The Social World

Category: International

  • Do black lives still matter?

    Do black lives still matter?

    It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in the appalling violence. Many thousands more have fled for their lives. Others remain trapped in the city.

    The scenes of slaughter were so blatant that it should have brought marchers out onto the streets in passionate protest. But there wasn’t a peep from the usual suspects. Was this because the killings did not take place in Gaza or the West Bank, but in Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries? The perpetrators, of course, weren’t the Israel Defense Force, but Sudanese militants fighting a vicious civil war in the vast country.

    The RSF, which had been besieging the town of El Fasher for 18 months, is primarily an ethnically Arab group. The victims in the most recent atrocities appear to be black Africans in the famine-stricken and war-torn Darfur province of eastern Sudan. When El Fasher finally fell, helpless civilians were gunned down in cold blood. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – including patients and their families – were killed. The Sudan Doctors’ Network said that RSF fighters had “cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present.”

    In London, this was seemingly of little interest to the marchers whose protests against “genocide” by “Zionists” in Gaza have regularly disfigured the streets of Britain’s capital since Hamas carried out their pogrom on October 7, 2023 – the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Do black lives matter?

    The slaughter in El Fasher echoed the massacres in Darfur in 2003, which were declared a genocide by the United Nations. In those terrible scenes, Sudanese government militias killed approximately 200,000 black African Darfuris and tortured, abused and displaced thousands more. Once again, protests in Britain were notable mostly by their absence.

    This one-eyed hypocrisy is remarkable, since Sudan, like Palestine, is a former de facto British colony. Events there were once of such pressing concern that the Victorian-era prime minister William Gladstone was forced by public opinion to send a military expedition up the Nile to save the legendary General Gordon, who was besieged by followers of a messianic Islamic leader called the Mahdi in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

    The expedition arrived too late and Gordon was murdered by a Mahdist mob. For years after that, British troops attempted to gain control of Sudan by force. In 1898, the young Winston Churchill rode in one of the Army’s last cavalry charges at the battle of Omdurman when an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by Sir Herbert Kitchener killed 20,000 Mahdists for the loss of fewer than 500 of their own men.

    The tomb of the Mahdi was desecrated and Kitchener was widely – but falsely – rumored to have used his skull as a drinking goblet. When Sudan finally won independence in 1956, the country continued to be the scene of conflict and inter-ethnic slaughter as the ethnically Arab north oppressed the mainly Christian and black African south.

    This finally led to South Sudan breaking away and being recognized by the UN in 2011 as Africa’s most recent independent state. But coups, civil wars and inter-ethnic violence continue to scar the Sudan. So when will the London rent-a-mobs pay attention and act? I’m not holding my breath.

  • Britain’s reverse imperialism

    Britain’s reverse imperialism

    Britain’s post colonial reckoning can be summed up in a single sentence delivered last June at the Glastonbury music festival when rapper duo Bob Vylan shouted “You want your country back? You’re not getting it back!” to an overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience roaring its approval. The message was unmistakable: Britain has been colonized – and its dominant culture not only accepts, but celebrates, it.

    Britain’s transformation has been driven not by invasion, but by invitation. The country’s population, political culture and national cohesion has been radically reshaped by immigration – one wave in the 1950s, driven by post-World War Two labor shortages, and another following Brexit. They brought an estimated 10-15 million immigrants, primarily from Africa and South Asia.

    And the more recent surge of what the British euphemistically call “irregular migration,” that is in fact illegal immigration, has only deepened the challenges.

    But the immigration debate is no longer simply about “uncontrolled” migration. The deeper threat lies in what legal immigration from certain regions has produced: reverse imperialism.

    After World War Two, Western colonial empires were dismantled, and their histories of economic exploitation, cultural dominance and political control were broadly condemned. It was hoped that the post-colonial world would look very different. But history is ironic. The racial superiority of the British raj has been replaced by the moral and religious supremacism of its Muslim population.

    The flow of migrants today, particularly from former colonies to their former colonizers, has initiated not a new chapter in diversity, but a quiet conquest by demographic, cultural and political means while Britain’s elites, paralyzed by guilt and progressive dogma, have permitted the erosion of core values in the name of multiculturalism.

    Legal immigration during both postwar periods has significantly increased the UK’s Muslim population – from negligible levels in 1950 to almost seven percent of the population today. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. In urban centers like Bradford and Tower Hamlets, their numbers are concentrated, climbing to over 35-40 percent in some neighborhoods.

    These are not merely demographic shifts but cultural. Increased levels of welfare dependency and low levels of female workforce participation in these enclaves – often influenced by cultural and religious values – have raised concerns about an extraction of state resources without corresponding integration. To some critics, this dynamic resembles a kind of “reverse imperialism.”

    Muslim concentration in cities also translates into political power – from “sharia councils” as well as power reshaping local elections, influencing national policy and asserting itself most clearly within the Labour party.

    Let us clarify: Not all Muslims are Islamists. But those who are do not merely reject integration; they actively seek the transformation of their host society. Dawah (religious outreach) funded by zakat (charity), as well as political organizations are used to embed Islamist ideals within public institutions – from schools to local governments and even Parliament itself. This is reverse imperialism – not by armies, but by slow, deliberate cultural and institutional conquest.

    Britain’s robust protections for freedom of speech and religion have been turned into shields for anti-assimilationist movements. Public displays of Islamic religiosity – mass prayers staged in Whitehall and along Tower Bridge, for instance – are not mere cultural expressions. They are demonstrations of societal power.

    Similarly, protests purportedly against the war in Gaza increasingly reveal themselves as anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic. The normalized antisemitism in parts of the Islamic world has quietly embedded itself in Britain’s urban centers and beyond. Consider the British-Palestinian NHS doctor in bucolic Gloucestershire, genuinely stunned to be arrested in October 2025 for hate speech and pro-Hamas posts – as if her deeply held belief in Islamist moral superiority should have granted her immunity. Its presence is most visible in double standards: pro-Palestinian marches in London receive full police protection, while pro-Israel rallies often proceed with minimal security – or none at all.

    And while violence is the most visible symptom, the intellectual and political conquest is quieter but no less potent. Even the once-iconic Oxford Union has become a stage for extremist voices. Far from challenging Islamist ideology, elite British institutions are increasingly complicit in legitimizing it.

    Underlying this societal vulnerability are two postwar developments that have hollowed out British resilience.

    First, Britain has become a post-Christian society. In 1950, 85 percent identified as Christian. In 2025, that number has collapsed to 46 percent. Second, pacifism has replaced patriotism. British youth, increasingly disconnected from national history or pride, express little willingness to defend their country. An Ipsos poll in April 2025 reported that 48 percent said they would not fight for Britain “under any circumstance.” A society that no longer believes in itself is easy to replace.

    Britain’s leaders have offered not resistance, but accommodation – and in doing so, they’ve allowed the institutions of state and society to be gradually reshaped in the image of their most assertive minority factions. These factors are not, as yet, visible in America.

    Many Americans assume that Britain’s postcolonial dilemmas don’t apply here. After all, the US never had colonies in the same sense. Our national reckoning has focused on slavery and civil rights – not empire. But this is a dangerous misconception.

    The United States has long defined itself not by “blood”, but by allegiance to a common set of civic values. But Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America, emphasized that unity depended on assimilation – on the willingness to become Americans.

    Today, that process is under threat. Consider Dearborn, Michigan, where the Muslim mayor unapologetically declared a Christian pastor “unwelcome” after he objected to renaming a road after a known Hamas supporter. This is not an isolated event but reflects a broader trend: the emergence of parallel societies with different values and civic loyalties.

    America’s constitutional protections – especially of religion and speech – may ironically be accelerating this process. Foreign flags now fly at US protests. Demonstrators chant for causes antithetical to the American creed. These aren’t just calls for global solidarity – they signal a growing rejection of national unity itself.

    Britain is a cautionary tale, not just about immigration policy, but about “cultural surrender.” The postcolonial legacy has produced fragmentation, the rise of groups with a supremacist agenda resisting integration and a populist backlash. But even populism may come too late if a nation’s sense of self has already withered.

    Trump understands this. His administration’s efforts to redefine immigration, restore assimilation and reassert national identity mark a sharp contrast with Britain’s passivity.

    But a course correction requires more than political leadership. It requires that Americans confront what the British have already endured: that legal immigration absent assimilation can be a mechanism not of enrichment but of replacement, even subjugation.

    Britain’s reversal of empire and identity is well underway. It’s time we learned from those who failed to prevent it.

  • The logic of Trump resuming nuclear weapons testing

    Donald Trump has exercised the nuclear option, sort of. Sitting somewhere in South Korea, the President launched a Truth Social post on the topic of nukes: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” Then he thanked the world for its attention and sallied into a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping.

    That timing isn’t coincidental. The Red Dragon has spent the last decade hoarding nuclear warheads – almost as if there were a second Cold War raging – and has been rather brazen about this fact. So too has Xi’s pouty neighbor to the north, Vladimir Putin. As Owen Matthews explains in the upcoming US edition of The Spectator, the Russian President keeps popping up on state television to flex his mad scientists’ novel nuclear technologies, including an ICBM nicknamed “Satan II.”

    Those schoolmarms who still believe in international law reacted predictably, claiming that President Trump was exploding decades of peaceful restraint. They are especially concerned that he’s violating the New START treaty, America’s agreement with Russia that limits the number of warheads either country can keep in their back pocket.

    But that treaty is in tatters. Russia called it quits in 2023. Neither country has let the other inspect any nuclear facility in years, and the agreement is set to expire in February, with no option for renewal. More importantly, China, the world’s most nuke-hungry state, has never been a part of this pact – or any other nuclear nonproliferation treaty, for that matter.

    In this context, then, Trump is acting totally sane. His critics are the lunatics. One of two things can happen: either Putin and Xi see Trump’s threat and de-escalate – in which case we get peace – or they ignore him and continue their current nuclear trajectory – in which case it would certainly be good for Americans to know whether those nuclear-launch buttons actually work. It’s all very rational.

    In his best moments, Trump is a peacenik. That’s why he penned love letters to Kim Jong-un. Unlike his predecessors, he’s interested in real peace, not just the appearance of it. That didn’t win him the Nobel Peace Prize, yet, but it could stave off atomic Armageddon for a few more years. Or not.

  • Brigitte Macron has run out of sympathy

    Ten people have been on trial this week in Paris, accused of transphobic cyberbullying against Brigitte Macron. France’s first lady, the wife of Emmanuel Macron, pressed charges after a claim that she was in fact a man went global. Some of those in the dock have apologized for spreading the allegations online but others have said that it’s just a bit of harmless fun and that in a free country one should be able to say what one likes.

    This argument was dismissed by Brigitte Macron’s lawyer, Jean Ennochi, who said: “They all talk to you about freedom of expression, defamation, they completely deny cyberbullying [and] mob harassment.” Prosecutors have demanded suspended prison sentences ranging from three to twelve months for the accused. The judges will give their verdict in January.

    Perhaps Madame Macron should have followed the late Queen of England’s maxim of “never complain, never explain.” Had she done so, the claims that she was a man would probably have not been covered across the world, from the BBC to the New York Times.

    But Macron felt compelled to take action after what began as a one-woman smear campaign turned into a global conspiracy theory. The American influencer, Candace Owens, began pushing the theory in 2024 and eventually released an eight-part podcast. She is being sued by the Macrons.

    The originator of the claim that Brigitte is a man who transitioned is a Frenchwoman in her fifties called Natacha Rey. She took a dislike to Brigitte from the moment her husband was elected president in 2017 and began a three-year “investigation” into her background. No one took any notice of Rey’s social media rants at first. That may have been because of the goodwill most people in France felt towards Brigitte Macron. She seemed like a grounded woman who was more in touch with the average citizen than her husband. They were prepared to overlook the “weird” circumstances of how they met; she was a 39-year-old teacher, a married woman with three children, and he was a 15-year-old pupil in her theatre class.

    In an Anglophone country more searching questions might have been asked by journalists but in France the fawning mainstream media depicted the union as an inspiring love story. As one paper wrote: “Two thwarted lovers ready to overcome all obstacles: the story begins like a Molière comedy.”

    In the early days of Macron’s presidency, Brigitte earned the respect of the French by fronting a campaign against bullying in schools and supporting victims of violence. But then stories began emerging that eroded much of the goodwill: the €600,000 ($694,000) that the Élysée Palace spent on flowers in 2020, the year when Macron locked the French in their homes because of Covid.

    In the summer of 2023 it was disclosed that Brigitte had forked out €315,808 ($365,000) on clothes in the past 12 months. “Brigitte Macron has a particular fondness for luxury items,” explained a fashion magazine, listing her favorite designers as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Chanel.

    The following year Brigitte made a guest appearance in Emily in Paris, the spectacularly vacuous Netflix sitcom that depicts the lives of the rich and frivolous in the French capital. It was not well received. France was in political turmoil, the country was ravaged by violence, the cost of living was soaring and here was Brigitte simpering on screen.

    Barely anyone in France takes seriously the claim that Brigitte Macron is a man. But whereas a few years ago many would have sprung to her defence now they just shrug. They have scant sympathy even if, as one of Brigitte’s daughters told the court this week, her mother suffers from the “horrible” things said about her. The view of the majority is “so what?” They have suffered eight years of her husband’s chaotic presidency.

    Brigitte was asked in an interview last December about the fraught relationship between her husband and his people. She replied that they “don’t deserve him.” It was a provocative remark and, judging from the slap Brigitte gave her husband a few weeks later, he can also drive her to distraction. “We are not an ideal couple,” Brigitte said of her marriage in 2019. The French would agree.

  • Activist silence over Sudan speaks volumes

    Activist silence over Sudan speaks volumes

    The city of El Fasher, long a symbolic and strategic stronghold in Darfur, has in recent days become the site of atrocities so grave that the United Nations has openly warned of the risk of genocide. Videos reviewed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights show scores of unarmed men executed in cold blood, some lying dead at the feet of Rapid Support Forces fighters, others dragged off and detained. Journalists and aid workers have disappeared. The last remaining functional hospital was shelled, killing patients and staff. The Saudi Maternity Hospital, once a rare lifeline, is now a mass grave.

    Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has confirmed that his office is receiving “multiple, alarming reports” of summary executions and ethnically motivated killings. He has also warned of sexual violence, the targeting of civilians, and the use of starvation as a weapon.

    In January 2025, the United States government officially recognized the situation in Darfur as a genocide. That designation was based on documented patterns of targeted violence against the Masalit and other ethnic groups, carried out by the RSF with deliberate and systematic brutality. What is happening in El Fasher now appears to be a continuation of that same pattern, on a new and terrifying scale.

    Yet despite this, global attention has been almost non-existent. There are no viral campaigns, no slogans echoing across protest marches, no campus occupations. The cultural and political forces that mobilized with speed and intensity over Gaza have, in the case of Sudan, fallen almost entirely silent. The contrast is stark.

    The numbers speak with grim clarity. The Sudanese conflict has killed at least 150,000 people, displaced over ten million, and according to some reports starved thousands of children. Entire cities have been razed. Bodies lie buried in shallow graves along roadsides. And still, the attention from media, advocacy groups, and international institutions pales into insignificance when compared with the hysteria over Gaza.

    This dissonance raises uncomfortable questions. Why does a genocide carried out by paramilitaries with a documented record of mass atrocities provoke so little public response? Why has the legacy of the Janjaweed, now rebranded as the RSF, not inspired the same moral mobilization as other contemporary crises? It cannot be for lack of evidence. Nor can it be due to the complexity of the conflict, for the situation in Gaza is hardly less contested or politicized. The absence of Sudan from the activist conscience is hard to explain.

    Perhaps it’s a case of ideological selectivity. The Gaza conflict fits into a broader matrix of anti-colonial, racial and political narratives that have been adopted by global protest movements. Sudan, by contrast, does not map easily onto these frameworks. There are no obvious Western powers to blame, no clean dichotomy of occupier and occupied. And so, the killing of Sudanese civilians, even on genocidal terms, fails to galvanize.

    This is not an argument about proportionality. Every innocent civilian death is a tragedy, whether in Gaza, Sudan, or anywhere else. But the silence around Sudan is not merely an oversight. It is a revealing index of what captures the moral imagination of the world, and what does not. It suggests that certain atrocities only gain traction when they resonate with a pre-established political script, however transparently manipulated.

    Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, has called the El Fasher hospital attack “horrific” and reiterated that “health care is not a target.” The Sudanese Journalists’ Syndicate has demanded the release of Muammar Ibrahim and warned that communications blackouts are placing civilians and reporters at grave risk. Such pleas relating to hospitals and journalists may sound familiar from a war where one side openly and deliberately abused medical facilities and the guise of journalists to carry out brutal terrorism and killing: that in Gaza. And still, in this case, the world barely blinks.

    Sudan does not lack for suffering. What it lacks is a globalised network of advocacy targeting our media, schools, universities, pop concerts, fashion designs, and cultural institutions. The very experts and campaigners who demand accountability elsewhere must now be asked: why have they gone quiet here? If the war in Gaza is paused why has none of their energy to write open letters and organise marches been directed toward the dying in El Fasher?

    I know the answer. Do you?

  • Trump’s Asian vacation

    Trump’s Asian vacation

    President Trump is meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever it is in Asia. Regardless of the time, the meeting will have enormous implications for the future of the US economy and for geopolitical stability. Don’t worry, Trump told his dinner companions in South Korea last night. The three-to-four-hour meeting “will lead to something that’s going to be very, very satisfactory to China and to us. I think it’s going to be a very good meeting. I look forward to it tomorrow morning when we meet.”

    The China summit will cap what’s been an absolutely delightful Asian invasion for Trump and his retinue. Trump told reporters last week that he felt incredibly lucky. And he’s grinned his way across the largest continent like the luckiest man alive, on the vacation of his dreams.

    First, he did the Trump Dance on the tarmac in Kuala Lumpur alongside beautiful, gleaming young people dressed in traditional Malaysian garb. That was so much fun that he danced on his way out of Malaysia as well. Then, it was off to Japan, where he got a nice boat trip and appeared with new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi on an aircraft carrier. “This woman is a winner,” he said as he embraced Takaichi. Later, Trump and his new “very close friend” ate American rice and American beef at Akasaka Palace, watched the Japanese-tinged World Series together, and signed baseball hats that read “JAPAN IS BACK.”

    Next came South Korea, for a state dinner that featured “Korean Flavors meet American spirit, celebrating the enduring friendship through taste.” The dishes included “a salad of shrimp, scallops and abalone tossed with autumn herbs in a classic Thousand Island dressing” (gross), and A Korean Platter of Sincerity: “Braised short ribs featuring tender Us beef complimented by chestnuts, mushrooms radish and carrot, served with steam rice and spinach soybean paste soup” (good). Trump also enjoyed Grilled deodeok with gochujang-ketchup glaze and a “Peacemakers Dessert” with gold adorned brownie and seasonal fruits served with buckwheat tea.

    This sounds like the Best Trip Ever, and Trump even skipped what we would all do if going to Asia for the first time. No Mount Fuji, Shibuya Crossing, Nintendo Museum, or Gangnam district for him. He should give his gold-adorned brownie to whoever set up his amazing itinerary, even if it was Chat GPT.

    North Korea appears to be off the table this week. The Trump Magic Peace Touch must bless Korean Unification at a later date. Trump said to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung that “You have a neighbor that hasn’t been as nice as they could be, and I think they will be. I know Kim Jong Un very well, and I think things will work out very well.”

    When Trump meets with Xi today (tomorrow), they’ll be discussing the ongoing trade war and tensions over rare-earth minerals and fentanyl production. “We have to get rid of it,” Trump said. They won’t, however, be discussing ongoing tensions between China and Taiwan. “Taiwan is Taiwan,” Trump said, which is very true. He won’t be doing the Trump Dance in Taipei on this trip, even though Taiwanese food is particularly delicious.

  • Is America at war?

    Is America at war?

    President Trump’s undeclared war on Latin America’s drug smugglers escalated dramatically on Tuesday when US air strikes destroyed four more boats allegedly carrying narcotics – this time in the eastern Pacific Ocean 400 miles south of the Mexican coastal city of Acapulco.

    At least fourteen crew members died in the attacks, and one was rescued alive by the Mexican navy, bringing the total number killed by the US campaign in the last two months to 57.

    Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the attacks as a violation of international law, and said Mexico’s ambassador in Washington would lodge a protest and demand an explanation from US officials.

    The latest strikes were personally authorized by Trump and announced by War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Videos were released showing the boats hit and bursting into flames. One of them appeared to be laden with large parcels which Hegseth claimed were drugs bound for America’s cities.

    Although the nationality of the vessels was not disclosed, the location of the strikes in the Pacific suggests that they were Colombian. The left-wing Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, has been engaged in a war of words with the Trump administration who accuse him of ties to the drugs cartels. During a recent visit to the UN in New York, Petro called the strikes a war crime, and Washington responded by sanctioning him and his family members.

    The previous US air strikes hit Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean, and were aimed at another leftist regime – Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro. Eight Venezuelan vessels have been sunk by the strikes since August , and dozens of their crew members killed.

    Maduro responded to the attacks by accusing Trump of planning to overthrow his regime, and mobilized his defense militia to resist. Trump has made little secret of his desire to be rid of the socialist President, whose rule has plunged the oil rich nation into economic chaos and has led to one in three Venezuelans fleeing their country, with many heading towards the America. Trump has openly ordered the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela aimed at deposing Maduro, whose reelection last year is widely thought to have been rigged.

    The Trump administration is shaking a very big stick against its Latin American neighbours. The Gerald Ford carrier group, whose eponymous flagship is the world’s biggest warship, is currently sailing from the Mediterranean to join the Naval task force already patrolling the Venezuelan coast.

    Although the aggressive US air war against drug smugglers has been denounced by several Latin American states, Trump is gambling that it proves popular in the US where cities have been ravaged by drugs like cocaine and fentanyl that have their origins south of the Rio Grande.

    Mexico, which has historically fought several shooting wars with America, is in the front line of this latest conflict. However, President Sheinbaum is constrained in her protests because she is currently engaged in delicate trade talks with Trump to try and moderate the tariffs that he is imposing on this, the most populous and powerful Latin American nation.

  • Will Hamas give ‘cold peace’ a chance?

    Will Hamas give ‘cold peace’ a chance?

    Gaza was always going to be a hard lift, and it is proving to be exactly that. The two years of fighting were hard and deadly. Establishing a stable peace after the fighting ended is proving just as hard, despite the promising settlement negotiated by President Trump’s emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

    Looking forward, there is some good news and some major obstacles to success beyond Phase One of the peace deal.

    Let’s start with two pieces of very good news. First, Hamas has released all its living hostages. They are still holding some bodies of the dead, despite explicit promises to return them. Pause for a moment to consider the moral depravity of killing innocent people and then holding their bodies for ransom.

    Still, releasing the living hostages is a huge step with important strategic consequences. The humanitarian consequences are obvious. The return of loved ones is an enormous relief for their anguished families and for hundreds of thousands of supporters who marched in the streets, demanding their return, even if that meant concessions to the terrorists who held them.

    As long as Hamas held the hostages, Israel’s leaders not only faced ongoing political pressure, the country’s military had to avoid tactics that might endanger the Israeli captives. Now, with those captives returned, that constraint is removed.

    If the Netanyahu government determines Hamas is violating major elements of the ceasefire, it can use military force to punish the terror group and make its violations more costly. That’s exactly what the Israeli Air Force did earlier this week after Hamas killed two Israeli soldiers. The major constraint for the Netanyahu government now is avoiding a direct conflict with the Trump administration over Israeli retaliation.

    The other piece of good news is the sharp limitation of Iran’s role in the Middle East and especially in Gaza. For years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has lived up to its name, establishing, funding, and supporting violent, Islamist terror groups surrounding Israel. In the war that began October 7, 2023, the Jewish state rolled back those groups one by one, extinguishing the “ring of fire,” and decimating the regime in Tehran that sponsors them.

    These other, Iran-affiliated groups launched their own attacks on Israel immediately after Hamas did. Their collective goal was not only to kill Jews but to divide and overwhelm Israeli forces. They failed in that mission and were successively destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

    After dealing with this “ring of fire,” Israel launched a two-week long aerial attack on its sponsor, Iran, and especially on its program to develop nuclear weapons. US bombers completed the last phase of that attack, taking out a nuclear production site buried too deeply for Israel jets. The current program was obliterated and will take years to rebuild.

    The Trump administration did something more: it punished Iran financially. The first Trump administration had imposed serious sanctions that left Iran almost broke. The Biden administration discarded that successful program and allowed Tehran to sell oil freely and pocket billions of dollars, some of it used to fund terror groups across the region. The second Trump administration re-imposed – and rigorously enforced – the sanctions against the Mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard.

    The Iranian regime still has enough money to pay for repression and cooptation at home, but it doesn’t have enough to fund the resurgence of its terror networks across the Middle East. Although those groups will try to rebuild, they will have to do so without the financial and material support Iran has long provided.

    The good news, then, is that Iran has been reined in and Phase One peace settlement in Gaza signed. There is still more good news in the support of that Gaza deal by so many Muslim-majority nations.

    The bad news is that governing Gaza and ensuring peace there will be extremely hard.

    No one expects Gaza (or the West Bank, for that matter) to establish a stable, comprehensive peace with Israel. The enmity is too great, the Islamist resistance too strong. A more realistic outcome would be one that simply allowed the residents of Gaza to live their lives in peace, no longer dominated by Hamas and other terror groups or by corrupt leaders who steal the humanitarian aid to enrich themselves and strengthen their political hold on the area. That modest aim would mean a “cold peace,” at best, like Israel’s current arrangements with Egypt and Jordan, not a warmer one envisioned by the Abraham Accords with the Gulf States.

    There are three obstacles to achieving even that modest goal in Gaza:

    1. Hamas has already come out of its hiding places and started killing local opponents in Gaza. Hamas has executed over 100 locals since the ceasefire. They have done the killings publicly as a show of force, designed to intimidate everyone in Gaza.

    2. Hamas is working hard to ensure it plays a major role in Gaza’s governance and could make up half of the so-called “technocratic” commission that will govern the area. The other half will be members of the Palestinian Authority. The PA is non-democratic, corrupt to its core, and happy to reward families of terrorists killed in attacks on Israel. It is a sick joke to call members of these groups “apolitical technocrats.”

    3. Two of the outside powers involved in Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction are regimes that routinely support Islamist attacks on Israel. Giving Turkey and Qatar a
    large role in post-war Gaza is a major error by the Trump administration and will have lasting consequences. Neither country has positive relations with Israel and can hardly be expected to encourage Gazans to seek one, either.

    These three obstacles amount to one overriding problem. The proposed governing arrangements for Gaza are weak protection against the resurgence of Islamist factions there.

    Put differently, the problem of rebuilding Gaza is not just one of establishing a stable government and paying billions for reconstruction, hard as those tasks are. It is also preventing Hamas and other Islamist factions from regaining control, stamping out peaceful opponents, and continuing to dominate the educational system and educate children in Jew-hatred.

    Those groups will seek to regroup and resume their decades-old terror struggle against the Jewish state. The big questions are whether they will succeed and whether the turmoil in Gaza will limit the great counter-movement for peace and cooperation: the Abraham Accords.

  • How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

    How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

    Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.

    Polling is consistent, showing increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters

    The polling on this question has been consistent and widespread, finding a clear trendline toward increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters. In America, the widely respected Harvard-Harris poll found last month that nearly half of Generation Z respondents supported Hamas over Israel, and more than a third of millennials shared their views.

    Gallup’s July survey found support among those aged 18 to 34 for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Iran to be just 9 and 15 percent respectively. A Quinnipiac survey which previously showed strong majorities believing it is in America’s interest to favor Israel found support had fallen from 69 percent in December 2023 to 47 percent today, driven by a significant increase in skepticism among younger voters.

    And a major study released in October by the conservative Family Research Council that surveyed American Christians found just six in ten regular churchgoers believe it’s important to pray for Israel, and a majority did not believe it was important for the United States or for their churches to support Israel. Consistent with other polling, churchgoing Gen Z respondents ranked the lowest in favoring any kind of support – prayer, verbal, or financial. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, it would have seemed ludicrous to predict this level of dropoff. But for those who consistently conduct polling on this topic, the trend is both undeniable and the reasons too convoluted to explain with simple questions.

    “For young people on the left, it’s a racial thing, a victimhood thing,” one pollster told me. “On the right, I think it’s more complicated. There’s a strong narrative that’s taken hold in a younger generation that claims American foreign policy is still overwhelmingly being dictated by the Jews, not ‘America First’ influences. So being an Israel skeptic has become a transgressive revolt against the establishment – and people need to understand that even for those who support him, Trump is the new establishment.”

    What has helped this trend take hold in the minds of some young conservatives is that sometimes the actions of Israel’s most vociferous supporters trigger callbacks to the speech codes of the American left. A survey over the summer conducted by Turning Point USA of roughly 7,000 attendees who participated in their major student activist conference in Tampa, Florida, found that 73 percent self-identify as pro-Israel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t recoil at what they view as a tendency by some Israel supporters to frame criticism of the nation or its political leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu as anti-Semitism.

    “One of the things that’s driving more people away from Israel is when you shut them down and don’t say they’re allowed to ask certain questions,” Andrew Kolvet, Charlie Kirk’s producer, said in a NewsNation interview outlining the results of the survey and a series of focus groups. “We have lived through an era where they were called racist if they felt like DEI was a problem. A lot of these kids have been steeped in a world where they were told they couldn’t say something, then the floodgates broke open and now they can say it, and now they feel like the anti-Semite word is being thrown out just like the racist word was a few years ago.”

    The effort Kirk and his team placed on navigating the complicated feelings on campuses about Israel, even gathering multiple Jewish and non-Jewish influencers to discuss the questions he was getting from fans in the weeks prior to his death, indicates how much this area has become a minefield for the young right.

    The Mike Huckabee generation of America’s baby boomer Christians who looked forward to their church’s annual trip to the Promised Land may still be in key positions within the Republican party, but they no longer dominate the conversation online or among younger voters. And for people raised on the idea that a core principle of “America First” foreign policy is avoiding entangling alliances which risk dragging the United States into needless wars, Israel is the number one example.

    Yet for some avowed supporters of Israel, the real story here isn’t entirely or even mostly an organic one, but is driven by a number of intentional actors with their own agendas, backed and promoted by foreign or anti-American interests. Mark Levin, the radio host and Fox News anchor, has taken to labeling these forces “the enemy within,” a combination of media figures and politicians he believes have seen their rhetoric boosted and shared across social media in an attempt to break the America-Israel alliance.

    The ongoing feud on this question between Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson (Levin calls him “Chatsworth Qatarlson”) has been just one of many to play out on social media and across a vast diaspora of podcasts, many of which have stronger consumption among politically engaged young people than the cable-news programs that once dictated the direction of foreign-policy debate.

    In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away so it cannot be considered lost

    Just as the degradation of power held by the Democratic media establishment has furthered the fortunes of radical candidates like Zohran Mamdani, the fear among some pro-Israel activists is that diminishing strength of leadership on the right could lead to critics of the Israel alliance – like once-MAGA darling Marjorie Taylor Greene – taking on larger roles within the coalition. And behind it all is an abiding concern about the future of the Republican party after Donald Trump. As much as Trump has cemented his place in the minds of many as the most pro-Israel President in American history, his heir apparent is viewed with significantly more skepticism. The potential of a J.D. Vance contest against the likes of Marco Rubio for the GOP nomination in 2028 could become one where differences of opinion on Israel take center stage.

    There is near-universal acknowledgment on the part of American Jewish activists that there is a problem here for their cause, but the question of what to do about it prompts little in the way of answers. AIPAC, the much criticized pro-Israel lobbying group, recently rolled out an ad campaign to rebrand their organization as “America First” to online derision. The elevation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison, who is very public about his pro-Israel views, has prompted hopes for more pro-Israel commentary from a network that has courted controversy with their coverage.

    But there is a noticeable lack of vibrant leadership making the case for Israel to young audiences – a fact that becomes all the more noticeable with the loss of Kirk. “We know the kind of voices we need, we just don’t have them right now,” one Jewish activist told me. And in their absence, anti-Israel voices such as Nick Fuentes’s can fill the void.

    When CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil put the question to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing a poll showing just 14 percent of Americans under 30 support Israel, his response was clear-eyed. “I think the first fix is to finish the war as speedily as possible, something that I have sought to do against all these contrarian propaganda… so, first, you want to end it, end the war speedily, because in the TikTok age and in the television age, letting wars go on too long is going to cost you precisely what it cost you. There’s a real battle on the social media. It’s a big battle. It’s a battle for truth, really.” Netanyahu’s answer implies that Israel is losing that battle.

    In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away, so it cannot yet be considered lost. The lack of bipartisan support for Israel has been an acknowledged problem for years, and now the danger of real opposition within both parties is a growing concern that can’t be ignored. For now, Israel backers can hold on to the reality that they continue to get the votes they need and the backing of many of the most prominent American politicians.

    So long as Donald Trump is the leader of the GOP, he defines “America First” – as he reiterated when some of his MAGA supporters were invoking the prospect of World War Three during the debate over striking Iran. He has given no indication of handing over the reins to anyone else.

    It is important to remember that there is a time for war and a time for peace. The debate over the Israeli alliance takes on a different nature in both contexts in American politics. The emergence of an emboldened anti-Israel faction of the American right has been driven not just by prominent voices but by the images from Gaza blasted across TikTok. With a ceasefire in place, a renewed conversation can be had. Israel’s focus remains survival above all else, even if the destruction of its enemies has come with a critical loss of western support. In the hierarchy of needs, staying alive matters most. The arguments can wait for another day.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • How the drug cartels are ‘diversifying’ into baby-trafficking

    How the drug cartels are ‘diversifying’ into baby-trafficking

    Juárez, Mexico

    On the morning of September 2, in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexican law enforcement raided a remote safehouse and uncovered one of the most grotesque cartel operations they had ever encountered. They found not just the usual drugs but rudimentary medical equipment and bloodstained tarps. The evidence confirmed what many investigators had suspected but couldn’t prove: that growing US demand has created a black market in human babies. Police arrested a brutal female gangster, Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, who was allegedly running an operation that procured these babies, luring in young mothers and performing illegal C-sections. On the streets they call her La Diabla: the She-Devil.

    Many of these women were lured with promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy

    For months, the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had tracked La Diabla’s movements. The dossier they compiled before the raid described a woman who was an expert at seeking out impoverished, pregnant girls and reeling them in with promises of work or money. For the girls in La Diabla’s grip, the promises proved empty. The babies were cut from the young mothers’ bodies and sold for as much as 250,000 pesos ($14,000) to American buyers in El Paso, Texas. It has been alleged that many of the girls did not survive the ordeal and their organs became another product to be sold.

    This seems almost too macabre to be true, but an account I heard from the mother of one victim persuaded me that the worst can and does happen. I talked to her in a cramped car in Chihuahua state as she clutched a rosary. “My daughter was a good person, she never wronged anybody… she was so excited to have her baby, investigators asked me if my daughter wanted to sell her baby, but that wasn’t the case. She was already buying everything for her son, and telling her daughter how she was going to be a big sister.”

    Her voice broke as she described searching police stations, hospitals, morgues – any place that might give her answers after her daughter went missing. It was only after La Diabla’s arrest that investigators confirmed that her daughter had been one of La Diabla’s alleged victims, lured with the promise of money for prenatal care. In the end she was butchered for profit.

    It would be one thing if La Diabla were a horrific anomaly but such stories echo across Mexico’s northern states, where women vanish daily into the machinery of organized crime. For years, Juárez has been synonymous with femicide, the killings of women often dismissed as collateral damage in cartel wars. La Diabla’s alleged operation is only the latest twist in the awful story.

    Many of the women who fell into her operation were offered promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy, others with invitations to make new friends or meet a man interested in taking them on a date. One woman told me she narrowly escaped La Diabla’s network. She had been promised simple, legal work for quick pay in Juárez, nothing that seemed suspicious at first. “My friend had been working with people in Juárez and making money, so I guess she told them to contact me. Over messages the guy made it seem like a good deal and I wouldn’t have to stay long. They said they wanted to help me because I’m pregnant and they kept telling me how much money I would make with them.”

    She described being contacted over Facebook by a persistent individual, urging her to meet. This Facebook profile was later identified as one of those linked to La Diabla. A relative became suspicious and advised her that the offer seemed odd and the young woman backed out of the meeting. Her testimony is now part of the prosecution’s case. Her survival offers a rare glimpse into the mechanics of the trade: recruitment, transport and coercion. How many others never made it out alive?

    Investigations into this network, on both sides of the border, are only just beginning. A Mexican law-enforcement source who worked on the investigation spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. He told me: “There is a lot of talk that these babies were sold into illegal adoption but when we checked the phone contacts of the woman [La Diabla], the men transferring the money and crossing the babies were smugglers. We don’t know where the babies eventually ended up.”

    These smugglers are experts in moving everything and anything across the border. One man was recently found to have a six-week-old Bengal tiger cub from Tijuana in his car. Dried hummingbirds – a necessary ingredient for a folk-magic love potion – have been seized. Smuggling babies is more complex. Sham paperwork is often procured, including Mexican birth certificates, while the babies are sometimes drugged to ensure they don’t start crying, bringing attention to the smugglers.

    Why would the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), one of the world’s wealthiest cartels, move into baby-trafficking? The short answer is that there’s money in it, and because impunity allows experimentation. Trafficking older children has long been a shadow industry in Latin America and the US, for illegal adoptions, child labor, sex-trafficking. But the industrial-scale operation uncovered in Juárez points to something new: a cartel cutting babies straight out of mothers and then selling them to the highest bidder.

    Since January, the southern border crackdown has hit cartel profits harder than most US policymakers probably realize. Stricter enforcement and expanded surveillance have disrupted some of CJNG’s most lucrative human-smuggling routes and slowed the flow of fentanyl shipments north.

    To compensate, cartels have pivoted, inventing new economies of violence. Baby-trafficking, organ-harvesting, crypto-laundering – each is a response to lost revenue. Every shift in US policy changes the underworld of organized crime. Crackdowns don’t end the business, they mutate it.

    Cartels adapt faster than the governments trying to contain them, turning political victories in Washington into new criminal blueprints in Sinaloa, Jalisco, and now Juárez. The arrest of La Diabla was made possible by unprecedented coordination between US and Mexican agencies.

    NCTC Director Joe Kent later called it a “terrorist cartel” operation, a phrase once controversial, now codified by President Trump’s designation of CJNG and other cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This meant that US counterterrorism infrastructure could be redirected against them. Intelligence once focused on al-Qaeda and ISIS now targets cartels such as CJNG that control swaths of Mexican territory with military precision.

    After the border crackdown, cartels have pivoted – inventing new economies of violence

    US officials insist this is the only way to treat them: as terrorists. And yet, for families in Juárez, Chihuahua, Guadalajara, and beyond, the designation doesn’t matter. What matters is that women are dying, babies are vanishing, and every cartel bust feels like just another head cut from a hydra.

    “This is one example of what terrorist cartels will do to diversify their revenue streams and finance operations,” Kent said. Yet what I saw in Juárez was beyond policy language. It was the commodification of life at its most obscene. For American couples desperate for a baby, willing to look the other way about how it came into their arms, $14,000 is a fraction of the cost of legal adoption. For child-traffickers, it’s even better, and for CJNG, it’s a goldmine. But for the women left behind, it’s a death sentence.

    As La Diabla sits in a Juárez prison awaiting trial, the questions are piling up. How many babies were sold? How many women were allegedly killed? Who on the US side is being held accountable for buying into this supply chain? Mexican authorities say they have identified several women connected to the network, though they will not disclose their identities.

    US officials insist investigations into American buyers are ongoing. But in borderland cities like Juárez, the fear remains. Everyone wonders if another La Diabla is already taking her place.

    For the families I spoke to, there’s no comfort in intelligence victories or policy designations. There is only the gnawing absence of their daughters and granddaughters and the knowledge that somewhere, their stolen babies might still be alive, raised in American suburbs with no memory of the women who carried them.

    Before I left Chihuahua, the mother I interviewed cried with me for her daughter and the granddaughter she leaves behind. “I want justice, I want this woman to pay for what she did to my daughter. She was smirking in the courtroom, and I need her to pay.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.