Uncategorized
Moral Clarity Is Missing From the Discourse on the War in Gaza
Red Cross transports the bodies of two deceased hostages, kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, after they were handed over by Hamas militants, in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, October 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Here is my one regret from the last two years of commentary on the October 7 War: we let ourselves get sucked into arguing the running death toll coming out of Hamas’ Health Ministry in Gaza.
In some ways, it was inevitable. Global outlets put those figures in every headline and chyron, so someone had to meet them on the field. Nevertheless, it was still a strategic mistake. We allowed Hamas’ daily ticker to become the global yardstick for morality in this conflict.
Start with a simple truth about war reporting: immediate casualty numbers after explosions are guaranteed to be wrong.
These are not fog-of-war errors from Hamas; they are straight-up lies. The Al‑Ahli explosion is a case study. Within minutes, the “500 dead” claim circled the world. Subsequent assessments from Western intelligence agencies put the likely death toll in the low hundreds, yet the first number did its work; it framed the narrative for days. We have seen this ruse time and again, and we fall for it each time it happens.
I am not saying the numbers do not matter at all; every innocent death matters infinitely to the people who loved them. But the “numbers game” — the breathless, running tally — turns a legal and moral analysis into a horse race graphic. It incentivizes speed over verification, from a single unverified source with a clear propaganda motive, and it collapses complex questions into a single, unreliable metric.
Even organizations and reporters who regard Gaza Health Ministry figures as broadly useful acknowledge the limits of instant counts and the likelihood of later revisions when conditions improve or bodies are recovered from rubble.
Here is the broader point. If the tally is 40,000, 68,000, or 100,000, the fundamental question remains unchanged: In no other conflict do we treat a running counter as the dispositive test of conduct.
Afghanistan’s war killed roughly 176,000 people through direct violence by 2021 — civilians, Afghan forces, insurgents, and others, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Iraq’s direct-war deaths from 2003 to 2021 total 275,000–306,000, including 185,000–209,000 civilians. Those wars are debated on strategy, aims, and legality, not by a daily, decontextualised ticker. Nobody alleges those wars were genocides.
Look around the world right now. Amidst the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Sudan, famine has been formally identified, with the UN-backed IPC system projecting expansion absent major relief. In the worst-case scenario, up to one million people could die in Sudan through war, famine, and pestilence. There are no mass marches in Western capitals keyed to that potential number, and no live tickers on cable news.
Even in the Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran legs of the same post-October 7 War, where thousands were killed over the past two years, death tallies were barely reported, and even then, only as background noise, not the central moral metric.
Why did Gaza become the exception?
Partly because Hamas and Gaza’s authorities understood the media economy and fed it a constant stream of numbers, which major outlets treated as the default baseline (sometimes with caveats, more often without). These figures were the central pillar of Hamas’ propaganda and information strategy, with a willing queue of allies and useful idiots ready to push the numbers and “verify” them through arcane and speculative twisting of formulae and surveys.
Partly because critics of Israel made the tally itself the argument: more deaths equals more wrongdoing.
And partly because many of us on Israel’s side took the bait. We tried to rebut, refine, and reclassify: are these militants or civilians? Does the ratio favor the IDF? In doing so, we validated the premise that Hamas’ death ticker was the thing that mattered most.
It is not. Not even the much‑vaunted “combatant-to-civilian ratio” decides the question. International humanitarian law asks something different and more exacting: did the attacker distinguish between combatants and civilians? Were feasible precautions taken? Was the expected collateral harm not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated?
These are the only metrics of proportionality. These are the standards commanders must apply in real time, and investigators should scrutinize on a case-by-case basis. A cumulative body count, especially one compiled in real-time under combat conditions, can neither prove compliance nor establish violations. It can only signal the scale of suffering (which we should never minimize), but it cannot, by itself, answer a single legal or moral question.
Yes, specific false claims must be corrected. When an immediate number is demonstrably wrong or wildly implausible, you challenge it with evidence and move on. But you do not let that back‑and‑forth define the whole conversation.
The lesson, as we advance, is simple. Do not play on the enemy’s turf when you do not have to. Engage where it matters: the law of armed conflict and the campaign’s purpose. What was the target? What was the necessity? What precautions were taken? What intelligence informed the strike? Those are hard questions, but they are the right ones. They do justice to the gravity of each loss without turning human life into a scoreboard.
Numbers should inform; they should not rule. Let us stop pretending a running death tally is a moral compass. It is not. The more we argue over the ticker, the more we concede the frame that Hamas designed to trap us.
Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer. Recent senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Masters study in Middle Eastern strategy and Psychology. Now a think tank research fellow focusing on Defence, the Middle East and Disinformation. Read more about Andrew on his website. Follow Andrew on Substack. A version of this article was also published by The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Uncategorized
German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
Uncategorized
Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.