Apologists for the campus demonstrations against Israel frequently point to the presence of Jews in the ranks of the protesters, who are often members of anti-Zionist Jewish groups such as IfNotNow. Among the founders of this group is Simone Zimmerman, who describes herself as, “like the best the Jewish community has to offer.” Zimmerman is one of the two stars of the documentary Israelism, released last year. Its thesis, Yehuda Kurtzer writes in his review, is that

the American Jewish community is committed to lying about the political plight and suffering of the Palestinians because if they told the truth, young Jews would reject Israel (and perhaps Judaism) in even larger numbers than they already do.

The film, Kurtzer observes, “is so one-sided and so certain of its own virtue and rightness that critique seems almost beside the point.” What is most striking to him is the way it frames its story of how Zimmerman and another American-born Jew achieve enlightenment:

Whether the film is conscious of it or not, the archetype here is Paul, who had been the Pharisee Saul until he had a vision on the road to Damascus, not too far from the one Simone had on the streets of Bethlehem. Paul’s vision transformed him from a self-described persecutor of Christians to Christianity’s first great evangelist. He went from being fierce, ignorant, and sad to happy, articulate, and liberated, as, the film shows us, has Zimmerman. Like Paul, Simone’s conversion moved her from a self-interested cloud of particularism to a vision of spiritual universalism—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” Paul tells the Galatians.

The Pauline trope helps explain two key dimensions of the film. Its insistence that young American Jews are lied to makes sense once one understands that the Jewish community has placed scales upon their eyes. And once the scales fall away and the truth is revealed—once one sees the horrifying truth that has been hidden—one must become an evangelist and bear the tragic burden of preaching the gospel, even at the cost of alienation from the community one seeks to transform.

For the enlightened, everything that runs counter to their new narrative must be a lie. This naturally gives rise to conspiracy theories. How else can one explain how the plain truth has been hidden, except through the perfidy of deception? This assumption helps explain the surprising plot turn of the second half of Israelism. The film argues explicitly that the rise of Donald Trump, and therefore the emboldening of the white supremacist antisemitism, is the fault of the pro-Israel community in America.

One of the greatest, and most baffling, of America’s errors since October 7 has been its indulgence of Qatar, a nominal ally that tends to act as anything but. Over the next week, I’m going to use this space to point to some of this regime’s bad behavior, and its deadly consequences. Today, I’ll focus on Al Jazeera, a state-sponsored media conglomerate that churns out anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda in a variety of languages. Douglas Murray calls attention to some of its employees in Gaza:

Take Muhammad Washah, whom Al Jazeera presented as a stellar part of the press corps merely reporting the truth. Unfortunately for them, their man is also a senior commander in Hamas. He used to be in Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit, but since 2022 he has been in charge of research and development for aerial weapons. Known to you and me as “rockets.”

It’s quite something to pull off. On the one hand, Washah can spend his days making rockets to fire at Israel. But in the evenings he can report on the terrible destruction in Gaza caused by the “Zionist entity.” . . . He might have kept getting away with it if IDF soldiers in Gaza had not managed to get a hold of his laptop.

And that’s why, Elliott Abrams explains, supporters of freedom of the press should have no qualms about Washington pressing Doha about the network—or about Israel’s decision to prevent it from operating within its borders:

While organized as a private company, Al Jazeera is the voice of Qatar’s regime. It was founded and financed by the then-emir of Qatar. Whenever I am told that this is not true, and that Al Jazeera is really an independent news source, I ask a simple question: show me one time since its founding nearly 30 years ago that it has voiced one criticism of the Qatari government. I’m still waiting.

And it’s not just Al Jazeera: Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. . . .

These news sources are not free; they need to stay close to the Qatari official line and never contradict it in significant ways. . . . And that is what makes their pernicious role so consequential: Qatar could turn them off, or turn them into actual independent news sources, if it wished. Instead it wishes to promote and laud violence.