Media literacy is not a thing you finish. It is a way of reading — noticing the frame before you evaluate the content, leaving the page to check the source, refusing to amplify what you cannot verify, treating confident language as performance rather than proof, and asking what system delivered a claim to you before deciding whether to trust it.

None of that is dramatic. It will not give you the feeling of having “seen through” something. It is the opposite of the exhilarating certainty that so much of modern media is designed to produce. That is the point. The manipulation stack — from framing to rhetorical tactics to algorithmic curation — runs on the feeling of certainty. Resisting it means being willing to sit with less.

The mechanics are small. Ask how before whether. Trace backward before you share forward. Treat the sensation of sudden clarity as a reason to slow down, not speed up. Let “I don’t know yet” be a complete sentence. And when you cannot verify something, let the silence do the work.

If you have gotten this far, you already have what you need. The rest is practice — one claim, one image, one feed at a time.

The Complete UNSPUN Series

Introduction: How to See Through Media Manipulation

Unit 1: What Media Manipulation Actually Is

Unit 2: How Manipulation Works

Unit 3: How to Verify Information in 60 Seconds

Unit 4: Why Online Truth Keeps Breaking Down

Unit 5: How to Resist Manipulation

Unit 6: Why a Real Photo Can Still Tell a False Story

Unit 7: AI Can Be Fluent and Wrong

Unit 8: How Algorithms Shape What You Believe

This series will not make you immune to manipulation. No checklist will. What it can do is make manipulation harder to pull off without you noticing — and that margin, the few seconds between encountering a claim and deciding whether to believe or share it, is where most of the work happens.

The goal was never to turn you into a fact-checker. It was to give you the reflex to pause, the tools to verify, and the confidence to say “I don’t know yet” when that is the most honest answer available. If you use even one of these habits once, the series did its job.

UNSPUN is a Media Literacy series from Jewish Onliner.

Tech for Palestine, a U.S.-based nonprofit that has developed dozens of anti-Israel tech tools for the broader anti-Israel ecosystem, will host Ezzeldeen Dwedar, an alleged leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, at an August 20 online roundtable titled “Winning the Algorithm Wars.”

Dwedar is the founder and general coordinator of ISNAD, a digital influence network that researchers have linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. He and ISNAD have publicly praised Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who pleaded guilty to the June 2025 murder of 82-year-old Karen Diamond during a pro-Israel hostage-awareness rally in Boulder, Colorado.

The event is scheduled for 7 p.m., according to Tech for Palestine’s official listing. The organization presents Dwedar as an Egyptian-Turkish politician and political-media executive who organized thousands of ISNAD volunteers into a “disciplined digital front” operating in influence, technology and the “information and algorithms war.”

Other announced speakers include Palestinian-American content creator Moath Hamzeh; digital-governance specialist Mona Shtaya; and Taysir Mathlouthi, senior European Union advocacy officer at the alleged PFLP-linked 7amleh.

Praising the Boulder Firebomber

In two X posts at the time, Dwedar reshared a propaganda video Soliman had recorded before the attack and praised him for possessing “rare courage.” In another post, Dwedar said Soliman had not merely recorded a video explaining an idea, but had “embodied” and “proved” it through his actions, concluding: “God is the Greatest.”

ISNAD’s Telegram channel separately amplified Soliman’s pre-attack video, circulating what it described as “the full will of the hero Mohamed Soliman.” The channel also forwarded a statement praising those who followed Soliman’s path and “ignited the flames” beneath Israelis. Jewish Onliner previously documented ISNAD’s response to the attack.

Soliman pleaded guilty to 101 state charges, including first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole plus an additional 2,128 years.

Dwedar’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties and Support for Hamas

Dwedar’s association with the Muslim Brotherhood is documented in his own words and in reporting about the organization’s internal leadership.

In a 2013 interview published by the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website, Dwedar said a film he directed faced criticism because of his Brotherhood affiliation. He stated that he did not deny belonging to the organization and was proud of his membership.

Egyptian newspaper Youm7 subsequently identified Dwedar in 2017 as a leader in the Brotherhood’s General Bureau faction. A 2018 report described him as a fugitive Brotherhood leader residing in Turkey.

When Hamas released a new political document in 2017, Dwedar disputed claims that the organization had never been structurally connected to the Brotherhood. He said Hamas had been represented in the Brotherhood’s International Organization, was organizationally subordinate to the Guidance Bureau and had leaders participating in the Brotherhood’s international coordination structures.

Dwedar added that any person who had belonged to the Brotherhood for at least 15 years could attest that Hamas had been part of the organization “organizationally and ideologically.”

In an April 6, 2026 X post, Dwedar wrote: “I am with Hamas.”

His support predates that declaration. In an April 2025 post about the Hamas assault on Sderot, Dwedar praised what he called the “glory and miracles” created by the “angels of October 7.” The attack was part of the wider October 7, 2023 massacre.

Dwedar has also eulogized Hamas terrorist leaders. In a September 4, 2025 X post, he wrote that Yahya Sinwar was in God’s mercy alongside hundreds of “heroes and leaders.” In December, he published a farewell to former Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida and expressed support for his successor.

Researchers Document Israeli Impersonation Network

The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) described ISNAD as a foreign intervention campaign presented as a grassroots movement. Its researchers found that ISNAD volunteers used fabricated Israeli identities, artificial intelligence-generated profile pictures, virtual private networks and prepared Hebrew messages accompanied by Arabic instructions.

An INSS analysis of 538 posts from ten identified accounts during the June 2025 Israel-Iran war found that 46.7% attacked the Israeli government, 32.7% promoted despair or hopelessness and 5.9% focused on fear and anxiety.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) identified more than 100 accounts whose attributes and activities it said resembled ISNAD. Approximately one-third connected through mobile applications or app stores outside Israel. X listed most of the remainder as Israeli-based while warning that they might be using proxies.

FDD also found that the accounts drew from a shared message library and lightly rewrote material before distributing it. Iran-related content increased from less than 5% of their output before the 2026 war to more than 20% after fighting began.

INSS senior researcher David Siman-Tov wrote in The Jerusalem Post that ISNAD included a managerial layer, Hebrew-language specialists, designers and technical personnel. He cited a post threatening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s family that was initially treated as an authentic Israeli message before investigators identified it as foreign activity.

ISNAD Distributes Hamas and Al-Qassam Messaging

ISNAD’s public Telegram repeatedly republishes statements from official Hamas accounts and material produced by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The channel has also translated Hamas messaging into Hebrew and instructed followers to place it in Israeli comment sections.

In April 2025, ISNAD’s Telegram channel promoted a fatwa from the Muslim Brotherhood-linked International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) declaring armed jihad against Israel obligatory for Muslims. The ten-point decree called on every capable Muslim in the Islamic world to wage armed jihad, with IUMS’s own English-language version stating that “all Muslims and Muslim nations” were obligated to engage in jihad against the “Zionist entity.”

IUMS was founded and long led by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whom Reuters described as a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

ISNAD Extends Its Messaging Into American Politics

After Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Aug. 4, 2026, MEMRI reported that ISNAD congratulated him and contrasted his victory with the defeat of Haley Stevens, whom it called “the Zionist AIPAC candidate.” ISNAD’s message used the hashtag “Gaza Changed the World” and praised El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and Gaza.

Tech for Palestine’s event listing does not address ISNAD’s Israeli impersonation campaign, its distribution of Hamas and Al-Qassam material, its amplification of a jihad fatwa, its praise for the Boulder attacker or Dwedar’s public statements supporting Hamas.

Two Jewish Onliner investigations entered the Senate record on August 5, 2026. They were cited five times in written testimony for a hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged U.S. network.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) presided over the hearing as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. The proceeding focused on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and legacy organizations identified in federal terrorism-financing evidence.

Witnesses also examined a CAIR-Ohio official’s participation in a conference featuring a sanctioned Hamas fundraiser. Additional testimony addressed an FBI archive of U.S. Brotherhood records, recent transactions involving CAIR’s Washington headquarters and litigation over the organization’s donor records.

The hearing was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.” It featured retired FBI special agent Lara Burns, counterterrorism analyst Kyle Shideler and senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center Arielle F. Klepach. The citations appeared in Klepach’s 48-page testimony.

Two Jewish Onliner Investigations Enter the Senate Record

Klepach’s 48-page testimony cited Jewish Onliner’s February 2026 DAWN investigation in footnote 84 on page 18. The citation supported the statement that Esam Omeish served as national president of the Muslim American Society from 2004 to 2008.

The citation appeared in a section examining Omeish’s chairmanship of the Washington Trust Foundation, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to support CAIR-Foundation. Klepach also cited a federal appellate brief describing the Muslim American Society as having been founded as the Brotherhood’s “overt arm” in the United States. A senior MAS official has acknowledged that Brotherhood members helped establish it while maintaining that the organization later developed beyond those origins.

A September 2025 Jewish Onliner K-12 investigation received four separate citations in footnotes 159 through 162 on pages 31 and 32. Klepach used the reporting to document similar CAIR educational materials promoted in Pennsylvania and Delaware. The reporting also traced related materials in New Jersey, Oklahoma, Florida and Illinois. One guide told teachers to avoid “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists” and “radical Islamic terrorists” when discussing September 11. The investigation also documented CAIR-Chicago’s advertised partnership with Chicago Public Schools.

Event With CAIR-Ohio Director & Hamas Official Receives Scrutiny

Klepach also devoted several pages to an October 2025 Al-Zaytouna Centre event originally reported by Jewish Onliner, which found that Khalid Turaani chaired the first session of a two-panel Arabic-language conference on October 22. Turaani had been appointed executive director of CAIR-Ohio in June 2024. The Beirut-based Al-Zaytouna Centre organized the event.

The event was titled “Palestinians Abroad and Regional and International Strategic Transformations in Light of Operation al-Aqsa Flood.” “Al-Aqsa Flood” is Hamas’s name for the October 7, 2023 attacks.

A separate session at the same event featured Majed al-Zeer and Sami al-Arian. The U.S. Treasury identified al-Zeer in October 2024 as a senior Hamas representative in Germany. It said he played a central role in the terrorist organization’s European fundraising and designated him for acting on behalf of Hamas. Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiring to provide services to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Klepach described Al-Zaytouna as a Brotherhood-aligned institution that had published material authored by Hamas leaders. She argued that Turaani’s participation gave credibility to the event and its organizer.

Testimony Traces a Broader Institutional Network

The hearing also addressed the Muslim American Society and the North American Islamic Trust. Other organizations discussed included the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Students Association.

Many of these institutions, along with their predecessors and offshoots, have been covered in Jewish Onliner’s comprehensive series. “The Brotherhood in Your Backyard” maps organizations named in or connected to the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum and traces how related entities evolved.

CAIR Contacts With Qatar-Based IUMS

Burns also examined repeated contacts between CAIR executive director Nihad Awad and the Qatar-based International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). Her testimony cited Arabic-language pages placing Awad at IUMS meetings between 2012 and at least 2022. These included a 2012 panel with IUMS founder Yusuf al-Qaradawi and a later meeting with secretary-general Ali al-Qaradaghi.

Qaradawi founded IUMS in 2004 and led it until 2018. Burns said evidence from the Holy Land Foundation trial identified him as an unindicted co-conspirator and an overseas fundraiser for the foundation alongside Hamas leaders. She also cited his religious rulings legitimizing suicide bombings. When Qaradawi died in 2022, Awad described him in an online tribute as “the most influential contemporary Muslim scholar.”

DSA Ties and El-Sayed Associations

The questioning later moved into electoral politics. Cruz asked Shideler whether Muslim Brotherhood groups partner with the Democratic Socialists of America. Shideler answered yes. Cruz then described the cooperation as a “red-green alliance” and asked about its basis. In a recorded hearing clip, Shideler said he believed it was also united by a revolutionary objective aimed at overturning the U.S. Constitution.

Cruz also asked about Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary one day before the hearing. When Cruz asked whether the candidacy concerned him, Shideler cited El-Sayed’s relationship with Emgage. Shideler described Emgage as close to CAIR. He also pointed to the past organizational roles of El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb. Tayeb served as president of CAIR-Michigan and has served on ISNA’s founders committee.

Witnesses Seek Investigations

Klepach called for ending CAIR’s federal grants, opening IRS examinations and not renewing its immigration-services accreditation. She also proposed legislation addressing successor organizations, pass-through foreign donations and discovery obstruction. Shideler’s principal recommendation was a new classified intelligence assessment. It could be compared with the structure documented nearly two decades ago.

By the time you evaluate a claim, a system has already decided whether you would see it — and increasingly, what summary of it you would read instead of the source. Search engines, encyclopedias, and AI assistants no longer just connect you to information; they interpret, rank, and reframe it. That transformation introduces its own risks, mostly invisible.

This is the last, and in some ways the most difficult, layer of the manipulation stack. The earlier units covered things you can learn to notice — a loaded frame, a cropped clip, a fluent-but-empty paragraph. This layer is harder to see because it operates before you see anything. The feed you scroll, the search result you click, the AI answer you skim — each is the output of a system that has already chosen what to show you, in what order, and often with what interpretation attached. You are not evaluating information. You are evaluating a curated selection of it, produced by a system optimized for its goals, not yours.

When The Summary Becomes The Source

Most people never reach the original anymore. They read the featured snippet, the AI overview, the top result — and trust it because the platform surfaced it. But search ranks content by algorithm, not accuracy: a well-optimized piece of misinformation can outrank a careful correction, and a snippet can pull a line out of context and present it as settled fact.

Encyclopedias can possibly be accurate but editable by anyone, and well-maintained on some pages while neglected on others. Citing one without checking its sources is trusting a summary of a summary. AI answers sound authoritative but do not verify — they synthesize patterns, and sometimes those patterns are confident hallucinations. When the summary is wrong, most people never find out.

The result is a strange inversion of how information used to work. For most of the internet’s history, the point of a search or a link was to get you to a source. Now, the destination is often the summary itself — the box at the top of the results page, the chatbot’s reply, the tweet-length paraphrase of a study nobody read. The source still exists, technically. It just isn’t where the conversation happens anymore.

How The Feed Shapes What You See

If summaries have replaced sources, feeds have replaced the act of choosing. Personalization tailors your feed to what the platform thinks will hold you. Click partisan content and you get more of it; engage with sensational headlines and you get more of those.

The system is not trying to inform you; it is trying to keep you there. Engagement-based ranking rewards what generates clicks and shares — outrage, surprise, controversy — and buries what does not, which is usually nuance, correction, and complexity. And synthetic engagement makes it worse: bots and coordinated networks inflate likes and shares to make content look popular, which the algorithm reads as real signal and amplifies further.

What reaches you is not what is true. It is what the system predicts will keep you scrolling: emotionally charged, ideologically familiar, socially validated, or infuriated. Over time, that isn’t just a feed. It’s a shape. It is the specific corner of reality the algorithm has decided you belong in, reinforced every day by the fact that everyone else in that corner is seeing roughly the same things you are.

What To Ask

Before trusting something delivered by search, an AI summary, or a feed, ask three things. How did this reach me — did I find it, or did an algorithm hand it to me, and did it go viral because it is credible or merely because it is engaging? Am I looking at the original, or a summary of it — and if a summary, who made it and what did they leave out? And what signals am I actually using to judge it — because top-of-results, a blue checkmark, and a high like-count are signals of visibility, not truth.

The systems that deliver your information are not neutral. Understanding how they work is now part of literacy itself.

On August 3, 2026, the socialist American magazine Current Affairs published a roughly 6,000-word essay by SOAS doctoral student Zenab Huriyah Ahmed titled “Israel’s Rave Music Drowns Out the Sound of its Victims.”

The article recasts a music festival where hundreds of people were killed and dozens abducted as an expression of Israeli decadence, portrays Hamas terrorists as “fedayeen”, and ultimately places Israeli electronic music in the same moral category as music used by Nazi Germany.

Published nearly ten months after the October 10, 2025 ceasefire, the essay omits several central facts documented by the Israeli military’s inquiry into the Nova attack. It does not report that 378 people were killed in and around the festival or that 44 were abducted, and it does not identify any victim by name. Despite making broad claims about Israeli society and the Nova massacre, the essay contains no original interviews with Israeli musicians, festivalgoers, survivors or victims’ families.

Rewriting What Happened at Nova

Ahmed organizes several section headers around B7O and A7O, marking periods before and after October 7. The device makes the massacre the essay’s chronological reference point, even as the people killed and abducted that day remain largely absent from its account.

Ahmed describes the Nova festival site as “a well-funded dream of Hindu paganism.” Her brief account of the attack says most festivalgoers fled, others were caught in crossfire, and alleges that some were killed by Israeli police and security forces. The essay does not name an individual victim. Although it refers to hostages generally, it does not report that 44 people were abducted from Nova. Nor does it address evidence of sexual violence documented by UN investigations and Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes.

The border kibbutzim attacked on October 7 are described as “military-agrarian complexes,” with their farmers characterized as “tools of social erasure.”

The essay’s clearest historical analogy predicts that Israeli electronic music will be remembered for its “fascistic utility” alongside Wagnerian opera and Beethoven symphonies in Nazi Germany. Ahmed also calls for new “Nuremberg Trials” for Israeli leaders.

Ahmed further argues that Zionism pressures Mizrahi Jews to suppress their Arab ancestry in favor of being “culturally Jewish,” and suggests that this heritage could be recovered if Zionism contracts. The essay concludes that Palestinians must “decisively get the upper hand” against Israel.

The Magazine Behind It

Current Affairs is run from New Orleans by editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, a 36-year-old English-born Harvard PhD. Print circulation is 3,795. The magazine received 501(c)(3) charitable status in September 2023 — one month before October 7 — meaning American donors now receive a tax deduction for funding content comparing Israeli DJs to Nazi propagandists.

Its most recent Form 990 lists five employees, with Robinson drawing a $66,709 salary and his mother, Rosemary Robinson, serving as Secretary/Treasurer. Robinson himself was dismissed from The Guardian US in 2021 after tweeting that U.S. law required Congressional spending to buy Israeli weapons — a claim Guardian US editor John Mulholland responded to by citing “the prevalence of antisemitic tropes regarding Jewish control of American public life.” Robinson called Ahmed’s essay “remarkable.”

Part of an Editorial Pattern

The Ahmed piece is the culmination of a systematic editorial line. In April 2026, the magazine published “Israel’s New Lynching Law Is its Most Heinous Yet,” comparing Israeli law to Jim Crow. In March 2026, “First the Cherokee, Now the Palestinians”.

The significance of the essay lies less in any single phrase than in the editorial framework Current Affairs accepted. Ahmed assigns political responsibility to Israeli cultural life while presenting Palestinian terrorism through the vocabulary of “resistance.” Robinson’s public praise, combined with the magazine’s uniformly critical 2026 Israel/Palestine coverage, places the piece within a broader editorial line rather than as an isolated contribution.

The Socialism 2026 conference will bring thousands of activists to Chicago from September 4 through 7 for a program that combines socialist political education with practical training on targeting military suppliers, pressuring university boards, organizing inside K-12 schools and building support networks for activists facing prosecution. The four-day gathering at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place features more than 100 discussions, lectures and workshops, according to Haymarket Books, which organizes the event.

The official schedule includes sessions titled “Confronting Zionism,” “Building the People’s Embargo for Palestine,” “Weaponizing Antisemitism” and “Break the Board.” The conference’s partner page lists more than 80 organizations and media outlets, including the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Currents and The Intercept.

Workshops Move From Analysis to Campaign Building

One workshop, “Building the Anti-War Movement,” will teach participants how to identify hundreds of lesser-known U.S. military subcontractors. Its description points to a campaign against Pittsburgh-based Howmet Aerospace and says local movements can organize against secondary contractors to “dismantle their power.”

PYM’s “Building the People’s Embargo for Palestine” workshop similarly promises to help attendees identify targets in their own communities. The session will share an organizing framework and lessons from campaigns in the United States and Europe intended to disrupt weapons-supply chains. PYM has already led pressure campaigns against shipping company Maersk, including protests at company offices, according to an ADL profile.

NSJP is organizing “Break the Board,” which introduces a “Board of Butchers” framework and asks academics to strategize around university governance and the “abolition of the university.” The panel extends the campus movement’s attention from protests and encampments to university governing boards. After October 7, NSJP described the Hamas-led attack as a “historic win” and called for “armed confrontation with the oppressors.”

K-12 Schools Become an Organizing Arena

The conference also extends pro-Palestine organizing into public education. “Resisting Attacks on Schools, from Gaza to Chicago” identifies K-12 schools as sites of what organizers call “imperial violence” and pledges to provide participants with knowledge to organize schools “for Palestine.”

Participating groups include Chicago Educators for Palestine, Drop the ADL from Schools and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. A separate session organized by Rethinking Schools is titled “Weaponizing Antisemitism: An Interactive History.”

The Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing is also listed among the conference partners. XITO previously worked as an outside consultant to California’s Santa Ana Unified School District on ethnic-studies programming. In February 2025, the district settled a lawsuit brought by Jewish organizations and agreed to suspend three courses pending an open redesign process, disband its Ethnic Studies Steering Committee and stop working with an outside consultant accused of expressing antisemitic views.

The Intercept Appears as an Institutional Partner

The Intercept’s inclusion is particularly notable because it is a national investigative news organization, not an activist coalition, union or political membership group. The conference does not merely identify the outlet as attending or covering the gathering. Its partner page states that Socialism 2026 is presented by Haymarket Books “in partnership with” the listed organizations and media. The conference FAQ calls the listed groups endorsers and says organizational partners play a crucial role in mobilizing organizers to attend.

Drop Site was founded in 2024 by former Intercept journalists Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Nausicaa Renner. Beyond its interviews with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials, Drop Site has repackaged Hezbollah communiqués, propaganda videos and military claims for Western audiences.

The watchdog HonestReporting also reported that Drop Site published contributors have included individuals linked to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad media, including Abdel Qadder Sabah, Hossam Shabat and Mujahed Al-Saadi.

Speakers Bring Records of Controversy

Socialism 2026 has promoted Twitch commentator Hasan Piker as a speaker, although no session for him appeared on the public schedule as of August 5, 2026. In an April 2026 Pod Save America interview, Piker said he would choose Hamas over Israel “every single time” and stood by his statement that Hamas was “a thousand times better.”

Scheduled presenters include legal scholar Noura Erakat, whose “Confronting Zionism” session describes Zionism as colonial and racist “in essence and practice.” Psychologist Lara Sheehi will lead “Psychic Militancy.”

The schedule also lists “Life After Death Row” with Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is serving life without parole for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Former Guantánamo detainee Mansoor Adayfi will appear in “Refusing Erasure.”

A Network Built for Replication

PYM, NSJP and JVP bring established organizing networks to the conference. The ADL says PYM has co-sponsored at least 450 U.S. rallies since October 7 and quotes a PYM organizer describing political, strategic and logistical support for campus encampments. JVP, meanwhile, reorganized in 2026 around a 501(c)(4) capable of legislative and limited electoral work. Its latest filing reported approximately $10.66 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 2025.

“Standing Up” to the National Security State will conclude with an organizing meeting intended to help attendees establish local campaigns, hold fundraisers and seek support from unions, religious institutions and community organizations.

Conference organizers say Socialism 2026 itself costs hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and is funded almost entirely through registration revenue. What the schedule documents is a shared venue where national organizations can teach radical activism as designed for replication in workplaces, universities, schools and local communities, while established publications appear as formal partners in the same conference network.

In 2023, a New York attorney submitted a federal court brief citing six legal precedents supporting his client's case. The brief was competent. It cited specific cases by name, quoted them accurately, and reasoned through them the way lawyers reason. It "worked" — right up until opposing counsel could not find any of the six cases in any legal database.

ChatGPT had invented all of them. The lawyer had trusted the output because it read like something a lawyer would write. It read that way because AI is very good at producing text that reads like something a competent writer would write. What it is not good at, what it fundamentally cannot do, is know whether any of it is true.

That gap, between how a claim reads and whether it is true, is where AI-era manipulation lives.

Generative AI produces text that reads like it was written by an expert: perfect grammar, authoritative tone, logical structure. None of that means it is true. These models do not know what is true; they predict which words are likely to come next. Sometimes those predictions match reality and sometimes they do not — and when they do not, the model writes the falsehood with exactly the same confidence and polish. Fluency has become cheaper than accuracy, and because most people read clarity as credibility, the fluent falsehood often outperforms honest uncertainty.

Why Fluency Stopped Being A Signal

For most of history, fluent writing was a rough proxy for expertise. Not a perfect one, but strong enough that most readers used it as a shortcut. If someone could produce a polished paragraph; good grammar, confident tone, coherent structure, they had usually spent time with the material.

That shortcut just broke. Polished paragraphs are now free, in unlimited quantity, on any topic, indifferent to whether they are correct. The Mata brief was not an anomaly; it was an early, unusually well-documented instance of a pattern that now runs at scale. AI-generated summaries, “explainers,” social-media threads, and even citations circulate constantly, and most of them are never checked because they don’t look like the kind of thing that would need checking. They look fine. That is exactly the problem.

When Manipulation Scales

The individual hallucinated citation is a small problem. The scale is the real one. What made the Mata case newsworthy — that AI produced a professional-looking output with no relationship to reality — is now happening millions of times a day, everywhere, on every topic.

AI has made it essentially free to produce fluent commentary, plausible-sounding “analysis,” polished summaries of events, and confident answers to questions the model cannot actually answer. Some of this is honest error. Someone asks a chatbot a question, gets a fluent answer, treats it as fact, and passes it on. Some of it is deliberate: AI-written blog posts, “explainers,” social threads, and product reviews engineered to look organic and rank well in search. And a growing share of it is invisible — quietly folded into articles, emails, and reports by people who used AI to draft and never disclosed it.

The old ecosystem of information was slow enough that most of what circulated had at least been touched by a human who cared whether it was correct. That is no longer true. A meaningful share of what you read on any given day was produced by a system indifferent to the truth of what it was saying and increasingly, downstream systems are being trained on that output, which means the errors compound.

What To Do

You cannot check everything. But you can adjust your defaults.

Check citations. If a claim references a study, an article, or a case, confirm it exists before you trust it. The Mata attorneys did not, and the cost was public sanction. Verify against the source directly rather than trusting a link, a screenshot, or a summary.

Treat AI-fluent tone as a reason to slow down, not a reason to trust. If something is unusually polished, confident, and free of hedging, that is not evidence, it is style. Ask what the claim rests on, and whether the writer (human or otherwise) had any way of actually knowing what they are asserting.

And when someone says “ChatGPT said…” or cites an AI output as a source, treat it the way you would treat “I heard somewhere that…” — interesting, unverified, please continue.

The Chicago-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit Dissenters is recruiting full-time, U.S.-based college students for a paid, remote “Anti-Militarist Campus Organizing Fellowship” scheduled for September 14 through December 11, 2026. The fellowship was identified by the X account Restore Canada, which drew attention to the public listing. Applications close August 7, 2026.

The 12-week program pays students to spend about 15 hours a week on anti-militarist organizing and fellowship activities while establishing Dissenters chapters and campaigns on their campuses. An individual fellow receives $3,000 over three months; two students applying together from the same campus receive $2,500 each.

The same application also allows students to seek an academic-year Sara Bilezikian Peace Fellowship. That option pays $6,000 over the 2026–27 school year, or $3,000 per semester, and focuses specifically on counter-recruitment campaigns on campus and in the surrounding community.

This recruitment comes amid a series of pro-Palestinian efforts to disrupt defense and technology companies, including vandalism at an Elbit office, No Tech for Apartheid’s occupation of Google offices, and a Boeing-focused campus occupation that left property damaged and led to arrests.

The application specifically calls for organizing to prevent weapons manufacturers, including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, and companies it labels “militarized tech companies,” including Palantir, OpenAI, and Google, from recruiting at campus job fairs. By marketing the fellowships to students from Palestine-solidarity and #NoTechForApartheid circles, Dissenters is creating a funded structure for sustained campaigns against those industries.

Recruiting Palestine-Solidarity Activists

The listing explicitly connects the academic-year counter-recruitment option to several existing activist constituencies. It says the Sara Bilezikian fellowship may “particularly interest” students involved in Palestine solidarity, activism Dissenters describes as anti-genocide, opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, campaigns concerning surveillance or data centers, #NoTechForApartheid, and broader anti-militarist work.

The listing gives concrete examples of counter-recruitment campaigns: trying to prevent weapons manufacturers or military-linked technology companies from recruiting at career fairs; asking graduates to pledge not to work for those companies or the military; and seeking an end to campus or community contracts with military-industrial firms.

Funding and Fiscal Structure

Dissenters and its paid campus programming have received support from major progressive funders, with public filings showing Dissenters-specific grants routed through the Center for Third World Organizing, or CTWO. A 2022 tax return from the Foundation to Promote Open Society records a $100,000 grant to CTWO specifically to support Dissenters’ national fellowship program. The Foundation to Promote Open Society is part of the Open Society philanthropic network founded by George Soros.

Other public records document additional support. Solidaire Network’s return for the fiscal year ending June 2024 lists $75,000 to CTWO for general support of Dissenters, according to its filing. The Arca Foundation’s 2023 return lists a $50,000 project grant to CTWO for Dissenters.

Dissenters has its own tax-exempt entity and EIN. Its 2022 return shows $325,500 in revenue and $661,968 in expenses, while its 2023 and 2024 filings report no revenue, expenses, assets, or liabilities.

Multiple foundation filings show Dissenters-specific grants flowing through CTWO, either describing Dissenters as a CTWO project or listing CTWO as the grant recipient. Read alongside Dissenters’ separate tax-exempt registration, the records indicate a two-part structure: Dissenters exists as its own nonprofit entity, while CTWO has administered grants designated for Dissenters’ programs. Federal filings show CTWO’s total revenue rose from $364,378 in 2016 to $12,498,518 in 2023.

NYU Event Featuring Samidoun Representative and Anti-Israel Network Presence

In November 2022, NYU Law hosted “Free Them All: Abolition Across Borders,” a program connecting Palestinian prisoner activism with U.S. prison-abolition organizing. The university’s event record identified one speaker as “Hussein from the NY/NJ chapter of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network” and stated that Dissenters co-founder Byul Yoon would facilitate the discussion.

On October 15, 2024, the U.S. Treasury designated Samidoun under its counterterrorism authority, describing it as a “sham charity” and international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP has been a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. Treasury said Samidoun was established by the PFLP, served as a front for the group in countries where it is designated, and provided financial support to it.

A June 2025 report by Günther Jikeli and Daniel Miehling for Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism ranked Dissenters fifth among the 20 most frequent collaborators in its preliminary analysis of Instagram co-authorship within anti-Israel campus-group networks, recording 336 collaborations. The report describes Dissenters as a non-campus group from the “radical political left.” In its discussion of National SJP’s network, it lists Dissenters among radical-left and anti-war groups whose collaboration with SJP “helps amplify SJP’s messaging within broader protest networks.”

India and Israel completed the second round of negotiations for a proposed Free Trade Agreement on July 23, advancing an economic initiative that both governments say could unlock the largely untapped potential of their commercial relationship.

The four-day negotiating round in New Delhi came five months after the first round under a newly adopted framework and followed the elevation of bilateral relations to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation & Prosperity” during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February visit to Israel.

According to India’s Commerce Ministry, bilateral merchandise trade rose from approximately $3.62 billion in fiscal year 2024–25 to $3.93 billion in 2025–26. Both governments believe a comprehensive agreement could expand trade, investment and economic integration between India’s large manufacturing and consumer economy and Israel’s technology-focused market.

The negotiations remain at an early stage, and neither government has released proposed tariff schedules, market-access commitments or an anticipated completion date. However, officials have identified machinery, chemicals, textiles, agriculture, medical devices, advanced technologies, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, high-tech manufacturing and services as areas with substantial potential.

A completed agreement could become an important expansion of economic ties between South Asia’s largest economy and one of West Asia’s leading innovation economies, particularly as both countries seek more resilient supply chains, diversified commercial partnerships and deeper cooperation in strategic technologies.

A Framework Years in the Making

India and Israel first opened FTA negotiations in May 2010, completing eight rounds by November 2013 before talks stalled for more than a decade. The current push began in November 2025, when the two governments signed new Terms of Reference establishing a structured negotiating framework.

Weeks earlier, on September 8, 2025, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had signed a Bilateral Investment Treaty in New Delhi providing investor protection, transparency guarantees, and independent arbitration mechanisms.

Modi at the Knesset: “Ambitious” and “Untapped”

Addressing the Knesset on February 25, 2026 — becoming the first Indian Prime Minister to do so — Modi declared that “our teams are working hard to negotiate an ambitious Free Trade Agreement” that would “unlock the vast untapped potential in our trade relationship.” The next day, a joint statement confirmed the elevation to a “Special Strategic Partnership,” with more than a dozen bilateral agreements concluded during the visit.

Netanyahu framed the stakes bluntly: “The future belongs to those who innovate and Israel and India are bent on innovation.”

Two Rounds, Wide Scope

The first round of the revived FTA negotiations concluded in New Delhi from February 23-26, 2026, timed to overlap with Modi’s Israel visit. Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal pressed both delegations toward a “modern, comprehensive, and future-ready” agreement.

The second round wrapped in New Delhi from July 20-23, 2026, led by India’s Chief Negotiator Ajay Bhadoo and Israel’s Chief Negotiator Yifat Alon Perel of the Ministry of Economy and Industry. Officials covered trade in goods and services, rules of origin, customs procedures, intellectual property rights, digital trade, and sanitary and phytosanitary measures.

The Diamond, Agriculture, and Defense Pillars

Bilateral trade is anchored by three sectors. Diamonds and precious stones alone accounted for USD 416.62 million in Indian exports to Israel and USD 316.24 million in imports — a decades-old value chain in which Israel dominates certification and marketing while India handles global cutting and polishing.

Agriculture forms the second pillar. India now hosts 35 operational Centres of Excellence built under the Indo-Israel Agriculture Project, with plans to expand to 100 nationwide, supported by the newly established India-Israel Innovation Centre for Agriculture.

Defense collaboration deepened on November 4, 2025, when the two countries signed a Defence Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding in Tel Aviv emphasizing joint development, technology transfer, and co-production rather than simple arms purchases.

Labor Mobility and Strategic Signaling

The Modi-Netanyahu joint statement carried implications beyond trade columns. Israel agreed to admit an additional 50,000 Indian nationals, expanding a workforce that has increasingly filled construction and caregiving roles since Israel restricted Palestinian labor after October 7, 2023.

The joint statement also referenced the Hamas-led October 7 attack and the April 2025 Pahalgam attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, with Modi declaring: “Terrorism cannot be accepted in any form or expression.”

What Comes Next

Bhadoo and Perel have committed to continued inter-sessional virtual engagement, with additional rounds planned toward an “early conclusion.” Israel currently ranks only 40th as an Indian export destination and 50th as an import partner — figures officials on both sides argue vastly understate the ceiling once tariff and non-tariff barriers fall.

For Israel, the deal offers scale, manufacturing depth, and a democratic partner outside a Western trade architecture increasingly buffeted by protectionism. For India, it provides direct access to Israeli innovation in AI, cybersecurity, water technology, precision agriculture, and medical devices. What began as a strategic relationship built on security cooperation is being rewired into an economic architecture — one that could define one of the twenty-first century’s most consequential democratic partnerships.

The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) Britain held its first Summer School over the May 2026 bank holiday, gathering more than 100 Arab young people from across Britain for four days at the YHA Edale Activity Centre in the Peak District. The centre is operated by YHA (England and Wales), which received £949,499 over three years from Sport England and £2.34 million through three recovery grants between 2020 and 2022.

An application post advertised the residential to people aged 17 to 35 and listed the dates as May 22 to 26. In a July 31 Instagram post, PYM described the event as four days of political and historical sessions, a hike and a cultural night featuring what it called revolutionary songs and poetry.

Footage included in the post shows attendees chanting in Arabic: “Young people, rise up, our revolution is an Arab revolution” and “We will crush Zionism.” The latter can be rendered more literally as “We will trample on Zionism.”

Kanafani Featured in Programme

One of PYM’s photographs shows a projected slide featuring Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian novelist who also served as a PFLP spokesman and as the founding editor-in-chief of Al-Hadaf, the organisation’s official weekly magazine. Kanafani was deeply involved in the operational side of the PFLP, and was a close associate of Fusako Shigenobu, the founder of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), which was responsible for the Lod Airport massacre.

Another photograph shows attendees posing with raised fists, wearing shirts with maps that erase Israel.

Kanafani’s inclusion is consistent with PYM’s longstanding promotion of his work. PYM lists the Kanafani scholarship among its early projects and says it produced a yearly anthology whose proceeds funded awards for selected submissions. A PYM-affiliated reading group in New Jersey advertised a February 2025 discussion of Kanafani’s short story “Letter from Gaza.”

PYM Britain also published a March 2026 programme teaser advertising sessions on the “foundations and principles of Palestinian struggle” ahead of the residential.

Official Findings and PFLP Statements

A July 2024 report published by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism alleged that PYM had “close ties” with the PFLP and its affiliates. That conclusion should be attributed to the Israeli ministry rather than presented as an uncontested independent finding.

In April 2024, the PFLP issued a public statement expressing support for student activism associated with Students for Justice in Palestine and PYM at Columbia, Rutgers, Yale and Stanford. The statement demonstrates the PFLP’s public endorsement of those movements, but does not by itself prove operational coordination.

YHA’s Public Funding

The Summer School took place at YHA Edale, which advertises serviced group stays for between 16 and 153 people. The centre is operated by YHA England and Wales, a registered charity listed under number 306122 in the charity register.

YHA has received substantial public funding at the organisational level. Its 2022-23 annual report states that it secured £284,079 from Sport England for its Outdoor Citizens programme, alongside funding from Natural England, the Pilgrim Trust and other partners.

Growth of the Britain Chapter

PYM was initially founded in 2006 as the Palestinian Youth Network. According to an academic history published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, it transformed into the Palestinian Youth Movement during its second international general assembly in Istanbul in 2011.

The organisation describes itself as an international movement that organises Palestinian and Arab youth for Palestinian liberation. Its website says its objective includes working to liberate Palestinian land “from the river to the sea.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported in 2025 that PYM operated more than a dozen North American chapters and had expanded into Sweden and the United Kingdom since at least 2022.

Researcher Salo Aizenberg’s continuing thread identifies 53 people associated with Gaza’s health sector whom he says were also members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. His evidence is drawn principally from the terror groups’ own martyr notices, compared with health-sector records, professional tributes and social-media material.

The complete thread attributes 23 people to Hamas and 29 to PIJ. One post describes an October 7 combatant but does not name a faction. Forty of the 53 were identified as commanders or deputy commanders; the remainder are described as fighters, combatants, an operative or an attacker.

The Doctors Who Held Hostages

Aizenberg identifies Dr. Ahmed Youssef Ahmed El-Gamal, a 73-year-old physician at a Nuseirat clinic, as a Hamas operative who held three Israeli hostages in his home.

The second doctor, Abd Al-Rahim Abd Al-Hay Youssef Kardi, worked at Shifa Hospital. The IDF and Shin Bet said he was also a deputy commander of a Hamas cell, entered Israel during the October 7 attack and was involved in holding hostage Romi Gonen and the body of murdered soldier Noa Marciano. Gonen publicly accused Kardi of sexually assaulting her early in captivity, as reported after his death on July 30, 2026.

The MSF Physiotherapist Who Doubled as a Terrorist

When Fadi Jihad Al-Wadia was killed on June 25, 2024, Médecins Sans Frontières announced the death of the 33-year-old physiotherapist, who had worked for the organization since 2018. MSF expressed outrage, saying he was killed while cycling to work, “on his way to provide medical care to others who had been injured.” On February 24, 2026, nearly 20 months after his death, PIJ publicly identified Al-Wadia as a commander in its military manufacturing unit.

October 7 Attackers in Scrubs

According to Aizenberg’s findings, at least three documented healthcare workers participated in the October 7, 2023 massacre. Ahmed Iyad Adel Mushtaha, a 23-year-old ER nurse at Indonesian Hospital, was killed during the attack and immediately lauded as a hero and participant. Saber Ragheb Shehadeh Al-Namnam, a 30-year-old nurse, also died during the October 7 attack after infiltrating Israel.

Mohammed Alaa Ibrahim Salman, known as Abu Zayed, worked as a nurse at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. He was identified as an October 7 attacker who took hostages. He was killed in March 2026, possibly from internal violence.

Five Cases Connected to Nasser Hospital

The expanded thread now includes five people who worked at Nasser Hospital: nurses Ibrahim Al-Farra, Ahmed Majid Ahmed Salah, Salem Juma Ishaq Sharab, Ayman Suleiman Abu Tair and Mohammad Haider Tofiq Hamad. Aizenberg attributes command roles to all five: three in Hamas and two in PIJ.

Their employment is significant in light of hostage testimony. A released hostage told The Associated Press that she and more than two dozen captives had been held at Nasser Hospital. The IDF separately said it had credible intelligence that hostages had been held there.

The Complete List

The full list of 53 individuals, including their health-sector roles and identified armed-group affiliations, appears below:

1. Ibrahim Abdul Raouf Saleh Al-Farra: nurse at Nasser Hospital; Hamas group commander.

2. Mohamed Ramadan Saber Qashqash: nurse at Shifa Hospital; Hamas fighter.

3. Muhammad Akram Abdullah Al-Kafarna: nurse at Kamal Adwan Hospital and head of Gaza’s Nursing Association; Hamas platoon commander.

4. Tamer Mohammed Salman Al-Humaidi: administrator at Al-Aqsa Hospital; PIJ platoon commander responsible for the armament portfolio.

5. Jaber Abdel Hamid Diab Mohamedin: nurse at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital; PIJ commander in military manufacturing.

6. Ahmed Youssef Ahmed El-Gamal: doctor at a Nuseirat clinic; identified by Aizenberg as a Hamas operative who held three hostages in his home.

7. Ahmed Mohamed Hassan Balousha: nurse in the Gaza Health Ministry’s organ-transplant unit; PIJ commander in military prosecution.

8. Ahmed Majid Ahmed Salah: nurse at Nasser Hospital; Hamas deputy group commander.

9. Ahmed Adel Selim Abu Hilal: nurse at European Hospital; PIJ commander in central intelligence.

10. Haitham Mohammed Hamad Hamad: operating-room technician at Indonesian Hospital; PIJ commander in a military ambulance unit.

11. Abdul Rahman Yahya Abu Muammar: nurse at European Hospital; Hamas Qassam fighter.

12. Ahmed Iyad Adel Mushtaha: emergency-room nurse at Indonesian Hospital; combatant described as having participated in the October 7 attack. The post does not name a faction.

13. Abdul Latif Adel Abdul Rahman Abu Taima: administrator or clerk at European Hospital; PIJ group commander in the Khan Younis Brigade.

14. Munzer Fayez Mohammed Al-Sharafa: administrator at Al-Daraj Health Center in Gaza City; PIJ platoon commander in a financial unit.

15. Salem Juma Ishaq Sharab: nurse at Nasser Hospital; PIJ commander in combat medicine.

16. Ayman Suleiman Abu Tair: nurse at Nasser Hospital; PIJ commander in the Central Operations Unit.

17. Ahmed Abdul Aziz Abdul Qader Al-Talbani: director of medical services in central Gaza; Hamas platoon commander.

18. Raed Abdul Hamid Khudair: Gaza Health Ministry administrator; PIJ platoon commander in the Khan Younis Brigade.

19. Ahmed Mahmoud Ahmed Miqdad: Gaza Health Ministry administrator; PIJ platoon commander in a rocket unit.

20. Fadi Jihad Al-Wadia: MSF physiotherapist; PIJ confirmed membership in military manufacturing.

21. Muhammad Kamal Sheikh Al-Eid: nurse who graduated from nursing school on October 4, 2023; PIJ combatant.

22. Najm al-Din Nasser Abdul Malik Abu al-Jabin: nurse, workplace unspecified; Hamas group commander.

23. Maisara Salah Ahmed Nassar: paramedic at Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah; PIJ platoon commander in combat medical services.

24. Ziad Humaidan Muhammad Abu Amra: anesthesia technician for the Gaza Health Ministry; Hamas group commander in the Central Brigade.

25. Mohammed Dargham Mohammed Abu Harbid: physiotherapist at Abnaa al-Balad in Beit Hanoun; PIJ squad commander in an air-defense unit.

26. Mahmoud Samir Saadi Asaliya: nurse at Indonesian Hospital; Hamas fighter.

27. Ahmed Fayez Rashid Al-Dalou: medical-laboratory technician at Kamal Adwan Hospital; PIJ group commander in a Gaza Brigade training unit.

28. Khalil Wahib Mahmoud Sand: Gaza Health Ministry administrator; Hamas fighter.

29. Mustafa Jamel Ismael Eid: nurse, workplace unspecified; PIJ group commander in artillery.

30. Saber Ragheb Shehadeh Al-Namnam: nurse, workplace unspecified; Hamas combatant and October 7 attacker.

31. Mohammed Alaa Ibrahim Salman, (Abu Zayed): nurse at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital; Hamas combatant described as an October 7 attacker who took hostages.

32. Abdullah Muhammad Ibrahim Habib: nurse at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital; PIJ fighter.

33. Rami Adel Misbah Labad: nurse at Kamal Adwan Hospital; PIJ platoon commander in a combat medical unit.

34. Rashid Muhammad Said Barhoum: medical staff member at Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah; Hamas fighter.

35. Mohammed Hassan Ismail Al-Qassas: emergency and rescue medical-services worker; PIJ Nukhba commander.

36. Mahmoud Mohammed Hamad Duheir: pediatric medical worker at European Hospital; PIJ commander in a rocket unit.

37. Awn Nawfal Abdul Ashour: fourth-year nursing student; Hamas fighter.

38. Ahmed Talal Khalil Al-Najjar: pediatric emergency-room nurse at Indonesian Hospital; PIJ platoon commander.

39. Abdullah Zakaria Mahmoud Muammar: nurse, workplace unspecified; PIJ deputy group commander in a rocket unit.

40. Abdul Karim Salim Abdul Karim Al-Ghoul: medical administrator, workplace unspecified; PIJ deputy group commander in the Rafah Brigade.

41. Abd Al-Rahim Abd Al-Hay Youssef Kardi: doctor at Shifa Hospital; Hamas commander and October 7 attacker involved in holding hostages. Romi Gonen has accused him of sexually assaulting her.

42. Diaa Al-Haq Mohammed Ahmed Abu Muammar: medical-records clerk, workplace unspecified; PIJ commander in the Northern Brigade.

43. Deeb Fouad Deeb Al-Arair: engineer for an unspecified Gaza healthcare NGO; PIJ commander in the Artillery Corps.

44. Mohammad Haider Tofiq Hamad: surgical-department nurse at Nasser Hospital; Hamas platoon commander in the Khan Younis Brigade. Aizenberg says he was likely killed while participating in the October 7 attack.

45. Mohammad Abdul Rahman Ahmed Shehab: technical assistant at the Health Ministry’s Abu Shabak Clinic; Hamas deputy platoon commander.

46. Shadi Talal Ali Al-Haddad: Health Ministry nurse; Hamas platoon commander in the Gaza Brigade.

47. Luay Ibrahim Shukri Khader: medical-laboratory specialist at Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital; PIJ platoon commander in a missile unit.

48. Muhammad Iyad Muhammad Farhat: nurse in the Health Ministry’s private medical unit; Hamas group commander in an artillery battalion.

49. Asaad Abdul Raouf Barabakh: nurse at the Health Ministry’s Jorat Al-Lout Clinic; Hamas deputy company commander.

50. Subhi Nasser Subhi Al-Attar: medical-laboratory specialist at Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital; Hamas platoon commander in an air-force drone unit.

51. Mahmoud Hassan Farag Shaheen: nurse for an unspecified private employer; Hamas fighter in the Khan Younis Brigade.

52. Ismail Khader Hassan Shalouf: Health Ministry revenue collector at Shifa Hospital; PIJ platoon commander in the Gaza Brigade.

53. Ahmed Misbah Jumaa Abu Qura: nurse at Al-Qarara Clinic in Khan Younis; PIJ deputy platoon commander in combat first aid.

Organizations Have Responded Unevenly

Responses from organizations that previously identified some of the individuals as healthcare workers have been mixed. Médecins Sans Frontières updated its memorial page after PIJ acknowledged Fadi Al-Wadia as a member, while maintaining that it had no prior knowledge of his military involvement, a response that leaves unresolved how an affiliation later acknowledged by PIJ escaped detection during his six years with MSF.

By contrast, the International Council of Nurses’ tribute to Mohammed Akram Al-Kafarna remains online and does not address Hamas’s subsequent identification of him as an operative.

Healthcare Workers Watch included six people later identified by Hamas or PIJ in its 2024 report. The organization did not respond when The Times of Israel asked whether it intended to revise the document or issue a clarification.

When an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 migrants crossed irregularly from Morocco into Ceuta on July 30 and 31, the sudden influx, equivalent to roughly two-thirds of the Spanish enclave’s population, overwhelmed local authorities and border controls. As the crisis unfolded, unfounded conspiracy theories alleging that Israel had orchestrated it spread rapidly online.

A Jewish Onliner investigation used social media listening tools to analyze X posts containing the keywords "Israel" alongside "Spain" or "Ceuta" during July 31 to August 1, 2026. The findings reveal what appeared to be a deliberate effort to weaponize a humanitarian crisis through antisemitic conspiracy narratives spread across multiple continents.

The Scale of the Antisemitic Campaign

The analysis identified 636,700 posts containing the monitored keywords, a significant portion of which promoted the false claim that Israel was connected to the Ceuta migration surge. The keyword-matched posts collectively generated 4.9 million engagements and an estimated 1.9 billion potential views during the 48-hour period examined.

Of the 8.3 million total posts on X mentioning Spain or Ceuta during July 31-August 1, approximately 8% included the keyword “Israel.”

Top Accounts Reveal the Discussion’s International Reach

A significant finding concerns the geographic distribution of the accounts generating the most engagement in posts containing the monitored keywords. Of the top 10 accounts, at least six appeared to be based outside the United States, including in West Asia, Australia and the U.K. Some falsely alleged that Israel was behind the Ceuta crisis, while others posted about the broader discussion captured by the keyword search.

The regional distribution of accounts spreading the antisemitic conspiracy narrative suggests a concerted effort concentrated outside U.S. borders. According to the social media listening data, the United States accounted for only 33.9% of accounts amplifying the antisemitic narrative. The remaining majority — 66.1% of amplification — originated from other countries and regions, with Spain representing 19.4% of the share, “Other” regions 24.5%, the United Kingdom 4.4%, Colombia 4.3%, Canada 5.2%, France 5.2%, Mexico 5.2%, Brazil 3%, and Germany 1.1%.

Why the Claim Falls Apart

Many of the accounts promoting the conspiracy theory have cited a 2019 post by Yair Netanyahu as evidence of Israeli involvement. Using ironic humor, the post shared a map highlighting Ceuta and Melilla and suggested that Arabs and Muslims concerned about “occupied” Islamic territory should begin there.

Netanyahu recently explained that the post was intended to contrast Spain’s criticism of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, with its continued control of the two North African enclaves. The post predates the 2026 crossing by more than seven years and provides no evidence of planning, foreknowledge or coordination with Moroccan authorities.

Pattern of Crisis Exploitation

The timing, scale, and geographic concentration of accounts amplifying the antisemitic Ceuta narrative point to a deliberate pattern. Non-U.S. based amplifier accounts served as primary drivers of the antisemitic narrative, with the rapid acceleration of antisemitic falsehoods occurring during an active humanitarian event. The 636,700 posts generated across a 48-hour window reached billions of accounts, illustrating how contemporary influence operations redirect responsibility toward Israel and Jews during moments of global crisis.

Text gets read. Images get absorbed.

When you read a sentence, part of your brain is still evaluating — checking whether the writer sounds credible, whether the argument holds together, whether you have reason to doubt. When you see an image, that evaluation mostly does not happen. The image doesn’t argue. It shows. And “shows” feels like proof in a way that “says” never quite does.

That instinct made sense when photographs were expensive, cameras were rare, and images were mostly used as documentation. It doesn’t make sense anymore. In an environment where millions of images circulate every day, most of them stripped from their original context, “real photo” and “true story” have come apart. And the gap between them is exactly where visual manipulation lives.

There is a stubborn assumption underneath most people’s visual instincts: if a photo is real, the story it tells must be true. That is no longer how it works. Images lie constantly — not by fabrication, but by framing, captioning, cropping, and the removal of context. And because images feel like evidence, they bypass the skepticism we would apply to a sentence.

The most effective visual manipulation almost never requires editing a single pixel. It requires a real image and a false claim about what it shows.

Three of The Most Common Moves

1. Recycled footage. Authentic video and photos from other conflicts and earlier years get recaptioned as current events. Throughout the Gaza war, the pattern was so common that verification desks built dedicated workflows just to catch it. An old image presented as new is misinformation; an image from one place presented as another is disinformation. Neither required editing a single frame.

   

2. Video-game footage. A stranger cousin of the same trick. Clips from the military simulator Arma 3 have repeatedly been passed off as real combat in both the Ukraine and Gaza wars — the problem widespread enough that the game’s studio has publicly urged people to stop, and offered tips for spotting it: fixed camera angles, low-resolution haze hiding the tells, an absence of the chaos real footage carries.

   

3. The cropped clip. Inverts meaning by amputation. The technique is simple: take a three-minute answer, keep eight seconds, and cut the “some people claim that …” off the front and the “… but that’s wrong” off the back. What was a rebuttal now reads as a confession. By the time the full clip surfaces, the short version is already embedded in articles and memes, and the full one gets dismissed as “damage control.” Same footage, same words, opposite story.

   

The Screenshot Trap

Screenshots are the most efficient tool for laundering a weak claim. Someone posts something provocative — maybe satire, maybe a parody account, maybe stripped of its thread. Someone else screenshots it, crops the context, and reposts it as “they actually said this.”

The screenshot removes your ability to verify: you cannot click through, cannot read the replies that would correct it, and cannot check whether the account is even real. Worse, screenshots can be edited — text changed, timestamps altered, usernames faked — and most people never notice, because an image reads as authentic. If a screenshot is making a shocking claim, find the original post before you believe it.

What To Do

Before you believe, share, or react to an image: reverse-image-search it to find the earliest version and check whether it is being recycled. Find the original source rather than trusting a screenshot.

Read the caption critically — it is telling you how to see the image, and a different caption would tell a different story. Check the date. And ask what is outside the frame: what happened just before or after, and what context was cropped away. Seeing is no longer enough. You have to see and verify.

Uncivilized Media is a Qatari outlet that presents itself as an American youth-culture media brand. Its newest video argues that Israeli travelers carry violence and colonization “in the DNA” — rhetoric that every major AI chatbot recognizes as antisemitic within seconds of being asked. The video has racked up hundreds of thousands of views anyway, cross-posted across multiple platforms, without any of them appearing to intervene.

A Jewish Onliner review of Uncivilized Media found that when shown the transcript of the outlet’s viral video portraying Israeli travelers as “global colonizers,” four major AI chatbots identified it as antisemitic without needing any specialized prompting. YouTube, where the video is hosted, and the social accounts where Uncivilized cross-posts its clips, apply no comparable standard. The video remains up and continues to accumulate views.

Every Model Flagged the Content

When provided with the transcript of Uncivilized Media’s “How Israelis Are Colonizing the World” video, all four models identified antisemitic or hateful elements in its rhetoric:

• ChatGPT concluded that it “crosses into antisemitism by portraying standard travel and emigration as a sinister global plot” and claiming violence is “in the DNA” of Israelis.

• Claude said the video uses “essentialist language about a people” by describing violence as living “in the DNA” of Israeli settlers and framing voluntary migration to Italy as “colonizing the world,” language it said many would flag as antisemitic.

• Grok determined that it “crosses into antisemitic and hateful territory by portraying Israelis as a single, inherently colonial group.”

• Perplexity said it “uses rhetoric that reads as antisemitic and hateful,” including “sweeping claims about Israelis/Jews as a group.”

None of this required specialized context or training most viewers would lack. It took a transcript and a direct question. That is the baseline the platforms hosting and distributing the video should be measured against.

Qatari Propaganda, Not Grassroots Media

Uncivilized Media, as Jewish Onliner previously reported, is registered in Qatar’s state-backed Media City hub and led by Salem Barahmeh, a veteran of PLO diplomacy who previously worked for Portland Communications, a firm contracted by Qatar for public relations. The outlet’s co-founders have backgrounds at Al Jazeera and the Doha Film Institute.

The video itself argues that Israeli tourists in Thailand, families relocating to Italy, and backpackers in India are all expressions of the same “colonizing” project. On YouTube, it passed 500,000 views within six days of posting, drawing more than 42,000 likes and 10,000 comments. Uncivilized also runs an active TikTok account with 74,000 followers, and an Instagram account with 203,000 followers — where it regularly cross-posts clips from its YouTube catalog to reach separate audiences on each platform.

On Instagram, Uncivilized’s “global colonizers” post has garnered almost 18,000 likes in just one week.

YouTube’s AI Is Built to Catch This

YouTube says hate speech enforcement does not rely on user reports alone. The company has stated that it relies on “a combination of people and machine learning technologies” to enforce its rules, backed by a review team of more than 20,000 people. Its Hate Speech policy bars content that promotes hatred against groups on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, or religion. “How Israelis Are Colonizing the World” remained online and gaining views as of this writing.

AI chatbots show a parallel blind spot. Asked why ChatGPT continues to reference Uncivilized Media neutrally despite flagging its content as antisemitic, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to the company’s Model Spec, which permits ChatGPT to analyze harmful material without endorsing it but does not address how the system decides which outlets to treat as credible sources.

Anthropic, Google, X, and Perplexity did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Social Media Platforms Make the Same Claims

Meta makes similar claims for Facebook and Instagram. The company’s Transparency Center says its enforcement AI now covers languages spoken by 98 percent of people online, up from about 80 languages previously, which it says lets it “apply policies more accurately and consistently across billions of pieces of content.”

TikTok claims the strongest detection performance of the social media platforms. The company says 96.3 percent of the content it removed for hate speech violations in the fourth quarter of 2025 was caught before any user reported it. Uncivilized maintains an active TikTok account that regularly cross-posts commentary from its YouTube catalog to a separate audience there.

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Differing Enforcement Philosophies, Same Result

Across the differing enforcement philosophies, the same result remains: content that took independent AI systems seconds to identify as antisemitic kept spreading.

Uncivilized Media’s video was never a hard case. Four independent AI systems identified it as antisemitic the moment they were asked, using nothing more than a transcript. The platforms carrying it — YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and X — have spent years building, and publicizing, AI systems built for exactly that kind of judgment. They let the video reach hundreds of thousands of people anyway.

A misleading claim lands in your feed. Maybe it’s a screenshot with no source. Maybe it’s a clip cut to imply the opposite of what was said. Maybe it’s a breaking-news headline that will be corrected in six hours but has already been shared a million times.

You have about two seconds. Long enough to feel something. Not long enough to think. And in that window, you become one of two things: someone who slows the manipulation chain down, or someone who speeds it up.

The manipulation machine doesn’t run on bad actors alone. It runs on ordinary people forwarding, screenshotting, quote-posting, and reacting faster than they verify. Every one of those actions is a vote for what deserves more reach. Most people never think of themselves as part of the infrastructure. They are.

Resistance does not mean becoming a full-time fact-checker for the entire internet. It means refusing to be a reliable component in the machine that carries unverified claims at scale. Two habits do most of the work: critical ignoring, and the share-check.

Critical Ignoring: The Skill Nobody Teaches

Not every controversy, claim, or outrage-post deserves your attention. Most do not. Critical ignoring is the deliberate choice not to engage with low-quality information — not out of fear of being wrong, but because engaging with bad information, even to debunk it, amplifies it.

When you see something engineered to provoke you, the honest question is whether it is worth your attention or whether it is simply bait. If it is bait, the strongest response is usually no response. Do not share it to mock it. Do not screenshot it to dunk on it. Let it die in the obscurity it deserves. Your attention is finite; spend it on purpose.

The Share-Check: Pause Before You Amplify

Every share, screenshot, quote-post, and forward is an editorial decision. You are deciding what deserves more reach — and treating that decision as automatic is how weak claims travel further than the corrections that follow them. Before you pass something on, run three questions: Can I verify it? If not, I’m not sharing it, I’m laundering it. Am I preserving context?

Screenshots strip attribution. Clips remove the sentences that reverse the meaning. Summaries introduce interpretation the original did not carry. And: what will this actually do? If the honest answer is “make people feel what I already feel,” that is not sharing information. That is amplifying a mood.

Silence is not a failure.

Declining to amplify a claim you cannot check is a legitimate — often the strongest — response.

Breaking News Is Where Both Habits Get Tested

Breaking news is where manipulation moves fastest: information is incomplete, sources are unclear, emotions are high, and everyone is racing to be first. In April 2026, after the Daily Wire laid off roughly 50 employees, Candace Owens told millions of followers it was “over fifty percent” of the workforce — then sixty percent, then an “absolute bloodbath.” None of it was accurate. Boreing’s own summary of the moment doubles as the rule for all breaking news: in 2026, “lies are fast and the truth gets there last.”

The al-Ahli headline is the same dynamic at civilizational stakes rather than corporate ones. The protocol is identical in both cases:

• Wait — initial reports are routinely wrong or incomplete. Let the story develop before you form a conclusion.

• Verify before you share — run the source through Unit 3. If you cannot verify it, do not pass it on.

• Preserve context — if you do share, link the original. Do not crop quotes, clip video, or screenshot a headline stripped of its source.

• Acknowledge uncertainty — “Unconfirmed reports suggest …” is more honest, and ages far better, than “Breaking: this just happened.”

Breaking news is not a race. Being right matters more than being first, and the cost of being fast-and-wrong is paid by real people.

The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism released its second annual report on July 29, concluding that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks in the Jewish diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.

The task force brings together major Jewish organizations from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. According to J7, those countries contain more than 90 percent of the Jewish population living outside Israel.

The 52-page report records 23,174 antisemitic incidents across the seven countries in 2025, down 13.7 percent from 26,857 in 2024 but 136 percent above the 2022 total. Germany recorded 8,725 incidents, the United States 6,274, the United Kingdom 3,700, Australia 1,654, France 1,320, Canada 788 and Argentina 713. The seven countries recorded a combined 91,419 incidents from 2021 through 2025.

Twenty People Killed

J7 counted 20 people killed in four antisemitic attacks during 2025. Fifteen were killed at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion describes the December 14 shooting as an antisemitic terrorist attack.

Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz were killed in the Heaton Park Synagogue attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot and killed after leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Federal prosecutors charged the alleged attacker with offenses including first-degree murder, hate crimes and terrorism-related crimes. In Boulder, Colorado, 82-year-old Karen Diamond died after being injured in the firebombing of a demonstration calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

J7 separately recorded 718 violent incidents across the six countries for which it had a breakdown.

Antisemitism in Mainstream Spaces

J7 identifies the normalization of antisemitism in political, professional and institutional settings as a trend connecting the country reports.

Germany’s RIAS monitoring organization attributed 807 incidents to a right-wing extremist background and 501 to a left-wing anti-imperialist background. Both categories increased 43.6 percent from 2024, although 57 percent of all German incidents could not be assigned a political or ideological background.

Statistics Canada recorded 788 police-reported anti-Jewish hate crimes. Those cases represented 71 percent of religion-motivated hate crimes, despite Jews making up less than 1 percent of the Canadian population.

The report also identifies anti-Zionism as a recurring vehicle for antisemitic expression. ADL’s U.S. audit classified 2,847 incidents, or 45 percent of its total, as containing elements related to Israel or Zionism. In the U.K., the Community Security Trust found explicit anti-Zionist motivation in 48 percent of recorded antisemitic incidents.

Campuses, Online Hate and AI

ADL recorded 583 incidents on U.S. college campuses, down 66 percent from 2024 but still nearly three times the 2021 level. In Australia, a survey of Jewish university students and staff found that 74 percent of student respondents had heard antisemitic comments. Across the student and staff sample, only 34 percent said they felt safe on campus.

J7 says online platforms are now the primary arena for antisemitic expression in most of the seven countries. Argentina classified 66 percent of its incidents as originating online, while Germany recorded 2,314 online incidents and the U.K. recorded 1,541.

The report also cites research on generative AI. One ADL test found that four text-to-video systems produced antisemitic, hateful or violent material in at least 40 percent of tests using prompts intentionally designed around extremist, hateful or violent content. Another study found harmful answers in 44 percent of test cases involving open-source language models.

Reported Rates and Government Responses

J7 calculated Germany’s reported incident rate at 69.80 per 1,000 Jewish residents, followed by Australia at 14.14 and the United Kingdom at 11.82. These rankings are subject to the same methodological differences affecting the national totals.

Surveys cited by J7 also point to widespread insecurity. In the United States, 55 percent of Jewish Americans reported experiencing at least one form of antisemitism during the previous year, while 52 percent worried about their personal safety.

Government responses included the establishment of a U.S. federal task force, continued British security funding for Jewish institutions and Australia’s royal commission. J7 nevertheless argues that government action remains too reactive and uneven.

The task force calls for stronger enforcement against antisemitic violence and incitement, national reporting systems, targeted security funding, campus protections and greater transparency from technology companies. It concludes that the killings in 2025 transformed an already elevated threat into a lethal one and require a coordinated response from governments, institutions, civil society and technology platforms.

A self-described “Internationalist, Decolonial, Revolutionary Socialist” collective based on Long Island is urging its approximately 3,350 Instagram followers to “get armed, get disciplined, get organized” and prepare for the “collective rage we must unleash on the ruling class.”

The Working People’s Liberation Corps published the 14-slide Instagram carousel on July 24, 2026. It pairs calls to become armed and trained with favorable portrayals of the U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as well as the conspiracy theory that the September 11 attacks were a “false flag” involving the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center.

Published as a collaboration with Anti-Social Socialist Club, @rizzzzyredd and @komradekermie, the post drew comments including “armed resistance to settlers is a right” and “I say we embrace it.”

The post appeared eight days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted officials from more than 60 countries at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. In a fact sheet issued for the meeting, the State Department said far-left actors were responsible for 63 percent of recorded anti-government attacks or plots in the United States in 2025. It also cited reports from partner countries of “the convergence of violent anti-American, antisemitic, or anti-tech movements with far-left terrorist networks.”

An Explicit Call to Arm

The post’s caption instructs readers to “stop telling ppl we can’t be violent, stop thanking cops, stop thinking your bare minimum efforts actually do anything.” It states that people must “either come together despite our differences and overthrow the pedophiles in power or we will all end up in the same camps.”

Deeper into the carousel, the collective becomes more specific. One slide tells individuals that “this is when you get educated, organized armed and trained on self defense.” Another instructs socialist organizations to “stop being scared of self defense, whether armed or unarmed. Stop being scared to go against cops.”

The final slide tells followers, “we must firmly seize all the levers of power and refuse to give them back.”

The post ends by directing readers to a volunteer form linked through the group’s Instagram profile.

Endorsing Hamas and the PFLP by Name

WPLC’s rhetoric is not limited to domestic politics. In a slide titled “The war on terror delegitamized [sic] resistance,” the collective writes that “Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas and the Pflp are called terrorists for resisting occupation of their land.”

A separate slide frames the Hamas-led October 7 attack as legitimate resistance: “Hamas, joined by Pflp and other Palestinian resistance groups, broke free of their open air prison on Oct 7th 2023 in an act of rightful resistance.”

The collective then claims that Israel “responded by spreading horrific lies about that day, that have since been debunked.” That portrayal omits extensive documented evidence of the atrocities committed during the attack. United Nations investigators found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations, while the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center records that the Hamas-led assault killed nearly 1,200 people. Palestinian terror groups also abducted 251 people and took them into Gaza.

9/11 Trutherism as Political Foundation

The carousel also promotes a debunked conspiracy theory about the September 11 attacks. WPLC claims that “those ‘terrorists’ were largely funded by American proxies” and that “the official determination for how the towers fell, pancake theory, is easily disproven by physics.”

The slide asserts that “only a controlled demolition can create the circumstances where a building implodes at free fall speeds” and calls 9/11 and the terrorism that followed “a series of false flags used by the ruling bourgeoisie.”

The Anti-Defamation League has documented how 9/11 “false flag” narratives have repeatedly been used to accuse Jews or Israel of orchestrating the attacks, recycling longstanding conspiracy theories about Jews manipulating world events for their own benefit. The ADL has also documented how controlled-demolition advocates have shared platforms with figures promoting explicitly antisemitic versions of those theories.

On July 29, the Chicago Liberation Center is scheduled to host a panel titled “The Erasure of Militant Women” and the launch of Liberation Luminaries, a booklet produced by the Palestinian Feminist Collective.

The event announcement describes the booklet as showcasing prominent women and feminist figures in the Palestinian struggle. Its promotional flyer depicts Leila Khaled, Assata Shakur, Anna Mae Aquash and Fatima Bernawi.

The flyer bears the logos of several organizations, including the Palestinian Feminist Collective, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, First Nations Garden, Black Alliance for Peace Chicago and Anakbayan at UIC.

Three of the women depicted have distinct histories involving violent criminal acts or convictions. Khaled participated in one completed and one attempted aircraft hijacking. Bernawi planted a bomb in a Jerusalem cinema that failed to explode. Shakur was convicted of first-degree murder. Aquash was herself kidnapped and murdered.

Documented Backgrounds of the Featured Women

Leila Khaled

Leila Khaled is a longtime leader of the U.S.-designated terror group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In August 1969, Khaled and another PFLP member hijacked TWA Flight 840 during its flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and diverted it to Damascus.

On September 6, 1970, Khaled and Patrick Argüello attempted to hijack El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York. Pilot Uri Bar Lev put the aircraft into a steep dive, throwing the hijackers off balance. Security guards restrained Khaled, while an air marshal mortally wounded Argüello. Khaled was arrested after the aircraft landed at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Liberation Army. In 1977, a New Jersey jury convicted her of first-degree murder and other charges arising from a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed. Shakur was sentenced to life imprisonment but escaped with armed accomplices on November 2, 1979. She later reached Cuba, which granted her political asylum in 1984. Her first-degree murder conviction remained in effect until her death in Havana on September 25, 2025, at the age of 78, according to the Associated Press.

Fatima Bernawi

Fatima Bernawi planted a bomb at Jerusalem’s Zion Cinema in October 1967. The device failed to explode, and an Israeli court sentenced her to life imprisonment. Widely recognized as the first Palestinian woman imprisoned by Israel on terrorism charges, Bernawi served approximately 10 years before being released in a 1977 prisoner exchange.

The Chicago Liberation Center and Liberation Illinois

The Chicago Liberation Center’s website states that the venue is sustained by Liberation Illinois Inc., a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) social-welfare nonprofit. Federal nonprofit records identify Patrick McWilliams as an officer of Liberation Illinois. The Washington Free Beacon, citing Illinois corporate filings, reported that activist Candice Choo-Kang also holds an officer role in the organization. Liberation Illinois and PSL Chicago both publicly list 2712 W. Cermak Road, the address of the Chicago Liberation Center.

Public records provide only limited information about Liberation Illinois’s finances. GuideStar states that the organization is required to submit Form 990-N, an abbreviated IRS electronic postcard generally used by tax-exempt organizations whose gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less. Unlike a full Form 990, the postcard does not disclose precise revenue, expenditures, assets, grants or funding sources. As a 501(c)(4), Liberation Illinois is also not required to identify its contributors publicly. Consequently, the available records confirm its tax-exempt status but reveal little about the scale of its finances, how it spends its money or who funds its activities.

Liberation Illinois Figures and Elias Rodriguez

McWilliams and Elias Rodriguez were separately quoted at the same January 2018 protest against Amazon. The contemporaneous report identified both men with ANSWER Chicago.

Rodriguez is now facing federal charges over the May 2025 fatal shootings of Israeli Embassy employees Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. A federal indictment charges Rodriguez with first-degree murder, hate crimes and terrorism-related offenses.

PSL’s Broader Organizing Infrastructure

PSL-affiliated organizing spaces known as Liberation Centers operate in several U.S. cities. The ADL reported that PSL organizer Sanika Mahajan described the party as having “mass organizations,” including Liberation Centers and The People’s Forum, that may not disclose explicit ties to the party in their public-facing work but are led primarily by PSL members.

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Israel has opened a grant competition offering up to NIS 100 million, approximately $33 million, to establish a national quantum-computing research and development infrastructure that will give Israeli companies and research institutions access to advanced systems.

The Israel Innovation Authority’s call for proposals opened on July 19 and was publicly announced on July 20. The grant will cover either 55% or 66% of an approved project’s budget, meaning NIS 100 million is the maximum government award rather than necessarily the infrastructure’s total cost.

The planned infrastructure must integrate at least three different quantum-processing technologies. Its intended users will be able to compare platforms, test algorithms, conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations and evaluate which technologies are best suited to particular applications.

The initiative comes as investment in the field accelerates. McKinsey reported that investment in quantum-technology startups reached $12.6 billion in 2025, with 90% going to quantum-computing companies. Israel is not attempting to match every larger country or multinational company dollar for dollar. Instead, the new infrastructure is designed to give its relatively small ecosystem access to several competing architectures while the industry is still determining which approaches will prove most useful.

Quantum Computing 101: Why Regular Computers Can’t Keep Up

To understand why Israel is making this move, you need to grasp what makes quantum computers different from the laptop you’re reading this on. Classical computers — the ones in your phone, car, and office — process information in bits, which are like tiny switches that can be either “on” (1) or “off” (0). Every calculation your computer makes involves flipping billions of these switches in specific sequences.

Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits. Unlike regular bits, qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time — a phenomenon called superposition. Think of it like a coin spinning in the air: while it’s spinning, it’s neither heads nor tails, but both simultaneously. Only when the coin lands (when the qubit is measured) does it “choose” a state. This allows quantum computers to explore multiple solutions to a problem simultaneously, making them exponentially more powerful for certain tasks.

The second quantum trick is entanglement — when multiple qubits become linked so that the state of one instantly affects the others, no matter how far apart they are. As NIST physicist Andrew Wilson explains, “you’ve got at least two things that are always connected; they have no independent existence.”

Why This Matters: The “Q-Day” Threat

The promise — and peril — of quantum computing centers on encryption. Most of the world’s sensitive data, from banking transactions to military communications, is protected by encryption that would take classical computers thousands of years to crack. In 1994, MIT scientist Peter Shor designed an algorithm proving that quantum computers could break this encryption in hours or minutes.

This potential “Q-Day” — when quantum computers become powerful enough to crack current encryption — is why governments are in a race. The U.S. intelligence community expects quantum computers to be “cryptographically relevant” by the early 2030s. China and the U.S. have accused each other of “harvest now, decrypt later” strategies: stealing encrypted data today to crack open once quantum computers mature.

Beyond code-breaking, quantum computers could revolutionize drug discovery by simulating molecular interactions, optimize supply chains, develop more efficient batteries, and accelerate climate solutions by modeling chemical reactions that produce greenhouse gases.

Israel’s Strategy: Specialize, Don’t Compete on Scale

Israel Innovation Authority CEO Dror Bin framed the initiative as a recognition of Israel’s limits — and advantages. “Israeli entrepreneurs and investors and also the state investments were much lower than other countries, but yet with very good results,” Bin told The Media Line. Rather than trying to build a complete quantum computer, Israel is betting that its startups can become “category leaders in some components.”

The planned infrastructure will integrate at least three quantum processing technologies, enabling companies to benchmark performance, develop algorithms, and test applications across different platforms. The facility must be fully operational within 18 months of approval, with R&D services available to users within the first 12 months.

Israel is home to about 20 quantum computing startups that account for 9 percent of global private investment in the field, including companies like Classiq and Quantum Machines. In 2025 alone, five Israeli quantum companies raised almost $500 million. But the country lacks the massive data centers and energy infrastructure that allow the U.S., UAE, and Saudi Arabia to make “huge leaps forward,” the Times of Israel reported.

The Global Race Israel Is Joining

China has announced more than $15 billion in public quantum investment — the most of any country — and is building a $10 billion national quantum lab. The U.S. doubled federal spending on quantum R&D following the 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act, though reauthorization of $3.6 billion in funding has stalled in Congress. Globally, governments and companies have invested $42 billion in quantum computing to date.

IBM aims to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer by 2033; Google is targeting one million qubits. Today’s most advanced quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits — far short of the potentially millions needed for advanced decryption or drug simulation.

The Technical Hurdle: Qubits Are Incredibly Fragile

The biggest obstacle to practical quantum computing is noise — any disturbance to a qubit’s environment. A stray electric field, temperature fluctuation, or even a cosmic ray can destroy a qubit’s superposition, forcing it back into a regular 0 or 1 state. Current quantum computers make an error roughly once in every thousand operations; classical computers make one error per quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeroes) calculations.

That’s why quantum computers often require temperatures near absolute zero and specialized hardware, leaving few companies and governments capable of operating them. Different qubit types — from electrically charged atoms (ions) to superconducting circuits to particles of light (photons) — each have trade-offs between speed, stability, and scalability.

What Comes Next

The Israel Innovation Authority will accept proposals from industrial corporations and user consortia until October 8, 2026. The selected operator will be required to provide access to the most advanced versions of each quantum technology and continuously upgrade them as the global market evolves.

“Israeli high tech must be also in the forefront of the quantum computing innovation wave,” Bin said. Whether Israel’s NIS 100 million bet can keep it competitive against rivals spending 100 times more will depend on whether the country’s startups can do what they’ve done before: punch above their weight by specializing in the components that matter most — and getting there first

Two Israelis involved in integrating advanced targeting systems onto Indian fighter aircraft have provided new firsthand details about how a prewar defense project became an emergency combat effort during the 1999 Kargil War.

In an interview published by NDTV, Ami, a former civilian program manager at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Shlomo, a retired Israeli Air Force fighter pilot and former Mirage squadron commander, described the emergency effort to help operationalize Israeli-made Litening targeting pods on Indian Mirage 2000 fighter jets.

Both men were identified only by their first names. NDTV described the appearance as their first interview with Indian media. The broader story of Israel’s assistance and the Indian Air Force’s rapid wartime integration of the system had been documented previously, but the interview provided new details from members of the Israeli team.

An Emergency Push Built on a Prewar Project

The Litening project did not begin during the war. Integration work was already underway by 1997, with Israeli specialists and Indian personnel testing the pod on India’s French-built Mirage 2000 aircraft. The system had not yet been fully operationalized when fighting began in 1999.

The emergency phase began with a Friday-night call from Group Captain N.A.K. Browne, who was then India’s defense attaché in Israel and later became chief of the Indian Air Force. The call came from Tel Aviv as Israel was entering Shabbat.

Ami recalled that by Sunday morning, engineers and other specialists who had not expected to travel were flying to India with tools and test equipment.

“We have a friend in need,” he said.

The account describes an improvised deployment, but not an improvised technology program. Years of earlier work gave the Israeli and Indian teams a foundation from which they could accelerate the remaining integration under wartime pressure.

The High-Altitude Technical Challenge

The Kargil conflict began after Pakistan Army forces, principally members of the Northern Light Infantry and Special Services Group, crossed the Line of Control and occupied strategic positions on the Indian side. Many were dressed to appear to be Kashmiri militants.

The Indian Air Force faced targets at elevations of approximately 14,000 to 18,000 feet. Thin air affected aircraft and weapon performance, while the rocky and snow-covered terrain made targets difficult to identify. Pilots were also prohibited from crossing the Line of Control and had to remain wary of Pakistani shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.

The Litening targeting pod allowed pilots to locate targets through electro-optical and infrared sensors and designate them with a laser. U.S.-made Paveway II bombs could then home in on the reflected laser energy.

Shlomo compared the integration challenge to making three different systems speak the same language: an Israeli pod, American laser-guided bombs and a French aircraft. The analogy referred to the aircraft’s software, electrical and weapons interfaces, not literal operating languages.

Although the overall development program had lasted years, then-Wing Commander Raghunath Nambiar later said the accelerated wartime integration of the pod and 1,000-pound laser-guided bombs was completed in 12 days.

Precision Over Mountain Terrain

On June 24, 1999, Nambiar’s Mirage 2000 used a Litening pod to designate Pakistani Army positions on Tiger Hill before releasing a Paveway laser-guided bomb. The strike was the Indian Air Force’s first successful combat use of a laser-guided munition.

Narmdeshwar Tiwari, then an Indian Air Force test pilot, also played a central role in operationalizing the Litening pod during the Kargil campaign. The new NDTV interview credited both Nambiar and Tiwari with using the technology under conditions that the Israeli team had not previously tested.

Shlomo estimated that conventional bombs landing 20 or 30 meters from a mountain target could have little effect, while the laser-guided system could place a weapon within two or three meters. Those figures are his characterization rather than a published Indian Air Force performance assessment, but independent studies confirm that the terrain frequently rendered near misses ineffective.

The Litening system and laser-guided bombs materially improved India’s precision-strike capability. They did not, however, determine the war on their own. The Indian Army, its artillery and the wider Indian air campaign all played indispensable roles in recapturing the occupied positions.

Beyond a Commercial Contract

Ami said he traveled to India approximately 100 times between 1996 and 2004, with roughly half of those visits occurring before the Kargil War. His recollection underscores that the emergency deployment grew out of an existing program and years of direct cooperation with Indian personnel.

“This is profound friendship,” he said, describing the relationship as extending beyond the commercial terms of a defense contract.

Kargil did not create India-Israel defense ties. The countries established full diplomatic relations in 1992, and India began purchasing Israeli military equipment before the war. But a detailed study of the bilateral defense relationship concluded that the relationship strengthened significantly after Kargil, when Israel demonstrated its willingness to meet urgent Indian requirements.

From Kargil to a Special Strategic Partnership

Israel has since become one of India’s leading sources of military equipment. According to SIPRI’s latest arms-transfer data, Israel supplied approximately 15 percent of India’s major arms imports in 2021-25, ranking behind Russia and France.

The relationship remains partly based on procurement, but it now also includes joint development and domestic production. The Medium-Range Surface-to-Air Missile system, developed jointly by India’s Defense Research and Development Organisation and Israel Aerospace Industries, is a prominent example.

Political engagement has expanded alongside the defense relationship. Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel in 2017, and Benjamin Netanyahu visited India in 2018.

Modi returned to Israel for a state visit on February 25-26, 2026. During that visit, the two governments formally elevated their relationship to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation and Prosperity.”

The framework encompasses defense and security as well as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors, quantum computing, biotechnology, space and other emerging technologies.