Two weeks ago, Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El had scheduled Albert Fox Cahn, a congregant who works as a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to speak at its Friday-night services, but rescinded the invitation abruptly after considering his links to this dangerous organization, which has longstanding ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Cahn has predictably labeled the disinvitation a failure of tolerance. The Muslim activist Shireen Qudosi, however, applauds the synagogue’s decision:

Synagogues should never be bullied into hosting organizations that promote divisiveness and demonization—especially groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which slurs [Muslim] reformists as “Uncle Toms” and seeks to impose its intolerant views on the American Muslim community. That intolerance often takes the form of harassing reformers who advocate for liberalism within Islam, while only recognizing as legitimate representatives of Islam those Muslims who represent Islamic orthodoxy. . . .

[Furthermore], CAIR has contributed dangerously to the politicization of Islam. . . . It doesn’t hide its behavior, either, often [working] as a self-appointed heresy hunter against Muslims who want to have an open conversation on Islamic extremism.

The Islamic faith has no organized leadership, and the caliphate of Islamic empires died long ago. Muslim organizations . . . such as CAIR, [trying to fill this vacuum], have positioned themselves as representatives of Muslims in America. . . .

Cahn [wrote in response the Emanu-El’s decision to disinvite him] that it “is up to this generation . . . to show that we have learned the lessons of history and the teachings of the Torah [and] to show that we are not doomed to wander the desert of intolerance.”. . . I don’t believe the Jewish tradition teaches its followers to submit [to bigots] and call it “tolerance.” In fact, I have heard of a Jewish saying that “if you are kind to the cruel, you will end by being cruel to the kind.” And we see that playing out here. Champions of indiscriminate interfaith dialogue such as Cahn are harming moderate Muslim communities by empowering CAIR’s bigotry.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.