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Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance
(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew.
In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in the tiny South American nation. One is a Guyanese-British-Israeli guesthouse operator who has been working in Guyana since the 1970s. The other is a former Madison Avenue marketing executive from Chicago who until recently ran the country’s largest tour operator.
Both offer a window into three dynamics that define Guyana: a government that embraces all faiths, an economy based on extractive industries and an expansive rainforest the country hopes will be a draw for its growing ecotourism industry.
Guyana, an English-speaking country of roughly 800,000, came to international prominence in 1978 as the site of the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones were killed, either by suicide or murder.
These days, though, the country is drawing attention for the recent discovery of oil off its coast. ExxonMobil announced the discovery in 2015 and promptly began developing Guyana’s oil resources. With over 11 billion barrels of reserves and producing over 350,000 barrels per day, Guyana is on track to produce more than 1 million daily barrels by 2030, potentially transforming one of South America’s poorest countries.
It was an earlier extractive industry that first brought Raphael Ades to Guyana. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951 to an Italian-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father, Ades had a peripatetic childhood. The family moved first to Milan when Ades, who goes by Rafi, was 11, after his father Meyer entered the diamond trade, then two years later to southwestern Germany. They landed in Pforzheim, known at the time as Goldstadt because of the prominence of jewelry and precious stone trading locally.
But the family was not yet settled: In 1967, Meyer took the family to London, where Ades finished high school and took his university entrance exams, excelling in all of the languages he had picked up — English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. As a psychology student at the University of London, Ades began helping his father, who maintained an office in London’s diamond district, at work. His father contracted out the polishing, and one of the polishers was Indo-Guyanese.
“That day, my dad took out the atlas and started to read up on Guyana,” Ades recalled. “‘This is somewhere I want to go,’ he told me.”
During a trip to visit an Israeli friend in Venezuela, Meyer went on a prospecting trip to Guyana, and registered the Guyana Diamond Export company. When he suffered a heart attack, Ades and his mother flew to Georgetown to be with him. Barely 21, Ades stepped in to take a larger role in the business. He flew with other diamond buyers into the rural mining areas, and learned the operations were producing thousands of carats of diamonds.
“I stayed in Guyana through the second half of 1972 and fell in love with the place,” Ades recalled. “I went to the [main] Stabroek market in Georgetown, seeing all of the iguanas and macaws. When my dad recuperated, I started going back to Guyana myself.”
His mining business thrived. In 1997, he bought Sloth Island, a 160-acre outpost about a two-hour journey from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, requiring an hour-long car ride through the small villages that dot the Atlantic coast, and then an hour’s boat ride down the widening Essequibo River, passing pristine forests lined with mangroves and Indigenous villages.
When Ades bought the property, it was mostly underwater. He brought in workers from neighboring villages to pump out the water, build up the sand and retaining walls and add structures. Sloths were already there, but he brought ocelots and monkeys from neighboring islands, as well as other birds. (The ocelots, he said, used to eat the electrical wires and open the fridge.)
Now anchoring Sloth Island is a blue and white guesthouse, a series of covered huts for dining and hammock relaxation and a wooden walkway for nature walks through partially cleared forest. Indigenous guides identify the numerous species of plants and birds. The pandemic has receded as a threat to business, and the island hosts tourists every weekend — though climate change is presenting new issues.
“There are many times that the river floods part of the island and I lose sand and soil,” Ades said. “We have to keep on pumping out water and repairing damage to the buildings when that happens.”
The year after he bought the island, his widowed mother, then living in Belgium, broke her hip. When she was well enough to travel she moved to Guyana to be with her son, dividing her time between Georgetown and Sloth Island. When she died in 2009, Ades was at a loss given the lack of a Jewish cemetery, synagogue, and minyan required to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He was interested in burying her across from Sloth Island, on a hill in the mining town of Bartica just across the river. But a Jewish friend from France facilitated a connection with the Surinamese Jewish community, who prepared the body for burial in the cemetery adjacent to Paramaribo’s main synagogue.
“That’s the last time I was in a synagogue, in 2010, after my mother passed,” Ades recalled.
A view of Raphael Ades’ resort on Sloth Island. (Seth Wikas)
The absence of Jews in Guyana is a notable lacuna in a country that otherwise boasts a broad range of religions. History records a colony of Dutch Jews who settled in northwestern Guyana in the 17th century to produce sugarcane, but the English destroyed that colony in 1666, dispersing the Jewish residents. Jews from Arab lands moved to Guyana in the late 19th and 20th centuries to escape persecution but then migrated elsewhere; Jews fleeing Europe came in 1939 but did not settle long enough to establish a sustained community.
Janet Jagan was an anomaly: Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she married a Guyanese man in the United States and moved with him to Guyana in 1947. Her father Cheddi Jagan was trained as a dentist but entered politics as Guyana gained independence from Great Britain, serving as the first premier of the semi-independent colonial government in the early 1960s and then as the country’s fourth president in the 1990s. When he died in 1997, Janet Jagan was sworn in as his replacement and then won a term of her own later that year. She died in 2009.
According to the 2012 census, Guyana is about two-thirds Christian, a quarter Hindu, and less than 10% Muslim, with smaller populations of Rastafarians and Baha’is. Guyana’s cities and towns are dotted with churches, mandirs and mosques, and the country has enshrined freedom of religion in its constitution. Christian, Hindu and Muslim holy days are national holidays.
“We embrace all faiths and are always looking to build bridges across communities,” Mansoor Baksh, a leader within the country’s Islamic Ahmadiyya movement, told JTA. Omkaar Sharma, a member of the country’s Hindu Pandit Council, said something similar: “We have a long tradition of co-existence and celebrating each other’s holidays. It’s what makes Guyana special.”
On the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali last month, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, South America’s only Muslim head of government, emphasized the country’s inclusivity when he told the nation: “Under the One Guyana banner, our people are coming together, rejecting the forces of division and hatred, and uniting in the pursuit of peace, progress and prosperity.”
The sentiments have had practical implications for the country’s two Jews. In 2017, when a Guyana Tourism Authority group was slated to travel to Suriname for a conference on travel catering to Muslim tourists, the Mauritanian organizer of the event protested the presence of Jewish participants. There were supposed to be two: Ades, and Andrea de Caires, then head of the country’s largest private tour operator, Wilderness Explorers.
“I got a call from the Guyanese Tourism Minister at 1 a.m., who asked me if I was Jewish, and he explained the situation. And I thought, this [antisemitism] is still going on in the world?” de Caires remembered.
The Guyanese tourism minister refused to abide by the ban, de Caires proudly said, and told the Surinamese hosts and conference organizers: “If Jews aren’t allowed, then none of us are going.” The Surinamese, long known for their religious tolerance, also refused to accept the prohibition, and said that all participants were welcome (in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, a mosque stands next to a synagogue and they share a parking lot). Both de Caires and Ades attended the event.
“When I arrived at the conference, the Surinamese minister of tourism welcomed me, and the director general of Guyana’s tourism ministry gave me the microphone to open the conference. We [Rafi and I] went in with our heads held high,” de Caires said.
De Caires has lived in Guyana since 2010 but her path to Guyana took a different route from Ades’. Born Andrea Levine in Chicago as the granddaughter of a rabbi, she traveled extensively as a child with her physician father, who taught her the importance of creating a Jewish home.
“Judaism was always a part of my life — we celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Friday night, but my father would often say, ‘Going to temple doesn’t make you Jewish,’” Caires said.
De Caires moved to New Jersey and trained as a jeweler, working with clients that included Tiffany’s. She transitioned to working at Bloomingdale’s in sales and then management, and then she moved on to the cosmetic company Borghese, where she became vice president of sales and marketing.
“I got caught up in Madison Avenue, a single mom of three kids, and then I met Salvador,” she recalled. “And I knew there was no point in pursuing a relationship if I wouldn’t move to Guyana.”
Salvador is Salvador de Caires, her Guyanese husband whom she met through her sister. Visiting Guyana for the first time in 2008, she fondly recalled her first visit to the Karanambu Lodge in the country’s south, a former cattle ranch that is now a conservation hub sitting at the center of Guyana’s forests, rivers, and savannahs. The most accessible route is via airplane from Georgetown and then four-by-four vehicle. While based at the lodge, de Caires continued to take conference calls for her New York-based career, while learning more about Guyana and the business of running a tourist destination off the beaten path. She and Salvador moved permanently to Guyana in 2010 to take over the day-to-day management of the lodge.
“When we moved to Guyana, it never occurred to me there would never be a Jewish community here. There’s a Jewish community everywhere,” de Caires remembered thinking. “That was pretty startling.”
Andrea de Caires is shown with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. (Courtesy of de Caires)
So when they moved from Karanambu in 2016 to work at (and eventually lead) Wilderness Explorers in Georgetown, de Caires was committed to opening her home to Guyanese friends and neighbors with Hanukkah parties and Passover seders.
“The first year we had a Hanukkah party, our invitation went out for latkes and black cake (a traditional Guyanese dish), and we had government ministers, ambassadors and local friends over,” she recalled. “I told the story of the holiday and we lit the candles.”
It wasn’t the first time de Caires had been single handedly responsible for the fostering Jewish traditions in Guyana. She recalled an incident in 2012 when a Colombian-Jewish tourist came to Karanambu Lodge during Passover and asked her to make matzah brei. Under a thatched roof, she was able to make the holiday delicacy for her visitor.
For Ades, too, it is hosting that makes him most appreciate his chosen home in Guyana.
“I will always remember Feb. 1, 1963, the day we left Israel. We had always planned to return,” he said. “But I’m still here. Between then and now I have lived in so many places, and Guyana has been my home for a very long time. One of the best parts of my week is meeting new people who come to Sloth Island — people of different backgrounds from around the world. It is wonderful to welcome them all.”
De Caires plans to share her Jewish traditions once again next month, hosting another Hanukkah party for her Guyanese friends and neighbors. And with the worst of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, both Ades and de Caires are looking forward to booming tourist seasons. De Caires and her husband are also ready to begin a new professional chapter: They recently accepted new positions with a Guyanese conglomerate to develop its tourism operations at a riverine resort.
Does de Caires feel like she has lost something by establishing roots in a place without an established Jewish community?
“If I left here, that would mean there’s one less person to support others [including Jews],” de Caires replied. “I think it’s interesting Rafi and I are both in tourism — you need to have a lot of tenacity, but it’s important that we welcome others to this beautiful country.”
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The post Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Labels Carlson a ‘Low-IQ Person’ After Criticism on Iran, Says ‘I Don’t Respond to His Calls’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
President Donald Trump on Tuesday lambasted far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of his longtime supporters turned outspoken critic, as the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran continued to fragment online discourse among right-wing influencers.
“Tucker’s a low-IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” Trump said in an interview with New York Post national security reporter Caitlin Doornbos when asked about Carlson’s condemnations of his Easter message promising massive destruction on Iran.
“He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him,” Trump said of Carlson. “I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”
On Monday, in his continued efforts to frame himself as a devout defender of Christian faith, Carlson released a more than two-hour long podcast on X and YouTube, announcing it by saying that “desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.”
Carlson took issue in part with Trump’s social media post the prior day, Easter Sunday, issuing a warning to the Iranian regime.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global shipping that Iran has effectively closed amid conflict with the US and Israel.
In addition to attacking the president, Carlson criticized multiple faith traditions and Christian Zionist religious figures including White House senior adviser Paula White and Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and of Samaritan’s Purse. Carlson also maligned the megachurch movement and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He has previously called Christian Zionism a heresy and said that he disliked its proponents “more than anybody,” remarks for which he later offered an apology.
Carlson’s 40-minute opening monologue framed his opposition to Trump in theological terms, asserting that Christians should have opposed the president’s effort to seize Venezuela’s oil, saying, “That’s not acceptable for Christians. In fact, that’s unacceptable for Americans or any civilized people because taking other people’s stuff by force cannot be allowed.” Carlson called Trump’s decision wrong “under the American legal code, but it’s also wrong under the Christian legal code.”
Carlson also argued that during Trump’s inauguration, he didn’t take the oath of office with his hand on the Bible.
“That should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about,” the online media personality added, claiming it “became clear that maybe [Trump] didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book. And what’s inside that book are limits on human behavior.”
Carlson condemned Trump’s Truth Social posting on Sunday, calling his words “maybe the most real thing this president has ever done and also the most revealing on every level. It is vile on every level.”
On Sunday, former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also used religious rhetoric to reject Trump’s use of the phrase “Praise be to Allah,” which appeared to be in jest.
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” Greene wrote on X in a post that has since received over 9.6 million views. “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”
Greene then referenced the Strait of Hormuz, arguing it’s closed “because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.”
Returning to religion, Greene wrote “our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace.”
On Tuesday, Greene called for members of the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution to remove Trump from power following his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.”
Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has also advocated Trump’s removal, asking a guest on his Monday InfoWars podcast, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” On March 31, Jones said that Trump “does look sick … the brain’s not doing too hot. And so, we just cut bait on Trump, and we just mobilize against the Democrats.”
Other influential far-right media figures who previously spent years boosting Trump have also now called for his removal. On Tuesday in response to the same Trump threat, far-right podcaster Candace Owens wrote that “the 25th amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness.”
The 25th Amendment states that if key government leaders determine that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the vice president “shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
On Tuesday, conservative radio host Mark Levin labeled those calling for the 25th Amendment’s use as “the Woke Reich neo-fascists.”
Owens had reposted Carlson’s podcast condemning Trump.
On Sunday in response to Trump’s post, Owens wrote on X in a post seen by at least 3.8 million people that “this is a satanic administration. We all realize that satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress needs to move to have the Mad King Trump removed.” She added, “All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing that Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah. We are in uncharted territory. Leaders worldwide need to act accordingly.”
On Tuesday, Owens accused Trump of involvement in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Resharing an X posting by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian asserting his willingness to die in defense of the Islamic regime, Owens wrote, “The Iranian President tweets that he is willing [to] sacrifice his own life for his people. Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice Charlie Kirk and is willing to sacrifice every American life and livelihood for Greater Israel. Who is the animal again?”
Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center and a conspiracy theorist ally of Owens, wrote on Tuesday in response to Trump’s threats of civilizational eradication that the president “believes he is threatening Iran with destruction, but it is America that now stands in danger. If he attempts to eradicate Iranian civilization, the United States will no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force in the world, but as an agent of chaos — effectively ending our status as the world’s greatest superpower.”
Kent reposted Carlson’s podcast too and came under fire from CNN’s Jake Tapper for also sharing Iranian propaganda falsely suggesting that the United States intentionally sought to kill its own downed pilot rather than rescue him.
Ann Coulter, the right-wing polemicist who authored 2016’s In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, has also turned against the president, writing on Tuesday that “Trump is going to set off the wildest rush for nuclear weapons the world has ever seen. Should go well.”
Coulter wrote in response to Trump’s Sunday message: “I really wish ‘legal experts’ hadn’t screamed bloody murder about every little thing Trump did, so they could speak with authority now that he’s actually committing war crimes.”
Antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes has also jumped on board the anti-Trump bandwagon.
“I’ve been saying this for the past couple of days: You have to understand that all Trump does is lie. It’s by design. This is the function of rhetoric from the White House,” Fuentes said on April 1 on his Rumble show. “But that’s the Trump doctrine, which is you flood the zone, you saturate the information space with disinformation or contradictory information, and the purpose of it is to throw your enemies and even your allies off balance.”
Fuentes added, “We are stuck. We made an attempt to destroy the Iranian regime and we failed. We took a shot and we missed. And what this has allowed Iran to do is seize the Strait of Hormuz and take a fifth of the world’s energy hostage. And we have no ability to take it back. Because the regime survived, it is now actually stronger. So, it’s not going anywhere. And what’s more, Iran prepared for exactly this scenario.”
Fuentes’ so-called “Groyper” movement promotes antisemitism, racism, rape, and support for Hamas. Proponents seek to infiltrate the Republican Party and subvert it from within, a tactic Fuentes has instructed. Conservative journalist Rod Dreher reported in The Free Press that his sources have told him that approximately 30-40 percent of Gen-Z Republican staffers sympathized with Groyperism.
While initial polling showed firm Republican support for Trump and Israel’s efforts to crush the Islamic regime in Iran, new research indicates diminished enthusiasm. A poll from YouGov and The Economist released on March 31 showed that while 62 percent of Republicans supported the conflict, that figure divided between pro-MAGA Republicans (79 percent) and non-MAGA Republicans (33 percent.) Self-proclaimed MAGA Republicans comprise roughly twice the number of non-MAGA Republicans.
Polling also shows that a majority of younger Republicans, a cohort more heavily influenced by Owens and Fuentes, now reject the war, with only 49 percent supporting Trump’s actions.
Tuesday wasn’t the first time that Trump blasted Carlson.
“Tucker has lost his way,” the president told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month. “MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Carlson told Status News editor Oliver Darcy that “there are times I get annoyed with Trump, right now definitely included. But I’ll always love him no matter what he says about me.”
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Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
President Donald Trump has backed himself into a corner on Iran. His increasingly apocalyptic threats — including a Tuesday morning social media post that warned “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not accede to his terms — make that much clear. Trump is looking for any way out of this war that will let him not just avoid blame, but claim superiority.
One uncomfortable possibility for how he might do so: follow the lead of far-right pundits, and pivot to blame the Jews.
We know how Trump handles failure. The 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? shows a 20-something Trump learning his strategies at the knee of the late, disgraced titular attorney, who instructed him never to admit error or accept responsibility for his failures. “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn,” Matt Tyrnauer, the documentary’s director, told NPR.
The techniques break down to this: deflect, attack, deny.
Trump has tried a combination of them as the war has defied a quick conclusion. He has denied reality, declaring victory two weeks ago. He has lashed out at the media for supposedly undermining the war effort through clear-eyed reporting, going so far as to have the FCC threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for war coverage he finds objectionable. He promised in an Easter Sunday message to bomb civilian infrastructure if Iran doesn’t “open the f— Strait” of Hormuz to maritime traffic.
But what if ramping up attacks won’t work? What if it becomes impossible to deny reality, as gas prices soar higher, American casualties pile up, and taxpayers see themselves shelling out more billions for a war they don’t understand?
Trump could look into a camera and tell the American people that he miscalculated. That the buck stops with him, and that as commander in chief he and he alone made the decision to go to war, and the war’s successes and failures are on him.
Or he could turn back to the first of those Cohn strategies, and deflect. And the easiest culprit to deflect blame to is, clearly, Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long pushed for a military strike on Iran. And a subset of erstwhile Trump supporters, including commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — both of whom have long records of spreading antisemitism — have been laying the groundwork for Trump to take advantage of that widely known fact for a last, desperate bit of narrative spin. They and their ilk have claimed that Israel and its American Jewish supporters, including, bizarrely, Chabad, pushed Trump into the unpopular war. Trump could easily slide into the nefarious narrative they have prepared for him, and cast himself as the innocent manipulated by a foreign government and its American agents.
The consequences of the president of the United States placing the blame for what could be an unpopular, failed, costly and deadly war on Israel and, by extension, Jewish Americans, are unforeseeable, and existentially frightening. They are also consequences that, given Trump’s track record, we need to consider.
Because here’s what we know about Trump: He has never accepted blame for anything during his presidency.
Confronted in 2020 with the suggestion that his administration had failed to effectively address the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump said, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” then blamed former President Barack Obama. When his ill-conceived tariffs sent the stock market into a nosedive, forcing the administration to reverse course and pause the tariff to avoid a market collapse, Trump and his spokespeople said that was the plan all along. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said. While 48% of Americans blame Trump for the spike in gas prices since the start of the Iran war, he has deflected, posting that the increase is “a very small price to pay… only fools would think differently!”
If Trump wants to get out of the war without following through on his threats to commit mass war crimes — which, despite his evident glee in playing bully, he may — he will need to cast blame in a way that makes him look like the reasonable party.
To those Jewish Trump supporters who think there is no way Trump would throw Israel, and by extension Jews, under the bus, consider this — he’s already tried.
After Israel’s March attack on an Iranian natural gas facility, which outraged Gulf allies and sent gas prices soaring, Trump claimed the U.S. “knew nothing” about the Israeli plans. But Israeli and American officials later confirmed that was a lie, and that Trump himself “green-lit” the operation.
Trump hung Israel out to dry once, and it’s far from inconceivable that he could try again.
Never mind that blaming Israel would make no sense. Successive administrations, including the first Trump administration, chose not to pursue wars with Iran because, well, the U.S. can freely choose when and when not to go to war — and Trump is the decider. Netanyahu has not been the world leader threatening civilizational destruction on Truth Social. And American Jews, crucially, oppose the current war. According to a GBAO Strategies poll commissioned by J Street, 60% of American Jews opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran.
But think of how easy it would be for Trump to, say, announce that the U.S. has accomplished its goals, then suggest Israel has been holding out for more wins, and that he’s told Netanyahu the U.S. is done fighting on Israel’s behalf?
If Trump were to go there, it wouldn’t be the first time Jews found themselves blamed for an unpopular war. The first Russian-language editions of the antisemitic forgeries The Protocols of the Elders of Zion sought to scapegoat the Jews for the country’s 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Following World War I, German antisemites promulgated the “stab-in-the-back” myth that Jews and Communists conspired to undermine the war effort.
American Jews and their institutions, already targeted as a result of the Gaza war and increasingly unhinged right-wing antisemitism, could be put in even greater danger by the president’s lifelong inability to take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. To quote Trump, only fools would think differently.
The post Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Calls on Children, Civilians to Form Human Shields Around Power Plants Amid Trump Threats
Iranian citizens, including children, form a human chain around a power plant in Tehran on April 7, 2026, as officials urge civilians to protect key infrastructure amid rising tensions with the US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Iranian authorities have urged children, teenagers, and civilians to gather around power plants and other sensitive sites to serve as human shields, in an apparent effort to raise the cost of potential US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s infrastructure.
The call came as US President Donald Trump’s deadline of Tuesday night for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a ceasefire proposal rapidly approached.
Trump previously warned that if Iran refused to reopen the strait — a critical global shipping chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to international waters, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — US strikes would destroy the country’s key infrastructure, including bridges and energy facilities including power plants.
“We have a plan according to which every bridge in Iran will be destroyed and every power plant will be bombed by midnight. It will happen within 4 hours if we want,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday.
Trump appeared to escalate his threats on Tuesday.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.
“However,” he added, “now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
In response, Iranian officials issued stark warnings that, should the strikes on Iranian soil go ahead, Tehran would retaliate by targeting infrastructure and other civilian sites in Gulf states hosting US forces, risking a broader escalation across the region.
Even as negotiations remain formally underway, Iranian officials signaled little change in their stance, insisting that Washington’s demands and tone “have not changed” amid ongoing conflict.
“There are no negotiations with the US, which wants Iran to collapse under pressure. We will show flexibility after we see flexibility from the US,” an Iranian official told Reuters.
“Iran will not open [the Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for empty promises,” he continued.
With tensions now approaching a breaking point, Iranian government and military officials have publicly urged civilians to gather near key infrastructure sites to act as a deterrent against potential airstrikes.
During a televised speech on Monday, Alireza Rahimi, Iran’s deputy minister of youth affairs, urged citizens to join the “Iranian youth’s human chain for a bright tomorrow” by gathering around power plants to serve as human shields.
“I call on all youth, athletes, artists, university students, and professors to gather tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 pm, and form a circle around our power plants, which are national assets and the nation’s capital,” Rahimi said.
“Come regardless of political views, because these facilities belong to the Iranian youth and their future. Let the world see that targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” he continued.
Old habits die hard.
In the Iran-Iraq War, this regime deployed children with plastic keys to heaven against Iraqi machine gun fire and to clear minefields. This is a regime which also deployed Iranian and Afghan children alongside the Basij to fight in the Syrian Civil War. https://t.co/vfR3iqZnG5
— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) April 7, 2026
In a separate televised message, Hossein Yekta, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), addressed parents directly and urged them to send their children to sensitive locations and checkpoints.
“Send the children to the checkpoints so they can become men,” he said.
The regime’s use of human shields appears to extend beyond minors, with reports indicating that political prisoners and dual nationals are also being positioned near sensitive sites as part of broader deterrence efforts.
Last month, the IRGC officially lowered the minimum age for war‑related roles to 12 as part of a campaign recruiting children to serve as “Homeland‑Defending Combatants for Iran,” assigning them to patrols, checkpoints, and logistics duties.
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.