Smoke billows from the Nabatieh district, following Israeli strikes, as seen from Marjayoun, in southern Lebanon, June 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

More than a dozen Israeli air strikes battered a row of hilltops in southern Lebanon on Friday, security sources said, with the Israeli military saying it had attacked a damaged military site that terrorist group Hezbollah was seeking to restore.

The simultaneous strikes hit a mountainous strip near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh, according to the Lebanese security sources, who said Iran-backed Hezbollah likely still had arms depots there. There was no immediate comment from the Islamist group.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets had attacked a site used to manage Hezbollah’s “fire and defense system.” It said the site was destroyed in last year’s war but that Hezbollah was attempting to resume activities there in breach of the November truce that ended the conflict.

Lebanon‘s President Joseph Aoun on Friday fired the same accusation back at Israel, saying it was continually violating the US-brokered ceasefire deal by keeping up strikes on Lebanon.

The ceasefire deal stipulates that southern Lebanon must be free of any non-state arms or fighters, Israeli troops must leave southern Lebanon as Lebanese troops deploy there. and all fire across the Lebanese-Israeli border must stop.

Israeli troops remain in at least five posts within Lebanese territory and its air force regularly kills rank-and-file Hezbollah members or people affiliated with the group.

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Zohran Mamdani, a New York City mayoral candidate, speaks on Primary Day at a campaign news conference at Astoria Park in Queens, New York, United States, on June 24, 2025. Photo: Kyle Mazza vis Reuters Connect.

Eric Hoffer was an American longshoreman and self-taught philosopher. His 1951 book The True Believer brilliantly dissected the inner workings of mass movements and the dangers posed by populism.

Writing with the simple clarity of someone who spent more time dealing with real people than attending conferences, Hoffer understood how populist ideology seduces the masses — by dazzling them with attractive ideas and unattainable utopian promises.

“It is startling to realize,” he wrote, “how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

Hoffer died more than 40 years ago, but that line could have been written yesterday. Exactly this nightmare is unfolding before our eyes. Today’s grand illusion — dressed up in protest chants and viral campaign videos — is progressive humanitarianism, which emphasizes social justice, equality, and, most significantly, systemic change.

The younger generation is dazzled by its promises, lured by its slogans, and swept up in its moral certainty. Which is why, in an era where a well-edited TikTok carries more weight than a serious résumé, New York City has just handed its Democratic mayoral nomination to a former rapper whose primary credential is that he has mastered the art of being a progressive humanitarian — and knowing how to sell it.

I wish I were exaggerating. But alas, welcome to the era of viral mayors and Instagram messiahs. Zohran Mamdani — a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist with a flair for TikTok aesthetics and a résumé thinner than a swipe-left dating profile — has just triumphed over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.

Yes, that Cuomo. The former governor. The guy who once ran the entire state — taken down by someone who used to perform under the name Young Cardamom and now proudly refuses to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada.” We’re not in Kansas anymore — we’re in Queens, and the revolution is apparently being livestreamed.

Mamdani’s win is being celebrated in some quarters as a historic moment — the potential first Muslim and Indian American mayor of America’s biggest city. It’s “one in the eye” for the stuffy elites who just don’t get Gen Z, they say.

And in a sane world, that would be a proud milestone. But strip away the headlines and the hashtags, and you quickly realize that sanity has taken a leave of absence. Mamdani is nothing more than a populist ideologue — a man who packages radicalism in the language of justice, makes promises he cannot possibly keep, and, like so many before him, sells chaos dressed up as hope.

Let’s be clear: Mamdani isn’t some fresh-faced civic miracle. He’s a seasoned — and deeply ideological — activist who’s made a career out of opposing things rather than building them. His one tangible legislative win is a pilot program for free buses in a few neighborhoods. His campaign promises are free childcare, frozen rents, free public transport, and a sweeping expansion of affordable housing — all funded, apparently, by sprinkling magic tax dust on “the rich.”

He’s the kind of candidate who preaches equality and coexistence — unless you’re a Jew who believes Israel should exist as a Jewish state. While Mamdani has said Israel has “a right to exist … with equal rights for all its citizens,” he has declined to affirm its status as a Jewish state.

He adamantly refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” a rallying cry widely denounced by Jewish groups and even the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as incitement to violence against Jews and Jewish targets. He also introduced legislation — the “Not on our dime!” act — targeting New York nonprofits that fund Israeli charities.

Mamdani has mastered the art of moral posturing — always championing “humanity,” but only when the humans in question pass his ideological purity test.

Mamdani’s appeal is real — dangerously real. He’s charismatic, telegenic, multilingual, and youthful. His campaign videos drip with Bollywood flair and street-walking humility. He even walked the length of Manhattan for a photo op, as if performative endurance were a substitute for policy depth.

But it’s all carefully curated populist theater — a choreographed persona masking a radical, destabilizing agenda. Beneath the dance beats and righteous hashtags lies a far more perilous proposition: the dismantling of complex, functioning governance in favor of utopian slogans and impossible promises.  And if left unchecked, this fantasy-driven politics will hollow out New York City, leaving behind a dysfunctional, diminished shell of what was once the world’s greatest metropolis.

Which brings me to the greatest populist in Jewish history: Korach. He, too, was a charismatic rebel — the man who stood up to Moses and Aaron and declared, in effect, “The old order is broken — it’s time for change.”

Korach didn’t challenge Moses on theology or principle. He challenged him on equality. “The entire congregation is holy,” he proclaimed. “Why then do you set yourselves above the people?” It sounded noble. It sounded democratic. It sounded like a grassroots revolution. It was, in fact, a catastrophe.

Korach didn’t want to elevate the nation — he wanted to topple its leadership. What he offered wasn’t a future — it was chaos. And the people, weary from the journey, tired of wandering, disillusioned by hardship, followed him. And they paid the price.

As the medieval commentator Ramban points out, what Korach did was not a spontaneous protest — he carefully plotted his move, waiting for the moment when morale was low and frustration was high. His rhetoric may have sounded righteous, but his true motive was to undermine the existing framework and thereby gain power. Korach cloaked personal ambition in the language of equality — and that’s what made him so dangerous.

Mamdani is reading straight from Korach’s script — only the costume has changed. He doesn’t want to improve New York; he wants to dismantle it. He doesn’t seek to reform flawed systems; he seeks to uproot and replace them with a radical ideology that divides rather than unites. To him, opponents aren’t fellow citizens with different ideas — they’re villains in a moral crusade.

He talks like he wants to do good, but the “good” he’s peddling will fracture New York along ideological, racial, and religious lines, undermine core American values, stir strife and resentment, and leave the city a battleground of slogans, not solutions. This isn’t idealism — it’s demolition wrapped in the language of hope.

The irony is that populists like Mamdani sell the snake oil but never deliver — and the people who believed in them are left to deal with the wreckage.  The renters who find out that rent-freezing drives landlords out of the market. The bus riders who learn that “free” service means longer waits, broken schedules, and collapsing infrastructure. The city workers who face layoffs when the budget implodes.

And in the end, just like Korach, populists like Mamdani always go down with the ship they set ablaze.

Moses didn’t prevail because he was popular. He prevailed because he was right. Because leadership isn’t about slogans or soundbites — it’s about responsibility. It’s about ensuring every stakeholder has a place and making the future brighter than the present.

New York doesn’t need a culture warrior in City Hall. It needs a mayor. Because, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said: “A society is strong when it cares for the weak. But it becomes weak when it cares only for the strong — or only for the weak.”

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California. 

The post What the Tale of Korach Tells Us About the New York City Mayoral Race first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy

British counter-terrorism police have arrested four people in connection with an anti-Israel protest last week in which military planes were sprayed with paint at an air base in England, authorities said on Friday.

A woman, 29, and two men aged 36 and 24, were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism, while another woman, 41, was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, the police statement said.

Two activists from the Palestine Action group broke into the air base in Oxfordshire in central England on June 20, spraying red paint over two planes used for refueling and transport, and further damaging them with crowbars, an act that was condemned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “disgraceful.”

Within days of the incident, interior minister Yvette Cooper set out plans to use anti-terrorism laws to ban Palestine Action, saying its actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.

Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems and other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza.

In response to Friday’s arrests, the campaign group accused authorities of “cracking down on non-violent protests which disrupt the flow of arms to Israel during its genocide in Palestine.”

The maximum sentence for preparation of terrorist acts, or to assist others in such preparation, in Britain is a life sentence. The government is also reviewing security across all defense sites.

Israel has repeatedly dismissed accusations that it is committing genocide in the war in Gaza which began when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing nearly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 others hostage into Gaza.

In response, Israel launched a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.

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