Armenia made a quiet announcement a couple of days ago. Customs officials stopped a truck coming in from Iran and found 143 bundles of natural hair (about 57 pounds of it) hidden inside pillows in the driver’s cabin. Since January there have been 11 separate smuggling attempts with nearly 300 pounds of hair, total.

Iranian activists immediately raised a very grim possibility…that some of it came from protesters killed during the January demonstrations. Tens of thousands took to the streets. Many didn’t come home. The regime has a documented history of refusing to return bodies to families.

The more likely explanation, according to Roger Macmillan, former security director at Iran International, is something almost as grim: women selling their own hair because they’ve run out of other options. Either way, both reasons are horrific.

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The hair trade in Iran isn’t new but it’s exploding. By April 2025, Iranian state media was reporting on it openly. Flyers advertising hair purchases were plastered on shop windows, street signs, and university entrances across Tehran. The going rate ranged from about $40 for shorter locks to $2,000 for uncut hair over 35 inches. Buyers set up on sidewalks. Online platforms joined in.

The women selling aren’t doing it for a change of look. A barber quoted in Iranian daily Khorasan said almost all of his clients come in for financial reasons. The sellers range from 10-year-old girls to elderly women, though most are young women from poor families trying to pay a bill or keep the lights on.

This is what economic collapse looks like at the human level. Not charts. Not percentages. Women sitting in a chair and letting a stranger cut off their hair for forty dollars.

If that were the full picture, it would be enough. But it isn’t.

Iran has had a functioning organ market for years. Kidney ads near hospitals. Online listings that read like classified ads for used appliances. “Blood type O, age 29. Selling half a liver and bone marrow.” One man posted: “Selling body parts, even the heart, for my wife and four children. For one meal without anxiety.”

Middlemen send donors to Turkey, Iraq, and the UAE where a kidney can sell for $7,000 to $15,000. The donor, already desperate, gets a fraction of that. One woman in Tehran told reporters she was renting out her womb on top of selling a kidney. For $115 a month. To keep her six-year-old daughter fed.

Children as young as 16 are in this market.

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Iran’s Central Bank data from April 2026 shows year-on-year inflation of 267% for oils and fats, 209% for rice, 191% for chicken, and 161% for eggs and dairy. Bread is now being rationed in multiple provinces — bakeries limiting customers to three loaves at a time. The average Iranian worker earns less than a third of what the government’s economists say is needed to stay out of poverty. Half of men aged 25 to 40 are unemployed and not able to look for work.

The regime is simultaneously waging a war, a Strait of Hormuz blockade, financial sanctions, drought, and locust infestations. It responds to protests with mass arrests and executions. It shuts down the internet, which wipes out the income of self-employed women who relied on online platforms. Then it watches as those same women try to figure out what part of themselves they can sell.

This gets described as an economic crisis. And technically, that’s accurate. However, “economic crisis” is the kind of phrase that creates distance. It suggests a bad run of luck, mismanagement, forces beyond anyone’s control.

What’s happening in Iran isn’t that. It’s the predictable outcome of a government that has treated its own population as a resource to be managed rather than people to be served. The Iranian regime didn’t stumble into this. For decades it made choices that concentrated wealth and power at the top and let everyone else absorb the consequences.

In Weimar Germany, economic collapse gave antisemitic movements their opening. In the Soviet Union, collectivization policies produced famine while the state exported grain. The mechanism was different each time. The logic was the same: people at the bottom are expendable.

Iran’s women are now selling the only things they have left. Their hair. Their kidneys. Their bodies.

The regime calls it a matter of personal choice and Sharia compliance. One member of Iran’s Health Commission said in 2017, regarding the organ trade: “There is nothing wrong when a person who lives in poverty transforms his life” by selling a kidney.

That’s not a social safety net. That’s a government telling its people their suffering is their own business.

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When the Armenia story broke, it barely registered in Western media. There were bigger headlines to keep people looking away from real atrocities.

This is what dehumanization looks like when it isn’t dramatic enough to trend. It’s a truck full of hair hidden in pillows at a border crossing. It’s a flyer on a university wall with a phone number for buyers. It’s a 33-year-old father posting his blood type online.

It’s a government that has so thoroughly gutted the lives of its own people that selling a piece of yourself is a rational decision.

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Armenia hair smuggling bust, Roger Macmillan assessment, food price data: The Jerusalem Post, June 11, 2026

The Trap Is Designed

The Germans had a word for what they wanted. They’d used it in Warsaw and Vienna and Amsterdam. Now, in the fall of 1941…they wanted it in Paris. The word was Judenrat. A Jewish council. One body, one address, one set of names they could call when they needed something done.

Theodor Dannecker was thirty years old and had been working for Adolf Eichmann since he was twenty-four. He was precise, efficient, and emotionless about his work. As head of the Gestapo’s Office for Jewish Affairs in Paris, his job was to implement the Final Solution in France, and one of the first things he understood was that it couldn’t be done cleanly without an administrative intermediary. There were around 300,000 Jews of France who were scattered across two zones — the German-occupied north and the so-called Free Zone in the south, still technically governed by the French under Marshal Pétain from the resort town of Vichy. They spoke different languages, came from different countries, worshipped in different ways. There were the old French Jewish families, the Israélites who had lived in France for generations and considered themselves thoroughly French. There were also the immigrants — the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and Austrians who had fled east European poverty or Nazi persecution and arrived in France between the wars. These two communities barely recognized each other as the same thing. Getting them into a single room was hard enough. Getting them onto a single list was another matter entirely.

In early 1941, Dannecker tried first, pushing for a coordinating committee of Jewish welfare organizations in Paris. In April 1941 the Comité de Coordination des Oeuvres de Bienfaisance du Grand Paris was formally declared. As a tool of control, it failed almost immediately. The established community leaders wouldn’t play the role Dannecker needed. They cooperated on charity work and nothing else.

So Dannecker went to Xavier Vallat.

Vallat was sixty-one years old, one-eyed, one-armed, and had been a vocal antisemite in the French parliament since the 1920s. He was now the Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, a position he’d pursued with the enthusiasm of a man who had trained and waited his entire career for this exact job. He didn’t need the Germans to tell him to hate Jews. He’d been doing that on his own for decades. He understood that Dannecker’s request, create a centralized Jewish organization that would serve also serve French interests, on that would give France control. If the Germans were going to impose a Jewish council regardless, better that it be a French Jewish council run under French supervision that answered to French authorities. The alternative was a purely German operation which would have been a humiliation to the collaborationist government that still believed with increasingly desperate sincerity that it was managing the occupation rather than being consumed by it.

On November 29, 1941 the Vichy government issued a law creating the Union Générale des Israélites de France. The UGIF.

The law was three pages long and clinical in its language. The UGIF would represent Jews before public authorities. It would handle matters of assistance, welfare, and social reintegration. All existing Jewish organizations in France…every charity, mutual aid society, and religious welfare body were formally dissolved with all their assets transferred to the new organization. Membership was not optional. Every Jew in France automatically belonged to the UGIF…whether they wanted to or not.

The trap was built. Now they needed someone to run it.

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On February 7, 1939, British officials opened the doors of St. James’s Palace in London to both Jewish and Arab delegations. The goal was to negotiate the future of Palestine before a war that everyone could see coming.

The Arab delegation refused to walk through the same door as the Jews.

They wouldn’t sit in the same room. They refused to formally recognize the Jewish Agency as a legitimate body. So the British improvised. They set up separate entrances, assigned separate conference rooms, and spent six weeks shuttling proposals back and forth between two groups who refused to look at each other. There were two official photographs taken of the conference: same British officials, same room setup, one with each side, because that was the only way to document a negotiation that was never actually happening.

Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald served as host and messenger. The Arab delegation was led by followers of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had just spent three years running a violent revolt across Palestine. The Jewish delegation included Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The conference ended on March 17 without an agreement.

To understand what Britain did next, you need to understand what it had already promised, and what it had already tried.

Document One: The Promise

On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the British Zionist Federation. It was short. The key sentence read: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

That was the Balfour Declaration.

It was Britain’s formal, public commitment to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It wasn’t vague about who the beneficiary was. It wasn’t contingent on Arab approval. When the League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, the Balfour Declaration was written directly into it. Supporting a Jewish national home wasn’t a political preference. It was Britain’s stated legal obligation as the administering power.

For two decades, Britain largely kept that commitment. Jewish immigration to Palestine grew significantly through the 1920s and 1930s. Institutions were built. A Jewish community took shape. The infrastructure of what would eventually become a state was put in place.

Then the Arab revolt of 1936 started, and Britain began looking for a way out of the promise it had made.

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Join and me tomorrow, June 11th at 9am EST/2pm UK for a live conversation with Charlie Spickler: and Mitchell Turk, the team behind After Never Again, a feature-length documentary coming to PBS.

The film follows something that’s hard to dismiss once you notice it: across the United States and Canada, in very different communities and contexts, Jewish people are describing the same experience. The details vary. The language shifts. But what’s underneath stays consistent.

After Never Again brings together a wide range of voices including Montana Tucker, Dara Horn, Jonathan Greenblatt, , , and little ol’ me — to talk about what antisemitism actually looks like right now…how it’s being reframed, normalized, and showing up across ideological lines in ways that can’t be written off as isolated incidents.

It’s also made for audiences with no direct connection to Jewish life. Where media coverage has been fragmented and social media has amplified misinformation, this film tries to replace confusion with clarity by grounding everything in lived experience.

At the center of the documentary is the concept of Tribe. Not as a label or a slogan, but as something that surfaces through shared experience: history, customs, language, and a historical connection to the land of Israel. The film finds that people who have never met, thousands of miles apart, keep telling variations of the same story.

This is sure to be an interesting conversation Hope you’ll join us! Please make sure you’re following or subscribed to Guy Montrose and Charlie Spickler! And don’t forget me, Melissa!

June 11, 9am EST/2pm UK. See you here on Substack Live!

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I have two rules I live by. When someone shows me who they are, I believe them. And I go with my gut. The times I’ve ignored either one, it’s cost me.

Both rules apply right now. To all of us.

Left-leaning parties across the western hemisphere have a Jew hatred problem. The Democratic Party. Labour in the UK. The Liberals in Canada. The equivalent parties across Australia and beyond. Not every member. Not every voter. However, the faction that does hate Jews isn’t fringe anymore. It’s winning primaries. It’s sitting in parliaments. It’s setting the tone. And leadership is either cheering it on or deciding it’s not worth the fight to push back.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s what’s been on display, openly, for anyone paying attention.

Jewish voters who have spent their entire lives aligned with the left keep finding ways to explain it away, contextualize it, wait for the party to correct itself from within. Non-Jewish liberals who consider themselves allies go quiet or make excuses because confronting it means confronting something uncomfortable about the coalition they’re part of.

Meanwhile, the people showing exactly who they are keep doing so. Loudly.

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In July 2016, a small leather notebook appeared in the auction catalog at Swann Galleries in New York City. It was listed under the heading “Colonial Religious Manuscript,” the kind of label designed to make you skip it.

Leonard Milberg didn’t skip it.

Milberg was a collector of Judaica, a Princeton graduate, and the kind of person who reads auction catalogs the way other people read newspapers. He saw the listing, went to the gallery to look at it in person, and felt his stomach drop. He recognized the handwriting: microscopic, precise, packed so tightly onto the page that you’d need a magnifying glass just to confirm it was writing at all. He knew exactly what this was. A palm-sized manuscript written in a dungeon, hidden beneath a condemned man’s hat and behind a wall in his house, stolen from a national archive in 1932, and passed quietly through the black market for eighty-four years while scholars assumed it was gone forever.

He called the Mexican consulate. He sat across from Consul Diego Gomez Pickering and spent forty minutes explaining the history of crypto-Judaism and why what was sitting in a New York auction house belonged to Mexico. The gallery pulled the items from sale. Scholars authenticated them. Through diplomatic channels, Milberg arranged the repatriation. The Mexican government later gave him the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor Mexico extends to foreign nationals.

The manuscript went home.

It now sits behind glass at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

The man who wrote it was Luis de Carvajal the Younger. He was twenty-nine years old when the Inquisition burned him alive in Mexico City’s central plaza.

The people who lit that fire believed they were erasing something. They weren’t. They were preserving the final piece of one of the most astonishing survival stories in Jewish history, a story that begins with a brutal ultimatum in Spain in 1492, runs through the desert frontier of northern Mexico, gets passed in whispers from mother to daughter for three centuries, and surfaces in a genetics lab in Texas five hundred years later.

A Choice with No Good Options

Luis de Carvajal didn’t end up in the Mexican desert by accident. His family had been running for a hundred years before he was born.

In 1492, the same year Columbus set sail, the Spanish Crown issued the Alhambra Decree. Jews living in Spain were given thirty days to convert to Christianity or leave. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people chose exile. Many of those who stayed converted — publicly, officially, with a priest and a baptism and a new Christian name. Outwardly they became New Christians. Privately, a significant number stayed Jewish. They kept Shabbat behind closed doors. They said the old prayers in hushed voices. They raised their children in two worlds at once.

Many of those who fled went to what looked like the safest option: Portugal, right next door.

It was not safe.

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Three reports. Thousands of pages. Forensic evidence, survivor testimony, war crimes archives, and legal conclusions endorsed by some of the most credentialed figures in international human rights law.

It appears that most of the world has no idea any of them exist.

This isn’t a mystery. There’s a trail that runs through newsrooms, UN offices, social media platforms, feminist organizations, streaming services, and the quiet decisions of millions of ordinary people who saw the story coming and looked the other way. Every step of the burial can be documented. So…let’s do it, let’s document it.

Step One: Label It So It Can Be Dismissed

The Roberts Report was produced by the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group. That single fact became the weapon used against it before most people had read a word.

An APPG is an informal cross-party group of Members of Parliament and Lords. It has no official parliamentary status. The moment that detail surfaced, the dismissals followed. “Not an official government report.” “Produced by a pro-Israel lobby group.” “Zionist propaganda.” Lord Roberts himself acknowledged it. The internet, he said, had become “the universal lavatory wall.” He believed the report couldn’t be “intellectually and rationally written off.” He was right about the first part. He was wrong about the second.

The labeling strategy is old and reliable. Attach an identity to the source, and a significant portion of the audience stops reading. It doesn’t matter that the report is 318 pages of forensic evidence, cross-referenced testimony, and GoPro footage filmed by the killers themselves. It doesn’t matter that it’s now a permanent parliamentary record. The label did its job before most people ever opened the document.

The Civil Commission’s “Silenced No More” got the same treatment. Led by an Israeli organization, therefore suspect. The Dinah Project: Israeli university, therefore suspect. The fact that “Silenced No More” carries endorsements from a former U.S. Secretary of State, the founding prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, and a former UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide wasn’t enough to override the initial classification. Israeli source. File accordingly.

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Step Two: The New York Times Does What It Does

The most documented single act of suppression in this story is what the New York Times did the night before “Silenced No More” was released.

The Civil Commission approached the Times months before publication. The Times said it wasn’t interested. Then, with full knowledge of the report’s release date, the paper published a prominent op-ed by Nicholas Kristof titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” the night before the most comprehensive account of Hamas’s sexual crimes went public. The piece relied heavily on a report from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, an organization with documented ties to Hamas. It included claims that analysts across the political spectrum described as unverifiable and, in several instances, built on altered testimony.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry stated directly: “Aware of the report and its release date, the night before its release, the NYT ran a shameful attack on Israel, belittling Hamas’ sexual crimes. That tells you everything about the NYT’s agenda.”

NGO Monitor’s founder, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, asked the obvious question publicly: “What are the odds that the grotesque piece via Kristof in the Times, claiming sexual abuse by Israel, randomly appeared on the day that the 300-page definitive documentation of Hamas October 7 rape was released?”

The answer is that it wasn’t random. The Times had the Civil Commission’s embargoed findings. It chose not to run them. Then it ran a counter-narrative timed to dominate the same news cycle. The op-ed flooded feeds. The Civil Commission’s report didn’t. One of those outcomes required effort. The other required nothing at all.

This isn’t an isolated pattern. A study by Fifty Global Research Group analyzing coverage of the Israel-Hamas war across CNN, BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Reuters, and the Associated Press found that the New York Times had a zero percent rate of citing specific militant casualty figures in its Gaza reporting. It used Hamas’s own Health Ministry numbers without noting that those numbers don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. Not a low rate. Zero.

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Step Three: The UN Performs Its Role

Eight weeks. That’s how long it took UN Women to issue a condemnation of the October 7 attack.

In those eight weeks, UN Women published multiple statements about the impact of Israel’s military response on Palestinian women. There was no parallel coverage of the Israeli women who had been raped, murdered, mutilated, or kidnapped. On November 25, 2023, the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls, the organization remained silent on what had happened on October 7.

Then something…interesting…happened. UN Women posted a condemnation of “the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7” on its Instagram page. Then deleted it. Replaced it with a statement calling only for hostage releases, with no condemnation of the perpetrators.

When CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga asked UN Women’s executive director why the organization had failed to specifically name Hamas after seven weeks of mounting evidence, the executive director refused to name Hamas. She said the agency supports an “impartial, independent investigation.”

London’s Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman wrote directly to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls asking why the organization had stayed silent. The Special Rapporteur responded that the evidence wasn’t “solid” enough to warrant a statement. This was said about an attack documented in real time on video, much of it filmed by the perpetrators themselves.

The hashtag #MeToo_UNless_UR_A_Jew was born from exactly this. Created by Israeli feminists Danielle Ofek and Nataly Livski within weeks of the attack, the campaign asked the question that women’s rights organizations refused to answer. Campaign adviser Noa Matz described what the silence communicated: “Israeli and Jewish women’s rights, bodies, souls and physical safety are not as precious as those of other women.”

By the time the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, visited Israel in early 2024 -- nearly four months after the attack -- she acknowledged “reasonable grounds” to believe sexual violence had occurred, including rape and gang rape at multiple locations, and that hostages were likely still being subjected to sexual assault in captivity. But she stopped short of confirming it was systematic. Pro-Palestinian advocacy groups then published detailed rebuttals arguing her findings actually undermined the evidence, despite the report explicitly finding credible evidence of rape and sexualized torture.

By November 2025, a senior UN official publicly and falsely claimed that no independent investigation had found evidence of October 7 rape. The Civil Commission archive, the Dinah Project report, and Patten’s own 2024 findings all directly contradict that claim. The false statement was reported by the Times of Israel. The UN didn’t correct it.

Step Four: The Evidence Gets Erased

Lord Roberts noted it in the foreword to the Roberts Report: much of the original evidence, including footage filmed by Hamas terrorists on their own GoPro cameras, was removed from social media platforms under content guidelines and when official terrorist accounts were banned. The Civil Commission built its archive specifically because its founders understood this was coming. They began collecting immediately after the attacks, preserving material that is no longer publicly accessible anywhere else.

In October 2023, Republican senators including Ted Cruz wrote to X, Meta, TikTok, and Google asking them to commit to preserving a full documentary history of Hamas’s atrocities, warning that standard content policies would likely result in the deletion of the only visual record of what happened. The letter was explicit: the footage documented war crimes in real time. Removing it would serve the deniers.

The preservation didn’t happen at scale. The footage went down. The archive the Civil Commission built is now among the only places where some of that evidence still exists in organized, verified form. That’s why “Silenced No More” matters beyond its legal conclusions. It’s a preservation effort. The researchers who built it knew that without it, the evidence would dissolve.

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Step Five: Hollywood Ignores the Films

The burial didn’t stop at reports. It extended to documentary films, and the pattern there is just as clear.

Sheryl Sandberg’s “Screams Before Silence” (full video in sources) was released in April 2024. The 60-minute film features first-hand accounts from survivors, released hostages, first responders, and forensic experts. It presents direct testimony about the sexual violence committed on October 7 and against hostages in Gaza captivity. Sandberg has called it the most important work of her life. It was screened at the White House and for members of Congress. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer compared it to “Schindler’s List” in terms of its role in countering denial.

Film critics ignored it. The total number of reviews from mainstream outlets can be counted on one hand, with only one coming from a publication of any scale. “Screams Before Silence” wasn’t available on Netflix or any major streaming platform. It was released for free on YouTube, which means there was no financial barrier to access, no distributor standing between the film and the audience. The Hollywood community, which mobilizes rapidly for documentaries it considers important, said nothing.

The “#Nova” documentary faced a starker rejection. Directed by Dan Pe’er, the 52-minute film documents the Supernova music festival massacre using raw, unedited footage -- survivor cell phone video, body cam recordings, and footage from the attackers themselves. No narration. No talking heads. Just the event, as it happened, in sequence. Netflix rejected it. Its commissioning team reportedly described it as “too political.” Thirteen UK Members of Parliament wrote to Netflix urging it to stream the film. Netflix declined.

“Too political” to stream. A documentary consisting entirely of footage shot by the victims and the killers, with no commentary, no narration, no argument being made, was deemed too political to stream. “#Nova” eventually landed on Amazon Prime Video in April 2025. Netflix, which had no such reservations about dozens of other conflict documentaries, passed.

Step Six: The Feminist Establishment Looks Away

Sisters Uncut, a UK feminist charity committed to “taking direct action for domestic violence services,” organized a demonstration that shut down London’s Liverpool Street Station in October 2023. The charity issued a 600-word statement afterward. It contained references to apartheid and genocide. It contained no mention of the 239 kidnapped Israelis, the women among them, or the sexual assaults documented on October 7.

The MeToo movement, which was built on the principle of believing women, amplifying survivor testimony, and refusing to let institutional silence protect perpetrators, said nothing about October 7. Organizations that had spent years arguing that sexual violence in conflict must be named, documented, and prosecuted didn’t apply those principles here.

The explanation sometimes offered is that verification takes time, that organizations must be careful. That argument might carry weight if those same organizations had ever required that standard of verification before speaking out in other conflicts. They hadn’t. The standard appeared when the victims were Jewish and Israeli. It disappeared in every other context.

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Step Seven: The People Who Should Have Amplified It Didn’t

This is where I stop tracing institutional failures and ask the question that has no comfortable answer.

These reports are free. Public. Downloadable in minutes. The Roberts Report is in the parliamentary record. “Silenced No More” is at civilc.org. The Dinah Project’s report is at thedinahproject.org. “Screams Before Silence” is on YouTube at no cost. None of this is hidden. A basic Google search finds all of it in seconds.

So what I genuinely can’t figure out is why every Jewish organization, every Jewish media outlet, every rabbi with a newsletter, every campus Hillel, every federation, every person who hadn’t been hollowed out by pro-Palestinian propaganda didn’t pick these reports up and refuse to let them disappear. The Conference of Presidents. The ADL. AIPAC. Every Jewish community paper from New York to Los Angeles. Why aren’t these reports in every comment thread where October 7 gets minimized? Why isn’t the Civil Commission’s archive cited every time someone tries to reframe what happened? Why hasn’t the Roberts Report become the standard reference every time someone claims Hamas attacked military targets? These organizations have reach, resources, and every reason in the world to ensure this material was inescapable. It wasn’t.

And then there’s the rest of us. “Screams Before Silence” was free and an hour long. The only thing missing was the amplification.

But I have to be honest…I didn’t know about the UK parliamentary report or the Dinah Project. And I’m someone who pays attention, who looks, who cares about exactly this. This is my lane, and those reports never made it to the same roads I travel on. That’s not a personal failing. That’s the burial working exactly as intended.

When the reports aren’t covered, when the films aren’t reviewed, when the counter-narrative runs the night before the evidence drops, the result isn’t that people weigh the cost of sharing and decide against it. The result is that most people never get the chance to make that decision at all. The information doesn’t reach them. It doesn’t reach their feeds, their timelines, their conversations. It simply doesn’t exist in their world.

That’s the most efficient form of suppression there is. Not censorship. Absence.

The Bottom Line

No one issued a burial order. No one had to.

The Roberts Report got dismissed as APPG output: informal, pro-Israel, not official. The Dinah Project got minimal coverage. “Silenced No More” got pre-empted by a timed counter-narrative from the most influential newspaper in the world, which had advance access to the findings and chose to run a counter-op-ed instead.

UN Women took eight weeks to issue a condemnation, then deleted it. The UN’s Special Rapporteur said the evidence wasn’t solid. A senior UN official falsely claimed in November 2025 that no independent probe had found evidence of rape -- a statement contradicted by the Civil Commission, the Dinah Project, and the UN’s own 2024 findings.

Social media platforms deleted footage filmed by the perpetrators themselves. Senators asked them not to. They did it anyway. Netflix called a film made entirely of unedited witness footage “too political” to stream. The Hollywood press corps that reviews documentaries weekly reviewed “Screams Before Silence” almost not at all.

And most of the people who should have been making all of this impossible to ignore -- didn’t.

The evidence is still there. The reports are still public. The archive still exists because the people who built it knew what was coming and prepared for it anyway. That level of foresight, and that level of dedication, deserves more than silence from the people it was built to protect.

The reports are at civilc.org, thedinahproject.org, and in the permanent parliamentary record of the United Kingdom. “Screams Before Silence” is on YouTube. “#Nova” is on Amazon Prime Video. Read them. Watch them. Share them. Because the burial only holds if nobody refuses to dig. Live links are in the sources. Please, let’s finally amplify all of this.

This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lioness roar for the truth.

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Roberts Report (7 October Parliamentary Commission Report)

https://www.7octparliamentarycommission.co.uk/

The Dinah Project — “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond”

https://thedinahproject.org

Civil Commission — “Silenced No More” https://www.civilc.org/silenced-no-more

Full PDF direct download: https://www.civilc.org/_files/ugd/aab121_7ac7981aff1043d49c55e5aeb012abe9.pdf

THE FILMS

“Screams Before Silence” (Sheryl Sandberg, 2024) YouTube — free, full film:

Official site:

https://www.screamsbeforesilence.com

“#Nova” (Dan Pe’er, 2023) Amazon Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.06afc185-1710-482b-af2d-ef5657930727?ref_=imdbref_tt_ov_wbr_ovf__pvt_aiv&tag=imdbtag_tt_ov_wbr_ovf__pvt_aiv-20

Instagram’s recommendation algorithm steered ordinary users from mainstream wellness content to antisemitic conspiracy theories within three days, according to a study released June 3 by the Antisemitism Research Center, the research arm of the Combat Antisemitism Movement.

The Lioness Writes is a fully reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Annual subscription fee is on sale through 6/8 for $70…a bit over $1/day.

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Researchers built two test accounts — one simulating a wellness-focused user, one a fitness-focused user — and engaged only with mainstream self-improvement material. Neither account searched for or interacted with extremist content of any kind.

The wellness account was served 59 classifiable videos over the study period. More than 32% were coded or explicit antisemitic content. The fitness account received 71 classifiable videos, of which 24% were identified as antisemitic.

Antisemitic content appeared during the first browsing session, before either account had built any meaningful engagement history.

Recommended videos included conspiracy theories linking the Israel-Iran war to a plot against the American food supply, rants about Jewish financial power, and claims that the Rothschild family was behind the sinking of the Titanic.

“You don’t have to search for antisemitic content to find it on Instagram,” said Oliver Marks, research director at the Antisemitism Research Center. “When platforms optimize for engagement without sufficient safeguards, they can end up amplifying hate to vast audiences.”

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Meta’s Moderation Rollback

The findings come more than a year after Meta overhauled its content moderation policies across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads in January 2025.

The changes ended third-party fact-checking in the United States and replaced proactive enforcement with a user-reporting model. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the shift as “a trade-off.”

Following the rollback, antisemitic comments on the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress increased nearly fivefold, according to a May 2025 Anti-Defamation League report.

Reporting System Fails to Remove Content

Between January and February 2026, ADL researchers submitted 253 pieces of violative content through Instagram’s standard user-reporting system — the same tool Meta directs users to when they encounter harmful material.

The flagged content included posts tied to white supremacist networks, accounts linked to designated foreign terrorist organizations, and vendors selling merchandise bearing Nazi symbols.

Instagram removed 11 accounts and 8 posts. In 20 cases, the platform told the ADL it did not have the capacity to review the submissions.

The overall removal rate was 7%.

A Meta spokesperson said after the report’s release that some of the flagged content “did not violate our policies.” The ADL had given Meta two weeks to act before publishing its findings.

In February 2026, Meta’s oversight board confirmed the company’s AI moderation system was only being applied to content that users had already manually flagged — not content the platform was scanning for on its own.

Threads

Meta’s Threads platform faces similar concerns, though no comparable algorithmic study has been conducted on the app.

Accounts displaying Nazi imagery appeared on Threads within 24 hours of the platform’s 2023 launch, according to the Tech Transparency Project. Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist banned from Instagram, publicly announced he had created a fake account on Threads at launch and encouraged his followers to do the same.

In April 2026, Meta’s director of content policy pointed to the company’s prohibition on Holocaust denial as evidence of its commitment to combating online hate. Jewish advocacy groups noted it had taken four years of sustained pressure to get Meta to classify Holocaust denial as a policy violation.

Unsurprisingly, Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the Antisemitism Research Center’s findings.

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SOURCES

• JNS article: https://www.jns.org/news/israel-news/instagram-algorithm-steers-users-toward-antisemitic-content-within-days-watchdog-says

• ARC/CAM full study: https://combatantisemitism.org/studies-reports/algorithmic-escalation-from-self-improvement-content-to-antisemitism-on-instagram/

• ADL report on Instagram moderation failures: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/alarming-proliferation-antisemitism-and-extremism-instagram-new-adl-report

• Jewish Insider on ADL findings: https://jewishinsider.com/2026/04/adl-study-instagram-extremist-content-meta-moderation/

• ADL on Meta policy rollback: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/metas-hate-policy-rollback-linked-increased-antisemitism

If you haven’t read The 1,500-Year Betrayal, that’s where this story starts. The people who arrived in Costa Rica were the ones Spain couldn’t finish.

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The First Jews Weren’t Immigrants. They Were Fugitives.

When Spanish colonizers arrived in Central America in the 15th and 16th centuries, they didn’t come alone. Sephardic Jews were among them…forced converts running from the same institution that had demanded their conversion. They were called conversos. They had new names, new faith on paper, and the same death sentence waiting if anyone inspected too closely.

The Spanish Inquisition gave Jews across the Iberian Peninsula three options: convert, leave, or die. Many converted. Many of those converts kept practicing Judaism in secret, which made them targets all over again. The Inquisition followed them across Spain, into Portugal, and eventually across the Atlantic into every colonial territory Spain was busy claiming.

It had jurisdiction in Costa Rica too.

It just never ran there.

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The One Place the Empire Didn’t Come After Them

The conversos who settled around Cartago, the colonial capital, were never tried, never punished, never executed. In the entire documented record of the Inquisition’s presence in Costa Rica, the only trial on file was against two young women accused of witchcraft. They were acquitted. For Jews who’d spent generations watching their people burned and expelled across Europe, Costa Rica became, without anyone declaring it so, the place where the hunt stopped.

That didn’t happen by accident. The conversos made themselves impossible to find.

They changed their surnames, but not to Christian names. They weren’t willing to go that far. Instead, they chose names tied to the natural world — animals, landscapes, things that carried no religious weight. León. Falcao. Águila. Chinchilla. Spanish enough to pass. Empty enough to keep.

Then they buried their history inside their own families.

Looking Catholic wasn’t enough. They made sure their children didn’t know they weren’t. Generation by generation, the Jewish past was removed from family memory until there was nothing left to remove. Historians describe the assimilation as so complete it left no Jewish traces at all. No prayers whispered behind closed doors. No rituals kept alive in secret.

Except, as it turns out, in one place.

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Kile, I’ve been watching the Hannibal claim mutate in real time since October 7 and it’s been really maddening. You dismantled it beautifully but I want to add a few things because this one really needs to be buried.

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The Hannibal Directive was officially abandoned by the IDF in 2016. The Haaretz reporting everyone keeps citing confirmed its use at three military locations near the Gaza fence. Three. The jump from three military facilities to “Israel killed most of its own civilians on October 7” is not a journalistic conclusion. It’s a script that was spoonfed to the media and they ran with it.

And here’s what makes the whole thing absolutely absurd. Hamas filmed October 7 themselves. They walked into homes with GoPro cameras. They livestreamed the Nova festival massacre. They uploaded the footage because they were proud of it…gleeful, excited, calling their parents from their victims phones and wanted the world to see it. To see all of it. You can’t invoke a discontinued military directive to explain away murders that the murderers documented on purpose and distributed voluntarily. The footage literally exists and so does the forensic evidence. Maybe force everyone on the planet to watch the uncut version and see if that changes minds.

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And then there’s your take on Wiesel and Sharansky. Both perfect choices. Wiesel made bearing witness into an act of defiance, and Sharansky zagged when they told him to walk straight. I will never get tired of that detail.

You asked for mine…

Since you opened up our exchange with Golda…now she’s been sitting in my brain like an ear worm since letter one, just waiting for her moment. Here it is.

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The flags are in the bio. The causes are on the tote bag. The march was last Saturday. And if you say the wrong thing in their presence, they will correct you with the patience of someone who has never once considered that they might be wrong about anything.

These are the people who have decided Jews are the problem. And while they’ve been busy building that ideology, Islamist extremism has been doing whatever it wants, right in front of them, and they’ve either looked away or actively run interference for it.

That’s not a contradiction they’ve failed to notice. It’s a choice they’ve made that exposes something they’d rather not examine too closely…their commitment to tolerance was always conditional. It was always organized around a very specific, tiny enemy. And when you strip away the policy language and the academic framing and the social media aesthetics, that little tiny, specific enemy has always been Jews.

Not Israeli government policy. Not a military operation. Not Zionism. Not Israel. Jews. The people. The community. The fact of Jewish existence and influence in Western life.

Antizionism used to come with a disclaimer. It was criticism of Israeli government policy. It was opposition to occupation. It kept the focus narrow, institutional, political. That framing is gone now. What replaced it isn’t subtle. People are celebrating the murder of Jewish civilians and calling it resistance. University professors are signing letters defending attacks on civilians and framing it as geopolitical analysis. Jewish students need security escorts to walk across campuses that are supposedly the safest, most inclusive spaces in America. Criticizing a government’s decisions doesn’t require you to celebrate the killing of its civilians. It doesn’t require you to deny Jewish people the right to exist as a people. If your political criticism keeps landing on Jewish people rather than on governments or policies…did you ever stop and ask yourself why?

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Liberal progressives built an entire moral identity around protecting the vulnerable and opposing hate, then watched Jewish communities get attacked in cities with progressive mayors, district attorneys…progressive everything and responded with statements carefully worded enough to avoid saying anything. They marched for every other group. They had no trouble naming every other form of hate. But this one was complicated. This one required context. This one? Could wait.

Well, it can’t wait. And the people who stayed quiet while telling themselves they were the good guys need to understand what they actually built, what they actually enabled, and what’s coming for them right alongside the Jews they decided weren’t worth defending.

The Wrong Threat

Let’s talk about what Jewish people have actually done to Western civilization. Not patting ourselves on the back or anything. Facts are facts, friends. It is what it is.

In Weimar Germany, Jews were disproportionately represented in medicine, law, academia, and the arts. In the United States, Jewish Americans helped build the civil rights movement, the entertainment industry, and some of the most significant legal and scientific institutions in the country’s history. In Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with no oil and constant existential threat, they built a functioning democracy, a world-class tech sector, and an agricultural model that feeds people in drought-stricken countries.

That’s the threat. That’s what people are organizing against.

Meanwhile, the actual dismantling has been happening in cities that used to be considered the heart of the Western world.

In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and dozens of other British towns, organized networks of men raped thousands of young girls over decades. Police and social services documented what was happening and chose not to act because they didn’t want to be accused of targeting a specific community. The girls were sacrificed to institutional cowardice. The perpetrators weren’t Jewish.

In France, Jewish people are leaving in numbers large enough that it’s been covered as a demographic crisis. They’re not leaving because of Jews. They’re leaving because they’re being attacked, harassed, and killed, and the French state has proven unable or unwilling to stop it. The people attacking them aren’t Jewish either.

In Sweden, Germany, and the UK, women have been told to dress differently, to avoid certain neighborhoods at certain hours, to modify their behavior to avoid provoking men who didn’t come to integrate into Western society and have said so directly. In parts of London, Brussels, and Malmo, local governance has bent so far toward accommodating a parallel legal and social structure that the people who actually built those cities are living like guests in them.

Theo van Gogh was shot and stabbed in Amsterdam by a man who left a note promising the same fate to others on a list. Salman Rushdie spent decades under a fatwa. The staff of Charlie Hebdo was massacred in their office. Kurt Westergaard lived under 24-hour police protection for years after drawing a cartoon. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re a pattern of enforced silence, and it’s working. Western artists and journalists are self-censoring because they’ve watched what happens to people who don’t.

December 2025…Southampton (UK), an 18-year-old boy named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times walking home from a night out. When police arrived, his killer told them he was the one who'd been racially attacked. Officers handcuffed Henry Nowak while he bled out. He died on the scene. The murder barely registered. It took until May 2026 when his killer was convicted and bodycam footage was released publicly for the country to see what actually happened. A kid telling officers he'd been stabbed while they stood there and did nothing, his killer nearby and uncuffed. Hampshire Constabulary issued a public apology. The story had existed for six months. It just took video to make it impossible to look away from. The perpetrator wasn't Jewish.

None of the people responsible for any of this were Jewish.

Jews are 0.2% of the global population and have contributed to medicine, law, science, literature, and civil rights at a rate that has no demographic explanation except a sustained cultural emphasis on education and argument. The civilization these people are supposedly corrupting is one they helped construct.

So when someone tells you Jews are the threat, ask them to be specific. Ask them to name the Jewish terrorist organization carrying out coordinated attacks across Europe. Ask them to identify the Jewish neighborhoods in Western cities where the local population has decided secular law no longer applies. Ask them to show you the Jewish community systematically grooming children in government housing while authorities looked away. Ask them to point to the Jewish state funding ideological exports into Western mosques and school curricula.

They can’t. Because it doesn’t exist.

And here’s what makes the whole thing even more absurd: nobody gets nervous seeing a visibly Jewish person board a plane. Nobody tenses up when a Jewish person sits down next to them on a bus. Because somewhere underneath all the ideology, people’s actual threat assessment still works. The history of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings, of buses blown up in the name of religious war, does not point at Jews. Everyone knows this, even the people who won’t say it out loud.

And most of the time, they don’t even know who they’re standing next to. The vast majority of Jewish people aren’t visibly identifiable. Someone ranting about Jewish people controlling and corrupting civilization is, statistically, standing next to Jewish people constantly and has no idea. The existential dread they’ve built an ideology around isn’t based on anything they’ve ever observed. It’s a story someone told them, and now they’re afraid of people they can’t identify when they’re standing right next to them.

You Voted For This

AIPAC. That’s the word that ends the conversation for a lot of people. AIPAC money. As if that’s the answer to every question, the explanation for every problem, the thing that justifies whatever comes next.

What came next was voting Islamist-aligned politicians into actual positions of governmental power. And calling it progress.

The logic went like this: AIPAC money is corrupting influence, corrupting influence serves Jewish interests, Jewish interests are the problem, therefore anyone opposing Jewish interests is on the right side. That’s not political analysis. That’s antisemitism with a policy explanation stapled to the front of it. And it led people who consider themselves progressive, rights-focused, and morally serious to vote for politicians who think women should have fewer rights, who have expressed sympathy for organizations that murder civilians, who represent a worldview that would criminalize the lifestyle of almost everyone who voted for them.

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The cognitive dissonance required to pull that off is wildly staggering. These are voters who will march for LGBTQ rights on Saturday and pull the lever on Tuesday for someone whose religious framework calls for exactly the kind of society where those rights don’t exist. They’ll call themselves feminists and then dismiss or minimize the systematic abuse of women in communities that have been protected from scrutiny because criticizing them got labeled as racism. They’ll talk endlessly about democratic values and then help elect people who have no actual attachment to democratic values, who see democracy as a useful ladder and nothing more.

Ilhan Omar sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rashida Tlaib used her platform to spread claims that were false and inflammatory during an active conflict and after. In the UK, figures with documented ties to Islamist organizations have moved into local government, school boards, and advisory positions. In Europe, politicians who would have been considered fringe a decade ago are now mainstream, not because their ideas got better, but because the people who should have been pushing back got distracted by a fight with Jews.

But wait, there’s more…

You were so focused on AIPAC that you handed the gates to people who want to tear the whole city down.

The Jews you blamed for corrupting your democracy were, at worst, a lobbying interest in a system full of lobbying interests. They were playing the game by the rules everyone else plays by. You can have a legitimate conversation about money in politics that includes AIPAC. But that conversation got hijacked, and now it’s being used to justify putting people in power who are genuinely, explicitly, ideologically opposed to the civilization you think you’re protecting.

You Were Warned

We’ve watched this before… a chaotic society under real pressure decides Jews are the source of all its problems, focuses its energy there, and discovers too late that the actual threat was never us.

We’ve been trying to tell you. The warning has been consistent and consistently ignored.

But…you decided we were the enemy instead.

The system being dismantled doesn’t distinguish between the Jews they hate and the people who hate them. A civilization that stops defending itself against an actual ideological threat doesn’t then carve out a protected space for the antisemites who cheered it on. Their daughters, their speech, their laws, their ability to live the way they currently live? Well, all of it sits on the same foundation they’ve been undermining while pointing at us.

It was all visible. The statements were public. The affiliations were documented. The ideology was stated out loud. The silent majority had every opportunity to say something and chose comfort instead while the loud minority marched us and them into this upside-down world.

This doesn’t get better until more people decide the discomfort of speaking up is worth it. That calculation isn’t complicated. Neither is what happens to everyone if they keep getting it wrong.

If you’ve decided Jews are too biased to believe, fine. Don’t take our word for it. Pick up a newspaper. Look at what’s happening in your own city, your own country, your own neighborhood. Look at who’s carrying out the attacks, who’s organizing the grooming networks, who’s calling for the elimination of Western values in Western streets. The information is public. The names are printed. The ideologies are stated clearly by the people who hold them.

It’s not Jews.

We’re broken records at this point.

Nothing else anyone can say except…

You reap what you sow.

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Happy Sunday.

Today is June 7th, and that date matters. June 7, 1967 Israeli paratroopers reached the Temple Mount during the Six-Day War and reclaimed the holiest site in Judaism. It had been under Jordanian control since 1948. For nineteen years, Jews were completely barred from it. When it came back, General Motta Gur radioed three words: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”

To mark it, I’m running a sale on annual subscriptions today only. $70 through midnight tonight. That’s it, that’s the window.

[SUBSCRIBE FOR $70 - TODAY ONLY]

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COMING UP THIS WEEK

This week is going to be heavy on diaspora history and I’m excited about it. I’ve been deep in the research on Jewish communities in Costa Rica, Mexico, and a few other places that don’t come up often enough. This is part of the ongoing project that I think is going to become a book. The “map” is here:

Also this week: I’m a guest on a podcast called The Jew Function. The conversation is going to go after something I think about a lot: what actually causes antisemitism? I’ll share the release date as soon as I have it.

THIS WEEK’S TOP POSTS

And don’t forget to check out the Letter Exchange I’m doing with

FROM THE ARCHIVES

If you’re newer here, these are worth going back to.

Thanks for reading this week. If you've been thinking about going annual, tonight is the night. $70 through midnight, and then it's back to full price.

And if a subscription isn’t possible right now, forward this to someone who needs to read it.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

See you tomorrow.

XO

Melissa

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4:00 p.m., Oct. 7, 1944

The plan was to start at 2:00 p.m.

The SS got there first.

At 1:00 p.m., German soldiers appeared at Crematorium IV in Auschwitz-Birkenau and called a roll call. They read out 100 prisoner numbers. The men whose numbers were called would be “transported.” Everyone in the yard knew what that meant. They had been the ones doing the transporting.

The prisoners looked at each other. They looked at the fence. They looked at the explosives they had spent 18 months smuggling into the camp one teaspoon at a time.

They made a choice.

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What the Sonderkommando Were

Sonderkommando means “special unit.” The name is clean and bureaucratic, which was the point. The reality was something the human mind resists taking in even now.

They were Jewish prisoners selected on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Their job was to run the machinery of the killing. They led new arrivals from the train platform to the gas chambers, telling them they were going to shower. They waited outside while the gas was pumped in. Then they went in and cleared the bodies. They extracted gold teeth. They cut the hair. They sorted the belongings. They loaded the corpses into the crematoria and shoveled the ashes.

If they refused, they were shot.

If they survived long enough to know too much, they were shot anyway. The Nazis regularly liquidated Sonderkommando detachments and replaced them with new arrivals, deliberately cycling men through so no single group could accumulate enough knowledge to testify. Over the course of the war, more than 3,400 people were forced into these units at Auschwitz alone.

The system was designed that way on purpose. The Nazis wanted the Jews of Europe implicated in their own destruction. They wanted the line between perpetrator and victim blurred beyond recognition. They wanted to make sure that if anyone survived to tell the story, nobody would believe them.

What they didn’t account for was that some of the men they forced into that role were keeping records.

The Man Who Wrote It Down

Zalmen Gradowski was a poet and scholar from Suwalki, Poland. He arrived at Auschwitz in December 1942 with his wife, his mother, his sisters and his mother-in-law. He watched them all go into the gas chamber. He was pulled out of the line and assigned to the Sonderkommando.

He spent the next two years writing.

He wrote in Yiddish, in secret, in the moments between the work the Nazis forced him to do. He wrote about what he witnessed. About the people who arrived on the trains not knowing what was about to happen. About the families separated on the platform. About the gas chamber and what came after. He wrote it all down in precise detail because he understood that he was the only record these people would ever have.

He figured he was going to die anyway, he just didn’t know when. So he buried the manuscripts in the ground near Crematorium III, sealed in a container, where they might survive even if he didn’t. On the outside of the container he wrote a message to whoever might one day find it:

“Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Dozens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons, which will shed light on everything that happened here.”

Then he started planning the revolt.

The Photographs

In August 1944, two months before the uprising, a Sonderkommando member named Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish military officer, took four photographs inside Auschwitz-Birkenau while another member, Alter Fajnzylberg, kept watch.

Errera shot from the hip, unable to aim with any precision. Two photographs were taken from inside a gas chamber looking out. Two were taken outside, showing bodies burning in open pits in the ground, used when the crematoria couldn’t keep pace with the volume of killing. The images are blurred and difficult. They are also the only photographs ever taken by prisoners inside the camp.

The Polish resistance smuggled the film out of Auschwitz rolled inside a toothpaste tube. The original uncropped versions of the photographs were not recovered until 1985. They are held today by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

The Women in the Factory

The men of the Sonderkommando had almost nothing. No weapons. No access to the outside. No way to get explosives into a facility under constant SS guard.

What they had was a network.

Roza Robota was 23 years old, born in Ciechanow, Poland, a member of the Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir Zionist youth movement before the war. She arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and was assigned to the clothing detail, sorting and distributing the belongings of people who had just been killed. The location gave her access to both the men’s and women’s sections of the camp. She became a resistance liaison.

Inside the camp’s Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke munitions factory, Jewish women were forced to manufacture detonators for artillery shells. Three of them, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn and Ester Wajcblum, worked in the section responsible for producing gunpowder. They were searched every day when they left the factory.

They did it anyway.

Teaspoon by teaspoon. Day by day. For more than six months. They rubbed gunpowder onto their bodies, hid it in the hems of their dresses, packed it into handkerchiefs and matchboxes. Between one and three teaspoons a day, passed from hand to hand through a chain of roughly 20 women, through the clothing detail, to Roza Robota and then to the men of the Sonderkommando.

Ester’s younger sister Hanka was part of the chain too. She knew what she was carrying. She knew what happened to people who got caught.

The men buried the gunpowder near the crematoria and waited.

The Plan

It took over a year to accumulate enough.

The Sonderkommando coordinated with the broader Auschwitz underground, which included Polish political prisoners and a resistance network that stretched outside the camp walls. The full plan called for a simultaneous uprising across all four crematoria. They would blow up the gas chambers, cut through the electrified fence and escape into the surrounding forests where the Polish partisans would be waiting.

By the autumn of 1944 they had run out of time.

The Soviet Army was advancing across Poland. The Nazis were liquidating evidence. In the months before Oct. 7, the SS had already executed hundreds of Sonderkommando members to prevent testimony. The men who remained understood they were next. Word came through the underground that another 300 were about to be selected.

The night before the revolt, the SS officer Otto Moll, who presided over the crematoria with a reputation for sadism that stood out even in Auschwitz, grew suspicious. He dragged Yaacov Kamiński, one of the Sonderkommando resistance leaders, outside and interrogated him. When Kamiński refused to give up anything, Moll shot him.

The remaining men received the news that night. The planned start time of 2:00 p.m. the next day held.

Oct. 7, 1944

At 1:00 p.m. the SS moved first.

When the soldiers began reading prisoner numbers at Crematorium IV, the men didn’t wait for the coordinated signal. They attacked with what they had: axes, knives, stones and the makeshift grenades assembled from the smuggled gunpowder and tin cans. They threw them at the SS guards. They set fire to the building. They packed the explosives into Crematorium IV and blew it apart.

The explosion ripped through the structure. Three SS guards were killed. More than ten were wounded. The men at Crematorium II heard the blast and rose up as well, cutting through the electrified fence, which was not yet live in the afternoon, and running for the tree line.

The coordinated uprising at Crematoria III and IV never happened. The signal never reached them in time.

The SS called in reinforcements and surrounded the escapees in the fields beyond the fence. Every prisoner who got out was hunted down and killed. Back inside the camp, 250 men died fighting. The SS executed 200 more in the days that followed.

Crematorium IV never operated again. Crematorium II sustained serious damage as well, and the SS themselves demolished what remained of it in the weeks that followed as they worked to destroy the evidence of what had happened there.

The Investigation

The Nazis knew the explosives had come from inside their own factory.

They interrogated dozens of terrified prisoners. Slowly the chain led them to four names. Roza Robota. Ala Gertner. Regina Safirsztajn. Ester Wajcblum.

The four women were arrested and tortured. The SS interrogators wanted the full network. The names of everyone involved. The chain of 20 women who had passed gunpowder day by day for six months. All of it.

The four women gave them nothing. The network held. Ester’s sister Hanka, who had been part of the chain, was never identified. She survived the war and was liberated from Neustadt-Glewe in May 1945. Much of what we know today about how the smuggling operation worked came from her testimony.

Jan. 6, 1945

The four women were publicly hanged in two separate ceremonies, one for the day shift and one for the night shift, so that every prisoner in the camp would see what happened to those who resisted.

As Roza Robota was walked to the gallows, she sang Hatikvah. Her final message, smuggled out of her cell before the execution, was four words: be strong and courageous.

Twenty-one days later, on Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz.

What Was Found in the Ground

After the war, workers excavating near the ruins of Crematorium III found a buried container. Inside were the manuscripts of Zalmen Gradowski. Everything he had written in secret over two years. The testimonies of the people who had arrived on the trains. The names. The faces. The details he had committed to paper knowing he would likely never survive to deliver them himself.

More manuscripts were found in subsequent excavations, written by two other Sonderkommando members, Lajb Langfus and Zalman Lewental. Together the scrolls form the only first-person testimony of what happened inside the crematoria of Auschwitz, written by the men who were forced to be there.

Gradowski died in the revolt on Oct. 7, 1944. He was right that he wouldn’t survive. He was also right that the manuscripts would.

What It Cost and What It Meant

The numbers are stark. The revolt killed three SS guards and wounded ten. It destroyed one crematorium. Four women were hanged. Roughly 450 Sonderkommando members were killed in the revolt and its aftermath.

By any military measure it was a failure.

That misses the point entirely.

These were men forced into the most degrading position the Nazi system could devise, made to participate in the killing of their own people, stripped of every form of dignity and agency. The system was built to break them, to make resistance unthinkable, to leave them with nothing.

They spent 18 months proving the system wrong. They built a network inside a death camp. They coordinated with women who smuggled gunpowder a teaspoon at a time past daily SS searches. They buried their testimony in the ground so the world would know what happened there. And when the moment came, they fought with axes and tin cans against an SS garrison and blew up a crematorium inside Auschwitz itself.

Every one of them knew they were not going to survive. They fought anyway.

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Sources

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1942-1945/auschwitz-revolt

• Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: Prisoner Mutinies https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/resistance/prisoner-mutinies

• Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: Historical Pictures and Documents https://www.auschwitz.org/en/gallery/historical-pictures-and-documents/extermination,11.html

• National WWII Museum: The Sonderkommando Uprising in Auschwitz-Birkenau https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/sonderkommando-uprising-auschwitz-birkenau

• Jewish Women’s Archive: Roza Robota https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/robota-roza

• Holocaust Memorial Day Trust: The Sonderkommando https://hmd.org.uk/resource/hmd-2016-sonderkommando

• International March of the Living: Be Strong and Courageous: Last Words of Roza Robota https://motl.org/be-strong-and-courageous-last-words-of-roza-robota-member-of-the-jewish-resistance-in-auschwitz-birkenau

• Yad Vashem: Inside the Epicenter of the Horror: Photographs of the Sonderkommando https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/epicenter-horror-photographs-sonderkommando.html

• Jewish Virtual Library: Sonderkommando Photographs From Auschwitz https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sonderkommando-photographs-from-auschwitz

This is happening in both parties…

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The candidates using Jews and Israel as the centerpiece of their campaigns aren’t confined to one side of the aisle or one corner of the country. They’re Republicans and Democrats. They’re running for Congress, for governor, for the Senate, and for city hall. What they share isn’t a party. It’s a playbook.

Here is what that playbook looks like state by state, in their own words and on their own records.

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Kile said he’d never heard of Hannah Senesh before my letter, and I love that. Getting to introduce someone to her feels like a small act of justice. She deserves to be known by everyone, not just people who grew up with her story in their bones. And he found a quote of hers I hadn’t even used, which tells me he went looking. That’s the right response to Hannah Senesh.

He took on the colonialism argument and did it the way he does everything he writes, incredibly well. I’ve written about that one myself, so I’ll link it below and spare us both the overlap. Because the comment I woke up to this morning sent me somewhere else entirely.

So cute when I get the “109 countries” conspiracy in my comments. It doesn’t matter what the post is about. It could be about me watering my plants. But these antizionist antisemitic trolls just love to copy/paste from their document of conspiracies and throw them at us. It’s charming.

Let’s quickly get into it, shall we. You’ve probably seen the claim floating around your neck of the woods…Jews have been expelled from 109 countries, so they must be doing something to deserve it. The number came from an Australian Holocaust-denial website, and nobody who shares it can produce a list that actually adds up to 109 sovereign nations because the counting method is fake news…it’s invented. Medieval duchies, city-states, territories that expelled Jews twice under different rulers, principalities that dissolved centuries ago. You keep counting until you hit your number. When you look at the actual expulsions, England cancelled Jewish debts and seized Jewish assets in 1290. France did the same in 1306. Spain absorbed Jewish wealth into a collapsing empire in 1492. Rulers found a convenient target and pocketed the proceeds. The expulsions are a record of the people doing the expelling and the whole thing is a debt cancellation scheme with a mythology baked into it to stop anyone from asking who actually benefited. Spoiler alert…Jews never benefited from it.

What I find more interesting (if you can even call it that) than any single conspiracy is how many of them are orbiting around the interwebs at the same time, how completely they contradict each other, and how nobody peddling them seems to care how stupid they sound.

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Jews secretly run every government on earth through a shadowy cabal pulling strings on elections, wars, and economies. Jews are also getting expelled by those same governments everywhere they go. Jews control all global banking and finance. Jews are also a predatory underclass operating in basements. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Tsarist secret police fabricated by plagiarizing a French political satire about Napoleon III that doesn’t mention Jews once yet somehow it supposedly proves Jews planned world domination in secret meetings. Jews also aren’t really Jewish at all, according to the Khazarian conspiracy, which claims Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of a medieval Turkic kingdom with no authentic Jewish identity or ancestral connection to Israel. So the people in the Protocols, secretly plotting world domination in the name of Jewish power, are apparently not even Jewish. Jews fabricated the Holocaust to manufacture sympathy and political leverage. Jews are also so powerless that 109 countries threw them out. Jews are loyal only to Israel and undermine every country they live in. Jews are also the masterminds behind open-border globalism designed to dissolve nation-states, including Israel.

Every single one of these is in active circulation right now. People share them in the same comment sections, sometimes in the same paragraph. The omnipotent shadow government controlling everything keeps getting expelled from everywhere. The financial geniuses running the world are also a vulnerable underclass preying on children. The people who staged their own genocide have no real Jewish identity worth protecting. The nationalist fifth column is also the globalist demolition crew.

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These people didn’t research anything. They found a conclusion they already believed and went looking for material to support it. The Protocols was exposed as a forgery by a Times of London reporter in 1921 who showed it was plagiarized line by line from a book that had nothing to do with Jews. The Khazarian DNA argument was built on a study that used modern Armenians and Georgians as stand-ins for ancient Khazars because actual Khazar descendants can’t be identified or tested. The researcher needed a population to prove his point, so he invented one. The claim that 4,000 Jews stayed home on September 11th came from a Hezbollah television network. Hundreds of Jewish people died at the World Trade Center. The blood libel, the claim that Jews murder Christian children for religious rituals, has been recycled since 1144 and has never once produced a shred of evidence in nearly 900 years of trying.

None of this is obscure. All of it is findable in about ten minutes or less. The people sharing these conspiracies either didn’t look or looked and didn’t care…which is the answer I’m going with. They don’t care, they just want to spread their hatred on complete lack ignorance quickly so it’s on full display. There needs to be a villain which has always been Jewish. Economic collapse, political instability, social change, terrorist attack. Whatever the crisis is, the conspiracy gets updated to fit it. What stays constant is the target. You know…the jooooooos.

That’s not a political argument. Heck, it’s not even a bad-faith argument at this point. It’s a 2,000-year-old bad habit, tic, reflex of reaching for the same answer regardless of the question, handed down through generations of pseudo-historical psycho-babble language to feel like research passed on to someone who’d rather forward a meme than read a book.

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By the time Alexander the Great took Egypt in 332 BCE, Jews had already been there for centuries.

The full story of how they first arrived, the garrison island, the temple, the letters to Jerusalem that waited three years for an answer, is told here:

What matters is what came next. That earlier community had dissolved by around 400 BCE, scattered in the upheaval that followed Egypt’s final break from Persian rule. But Jews had been in Egypt long enough to be part of it. When a new world opened, they were already standing inside it.

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Western governments didn’t just bend the knee to oil-producing states. They built a luxury VIP lounge for the people holding the leash, handed the taxpayers the bill, and called it “diplomacy.”

It’s a safe bet absolutely nobody voted for this. No citizen in the UK, the US, France, Germany, Canada, or Australia woke up on Election Day and checked a box that said, “Yes, please build a culture of institutional cowardice around Islamist ideology.” Nobody signed off on a geopolitical subscription model where Gulf state relationships get ironclad protection while domestic safety gets outsourced. It happened anyway. It happened decision by decision, over decades, by politicians who understood exactly what they were trading. They decided the public was an acceptable price to pay.

The public wasn’t consulted. They were managed.

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That’s what it actually means for a population to be held hostage to its government’s foreign policy. The process lacks the drama of a bank heist. It happens in the grinding, banal reality of watching institutions learn that one specific threat is entirely untouchable, and then watching what happens to the people those institutions were supposed to protect.

The Bipartisan Fist-Bump

Here’s the grift. Western economies run on oil. A massive chunk of that oil flows from Gulf states whose governments have spent decades simultaneously selling the West crude and funding mosques, imams, and ideological networks across domestic backyards.

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Elephantine is a small island in the Nile, barely a mile long sitting just north of the first cataract. That’s the point where the water crashes over granite boulders and the smooth river highway from the Mediterranean breaks apart into churning white water. South of the island was Nubia. North was Egypt. Elephantine was the border, which is why it was important. Whoever held that island held the southern gateway of the entire country.

The ancient Egyptians called it Abu… “elephant,” either for the ivory trade that moved through it or for the shape of the rounded granite rocks along its banks, dark and massive and smoothed by the river into forms that, from a distance, looked like the backs of animals cooling themselves in the water. It was a garrison island, a trading post, a sacred site. The ram-headed god Khnum had his temple there. He was said to control the Nile’s annual flood from a cave beneath the island, releasing the waters each year that made agriculture possible in an otherwise uninhabitable desert. Khnum was the reason the island existed at all, and his priests had been there for thousands of years before anyone else arrived.

Sometime in the 7th century BCE, Jewish soldiers arrived and stayed.

From Refugee to Garrison: The Origins of the Elephantine Jews

The exact origin of the Elephantine Jewish community is still debated. What scholars agree on is the general shape of it. Jews came to Egypt during the turbulent years when the Assyrian Empire was dismantling the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Some came as refugees. Others came as soldiers, mercenaries who hired themselves out to whatever government needed men who could fight. Egypt under the 26th Dynasty, the pharohs of Saite (Egypt’s last native dynasty before the Persians arrived, known for recruiting foreign soldiers to rebuild their military) were actively recruiting foreign soldiers for its armies and Jews were among those recruited.

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By the 5th century BCE when the first written records appear, a Jewish garrison was well established on Elephantine. The Persian Empire had conquered Egypt in 525 BCE and kept these soldiers on, garrisoned at a border post that controlled river traffic in and out of Nubia. A satrap (the Persian Empire’s version of a regional governor) administered Egypt from the capital at Memphis, and under him a web of local commanders and officials managed the frontier outposts. The Elephantine garrison fit into that structure as soldiers whose usefulness predated the Persian arrival and whose loyalty the Persians saw no reason to disrupt.

The community at that point had been on the island long enough to have built permanent structures, accumulated property, formed families, and buried their dead. They were rooted in a way that only happens over generations.

The papyri that survived tell us what they built once they decided to stay.

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A piece published last week in Tablet, The Joy of Hating Jews by Todd Pittinsky does something most writing about antisemitism doesn’t. It stops asking why people hate Jews and starts asking something more uncomfortable…why they enjoy it.

The stripped down argument is this. Antisemitism has always offered a gift bundle of pleasures. The first is revelation…the feeling that you’ve finally cracked the code, that the chaos of the world makes sense now because someone is behind it. The second is belonging. You’re not just angry alone. You’re angry together, part of a community bonded by shared knowledge and shared targets. The third is moral license. The antisemite doesn’t experience himself as a bully. He thinks of himself as brave, powerful. He’s defending his people. The vocabulary glides between anti-colonialism, anti-globalism, and anti-elitism but the emotional architecture stays the same.

That’s a better explanation for antisemitism’s durability than anything I’ve read that focuses on ideology alone. Ideology changes. Pleasure doesn’t.

And the moment I read it, I thought: hmm…this isn’t only about Jews.

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