April 30: Jerusalem of Fire
Harvard's antisemitism report; A Trump golf course in Qatar; Remembering David Horowitz
The Big Story
Today is Israel’s 77th Independence Day. There was not much in the way of celebration, however, as massive wildfires in Jerusalem and northern Israel prompted the nationwide cancellation of events and forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and offices. Videos of the blaze, which Jerusalem fire chief Shmulik Friedman called “possibly the largest fire ever in the country,” circulated on social media throughout the day on Wednesday, including this one from the X account @Osint613:
As of early Wednesday afternoon, U.S. east coast time, the fires were continuing to spread eastward from Jerusalem, prompting further evacuations and a furious firefighting effort from Israeli authorities.
Several reports in the Israeli press have raised the possibility that the fires were the result of Palestinian arson, though it is not clear at the moment if arsonists started the fires or merely to have jumped in to hasten the spread of fires that had already begun for other reasons. The weather in Israel has been hot and dry, with high winds—conditions obviously conducive to natural or accidental fires. But at least one “East Jerusalem resident”—i.e., an Arab—was arrested on Wednesday after being reported to police for attempting to set fire to vegetation in the Jerusalem area; he was found with a lighter and other fire-starting materials, according to police.
Arab and Palestinian social media, meanwhile, has been rife with calls for Palestinians to rise up and set fire to the “settlements.” “Your role is to set fire to gardens, vehicles, and everything around the settlements,” read one Arabic X post quoted in The Times of Israel, while Shehab, a Hamas-affiliated channel, reported on “popular calls to set fire to forests near the settlements,” again according to TOI. Here’s a poster that circulated on Palestinian social media, highlighted by the blogger Elder of Ziyon:
It reads, in Elder of Ziyon’s translation:
Let the settlers’ homes be
ashes
under the feet of the revolutionaries
#Burn_the_settlers’_homes
The Shin Bet and Israeli police are investigating potential arson leads, but have said it is “too early to determine the cause of the fires,” The Times of Israel reports.
—Park MacDougald
IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith remembers David Horowitz
The Rest
→In case you were starting to feel queasy about the Trump administration’s war on Harvard University, here’s our Quote of the Day:
For example, during the talent show, a [Harvard Medical School] student performed an Arabic song that was written by Lebanese artists after the Israeli victory in the Israeli-Arab War of 1967 that reflects sadness over the outcome of that war and a longing for the conquest of Jerusalem. In Arabic, the song is called “Ya Zahrat al madayn.” The HMS student performed the first verse of a three-verse song, where the first verse reflects a longing for Jerusalem and a praise for its holiness, the second verse reflects a lament for the loss of Jerusalem to Israel in the war of 1967 and the third verse expresses faith that fury will come and restore Jerusalem to Arab rule.
That’s an excerpt, highlighted by X user “daniela” (@daniela__127), from the final report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. It describes a talent show performance at an “Admitted Student Preview Day,” a school-sponsored event designed to convince admitted students to enroll in Harvard Medical School.
We highlight the above passage not because it is the worst example of antisemitism in the report, but because it reflects, as daniela observes, the “complete leftist capture of public health”—such that it was apparently considered appropriate to subject prospective students to Arab rejectionist balladeering at a talent show designed to recruit them to HMS. As the report notes, the event could have been even worse: HMS blocked students from inserting pro-Palestinian messaging into an official welcome video for admitted students, which provoked howls of censorship from students who noted, fairly enough, that HMS had allowed explicitly pro-abortion messaging in the previous year’s video.
Before you give Harvard too much credit for owning up to its failures, the antisemitism report was released alongside another book-length report on Tuesday: “Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.”
Read the (antisemitism) report here: https://www.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/FINAL-Harvard-ASAIB-Report-4.29.25.pdf
→David Horowitz, the New Left radical turned anticommunist crusader, died Tuesday at the age of 86. Read today’s Back Pages for a fuller consideration of Horowitz’s life and legacy, but for now, we’d like to highlight this clip, from a talk Horowitz gave at the University of California, San Diego in 2010, which serves as a stark reminder of what, exactly, schools such as Harvard have caved to:
→The Trump Organization has signed a golf course and real estate development deal with a Qatari government-owned firm, two weeks ahead of President Donald Trump’s state visit to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The deal, which was initially reported by Reuters on Tuesday, will see the Trump Organization partner with Qatari Diar, “a real estate company established by the country’s sovereign wealth fund and chaired by a government minister” (per The New York Times), and Dar Global, a private Saudi real-estate firm with ties to the Saudi government, to develop a Trump International Golf Course and Trump Villas on land owned by the Qatari state, which is, along with Iran, one of Hamas’s primary external backers. As the Times notes in its report, the deal would seem to violate the Trump Organization’s pledge, made in an ethics agreement published in January, that it will “not enter into any material transactions or contracts with a foreign government.” According to a Wednesday statement from Eric Trump, the company’s position is that it is still technically observing that pledge, since it did not purchase the land directly from the Qatari government but rather routed the purchase through its Saudi “partner.”
→The U.S. economy contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of 2025, the largest decline in three years, according to statistics released Wednesday by the Commerce Department. Those growth numbers fall well short of the 0.4% growth expected by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, but the paper notes that the statistics are “difficult to interpret.” Imports subtract from GDP, since they represent spending on foreign goods and services, and imports rose by more than 40% in the first quarter as businesses dramatically increased orders to get ahead of expected tariffs. Other measures of economic health, such as consumer spending and final sales to domestic purchasers both rose in the first quarter, though less rapidly than in the fourth quarter of 2024. “Overall, I think that it was a relatively solid underlying report when it comes to demand,” the Wells Fargo economist Shannon Grein told the Journal.
→The Trump administration announced sweeping new sanctions on Wednesday against an Iranian smuggling network responsible for illicitly exporting nearly $500 million worth of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products, according to estimates from the U.S. State Department. Reporting for The Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo writes that the new sanctions “target five United Arab Emirates-based companies, a Turkish petrochemical supplier, an Iranian cargo firm, and two ships known to ferry Tehran’s illicit petroleum products to foreign markets like that of China.” The new State Department sanctions come one day after the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control sanctioned five Chinese companies, one Iranian company, and six Iranian individuals “for their role in a network procuring ballistic missile propellant ingredients on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),” according to a Treasury Department statement. Specifically, the network sourced sodium perchlorate and dioctyl sebacate, two ingredients in solid fuel for ballistic missiles, from China to Iran.
→Speaking of Chinese sodium perchlorate in Iran … Over the weekend, a large explosion set fire to the port of Shahid Rajaei, near the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, killing at least 70 and injuring more than 1,000. The Iranians have blamed “negligence” and the improper storage of unnamed materials, but a source connected to the IRGC told The New York Times on Saturday that the explosion was caused by sodium perchlorate. The Financial Times reported in January that China was shipping sodium perchlorate to Iran to help the IRGC replenish missile stockpiles that had been depleted by its attacks on Israel in April and October of 2024. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that the epicenter of the explosion was a facility owned by the “Foundation of the Oppressed,” a “charity” controlled by the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that acts as the IRGC’s de facto “money box,” according to United Against Nuclear Iran.
→For the second straight day, sectarian violence between Druze and Sunnis broke out in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria, Tuesday night and into Wednesday, prompting Israeli airstrikes Wednesday morning. While details on the latest round of clashes are not yet clear, they appear to have been sparked by an alleged recording of a Druze cleric insulting the Prophet Muhammad, which riled up the local Sunnis and led to fighting between Druze militias and Sunni militias loosely allied with the Damascus government. On Wednesday morning, the Israeli Air Force struck what it described as “extremists” threatening the Druze on the outskirts of Damascus, as part of Jerusalem’s larger stated commitment to protect Syria’s Druze and (to a lesser extent) other minorities. Tablet News Editor Tony Badran told The Scroll:
The problem here is that the dynamic with Israel and the Druze is kind of self-reinforcing. On the one hand, it gives the semblance of protection, while on the other hand it hardens sectarian hatred and suspicion. Then it opens the door to other shittiness: namely, Assad regime figures potentially organizing under a de facto Israeli protective umbrella. That then opens the door to Iranian infiltration, which would, at least in theory, engender further Israeli responses.
On Wednesday, the Syrian government vowed to “protect all components of the Syrian people,” including the Druze.
→A Tuesday report in Ynet suggests that Iran’s attempts to regain a foothold in Syria are already underway, with the IRGC establishing training camps in Anbar province, in western Iraq, to shape former Assad regime elements into a new “pro-Tehran fighting force just miles from the Syrian border.” The report cites a recent Facebook post by Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of Assad, announcing that he had formed a “division” of 150,000 special forces personnel and 150,000 reservists. While those numbers are implausible, Iraqi sources told Ynet that as many as 5,000 Assad regime soldiers had fled to Iraq and that “hundreds” of them were being transported to training camps operated by the IRGC and Iraqi Shiite militias, such as Kataib Hezbollah.
→Word of the Day: GONGO
Noun: Acronym for “government-organized nongovernmental organization,” used by United Nations workers to describe a host of Chinese state- and Communist Party-backed NGOs that surveil and harass Chinese dissidents at the UN office in Geneva, as detailed in a new article from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. GONGOs were created to exploit U.N. rules that allow NGOs to participate in sessions of the UN Human Rights Council; delegates from the GONGOs use this privilege to “disrupt and drown out criticism of China, heaping praise on their government,” while also acting as de facto intelligence agents, spying on dissidents who travel to Geneva to plead their case. According to ICIJ’s investigation, of 106 NGOs from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan with consultative status at the UN, “59 are closely connected with the Chinese state or CCP,” and “46 are led by people with roles in the government or the party.”
Example of GONGO in a sentence: Some Uyghur activists are reluctant to testify at the UN’s Geneva office, fearing that GONGOs will spy on them and threaten their family members back home.
Read the report here: https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/united-nations-ngo-gongo-intimidate-human-rights/
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David Horowitz, 1939-2025
A remembrance of the author of the American classic, 'Radical Son', who became a leading voice on the right
by Lee Smith
I’d forgotten that David Horowitz’s Radical Son opens with something breaking:
My only clear recollection of my grandfather Morris—a memory forever sharpened by remorse—is that when I was six he sat on my favorite record of the Seven dwarves singing “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho (It’s off to work we go…)” and broke it. And that I yelled at him, protesting the injustice with all the force my small lungs could muster, as if my yelling could make the record whole. And that, shortly afterward, they took my grandfather to the hospital—and I never saw him again.
It's a remarkable opening passage, assuring readers they’re in the hands of a uniquely gifted writer who, we learn as the story unfolds, has here foreshadowed the key themes of the tale to come—family and fathers, protest and injustice, redemption and loss. Horowitz’s 1996 masterpiece is one of the greatest autobiographies in American literature. It’s a story about things that break—parents, children, marriages, politics. But he seems to have gotten stronger, since as he shows in his books and public life his purpose was to understand more about himself and what he loved, including his country.
He was born January 10, 1939, and died April 29 at the age of 86. But his life story covers hundreds of years, for the material that shaped him constitutes the full sweep of American history, from the Middle Passage and the Pale of Settlement through Vietnam and the Fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and the Donald Trump presidency. Both sides of Horowitz’s family escaped Russia, though it seems his mother and father never really got far enough away, even in Queens, NY, where they devoted themselves to the communist cause, Josef Stalin, and their son David.
Their red-diaper baby became one of the stars of the New Left, as a writer, publisher, and organizer who protested against the war in Vietnam and racism, worked with the Black Panthers and became friends with the group’s founder Huey Newton. And then in the early 1980s, he made an about-face and supported Ronald Reagan. He started the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1998 and became one of the leading voices of the American right. He was so successful as an activist, and so prolific in promoting younger conservatives, that his public gifts tended to overshadow his contributions to American literature and historiography. He wrote many dozens of books—memoirs, polemics, histories—and told me that he considered the nine-volume The Black Book of the American Left, an encyclopedic chronicle of leftwing radicalism, one of the cornerstones of his legacy.
In 2016, I visited David at his home in the desert north of Los Angeles. He said he’d never traveled to Israel—he didn’t like flying—but with the late summer light breaking over the mountains and illuminating the valley behind him, it struck me the patriarch of the right had recreated a Jerusalem of sorts in his own backyard.
I asked him about the upcoming election, Trump, and the global paranoia his campaign had given rise to. He asked of his fellow Republicans “Don’t they understand the seriousness of this election?” He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”
Radical Son is a narrative driven by crimes and lies. He’d helped his friend Betty Van Satter get an accounting job with the Panthers and Newton had her murdered. That kept Horowitz out of politics for a while, as he wondered if the left could “take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals.” He writes: “I already knew the answers, although I wasn’t ready yet to draw the appropriate conclusions.”
His parents had not wanted to ask those questions so when it became impossible to ignore or excuse Stalin’s crimes, they were crushed—they’d nurtured lies great and small for decades. In the Tablet article recounting my afternoon with David I wrote that, with his parents’ failed political commitment in mind, he’d “resolved not to be played for a sucker.” Now I see that was a coarse formulation, and false. There was nothing calculated about his re-evaluation of his place in the political realm. He lived by his sense of what was true and what was good, as he records in Radical Son. It’s a work of profound psychological acuity, whether he’s describing Newton, his parents, the character of an ex-wife or his failure to see his own faults as clearly as he sees others’.
The fact is that throughout his career, first on the left and then the right, Horowitz’s main theme wasn’t really politics, rather it was family. Along with fellow former leftist turned conservative Peter Collier, he wrote several histories of great American families, including the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Many consider A Cracking of the Heart, his memoir of his late daughter Sarah, to be his best book. Conservatives generally argue, with good reason, that leftist policies are designed to break the traditional family structure. But David believed that failures at home generate the psychological chaos at the heart of the leftist project to undo civilization and remake it in the image of barbarism.
“The perennial challenge,” he wrote in Radical Son, is “to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. My own life, which has often been painful and many times off course, is ultimately not discrete—a story to itself—but part of the narrative we all share.”
It’s true, almost everything we love breaks. May we, too, earn the wisdom David Horowitz sought and found and shared with family, friends, colleagues, and readers.
The David Horowitz "obituary" - touching and beautifully written
By that description, every NGO I can think of in America is a GONGO!