Born into a Catholic family in a German-speaking village in southwestern Romania, Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for her poetry and novels in 2009. Last month, Müller delivered a speech about the October 7 massacres, the Gaza war, and the escalation of anti-Semitism in which she displayed a moral clarity rarely heard from Europeans these days. Of the progressive-minded protesters eagerly repeating the slogans of bloodthirsty jihadists, she says:

I lived in a dictatorship for over 30 years. And when I came to Western Europe, I could not imagine that democracy could ever be called into question in such a way. I thought that in a dictatorship, people are systematically brainwashed. And that in democracies, people learn to think for themselves because the individual counts. Unlike in a dictatorship, where independent thought is forbidden and the forced collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part of the collective, but an enemy.

I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. . . . One wonders what is being taught at universities today.

She then turns to the specific consequences for the Jews:

In Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, National Socialism is said to have “made everything German unbearable to the world.” I have the impression that the strategy of Hamas and its supporters is to make everything Israeli, and therefore everything Jewish, unbearable to the world. Hamas wants to maintain anti-Semitism as a permanent global mood. That is why it also wants to reinterpret the Shoah. The Nazi persecution and the rescue flight to Palestine are also to be called into question. And ultimately, the right of Israel to exist. This manipulation goes as far as to claim that German Holocaust remembrance only serves as a cultural weapon to legitimize the Western-white “settlement project” of Israel.

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.