Uncategorized
Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories
TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann.
But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to kill the architect of the Holocaust.
That detail is one of many that has spurred Ho Manli, Feng-Shan’s daughter, to speak out against “Night Angels,” the fourth novel by the Chinese-American author Weina Dai Randel. Manli says the book distorts elements of her father’s story, which was unknown before she spent decades documenting his heroic efforts to issue visas allowing Jews to escape to Shanghai.
“What I have found in doing this story is it’s very difficult to try to maintain the historical integrity of the facts,” Manli told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Countless people … want to use this for their own means, whether it be commercial like this novelist, whether it be political, or whatever. So over the two decades that I have been doggedly trying to uncover more and more, I’ve been constantly fending off these sorts of opportunistic assaults.”
The dispute is casting a shadow over the novel, released this month, and reinvigorating longstanding debates over the importance of truth in historical fiction — particularly in stories about the Holocaust.
“Night Angels” follows Feng-Shan and his wife, Grace, as they risk their lives by issuing visas that allow thousands of Jews escape Germany and Austria to Shanghai. Grace, one of the novel’s narrators and main characters, is based on Feng-Shan’s real second wife with the same name who was no longer in Vienna after the Anschluss — Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and the period in which the novel is set. By that time, Feng-Shan had already sent Grace away to Boston. She never witnessed Nazi rule or Feng-Shan’s efforts to save Jews, Manli writes.
Several other events in the book, including Grace’s friendship with a Jewish woman who attempts to assassinate Eichmann and her development of a morphine addiction, are fully fictional.
Manli first took aim at the book in a column last month in China Daily. The novel, she wrote, “exploits real names, real people, real events and places, in what is essentially a Holocaust-themed melodrama.”
“In online reviews, readers say that they are thrilled to learn of my father and this history — except of course, what they have learned is not really history, my father’s, or anyone else’s,” she wrote.
Randel and her publisher, Amazon Publishing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Randel dedicated the novel to “Ho Feng-Shan, his family, and all the angels in Vienna and beyond.” The book includes a disclaimer disclosing that its contents are a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
But that’s not satisfactory to some readers, including Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of the heritage group Historic Shanghai, whose book group read a previous Randel story set in Shanghai.
“If you’re talking about a historical character, you have to get the history right. Otherwise, just create a fictional character,” Kanagaratnam told JTA. “This is written for people who don’t know the history, but as Manli said, that’s dangerous, because then that’s what they remember. That’s what they take away.”
Ho Monto, left, and Ho Manli stand in front of the Righteous Among the Nations wall at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Jan. 23, 2001. (Isaac Harari/AFP via Getty Images)
“Night Angels” has accumulated thousands of positive reviews on Amazon and has been promoted by Jewish organizations across the country. On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council, in collaboration with Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Museum in New York City, will hold an event with Randel and journalist Jonathan Freedland that will explore “fact, fiction, and the sometimes blurred line between them.”
Randel’s book adds to a long list of Holocaust stories occupying that blurry territory, dating from the genre’s early days. Many readers believed, for example, that “The Painted Bird,” the pivotal work of Holocaust fiction from the 1960s, was based on author Jerzy Koszinski’s experience during the Holocaust; it was not. Scholars and booksellers have long agonized over whether to call Elie Wiesel’s “Night” a memoir or a novel, and whether the distinction matters when it is taught in American classrooms.
The fight has extended to questions over who can tell which stories from Holocaust. In 2014, Haaretz journalist Judy Maltz filed a lawsuit against Penguin Canada and author Jenny Witterick alleging that Witterick’s novel, “My Mother’s Secret,” copied Maltz’s documentary film about her family’s rescue during World War II. The court ruled in favor of Witterick on the grounds that copyright protection does not apply to historical events.
“An author is only ever responsible to their own fiction. They have creative license. And fictionalization of other people against their will is part of the history of literature,” said Helen Finch, a professor at the University of Leeds who studies representations of the Holocaust in German literature. “But that doesn’t absolve the writer from criticism.”
Manli — a journalist who has worked for the Boston Globe and helped found the China Daily, a state-backed media outlet, in 1981 — has made it her mission to set the record straight on Feng-Shan’s story. She began researching her father after his death in 1997, while writing his obituary. One line in his memoir from 1990 that recalled “saving who knows how many Jews” piqued her interest and led to a 25-year quest to document the extent of what her father did during the war.
His story of defying both his own government and the government of Germany to write Shanghai visas for thousands of persecuted Jews had been previously unknown, even to the refugees themselves — most of whom never met Feng-Shan.
Manli’s research led to Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial authority, in 2000 as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to those who risked their own lives to help Jews during World War II. Since then, greater attention has been paid to his story, and memorials across the world, from Israel to China to Italy, bear his name today.
Manli said Randel reached out to her several times before her book was published but after it had already been written. According to Manli, Randel sought out her blessing on the book by phone and email, saying that “the Holocaust history and your father’s history is now being forgotten” and adding that she wanted to help spread that history. Manli, who is working on a book of her own about her father, said she refused to answer, “just from the tone of her letter and what she wanted.”
“I have been burned before by this,” Manli told JTA. “I knew immediately that this was not something that I wanted to participate in and certainly that I wasn’t going to endorse.”
In an email shared with JTA in response to Manli’s editorial, Randel wrote that she has “great respect for Dr. Ho Fenghan[sic] and his family. I’m surprised to hear such strong negative criticism. I’m puzzled to see my gesture of respect is viewed in such a hostile way. If Ms. Manli Ho wishes to speak to me, I’m here.”
Randel, according to a biography on her website, came to the United States from China at 24 and became “the first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII.”
Her previous novel, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” follows a Chinese woman who falls in love with a German Jewish refugee living in the Shanghai Ghetto, the restricted area in which over 20,000 displaced Jews lived during World War II, under brutal oversight by Japanese officials who occupied the area. In interviews before the book’s 2021 release, Randel recalled hearing about Jewish refugees while she was living near the district that housed the ghetto.
After moving to the United States, she married an American Jew and is raising her children with both cultures in Boston. She has said “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was inspired by her interest in the history she saw in Shanghai and a desire to pay homage to her Jewish side of the family.
“I think it’s apt to say the survival of Shanghai Jews is also a story of how we as different races and as human beings shine and triumph over war and adversity,” she said in a January 2022 interview with World Literature Today.
But other researchers and authors deeply familiar with Feng-Shan’s story and Jewish history in Shanghai told JTA that “The Last Rose of Shanghai” also contained historical inaccuracies, including misrepresentation of real people who appear as characters, such as Victor Sassoon, a Jewish businessman and member of the dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” and Laura Margolis, the first female Joint Distribution Committee representative.
The book also includes a character named Goya, described as “a shameless Jew … who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.”
The Jewish character is based on the real Kanoh Ghoya, who was not Jewish, but a notoriously cruel Japanese officer who had dubbed himself “king of the Jews” and “was infamous for his inhumane treatment of ghetto inhabitants,” according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was sold to Lake Union Publishing — an imprint of Amazon Publishing — in 2021 as half of a two-book deal worth between $100,000 and $250,000. It was a finalist for a Jewish National Book Award that year. (The Jewish Book Council, which confers those awards, did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the “Night Angels” event.)
Kanagaratnam said Historic Shanghai’s book group read “The Last Rose of Shanghai” in 2021 and hosted Randel for an event. The group was unsatisfied by Randel’s response when factual issues were brought to her attention, particularly the characterization of Ghoya as Jewish, Randel dismissed them, Kanagaratnam said.
Randel’s novel is only part of a growing consciousness among the general public of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story. In recent decades, especially following the normalization of Israel-China relations in 1992 and Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, both governments have promoted the history, sometimes distorting facts to push different narratives about their wartime past.
New books and other media adaptations about the Shanghai Jewish refugee story have proliferated, such as the musical “Shanghai Sonatas” (2022) and the novels “Someday We Will Fly” (2019),“The Lives Before Us” (2019), and “The World and All It Holds” (2023). Other films and books are forthcoming.
“The audience of people who are interested in, if you will, an ‘exotic’ Jewish story, I think has meant that we’re seeing more and more of these. Everyone’s heard the Holocaust story. But now here’s one in an exotic setting,” said Kanagaratnam. “I think authors need to take responsibility. But honestly, I also blame the publishing industry, because where are the fact-checkers? A lot of the stuff in this can be really easily googled.”
Finch said novels that are set during that period are “always a work of fiction about the present.”
“So the question is, why is this author writing this book now? What does that say about the current moment when she’s writing? And what is with Randel trying to reflect either consciously or unconsciously in contemporary politics as well?”
—
The post Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Viktor Orbán may fall. Netanyahu should be next
At first glance, Hungary may seem like a small central European country with limited relevance to Israel. But political trends can cross borders, and a shift in one society might herald something broader.
The defeat that polls are predicting for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a towering icon of the global populist right, could spell trouble for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well.
For 16 years, Orbán has been widely seen as the most successful architect — indeed the prophet — of illiberal democracy, devising a system that preserves elections but systematically tilts the playing field, turning a country’s leader into a seemingly elected authoritarian.
Since returning to power in 2010 — like Netanyahu, Orbán also served a term starting in the 1990s — Orbán’s party, Fidesz, has rewritten constitutional rules, weakened the judiciary, neutered institutional checks, cultivated a loyal media ecosystem, and fused political power with economic patronage.
Orbán has also pumped out an obsessive narrative whereby the Hungarian nation is in danger from progressives, cosmopolitan Europeans, migrants and Muslims — dangers that, naturally, only Orbán can see clearly and fight well. The meta-narrative, bizarre in currently peaceful Europe, is one of constant crisis, of nerves ever on edge.
And it has worked wonders, yielding something that looks like democracy while functioning as autocracy.
Until now.
If Orbán loses this weekend’s election, his defeat will send a message across the world and particularly to Israel, where Netanyahu has carefully followed his model.
Populist systems thrive on polarization. They convert politics into a series of existential battles — identity, culture, survival. In such an environment, challengers who attempt to outbid the populist in ideological intensity often fail. They reinforce the terrain on which the incumbent is strongest.
Orbán’s defeat would show that what can prove more effective is something quieter: a shift away from ideological maximalism toward questions of competence, propriety and everyday governance.
An almost-perfect system
When perfected, the opposition in the kind of system Orbán pioneered has an almost impossible time returning to power. Admirers around the world have looked to Hungary not for its economic model or foreign policy, but for a blueprint for how a modern elected leader can entrench himself so deeply that removal through the ballot box becomes nearly impossible.
For years, Orbán’s system appeared invincible. He was reelected in 2014, 2018, and even in 2022, amid inflation and economic strain, and facing a rare unified opposition. He succeeded in amplifying a narrow majority in the last election into almost a two-thirds majority in parliament through districting and electoral “reforms” which he had put in place during his previous terms.
The lesson drawn by many observers — supporters and critics alike — was that once entrenched, such leaders do not lose, since the system becomes self-reinforcing. But now that certainty has begun to fray.
Israelis will recognize the contours of that story.
Over the past decade or so, as Netanyahu began to face serious legal trouble that has since landed him in court on bribery and other charges, his mania for holding on to power went into overdrive — and he adopted the Orbán playbook with precision.
Israelis have witnessed sustained attacks on the judiciary; efforts to restructure the balance of power; the delegitimization of legal and media institutions; and a politics increasingly organized around permanent cultural and existential conflict. During the last vote, in 2022, Netanyahu largely hid his intention to drag the country in this direction; should he win again, this will be interpreted as a mandate. The “Orbánization” will go into overdrive.
Israel has not yet become Hungary: its institutions remain more pluralistic, its media more combative, its political system more fragmented. But the direction of travel is clear.
How the system fails
In early 2024, a controversial Orbán-engineered presidential pardon — linked to a figure associated with a child abuse case — punctured his carefully cultivated image of moral authority and care for traditional values. It was simply, for many, too much.
Into that breach stepped challenger Peter Magyar, who is not a traditional opposition figure, which is a key point. Magyar comes not from Hungary’s fragmented liberal camp, but rather from within Orbán’s own orbit. A former insider of Orbán’s Fidesz party, Magyar understands the machinery. His political movement, the Tisza Party, rose with remarkable speed, transforming into a credible electoral force within months. It currently has a growing lead in the polls.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Magyar’s rise is how he has campaigned. Previous Hungarian opposition efforts focused heavily on abstract democratic principles, including rule of law, institutional checks and media freedom. These are vital issues. But against Orbán’s emotionally charged narratives or sovereignty and national survival, they failed to mobilize a broad electorate.
Magyar instead has traveled extensively, visiting hundreds of towns and villages, engaging with practical grievances: failing public services, rising costs and bureaucratic dysfunction. The implication is that Orbán has hubristically lost touch. Magyar’s message has been almost technocratic in tone: He wants, he says, to make the state function again for ordinary citizens with regular concerns.
If Orbán were to lose, it would be, in effect, because Magyar is a centrist with practical, citizen-focused ideas — sidestepping entirely the identity issues that Orbán peddles.
The lesson for Israel
Magyar cannot easily be dismissed as alien or threatening by Orbán’s base. For Israelis contemplating a post-Netanyahu future, this is instructive.
For years, one of Netanyahu’s greatest political strengths has been his ability to frame opponents as fundamentally “other” — as disconnected from national priorities, or as representatives of a different, even suspect, ideological camp. A challenger who reframes the conversation — toward competence, integrity and the basic functioning of the state — may find a different kind of opening.
Hungary and Israel are not the same; the dangers Netanyahu weaponizes politically are vastly more acute. But he and Orbán represent something that has been widespread around the world: a rebellion against the establishment, and a message that says an elected government can do close to anything it wants in the name of “the people.”
It is a proposition that exists at the most vulgar democratic baseline: that of majority rule. It cares little for the niceties of liberal democracy: checks and balances, rule of law, minority rights, equality under the law, guaranteed protections and individual freedoms.
Orbán’s genius, eagerly embraced and copied by Netanyahu, has been to convince enough people that majority rule is basically all that matters. Majority rule is critical when one is attacking the establishment, the elites, the intellectuals, the journalists, the professors, the experts, and the judges who preside at one’s trial.
If Orbán loses on Sunday, it could bode ill for Netanyahu in the Israeli election that must be held by October, and good for a world that desperately needs to return to a more nuanced understanding of how government is supposed to work. It would suggest that the fever that sustains Orbán and Netanyahu alike has started to break.
The post Viktor Orbán may fall. Netanyahu should be next appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn
An aspiring authoritarian, who has spent more than a decade shaping his country through a political project of popularist grievance and personal enrichment, may soon meet his electoral end.
That elected leader is not President Donald Trump, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary consecutively since 2010 (and who previously served as prime minister between 1998 and 2002). Hungarians will go to the polls on April 12, and Orbán’s Fidesz party is polling well behind the conservative, pro-European Tisza. That Trump, who is closely allied with Orbán, this week dispatched Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to campaign for Orbán may not be enough. (While there, Vance baselessly claimed EU interference in Hungary’s elections, turning back to the same old Trump playbook.)
There is much that Americans can learn from the Hungarian experience of years spent under the governance of someone accused of dismantling rule of law, a person whose inner circle has grown rich during his time in office. But American Jews in particular should pay attention. Because Orbán’s administration has used antisemitism as a political tool throughout his time in power, and is desperately turning to this hatred once again on its way, possibly, out the electoral door.
Examining the different purposes for which Orbán has employed antisemitism is instructive. The essential lesson: Antisemitism deployed by powerful people is often an attempt to evade accountability for their own bad actions.
The Orbán administration has tried to rewrite history so as to paint Hungary as a perpetual victim or victor — never a country responsible for misdeeds like, say, allying with Nazi Germany prior to being occupied by it. Orbán, like other politicians interested in historical revisionism, has tried to make adherence to his specific retelling of Hungarian history synonymous with being a true Hungarian. Anyone who challenges his vision is, in it, an enemy of the state.
For no one has that been more true than Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros. In past elections, Orbán has inflated Soros to the status of a political adversary, campaigning against a spectral version of him instead of his actual political opponents. This approach, rife with antisemitic dog whistles, has been alarmingly effective.
“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” he said of Soros in the 2018 campaign, invoking any number of longstanding antisemitic tropes.
When Orbán’s authoritarian efforts extended to cracking down on liberal institutions and civil society, he turned again to antisemitism in the form of Soros conspiracy theories.
Under attack by Orbán, Central European University, the university that Soros founded, has mostly been pushed out of its original home of Budapest. When the Hungarian government passed legislation to criminalize helping those who wanted to claim asylum in the country, it was called “Stop Soros” legislation. NGOs in Hungary have long been smeared for receiving money from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, accused of being proxies through which Soros is “targeting” Hungary.
Recently, Orbán has pivoted, making Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the new scapegoat of his antisemitic conspiracy theories.
He has charged that support for Ukraine is expensive and even dangerous, and pushed the idea that Orbán and Fidesz are all that prevents such support from leading Hungary to disaster. Orbán and Fidesz have erected billboards showing Zelenskyy smirking with an outstretched hand, in a pose reminiscent of the antisemitic “happy merchant” meme. Perhaps most tellingly and menacingly, Fidesz has put up posters with Zelenskyy’s face, blazoned with nearly the same words that, almost a decade ago, accompanied campaign posters with Soros’s visage on them: “Let’s not let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.”
As Hungarians are asking what, exactly, the last decade and a half of autocracy have accomplished for them, their governing party appears to be suggesting that it is the only thing standing between them and the machinations of a nefarious Jew. Antisemitism can be many things, but in Hungary, again and again, it has been an attempt to trick citizens out of asking what good Orbán’s government has done for them.
This playbook has clear resonances in that deployed by Trump.
When threatened, Trump and his allies repeatedly turn to blaming Soros. They have used the idea of Soros as a sort of universal bogeyman to try to explain away Trump’s felony charges and to justify violence against citizens protesting ICE. The Department of Justice has tried to find ways to push for prosecutions of Soros and his allies, on far-fetched charges possibly including material support of terrorism.
What Orbán and Trump have both bet on is that dog whistling about all-powerful Jews will distract enough voters from noticing while they help themselves to their country’s rights and riches. If Orbán is defeated on Sunday, his loss will send an essential message to Americans: that strategy can only sustain a leader for so long.
Flailing about and sowing the seeds of antisemitic conspiracies cannot change the stubborn fact that neither Soros nor Zelenskyy is in charge in Hungary: Orbán is. Hungarians seem to see, now, that all that talk about Soros didn’t make their lives any better. Neither will going after Zelenskyy.
We can hope Hungarians remember that as they go to the polls. We, American Jews, should remind others, and ourselves, of it here, too. We often focus on trying to communicate that antisemitism is hateful and unfair toward American Jews. Perhaps, in addition, we should try to point out that Trump’s antisemitism, like Orbán’s, is not only hateful, but a hateful deflection.
The post Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel Expels Spain From US-Backed Gaza Coordination Center as Diplomatic Rift Deepens
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks during a press conference after attending a special summit of European Union leaders to discuss transatlantic relations, in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Israel has expelled Spain from the United States’ Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Kiryat Gat, a hub established to coordinate humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip, marking a sharp escalation in an already deteriorating diplomatic rift between the two countries.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Spain’s expulsion from the CMCC, framing the move as a response to Madrid’s increasingly anti-Israel stance and what he described as continued hostility toward the Jewish state.
“Spain has defamed our heroes, the soldiers of the [Israel Defense Forces], the soldiers of the most moral army in the world,” Netanyahu said during a press conference. “Anyone who attacks the State of Israel instead of the terrorist regimes … will not be our partner in the future of the region.”
“I am not willing to tolerate this hypocrisy and this hostility,” the Israeli leader continued. “I do not intend to allow any country to wage a diplomatic war against us without paying an immediate price for it.”
In a press release, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar confirmed that the United States had been informed ahead of time, adding that the decision followed Spain’s serious harm to the interests of both Jerusalem and Washington.
The Spanish government has also been informed of the decision, though it has yet to issue any public statement or official response.
“Spain’s obsessive anti-Israel bias under [Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez]’s leadership is so egregious that it has lost all capability to serve a constructive role in implementing US President Donald Trump’s peace plan and the center operating under it,” the top Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
For a long time, the government of Spain under @sanchezcastejon has been operating against the State of Israel in every way possible. Sánchez and his ministers level false blood libels against Israel and its army, defame and incite against Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The…
— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 10, 2026
Established in October 2025 as part of US Central Command, the CMCC was set up to coordinate and manage the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from the international community into Gaza under Trump’s peace plan for the enclave.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, and increasingly amid the war with Iran and broader regional escalation, Spain has launched a fierce anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state on the international stage.
Earlier this week, Sánchez publicly condemned Israeli strikes in Lebanon and the widening regional escalation tied to the Iran conflict, renewing calls for the European Union to suspend its association agreement with Israel and urging an end to “impunity for [Israel’s] criminal actions.”
The Spanish leader also accused Netanyahu of breaching basic humanitarian norms, saying his “contempt for life and international law is intolerable.”
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has also publicly condemned Israel’s military campaign, describing the conflict as “the greatest assault on the civilization built upon the humanist ideals of reason, peace, understanding, and universal law over the abuse of power, brute force, and arbitrariness.”
In a phone call with his Spanish counterpart on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi praised Spain’s “principled and honorable” stance on what he called “US-Israeli aggression against Iran,” urging countries to take a firmer stand against what he described as war crimes.
“Spain’s valuable stances in defending international law and human values have been noted and praised by the Iranian nation and the international community, and will never be forgotten,” the top Iranian diplomat said.
Even though Spain welcomed the recently announced US–Iran ceasefire, Albares said, “Madrid will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket to put out that fire.”
As part of its broader anti-Israel campaign, Spain had recently closed its airspace to aircraft involved in what officials described as a “reckless and illegal confrontation” – another move welcomed by Iran’s Islamist government.
In one of its most controversial recent moves, Madrid also announced this weej the reopening of its embassy in Tehran.
According to data from Spain’s Ministry of Trade reported by Servimedia, the Spanish government exported more than €1.3 million worth of dual-use materials to Iran in 2024 and the first half of 2025, including explosive components, laboratory reagents, and specialized control software.