February 22: Russia, Russia, Russia

The IDF buys local; Terror attacks and “violent settlers”; Biden mulls border executive order

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The Big Story

Russia is back in the news. On the domestic front, we’re getting treated to a low-budget Russiagate rerun from Democrats and their media allies, thanks to the combination of ongoing congressional debates over the Ukrainian aid bill, Trump’s tasteless comments comparing himself to murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and recent revelations that a confidential human source for the FBI, Alexander Smirnov, had met with “Russian intelligence officials” before falsely telling FBI agents that Joe and Hunter Biden had received $5 million in bribes from executives at Burisma. 

On Wednesday, for instance, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that the House Republicans behind the effort to impeach Joe Biden over his family’s influence-peddling operation were “dupes to a Russian disinformation propaganda effort.” (In fact, most of the evidence against the Biden family comes from Jim Biden and Hunter Biden’s former business associates, such as Tony Bobulinski and Devon Archer, as well as from Hunter’s laptop.) A few days earlier, Nancy Pelosi had speculated to Psaki that Vladimir Putin had “financial” dirt on Trump, after the former president compared his own legal troubles to Putin’s persecution of Navalny. Similar comments from Trump at a Fox News town hall this week prompted MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to declare yesterday, “If Trump loves Russia so much he should move there.” And so on. 

Back in the real world, there have been a few important Russia-related developments this week. On Monday, Russian diplomats confirmed that they will host representatives from all Palestinian political factions, including Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, in Moscow next week in an attempt to achieve Palestinian unity. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Iran had supplied Russia with about 400 surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, including Zolfaghar short-range ballistic missiles, which can be mounted on trucks and strike targets at distances of up to 435 miles—about the distance between Kyiv and Sevastopol, in Russian-held Crimea. 

We spoke to The Scroll’s in-house geopolitical analyst for his view on how these two developments—Russia’s attempt to play peacemaker among the various Palestinian factions, including the Iran-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Russia’s deepening military alliance with Iran, driven by battlefield considerations in Ukraine—are connected:

Russia grandiosely persists in imagining itself to be a geopolitical rival to the United States. And guess what? They’re doing pretty well. 

Russia’s current run as a player in the Middle East began when Putin entered Syria at Barack Obama’s invitation to help preserve Iran’s “equities” in that country against a civil uprising that eventually cost perhaps 500,000 Syrian lives. Over the past decade, Russia has played off its growing ties with Iran against its ties with Israel in order to maintain its stake in Syria and expand its regional influence.

Russia’s balancing act in the Middle East has gained strategic importance in its war against Ukraine. Because Ukraine is located on Russia’s borders, the conflict there is existential for the Putin regime. Iran has proved to be a strategically important ally for Putin, providing the regime with drones, drone factories, and drone operators, as well as supplies of Syrian Orcs to be fed into the frontline meat grinder. At the same time, Putin’s position in Syria, meaning on Israel’s border, constrains the Israelis from bowing to U.S. pressure to arm and train the Ukrainians. 

When Russia breaks through Ukrainian lines in the spring, as it likely will, Russia’s successful great power politicking in the Middle East will turn out to have played a not-insignificant role, in exchange for which Russia will continue to strengthen Iran and its proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, within limits set by Russia’s relationship with Israel. 

Because the Russian-Israeli relationship is grounded in the personal trust established between Putin and Netanyahu over the past two decades, a successful U.S. drive to remove Bibi from power would therefore likely have a further negative impact both on Israel’s security and on Ukraine’s battlefield positioning, as Putin would no longer seek to do business with a weak Israeli leader who served as a simple U.S. proxy, and would be free to back Hamas and Iran to the hilt.

To put a finer point on it: Team Obama-Biden’s commitment to strengthening Iran in the Middle East is also strengthening Russia, which is undermining Washington’s ability to confront Russia in Ukraine or to compel the Israelis to cooperate with its anti-Moscow policy. Successfully ousting or undermining Bibi, as the White House has made clear it wants to do, would lead to more of the same: a stronger Russia, a stronger Iran, and a weaker Israel. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Why are so many porn stars coming out against Israel? Ross Anderson investigates.

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The Rest

→Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that Biden’s Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, has urged the Israelis to send a delegation to upcoming hostage talks in Paris and claimed there has been “progress” in negotiations with Hamas, shortly after Egyptian officials said Hamas had lowered the number of prisoners it wants released to 3,000. Talks appeared to stall last week over what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has referred to as Hamas’ “delusional” demands, while Israeli war cabinet minister and opposition leader Benny Gantz said over the weekend that Israel will invade Rafah if Hamas does not release the remaining Israeli hostages by the start of Ramadan on March 10. In a meeting with McGurk on Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly told the U.S. envoy that Israel would “expand the authority given to our hostage negotiators,” but also warned that the IDF “is preparing the continuation of intense ground operations.” Multiple media reports indicate that U.S. negotiators hope to use a pause in fighting as a stepping stone to a more permanent cease-fire, but Netanyahu has said that ending the war is a “red line” that Israel will not cross. 

→The Israeli Defense Ministry announced earlier this week that it will purchase tens of thousands of Israeli-made Tavor assault rifles as part of a “broader policy seeking to reduce Israeli dependence on imported weapons and ammunition,” according to a report in Ynet News. The order is the ministry’s largest ever for the procurement of Israeli-made weapons and represents a continuation of what has arguably been Israel’s most successful tactic during the current war: reducing Washington’s leverage over Israeli decision-making by reducing the IDF’s reliance on U.S.-supplied munitions. 

The announcement is also good news for the Israeli defense industry. In their July 2023 Tablet article calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz cited, among the many pathological effects of the aid relationship, its crippling consequences for Israel’s defense industry. In 2018, for instance, the Israeli Ministry of Defense projected that the current U.S.-Israeli memorandum of understanding, signed in the waning days of the Obama administration and set to expire in 2028, would cost Israel $1.3 billion annually in lost defense-industry revenue and lead to the elimination of 20,000 jobs while granting the United States near-veto power over Israeli decisions about war and peace. As Jake and Liel put it at the time:

In return for a so-called “aid package” that actually costs Israel a fortune, the Jewish state is now tethered to its benefactor’s Iran-centric foreign policy and prohibited from capitalizing on its own considerable capabilities, while granting the U.S. access to its best military and scientific minds at a heavily reduced rate of pennies on the dollar. In turn, the ostensible largesse of this arrangement transforms Israel into a scapegoat for every lunatic conspiracy theorist in America to indulge in Jew-baiting in the guise of pontificating about “U.S. foreign policy.”

Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-american-aid-israel 

→President Biden is reportedly considering issuing an executive order to restrict migrants’ ability to seek asylum in the United States, just weeks after claiming that he needed new legislation to address the border crisis. CNN reported Wednesday that the president was considering invoking section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to tighten asylum screenings, though it offered scant details beyond that. However, Scroll readers may remember that 212(f) is exactly the authority we pointed to in our Feb. 5 Big Story, in the course of explaining that Biden had the authority to act even without the Senate border deal: 

Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states, “Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.” No new shutdown authority is needed.

Ironically, asylum law may be the one area in which 212(f) authority is most limited; federal courts blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to invoke the authority to deny asylum claims to those crossing illegally. But we suspect that the point is less for the White House to do anything about the border and more for it to do something to allow it to hold a press conference to pretend it’s doing something about the border. The idea of a border-related executive order was first floated on Monday in Axios’ preview of the State of the Union. As Axios wrote, “This could even happen in the two weeks before the address, allowing Biden to say he took action while Republicans just talk.” 

→On Thursday morning, three Palestinian terrorists armed with assault rifles opened fire at Israelis waiting in traffic near the az-Za’ayyem checkpoint, between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, killing one and wounding eight others. The attack, which was praised by Hamas, comes amid reports that the Biden administration is weighing a new round of sanctions against allegedly violent Israeli settlers. As Liel Leibovitz explained in his Feb. 7 article for Tablet, “The Fraudulent Case Against ‘Violent Settlers,’” the administration’s narrative of an “epidemic” of “settler violence” is cribbed from reports by left-wing NGOs, which attribute all violence in the West Bank to Israeli settlers, even when it is initiated by Palestinians and when the settlers are clearly acting in self-defense. For instance, on X, Hen Mazzig provides background on some of the victims of today’s attack:

Using the White House’s criteria, the deceased Elmaliah and the wounded Hananya are exactly the sorts of “violent settlers” who are prime targets for U.S. sanctions. 

→Last Friday, in a case involving the accidental destruction of frozen embryos at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized eggs are “extrauterine children” under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. On Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham paused in-vitro fertilization (IVF) services, citing fears that patients or doctors could be held criminally liable for accidental damage to embryos during the procedure. In addition to threatening access to IVF in Alabama and other red states that might follow its lead, the ruling is another potential albatross around the neck of the GOP, which has underperformed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. According to polling conducted by Kellyanne Conway, the GOP pollster and former Trump aide, 86% of Americans support IVF, including 78% of “pro-life” advocates and 83% of Evangelical Christians. “When a state, any state, takes an aggressive action on this particular topic, people are once again made aware of it and many think: ‘Maybe I can’t support a Republican in the general election,’” GOP political consultant Stan Barnes told Politico.

→More than half of college graduates are underemployed one year after graduation, and 45% remain underemployed 10 years after graduation, according to new research by The Burning Glass Institute, a labor analytics firm, and Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit. The study, which tracked the career paths of more than 10 million workers from 2012 to 2021, found that roughly half of them remained in jobs for which their degrees weren’t needed for the entirety of the study period. That has a major effect on lifetime earnings: According to the study, bachelor’s degree holders in college-level jobs earn almost 90% more than workers in their twenties with high-school diplomas, while underemployed degree holders earn only 20% more.

→The leading candidate in an upcoming election for the Los Angeles Unified School District school board said on X that Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitic tome The Secret Relationship Between Black and Jews, which falsely alleges that Jews controlled the transatlantic slave trade, should be “mandatory” reading in “community schools,” among other antisemitic social media posts. Kahllid Al-Alim, who has been endorsed by the United Teachers Los Angeles union and the Democratic Socialists of America, recommended Farrakhan’s book in an Oct. 17, 2022, X post, in which he told followers that they didn’t understand the “Kanye interview” because they hadn’t read Farrakhan. Alim has also “liked” pornographic posts and a speech by Farrakhan in which the Nation of Islam leader referred to “the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who has blamed rising antisemitism in the United States on “MAGA politicians” criticizing George Soros, appeared at a Feb. 18 get-out-the-vote event for Alim organized by the United Teachers Los Angeles. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

U.S. Scheming for a Palestinian State Unwittingly Strengthens Netanyahu, by Gadi Taub

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Porn for Palestine

Mia Khalifa and other adult film stars have a lot to say about the conflict in the Middle East. In part because it’s good for business.

By Ross Anderson

If you’ve heard of Mia Khalifa, it's for one of two reasons.

It’s likely because she's one of the most famous faces in pornography. This is highly ironic, as it's an industry she hates, was only involved with for a short time, and has trashed ever since. Despite the fame it has brought her—which she continues to monetize—Khalifa has few credits to her name. She told Playboy in 2018 that she'd only done 12 nonsolo professional videos (her IAFD page puts it at closer to 30, but no matter), and she shot these over roughly three months, before signing an exclusivity deal with Bang Bros, which she resigned from a few weeks later.

She would have been completely forgotten were it not for wearing hijabs in a stepmother threesome scene (along with co-star Juliana Vega)—a choice that sent the video viral and made her famous. She was soon the No. 1 searched "star" on PornHub, but also received death threats, apparently including from ISIS members.

Until Oct. 7, this was the only reason she was well-known. But if you’ve logged onto X in the months since Hamas’ massacre, you probably know her for something else. Despite experiencing the threat of religious violence—both because of her pornographic work and as the daughter of Christians who fled Lebanon after Hezbollah seized control of the country in 2000—she has become one of the most vocal advocates of Hamas and anti-Israeli violence, with no degree of barbarism too much for comfort.

Indeed on Oct. 7, her reaction to videos of Hamas’ atrocities was to tweet, “Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal.”

Khalifa’s interest in the issue, however, has been sustained. Since Oct. 7, she has tweeted defending the Houthis (“Imagine bombing a country for seizing a ship in their own waters that THEY have jurisdiction over …….”), insisting that celebrities supporting Israel have “no soul or opinions of their own,” and “it’s the money that’s talking,” calling Israel’s war a “genocide” that has turned Gaza into a “concentration camp” run by “a genocidal sociopath playing out before our eyes, funded by our tax dollars,” and labelling Gal Gadot a “Genocide Barbie” for organizing screenings of footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. She also retweeted baseless accusations that the tunnels illegally built beneath Chabad’s headquarters in Brooklyn were used for pedophilia.

Though there has been much backlash from the part of humanity that doesn't support the slaughter of Jews, Khalifa has also earned a lot of stans in her comments cheering on her barbs. But Khalifa’s antisemitic anti-Zionism, while it appears sincere, is also a grift; a sign of the broken economy of online adult influencers that incentivizes provocation and extreme rhetoric over everything else. Even more than porn, applauding Hamas has given Khalifa the most important currency in the internet economy: attention.

From its first edition published in 1953, Playboy always tried to combine the licentious with meaningful political discourse. In his opening editorial, Hugh Hefner imagined the Playboy reader as the sort of man who would “enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” The following year, the magazine would serialize Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and in the years to come, its “Playboy Philosophy” column aired arguments about gay and women’s rights, drug legalization, and free expression. The Playboy Interview became second only to 60 Minutes as America’s premier interview series.

And yet, despite publishing A-tier writing, the intellectual seriousness of the magazine was almost always dismissed. To “read Playboy for the articles” was a common joke. The magazine is dead, having imploded in a fit of internal dysfunction in 2020. But however much Hugh and his editors and writers tried, sex and politics wouldn’t sit comfortably together.

With the advent of the internet, pornography faced the same challenge that journalism writ large is currently navigating: the free proliferation of something that used to cost money. No longer restrained to nudie mags and VHS tapes, nudity of all stripes and tastes became one Google search away—and porn stars weren’t paid when someone Googled "boobs."

The response of the porn industry mirrored that of the news media: ad businesses, bundled content, and paywalls. Conglomerates WGCZ s.r.o. and Aylo—formerly MindGeek—bought studios (including Bang Bros) and then released free, ad-supported versions of their videos for their various tube sites, like Xvideos, PornHub, RedTube, and YouPorn. Long before New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger bought Wordle, porn studios told viewers to whip out their credit card if they wanted access to the best stuff. The kings of premium pornography, Vixen Media Group, began charging $599 a year for access to all their sites. Through it all, porn stars have emerged as an odd species of celebrity—hugely famous and looked at, but rarely spoken about in polite conversation.

The landscape changed again with the advent of platforms like OnlyFans and JustForFans, which allowed adult film stars to harness the entrepreneurial potential of the influencer economy. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, these platforms introduced a new, independent income stream for professional porn stars and amateur exhibitionists alike. Instead of just paying for nudity, OnlyFans subscribers pay for personal access to these performers through DMs and message boards. The biggest stars began outsourcing their messaging to staff or AI personas.

To be a successful porn star in 2024 is to combine semi-authentic self-expression with the craft of social media influencers. And having a distinct and memorable personality is crucial for helping adult film stars stand out, just as it is for any other influencer. You have to be novel—unique amid a sea of nondescript free nudity.

Thus the empire of OnlyFans star Belle Delphine is built on her quirky YouTube humor, manic aura, and cultivated teen or even preteen appearance, while Aella's relies on her unfiltered, direct intelligence. She looks beautiful, and talks about sex very openly; but so do many people, and participating in Free Press debates about feminism, making detailed sexual preference surveys, and being a regular podcast guest—speaking intelligently on all matters around dating and romance—makes her stand out. And though Mia Khalifa’s OnlyFans is just lewd, the same principles apply. Controversy gets clicks, and she's a busty, pro-Palestinian activist who is completely unhinged on Twitter, which is a winning recipe.

And as a user, it also makes you feel like the kind of well-rounded person Hugh Hefner hoped to appeal to. For Khalifa’s subscribers, they are not only paying for pornography and nude content, but also for a product that makes them feel politically virtuous and informed.

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The only Jewish owner of a major gay porn studio, Michael Lucas—a 51-year-old producer and both a U.S. and Israeli citizen—runs Lucas Entertainment out of Manhattan. Among the hundreds of films under his beltline, Men of Israel is a particular landmark production. As Tablet Executive Editor Wayne Hoffman wrote in 2009, it was the first gay porn film featuring an all Jewish cast. Unlike Khalifa, Lucas is a veteran in the industry (he is in the GayVN Hall of Fame), has generally centrist political views, and hasn’t cheered on the slaughter of innocents. Since Oct. 7, Lucas has made a “small donation” to Israel and received a thank you video from IDF soldiers in response.

When anti-Israel reactionary commentator Jake Shields tweeted in outrage after IDF soldiers sarcastically wrote Shields’ name on an Israeli rocket, Lucas replied with a photo of another missile, on which soldiers had penned in red marker: “From Michael Lucas to Gaza.” Lucas tweeted “Hahaha I actually asked to write my name. Got a pic before and after.”

The first part of this was a joke—Lucas did not write his name on the missile—but he was just riling up an online provocateur. Prior to rebranding as an ally of Palestinian refugees, Shields was best known as a former MMA fighter who defended Kanye’s antisemitism, “asked questions" about the Holocaust, opposed women having the right to vote, and once said that “Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg need to stop flirting and just fuck already,” before following this up with the gentlemanly “just give her a proper smashing and she will knock it off with her crazy feminest/climate [sic] nonsense.”

Lucas was toying with an asshole. But in his professional life, the tweet itself was a bomb.

Gay porn star Sean Xavier said he would never work with Lucas’ company again, or promote the work he did for them. Derek Kage, Aiden Ward, and Teddy Graham all followed suit, and mononymous porn star Sharok tried to spread the hashtag #boycottmichaellucas and called Lucas “an accessory to murder and genocide.” Porn star Sammy Sinsss said Lucas is “disgusting and a disgrace to the gay community”; ItalianXlff said, “This is utterly unacceptable. I'm shocked this has been posted. It made me sick! 😔” and Nico Kraken wrote, “No surprise that’s why nobody likes him in Puerto Vallarta, always had that racist behavior.”

Where Khalifa posts selfies behind an OnlyFans paywall, and thus financially benefits from all controversy bringing attention to it, Lucas works in the pre-influencer model of the porn economy, making films that require actors and a crew to produce. His comments have made his name better known—unintentionally, of course—but only insofar as he is becoming a notorious pariah in the porn industry for his stance on Israel. Talent who may have considered working with him may now stay away over worries that they too will be called out if they star in his films.

By contrast, so far, there has been no downside to speaking out against Lucas. These terminally online adult stars, immersed in today’s attention economy, have their OnlyFans linked in their bios. Replying to Sharok’s tweet—which has over 4,000 likes and 1.2 million “views”—is good marketing.

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Khalifa’s tweets made it an easy sport to dunk on her, mentioning her history in sex work as a way to delegitimize her opinions. It’s become routine to (correctly) point out that Hamas would “throw her from a building” for her pornographic work (among other reasons), or to say variants of “You’re telling me the degenerate porn star isn’t the brightest bulb?” “she’s a porn star so her decision making is questionable,” “she isn’t exactly known for her brains. Not that kind at least,” and “she sucked d*ck for a living. what do you expect” (as though expertise in fellatio is incompatible with having informed, morally sound politics). Dave Rubin said, “She’s a bigger cunt in real life than in the videos 😉” and had previously said, in response to an anti-Zionist tweet of hers, that “you’ve had too many loads blown on your face.”

But Khalifa isn’t the loser here. All of these retweets and quote-tweets have only brought more eyeballs and wallets to her OnlyFans, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A month and a day after imploring Hamas members to hold their phones sideways to better capture the rape, murder, and incineration of Israeli Jews, she tweeted: “I love all my new followers on onlyfans who have subscribed just to say they support the cause. I see all of your messages and they mean the world to me, thank you🤍🍉”