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Kamala Harris is No Friend to Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIK A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America.
That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.
For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast!
Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.
Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” — worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.
The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less.
Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”
Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.”
We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis.
“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”
“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.
On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel.
Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”
Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.”
Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added.
“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.
The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.
Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.
All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.
Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.
“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.
Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.
But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.
Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.
Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.
I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government.
And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons — there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones — and ideological ones — progressive woke ideology — but do Jews have to go along with this?
(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.)
“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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China Slams Israel for Joining UN Human Rights Statement Condemning Beijing
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon addressing the UN Security Council on Sept. 19, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
China slammed Israel on Wednesday for joining a United Nations declaration condemning its human rights record, accusing some nations of “slandering” Beijing on the international stage as bilateral relations between the two countries grow increasingly tense.
Last week, Israel endorsed a US-backed declaration, signed by 15 other countries — including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan — that expressed “deep and ongoing concerns” over human rights violations in China.
In a rare move, Jerusalem broke with its traditionally cautious approach to China — aimed at preserving diplomatic and economic ties — by signing on to the statement as Beijing continues to strengthen relations with Iran, whose Islamic government openly seeks Israel’s destruction, and expand its influence in the Middle East.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing.
Iran’s growing ties with China come at a time when Tehran faces mounting economic sanctions from Western powers, while Beijing itself is also under US sanctions.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
With this latest UN declaration, the signatory countries denounced China’s repression of ethnic and religious minority groups, citing arbitrary detentions, forced labor, mass surveillance, and restrictions on cultural and religious expression.
According to the statement, minority groups — particularly Uyghurs, other Muslim communities, Christians, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners — face targeted repression, including the separation of children from their families, torture, and the destruction of cultural heritage.
In response, China’s Foreign Ministry accused the signatories of “slandering and smearing” the country and interfering in its internal affairs “in serious violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.”
The UN declaration also voiced “deep concern” over the erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law in Hong Kong, citing arrest warrants and fines for activists abroad, as well as the use of state censorship and surveillance to control information, suppress public debate, and create a “climate of fear” that silences criticism.
Western powers called on China to release all individuals unjustly detained for exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms and to fully comply with international law.
Israel’s latest diplomatic move comes amid an already tense relationship with China, strained since the start of the war in Gaza. In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Beijing, along with Qatar, of funding a “media blockade” against the Jewish state.
At the time, the Chinese embassy in Israel dismissed such accusations, saying they “lack factual basis [and] harm China-Israel relations.”
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‘Dead on Arrival’: Inside the Breakdown of Second Phase of Gaza Ceasefire and Hamas’s Resurgent Control
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The second phase of the Trump administration’s Gaza plan has collapsed into “stalemate,” according to Gaza-born analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, derailing plans to disarm Hamas and enabling the terrorist group to reassert control over aid convoys and Gaza’s three main hospitals, which he said have turned into interrogation centers for political opponents.
“Phase Two is not going to proceed,” Alkhatib, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a call with journalists on Tuesday.
Under the plan, the first stage included Hamas releasing all the remaining hostages, both living and deceased, who were kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. In exchange, Israeli released thousands of Palestinian prisoners and detainees and partially withdrew its military forces in Gaza.
Currently, the Israeli military controls 53 percent of Gaza’s territory, and Hamas has moved to reestablish control over the other 47 percent. However, the vast majority of the Gazan population is located in the Hamas-controlled half, where the Islamist group has been imposing a brutal crackdown.
The second stage of the US plan was supposed to install an interim administrative authority — a so-called “technocratic government” — deploy an International Stabilization Force — a multinational force meant to take over security in Gaza — and begin the demilitarization of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that has ruled the enclave for nearly two decades.
“The International Stabilization Force is dead on arrival,” Alkhatib said. “The gap between what the force is meant to do versus the expectation of the volunteers is too wide.”
Alkhatib’s comments stood in stark contrast to those of US President Donald Trump, who on Wednesday told reporters at the White House that phase two of his Gaza peace plan was “going to happen pretty soon.”
“It’s going very well. We have peace in the Middle East. People don’t realize it,” Trump said. “Phase two is moving along. It’s going to happen pretty soon.”
However, Israel and Hamas have not actually reached an agreement regarding the second phase.
The United States had hoped to scale back its role in its newly built Civil-Military Coordination Center in the Israel city of Kiryat Gat, Alkhatib said, while pushing regional partners to assume responsibilities they lack the capacity or willingness to take on.
However, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are “furious” that the process has placed Qatar and Turkey, both longtime backers of Hamas, in what Alkhatib called the “driver’s seat,” giving them outsized influence over Gaza without requiring them to shoulder the financial burden.
“You put the Qataris in the driver’s seat, then why don’t you make them commit a billion dollars?” Alkhatib said.
Egypt and Jordan, meanwhile, lack the money and resources to train security personnel on the ground, while other partners like Pakistan and Indonesia have made clear they will not take part in disarming Hamas.
“Israel is the only body in the world — from a brute force perspective — that can take on Hamas,” he said, arguing that the Islamist group had been “very close to defeat” before the US-brokered ceasefire took effect in October, though at an extreme cost for Gazans and after a two-year campaign he said was at times undermined by far-right elements in the Israeli government.
Meanwhile, Hamas is building a new tax economy around the flow of goods into Gaza. Alkhatib described a sharp rise in commercial shipments alongside humanitarian aid, with merchants paying 50 percent of the value of the goods in taxes and fees.
“The same Qassam brigadiers [Hamas operatives] who were in tunnels throwing IEDs [improvised explosive devices] at Israeli soldiers are now protecting commercial goods trucks,” he said.
He added that Hamas was continuing to seize control of the humanitarian pipeline, imposing charges on aid shipments and asserting authority over the 800 to 900 trucks entering Gaza each day.
Alkhatib’s comments came one day before the research institution NGO Monitor, which tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations, released a new report revealing how Hamas has long run a coordinated effort to penetrate and influence NGOs in Gaza, systematically weaponizing humanitarian aid in Gaza and tightening its grip over foreign NGOs operating in the territory.
The terrorist group has also stepped up the recruitment of teenagers, described by Alkhatib as “child soldiers,” to help enforce control over goods and movement.
Gaza’s three main hospitals — Shifa, Nasser, and Al-Aqsa — have been turned into “pseudo-government operation centers,” Alkhatib said, with the terrorist group embedding elements of its Interior, Economy, and Finance ministries inside the compounds, and using them to interrogate political opponents, levy financial penalties on businessmen, and oversee arrests.
Alkhatib said the difficulty of speaking candidly about Hamas’s conduct has created a distorted public conversation.
“I can’t say these things without journalists saying, ‘Ahmed, I can’t believe you’re repeating Israeli talking points,’” he said. “Meanwhile, you talk to any child in Gaza about what’s happening [in the hospitals],” he added, noting that Gazans have circulated a grim joke that Hamas has “come out of the labor and delivery department” — a reference to operatives hiding in maternity wards and using pregnant women as human shields.
Part of the postwar landscape now includes several anti-Hamas militias, loosely aligned under the Abu Shabab group. While some Muslim Brotherhood–aligned outlets, including Al Jazeera, have claimed the Israel Defense Forces plan to dismantle these militias, Alkhatib argued the opposite is more likely, predicting the IDF will lean on them as the only armed actors available for post-ceasefire “mop-up” operations against Hamas cells.
In late October, The Algemeiner reported that four Israel-backed militias fighting Hamas are moving to fill the power vacuum in Gaza, pledging to cooperate with most international forces involved in rebuilding the enclave but vowing to resist any presence from Qatar, Turkey, or Iran.
Iran, like Qatar and Turkey, has spent years supporting Hamas.
Based in Khan Younis, Hossam al-Astal, commander of the Counter Terrorism Strike Force, said his group and three allied militias had coordinated in recent weeks to secure areas vacated by Hamas.
The militias, mainly in southern Gaza, are not part of US President Donald Trump’s proposed plan for a technocratic administration in the enclave.
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In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a peek into Brazilian Jewish history — and a warning against propaganda
When we first meet Marcelo in the fiction film The Secret Agent, the only thing that’s clear is that he’s on the run — we’re not sure that Marcelo is his real name, who he’s on the run from, or why. As the story, set in 1977 Brazil, unravels, we learn government officials and hired killers are working together to take Marcelo down and strip him of any credibility he had in his pre-fugitive life — even if that means manipulating the press.
But the film also spends time on the characters Marcelo meets while hiding among others being persecuted by the military dictatorship in the city of Recife, illustrating the diversity of the people affected by the fascist regime.
One of those characters is a man many assume is an escaped Nazi; in fact, however, he is a Holocaust survivor.
The audience’s introduction to the survivor, Hans, played by German actor Udo Kier in his final film role before his death, is not a pleasant one. A corrupt police chief named Euclides brings Marcelo to Hans’ tailor shop, insisting there is something interesting he must see there. Euclides then forces Hans to lift his shirt and show his scars — something Euclides clearly regularly has the man to do as we can see by Hans’ immediate sour reaction to the chief.
Euclides believes the intense, sprawling scar tissue tells a glorious military story of a Nazi who evaded capture.
“He’s just fascinated with, I don’t know, maybe Nazi Germany, with the German soldier, or the idea of the German soldier,” explained director Kleber Mendonça Filho in a video interview. “And he seems to have a one track mind in terms of thinking that Hans, because he’s German, must have been a heroic soldier in the German army in the Second World War, which explains why he’s still alive.”
But, as the audience learns through a conversation Hans has with an employee in German — and a shot of the menorah he has tucked away in his office — he is actually a Jewish Holocaust survivor. His wounds are a testament to surviving violent antisemitism, not markers of fighting for militaristic ideals the police chief believes they share.
“Identity can be on your body,” Filho said. “In the scars that you have, in the tattoos that you have, in the way that you have collected physical experience throughout life.”
Like many of the elements in the film, the character of Hans was inspired by Filho’s own memories of growing up in Recife during the Brazilian military dictatorship, known for its violent suppression of media and political dissidents, that ruled the country from 1964-1985. Even though Filho was only 9 years old at the time the film is set, he remembers a lot from that time in his life, including an old Romanian tailor his father visited in the downtown area that they recreated in the film.
Filho combined this character from his life with the experience of growing up in an area with a strong Jewish presence. Recife was the site of Brazil’s first organized Jewish community, which consisted of Dutch Jews, who arrived with other Dutch colonialists, and Sephardic Jews escaping the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions. Between 1636 and 1640, these Jews built the first synagogue in the Americas, Kahal Zur Israel, which was turned into a museum in 2001.
In 1654, the Portuguese expelled Dutch Colonists and Jews from Brazil, but another wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the 1910s revitalized Recife’s Jewish population. Even though Filho isn’t Jewish, he had a lot of Jewish friends throughout his life, even styling the marine biologist in the film off of one of them.
Although The Secret Agent takes place in 1977, Filho saw events similar to those he wrote into the film play out around him under the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, which lasted from 2019 to 2023.
Filho said that “a lot of the logic of what was happening under the Bolsonaro regime seemed to mimic” the military regime of the 20th century “in a fetishistic way.”
“Words like torture were now being thrown around,” he said, “misogynistic treatment of women in words that would be questionable in 1977 and completely alien and unacceptable today.”
Filho said the country also experienced a renewed period of racism and xenophobia under Bolsonaro, encouraged by the policies of the government. And those were sometimes overtly inspired by admiration for Nazi Germany; then-Special Secretary Roberto Alvim was removed from his post after just a few months for plagiarizing a speech from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Today, in the United States, many are worried that Nazis are being reimagined as the good guys, as Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes are given increased attention by news pundits and the Trump administration normalizes relations with the far-right groups.
Much of the plot of The Secret Agent concerns the rewriting of history through propaganda and media censorship. And the intimate and abusive interaction between the police chief and Hans feels like a particularly salient demonstration of how easily facts can be written over to fit the world someone might want to see.
The post In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a peek into Brazilian Jewish history — and a warning against propaganda appeared first on The Forward.