock in the Jewish diaspora (as well as inside Israel) falls a bit flat after the ensuing – and typically – hideously disproportionate response by the Israeli military in Gaza and paramilitary settlers in the occupied West Bank, facilitated by the easy flow of weapons from the USA. And now (as of this writing) in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria (and perhaps Iran by the time this is published). Given the public outrage against Israeli massacres of non-combatants, the targeted assassinations of journalists, and the bombing of schools and hospitals, it feels uncomfortably self-centred to read a book about mostly non-deadly Jew-hatred. To their great credit, Burley and Lorber have provided a concise but still excellent history of antisemitism in the first 138 pages (chapters one through six). Also excellent are the ways they briefly interrogate others’ analyses of Jew-hatred as inadequate, obsolete, or in the case of chapter two (Neither Eternal, Nor Inevitable: New Perspectives on ‘The Oldest Hatred’), politically biased. Yet in chapter five (The Socialism of Fools: Antisemitism and Anti-Capitalism), they succumb to their own. Despite being known as anarchists for years, they have a soft analytical spot for some broad Left, even while taking various leftists to task for harbouring, maintaining, and sometimes promoting a vulgar populist-driven antisemitism. On pages 100-101, they write: > > “Unlike the Right, the early European Left tended less to look backward at > > restoring a nostalgic past, and more to look forward, to the building of a > > more equal society. But they, too, often propagated antisemitism in > > misguided attempts to ‘punch up’ at the root of capitalism, and the ‘Jewish > > question’ was a fiercely common debate among Leftists. In the mid-nineteenth > > century, influential anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin railed against ‘the > > whole Jewish world, which constitutes a single exploitative sect, a sort of > > bloodsucker people, a collective parasite, voracious… every popular > > revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence’. > > Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, insisting that ‘the Jew is > > the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or > > exterminate it’”. The very name of the Lorber and Burley’s chapter cries out for an explanation of Marx and Marxist Jew-hatred. Yet despite correctly raking the old-guard anarchists over the coals — insinuating that anarchists (alone? especially?) are the ones to watch out for — the authors pointedly and inexplicably ignore (or is it censor?) the contributions of Marx and his many followers to this unfortunate discourse; they briefly mention Red Army pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War as well as the idiocies of the German Communist Party in the 1930s, who made the accusation that “Nazis help Jewish capital” (p 106). Also mentioned in passing are Stalinist anti-Jewish purges in the former Soviet Union “and satellite states like Czechoslovakia”, (p 107), accusing Jews of being Zionist agents (despite the Soviet Union being among the first governments to recognise the new state of Israel in 1948); here, “Zionists” was clearly a codeword for Jews, aka “rootless cosmopolitans”, generally accused of dual loyalty, and therefore politically unreliable. They rightly accuse contemporary leftists of minimising and/or ignoring antisemitism because “Jews are white and therefore oppressors” (and other similar nonsense), but never bother to question where these prejudices might come from. Since Burley and Lorber are (anarcho-)leftist organiser-activists, it’s taken for granted that there should be – indeed, must be if there isn’t already – a mass movement for social justice based on anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and that this renewed mass movement (the incipient stages of which are allegedly seen in the Palestinian solidarity movement[s]) needs to take antisemitism seriously if it to succeed. They write, “It is through… building community and organizing a mass movement, that we can build safety through solidarity, and win a just world” (p 325). This is perhaps their primary reason for avoiding taking Marxism to task for being just as mired in anti-Jewish caricature-based prejudice as Bakunin and Proudhon; the risk of alienating people with a history of Marxist-dominated mass movements is just too great. But if radical social justice activists are allowed to challenge pro-Palestinians for their support of Hamas and Hezbollah (“despite those groups’ reactionary beliefs”, p 214 –I would call this kind of truncated and facile anti-imperialism the other socialism of fools), shouldn’t they equally be able to challenge a truncated anti-capitalism that includes the Jew-hatred in which Marx was mired, and which too many of his followers continue to perpetuate? Or is there no historical throughline within the socialism of fools? The topic of antisemitism requires a multilayered and nuanced analysis in order to defy the too-easy conflation of Jews and Israelis – or making diaspora Jews responsible for and representative of Israeli policies (not coincidentally the shared wet dream of zionists and antisemites). And in the wake of the latest round of seemingly endless and increasingly horrifying Israeli atrocities, the potential targeting of non-Israeli Jews for retaliatory violence is sadly real. Burley and Lorber’s project to counter the mundane racism of collective guilt/responsibility is both honourable and necessary, and they have provided anarchists and other radicals a critical entry-point into the discourse.     Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Melville House Publishing, 2024. 375 pages. The post Book Review: Safety Through Solidarity appeared first on Freedom News.