Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar looks on as Palestinian Hamas supporters take part in an anti-Israel rally over tension in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, in Gaza City, Oct. 1, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

Millions of Britons pick up Metro UK each morning on the London Underground, expecting light news and human-interest stories. So readers could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled on a heartwarming feature about a Palestinian chess club offering hope to young refugees.

Titled, “How a chess club took on a refugee camp’s darkest forces – and won,” the story by Gergana Krasteva instead focused on putting a positive spin on some very dark forces within the chess club itself.

And when Metro UK was called out by HonestReporting, editors went to great lengths to cover up the evidence.

There were several obvious clues in the piece that the Palestinian Chess Forum’s focus isn’t exactly benign. For example, the photograph of a map of “Palestine” on the wall, where the colors of the Palestinian national flag cover the entirety of the State of Israel.

But that’s actually subtle compared to the photos Metro included of huge portraits of Hamas October 7 massacre mastermind Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

And it’s not as if Metro UK included the image as an afterthought.

The chess club’s director directly addresses the portraits (one of which Metro erroneously states is Ismail Haniyeh rather than Sinwar):

Gesturing at the two portraits on the wall – of former secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and former Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who were both assassinated by Israel in 2024, the director says: “We are not an NGO, or an official humanitarian organisation. This is why we can have their portraits here.”

But where is this terror-sympathizing chess club getting its funding from? None other than Christian Aid, a major UK charity, which “provided microgrants to 59 community groups in 2024, including the chess club in Shatila.”

In other words, Metro UK had just published a glowing endorsement of an organization that openly venerates terrorist masterminds — and inadvertently exposed a UK-registered charity’s financial link to it.

A Journalistic Cover-up

When HonestReporting contacted Metro UK about this journalistic disaster, the outlet didn’t issue a correction, a retraction, or even an editor’s note.

Instead, the story was quietly rewritten.

2/
REMOVED: The photo of terrorist leaders Sinwar and Nasrallah on the chess club wall.

ERASED: This paragraph, where the chess club director proudly acknowledges the terrorist portraits (one of which Metro’s correspondent mistakenly identifies as Ismail Haniyeh). pic.twitter.com/L0kasGiMfx

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 28, 2025

The updated story no longer includes the photo of the Sinwar and Nasrallah portraits, along with the paragraph in which the chess club director proudly acknowledged his terrorist heroes.

In addition, references to Christian Aid’s support for the chess club have been removed, possibly indicating the charity is hoping to avoid a potential investigation by the UK’s Charity Commission.

But the stealth edit didn’t stop there.

Metro’s editors also tweaked language throughout the article to soften its tone.

A reference to someone being “martyred” (a favorite term for extremists) now reads as “killed,” while the misleading suggestion that the IDF was directly involved in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres was watered down to describe the Lebanese militia responsible as a mere Israeli ally.

What Metro Should Have Done

The responsible journalistic response would have been transparency: acknowledge the error, explain the oversight, and publish a correction.

Instead, Metro UK chose quiet deletion — a modern-day “cleanup crew” sweeping away the evidence.

The original piece could have sparked an important investigation into how extremist ideology persists in Palestinian institutions, and how UK charitable funds might inadvertently sustain it. Instead, it now serves as a case study in media complicity and moral cowardice.

Readers of the updated version will never know what was erased -– but HonestReporting preserved the receipts. You can read the archived version here.

UK charity regulators — and Christian Aid donors — might want to do the same. Something positive could still come from Metro’s blunder, even if it wasn’t what the paper intended.

The author is the Editorial Director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Tomorrow is the election.

As you get ready to vote, read how Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa answered our questions about Jewish New Yorkers.

Tomorrow is Election Day

• The candidates appealed to Jewish voters on Sunday as early voting ended. More than 735,000 New Yorkers have already voted, the highest in-person turnout ever for a non-presidential election in the city.

• Cuomo told Orthodox Jewish radio host Zev Brenner, “There’s been no one who’s been closer to Israel and the Jewish community than me. Maybe my father, but let’s call it a tie. I will be there to protect the Jewish community in a way no one else can or will.”

• Cuomo also said the election presented a “pivotal moment” for attitudes toward antisemitism in New York. “All eyes are on this race. It’s a statement to the Jewish community to say, ‘We’re not going to allow this kind of antisemitism to go unanswered.’ You answer the antisemitism on Election Day, at the voting booth,” he said.

• Mamdani gave his closing message to Jewish New Yorkers on MSNBC. “There’s no room for antisemitism in this city, and it’s a scourge that I would root out of the five boroughs as someone who will be leading the entirety of the city,” he said.

• Mamdani acknowledged his own divisiveness in Jewish families through a story about meeting a Jewish speech therapist on the M57 bus. The woman said her daughter phone-banked for Mamdani from college, but she herself had questions about his views of Israel and antisemitism.

• Mamdani said his critical stance on Israel would not prevent him from protecting and celebrating Jewish New Yorkers regardless of their own views. “I’ve made clear my thoughts on Israel and Palestine, and I’m also running to be a leader of this city, and that means leading everyone no matter their opinions on that subject or any subject,” he said.

• Mamdani also aired an ad in Arabic, a first in New York City mayoral politics, and was clocked by a Jewish anti-Zionist influencer at a bar during one of his all-night campaign jaunts.

• Meanwhile, Sliwa visited the Ohel of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known by Chabad-Lubavitch Jews as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, to “pray for strength, wisdom, and the blessing to finish this journey in a meaningful way.”

• Sliwa posted about his “deeply personal” relationship with the Rebbe, starting with the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when the Rebbe gave him two “Rebbe Dollars” for charity and a blessing. “One of those blessings saved my life during a shooting. That kind of protection changes you,” said Sliwa.

• Sunday saw a surge of voters under 35, bringing the median age of early in-person voters down to 50. Recent polling suggests that Cuomo and Mamdani are tied for voters between 50 and 64, while Mamdani leads significantly with younger voters and Cuomo leads slightly with voters over 65.

 Cameos

• The Jewish actor Wallace Shawn, who has been involved in Jewish Voice for Peace, was clocked while canvassing for Mamdani on Sunday.

• Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of England’s Labour Party who stepped down amid an antisemitism scandal, led a phone banking session on Mamdani’s behalf for the Democratic Socialists of America on Sunday.

Rabbinic discourse continues

• Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, one of the city’s most prominent rabbis who leads Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, pointedly criticized Mamdani on Friday night.

• “I fear living in a city, and a nation, where anti-Zionist rhetoric is normalized and contagious,” Buchdahl said during services at her synagogue, one of the country’s largest Reform congregations. “Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.”

• Buchdahl cited a 2023 remark in which Mamdani said the NYPD had learned aggressive policing tactics from the Israeli army, as well as his past reluctance to label Hamas a terrorist group.

• Buchdahl continued to reject calls from some in the Jewish community to make a political endorsement, a demand that has placed intense pressure on her and other New York rabbis in recent weeks.

• She lamented tensions between Jews over the race, saying that internal litmus tests resulted in “pitting Jew against Jew, rabbi against rabbi.”

Numbers to know

• A new poll from AtlasIntel found Mamdani’s lead narrowing to 40.6% of voters, followed by Cuomo with 34% and Sliwa with 24.1%.

• The survey is the first to give Mamdani a single-digit edge, though others have shown the race tightening.

Satmar leaders split

• Satmar Hasidic leaders, representing an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, have split over Mamdani.

• Rabbi Moshe Indig, a political leader of the Satmar sect known as the Ahronim, endorsed Mamdani at a meeting in Williamsburg on Sunday. Indig and Mamdani were also joined by Lincoln Restler, a Jewish New York City Councilmember.

• But hours later, three other Ahronim leaders rejected the move and issued their own endorsement of Cuomo. “Across the board, the progressive movement’s crusading agenda is a threat to our ability to live as Torah Jews and educate our children with the same values,” said a joint statement from Cheskel Berkowitz, Avrum Brach, and Shulem Yitzchok Jacobowitz.

• Another Satmar faction, the Zalis, said it would not endorse a candidate last week. The group also said, “We feel compelled to distance ourselves from the irresponsible scare campaign and incitement against Zohran Mamdani.”

SNL spoofs the candidates’ bagel orders

• SNL took aim at Cuomo’s efforts to mobilize Jewish voters in a parody of the mayoral debates.

• Cuomo was played by actor Miles Teller, who has Russian Jewish ancestry. Asked for his bagel order, Teller replied, “I swear to God I am not saying this to pander to Jewish voters, but it’s a latke schmeared with gefilte fish, eaten in a booth next to Barbra Streisand by the light of a menorah.”

• Comedian Ramy Youssef played Zohran Mamdani and dodged the same question, saying, “What I’d like is for the person serving me that bagel to be paid a living wage.” Youssef, who has Egyptian parents and filmed his award-winning show “Ramy” in Israel, has previously expressed support for Palestinians and Israeli hostages on SNL.

• Sliwa was played by comedian Shane Gillis, who spoofed Sliwa’s wacky New York City tales before answering the bagel question. “Obviously, blueberry bagel toasted on strawberry cream cheese, eaten over a garbage can,” he said.

President watch

• President Donald Trump reluctantly said he would choose Cuomo over Mamdani in an interview on “60 minutes” on Sunday.

• “I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” he said.

• Asked how he felt about Mamdani being a left-wing version of him, Trump said, “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him, right?”

• Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama called Mamdani on Saturday. He praised Mamdani’s campaign and offered to be a “sounding board” in the future, reported The New York Times.

• Obama has not made an endorsement, but the call signals Mamdani’s growing support among Democratic leaders. Mamdani’s campaign has drawn comparisons to the former president’s 2008 race for energizing a generation of younger voters with the promise of change.

Following the money

• Billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has endorsed Cuomo, gave $3.5 million to the anti-Mamdani PAC For Our City along with $1.5M to the pro-Cuomo Fix the City PAC last week, making him the largest single donor of the general election.

—
The post On Erev Election Day, mayoral candidates make their last pitches to Jewish voters appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

One of the many virtues of Leah Litman’s lucid and blistering new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes is that it, as the title suggests, reads almost like a pulpy crime story. But unlike most whodunits, we know at the very start of Litman’s tale who dun the crime. No less unusual, Litman ends her story with what can be dun by Americans who wish to resist this state of lawlessness.

Litman is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Michigan, and co-host of the popular weekly legal podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” which subjects the decisions made by SCOTUS to scathing wit and surgical analysis. (In Litman’s wide-ranging criticism of SCOTUS, she lambastes the hypocrisy of the Republican-majority’s skepticism on abortion cases presented by Jewish plaintiffs who argue that their religious faith compels them to perform, provide, or access abortion care. As she notes, this skepticism is a decidedly unusual response from a court that is usually keen on expanding, not retracting, religious exemptions from law.)

When I spoke to Litman over Zoom, she expanded on the Roberts court’s cultural grievances, crackpot theories, and overall “bad vibes,” a term she says she uses to draw a distinction between “what some people think of as law,” i.e.  “something that’s objective or determinate.” Instead, it becomes something based on feelings and what “triggers them and what upsets them,” which she sees as reflective of the “talking points and zeitgeist of the Republican Party.”

In our conversation, Litman traced the historical origins of bruised feelings and bad vibes that passes itself off as conservative jurisprudence. We can see today, she emphasized, a reaffirmation of the Lost Cause movement following the Civil War, “this firm commitment to restoring and entrenching white conservative political power and shutting out racial minorities from the political process and treating the inclusion of racial minorities in the polity as an affront to white conservatives and as a form of discrimination against white conservatives. And these same ideas seed, you know, the opposition to the modern Voting Rights Act.”

“Bad vibes” is, of course, not a term often found in the footnotes of law review articles. Yet while Litman acknowledged the term is kind of “loosey-goosey,” she sees it as the driving force behind SCOTUS’ legal reasoning. One of the many problems with vibes, Litman observed, is that “while everyone has feelings, my feelings don’t govern what other people can do. I am allowed to have feelings and views about the world. But that doesn’t mean I get to declare that everyone must make me feel good.”

In the case of the court’s conservative majority, Litman says, this means that they get to feel good about expressing their cultural and social grievances. They can, like Martha-Ann Alito, do so by, say, flying an upside-down American flag outside their house in support of the men and women who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. But, more importantly, they can also bring those grievances to their legal reasoning and turn our constitution upside down. (Something that Mrs. Alito’s husband has done time and again as one of our nation’s nine sages.)

Yet, though the Roberts Court — which Litman refers to in her book as “the guys (and Amy)” — might be consumed by grievance, they are not blind to the need to garb these bad vibes in the guise of theories. This is the case for originalism, a seemingly neutral method to decide cases based on a literal reading of the Constitution. Yet, the absence of any mention of women in our founding document has allowed the Supreme Court, even after the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, to continue to deny equal rights to women.

Hence the importance of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. As Litman drily observed, originalism offers conservatives and reactionaries a way to speak about issues without acknowledging the actual stakes involved. It provides a kind of plausible denial from positions that, in effect, declare, “Yes, we should take away women’s birth control pills, force them to go through childbirth, and not allow them to get divorced.”

Meanwhile, as Litman remarked, the Roberts Court often dons the guise of another supposedly objective theory, institutionalism. Her critique is particularly unsettling for those of us who would like to think that Chief Justice John Roberts is an institutionalist who, like the deus ex machina in ancient Greek tragedy, will suddenly appear over the stage set and lift us free of our tragic and fatal predicament.

On one level, Litman said, “anyone looks like an institutionalist when compared to Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. That John Roberts is more along the spectrum toward the median American voter than either of them is just obviously true and doesn’t tell us that much about whether John Roberts is actually a moderate or median. There are just so many examples where decisions by John Roberts have undermined our institutions and delegitimized our institutions.”

Consider all the decisions written or signed onto by Roberts on campaign financing, presidential powers, partisan gerrymandering, or voting rights to illustrate her claim. Clearly, Litman is not waiting for the Chief Justice to save us. “Look at all the things that Donald Trump is doing that defile our institutions and degrade our democracy. Those are things that John Roberts made perfectly clear that the president is constitutionally entitled to do. And there’s just nothing our lawmaking institutions like Congress or the federal courts can do about that,” she said.

What, then, are we to do? In her book, Litman urges the reader to “make them fight for their nihilism and obtain it at a cost.” In our conversation, she eagerly expanded on this call to action. The forces of democracy and decency cannot win this fight overnight, she told me. “There is no magic fix that will work. Instead, we need to make the case to our fellow citizens and our future elected leaders that in order to get ourselves out of this mess…and shore up our democracy so that we don’t run the risk of sliding back into autocracy and authoritarianism, we need to reform and democratize the Supreme Court.”

It is not what we might hope to hear, but it is the message we need to hear. In fact, as Albert Camus insisted, there is no reason for hope, but that is never a reason to despair. Or, as Litman concludes in her book, “the nihilistic take would be to throw up our hands and do nothing because it all seems too difficult. They’ve stolen a Court and they are practically daring anyone to challenge them. It’s time to call their bluff.”

The post John Roberts will not save us — but we might just able to save ourselves appeared first on The Forward.