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Judaism’s Code of Silence

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Judaism possesses a concept that bears striking functional similarities to the Italian Mafia’s omertà, the well-known code of silence that forbids informing on fellow members. Omertà is a code of silence and refusal to cooperate with legal authorities that forms a central pillar of southern Italian organized crime, enforced by intimidation, fear, and dishonor.

While omertà protects criminal enterprises, the Jewish concept of mesirah (Hebrew for “handing over”) arose from a different historical necessity: protecting Jewish minorities from gentile authorities. Mesirah prohibits Jews from reporting fellow Jews to non-Jewish authorities, creating a parallel system of internal loyalty and silence that has operated within Jewish communities for millennia.

According to traditional Jewish law, mesirah is the forbidden action of one Jew reporting the conduct of another Jew to non-rabbinic authorities in circumstances prohibited by Jewish law. This prohibition extends to both turning over a person and their property. The prohibition covers both the person and the property, a point the Shulchan Aruch makes in Choshen Mishpat 388 when it forbids handing over a fellow Jew “be it his person or his money.” A Jew who violates it is a moser, an informer, and the historical consequences were severe. Medieval Jewish tribunals in Spain sometimes branded informers or, for repeat offenders, put them to death, and in 19th century Russia a moser was occasionally found drowned in a river.

The prohibition of mesirah runs deep in Jewish law, set down in the Babylonian Talmud and sharpened by medieval codifiers. The Talmud gives it a stark illustration in Bava Kamma 117a. A man came before the Babylonian sage Rav and announced that he meant to show another Jew’s straw to the gentile authorities, who would seize it. Rav forbade him twice. The man answered that he would show it regardless, and Rav Kahana, seated before Rav, broke the informer’s neck on the spot. Rav justified the act by citing Isaiah, reasoning that once a Jew’s property falls into hostile hands the owner’s life is at risk. Then he told Kahana to flee to the land of Israel, since the Persian rulers who once tolerated such acts had given way to authorities “particular about bloodshed” who would try him for murder.

The medieval codifiers turned that severity into settled law. Writing in the 12th century, Maimonides fixed the rules of the moser in his Mishneh Torah, in the section Chovel uMazzik, the laws of one who injures a person or property. He separated the Jew who voluntarily hands a colleague’s property to a “strong, lawless person” from one who does so under compulsion, and he held that an informer forfeits his share in the world to come. On the informer himself he was blunt. “It is permissible to kill a moser in any country, even in the present age, when the court no longer metes out capital punishment,” Maimonides wrote in Chovel uMazzik chapter 8. “It is permitted to kill him before he informs.” The Shulchan Aruch, the authoritative sixteenth century code, carried the prohibition forward, forbidding a Jew to hand another to a gentile “even if the Jew is a rasha (wicked person) and baal aveirot (habitual sinner) and even if the Jew is harassing him,” at Choshen Mishpat 388.

The severity reaches past physical punishment. As Rabbi Hershel Schachter explains, a moser is treated as a gentile for certain ritual purposes even when he is otherwise devout, because “he demonstrates his rejection of the unity of all of Klal Yisroel [the collective of Israel]” by the act of informing. In practice this bars him from writing a Torah scroll or performing ritual slaughter, functions reserved for Jews in good standing, a disqualification the codes trace to Yoreh Deah 281 and the Rama.

Both systems prescribe the ultimate penalty, death, for those who break the code of silence. In Jewish law, the principle of din moser allows for the execution of persistent informers. How far that severity once ran shows in an account preserved by Rabbi Reuven Margaliot in his Talmud commentary Margaliot HaYam, a story his father told him from the family’s Polish hometown. A brazen local informer walked into the synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur and stood wrapped in his prayer shawl near the rabbi. A few men seized him, gagged him with his own shawl, carried him to the river beside the synagogue, and drowned him. When the authorities investigated the death, not one worshipper said a word. Similarly, in Mafia culture, breaking omertà is considered the ultimate betrayal, punishable by death. The enforcement mechanisms in both systems rely on community complicity and a shared understanding that silence is essential for survival.

The most fraught modern application arrives in cases of child sexual abuse inside insular Orthodox communities, where mesirah has at times been turned against the wrong party. In the 2012 prosecution of Nechemya Weberman, a Satmar counselor convicted of abusing a girl over three years and sentenced to 103 years in prison, the victim who testified was branded a moser by some in the community, and four men were arrested for trying to intimidate her into dropping the case. It was the mirror image of the doctrine’s stated logic, protecting the predator rather than the pursued.

To understand how the community reached this point, it helps to know where it came from. Satmar is an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement that grew up around Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who settled in the Hungarian city of Szatmar, now Satu Mare in Romania, in 1905 and built his court there over the decades that followed. Teitelbaum survived the Holocaust, spent roughly a year in Mandate Palestine, and reached New York in 1946, where he rebuilt the community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The movement is defined by a fierce anti-Zionism that rejects the modern State of Israel as a sinful human seizure of a redemption meant to await the Messiah. Today the Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel communities together form the largest Hasidic group in the world.

Within this closed community, at least one man refused to look away. Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg became the most visible figure confronting the silence around abuse in his community. He ran a telephone hotline for victims in Hasidic Williamsburg and sat through the Weberman trial in open support of the accuser. The reprisal was swift. The day after the December 2012 conviction, a man named Meilech Schnitzler, the son of an accused abuser Rosenberg had named, ran at him outside a fish market and threw a cup of bleach in his face. Rosenberg was burned around the eyes and escaped blinding only because a bystander doused his face with water. Schnitzler pleaded guilty to a felony and received five years of probation and no prison time. Prodded by the judge to apologize in court in 2014, he asked Rosenberg for forgiveness, and Rosenberg refused it. “You didn’t harm me. You harmed all the children I represent,” he said.

Due to the changing demographics of American Jewry, similar cases of mesirah are likely to multiply. Driven almost entirely by a fertility gap that Pew measured at 3.3 children per Orthodox adult against 1.4 for non-Orthodox Jews, with Orthodox Jews starting families five years earlier (first birth at 23.6 versus 28.6) and running a median age of just 35 against 53 for Reform and 62 for Conservative Jews, American Jewry is set to tilt sharply Orthodox. Yale demographer Edieal Pinker projects the Orthodox share rising from 12 percent to 29 percent by 2063 while the Reform and Conservative denominations slide from 50 percent to 39 percent and lose nearly half their members aged 30 to 69.

As Orthodox Judaism becomes the dominant expression of American Jewish life over the coming decades, the mesirah prohibition will not fade into history. It will expand, carried by a young, insular, and rapidly multiplying population that views the secular state as an alien and often hostile power. Western societies assume a baseline of civic loyalty that the practice of mesirah explicitly denies. There is no halfway accommodation between a legal system that demands every citizen be a witness and a religious code that brands every witness a traitor. One of them must give way. History suggests it will not be the code hardened by two thousand years of exile.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.

 

Free Expression Foundation: Rob Rundo’s Unenforceable Rights

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How the Government Imprisoned Him Without Charges

The Constitution guarantees every citizen certain rights. But an official told Rob Rundo, founder of the Active Club movement, something else: “You have the rights you can enforce.” Mr. Rundo experienced the reality of this seldom spoken maxim at the hands of the American justice system when he was incarcerated without charge for 147 days.

When Mr. Rundo was first arrested in 2018 in connection with the Rise Above Movement’s involvement in various political flashpoints of 2017, the government alleged violations of the federal Anti-Riot Act. Judge Cormac Carney of the Central District of California dismissed these charges in 2019, holding that the Anti-Riot Act was overbroad and unduly burdened First Amendment expression. Mr. Rundo, now a free man with no pending charges, left the country. The government promptly filed an appeal of Judge Carney’s decision and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. Following lengthy extradition proceedings, the long arm of the law brought Mr. Rundo back to the United States in 2023 to face the same charges as before.

Judge Carney again dismissed the charges, this time on grounds of selective prosecution. As Mr. Rundo’s attorneys argued, the Department of Justice left unmolested countless violent Antifa activists at the same events. Judge Carney released Mr. Rundo on February 21, 2024. The government then filed an emergency appeal for a stay of the release order and against Judge Carney’s second ruling. The Ninth Circuit granted the stay for the duration of the appellate proceedings even though Mr. Rundo had already been released. The government contended that Mr. Rundo was a flight risk, citing his legal departure from the country after his first release five years prior.

Simultaneously, the government returned to the District Court, which had already lost jurisdiction, to seek an arrest warrant. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim granted the request on the government’s false assurances that their conduct was in accordance with due process. Erin Murphy, Mr. Rundo’s attorney, quipped at the February 23 status conference, “I think that if I engaged in even a fraction of that kind of gamesmanship, I don’t know that I’d have my license anymore.” United States v. Rundo, No. CR 18-00759-CJC, Status Conference Tr. at 14:3–5 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 23, 2024). Judge Kim called the government’s conduct “misrepresentation” and “an abuse of power” and would not have issued the warrant if fully informed. Id. at 14:12-14; 42:12.  Judge Kim further admonished the government: “You [the government] seem to be determined that, when the process is unclear, it doesn’t matter, whatever the shortest path is that I can get there. And you represent all of these things as if that is simple.” United States v. Rundo, No. 2:18-cr-00759-CJC, ECF No. 366 at 39:25, 40:1–4 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 23, 2024).

Less than 24 hours after his release, Mr. Rundo was back behind bars on a faulty warrant. In layman’s terms, Rundo had no charges pending against him but remained incarcerated. Judge Carney expounded on the government’s underhanded conduct, “If Mr. Rundo was a popular figure in today’s society  . . . there would be complete outrage about what’s happened here.” Rundo, ECF No. 373 at 27:3-6.  The United States Attorney at the conference offered this response after a lengthy exchange: “The Government’s position has been we do not believe that the defendant is entitled to any sort of appearance in front of a judge in light of the Ninth Circuit’s decision,” contradicting the government’s promise to Judge Kim that Rundo would receive due process upon re-arrest. Id. at 34:24-25, 35:1. Judge Carney asked, if the government’s position were true, why was the arrest warrant even sought from Judge Kim?  The U.S. Attorney could only offer that this action was undertaken out of an “abundance of caution.” Id. at 35:18.

Mr. Rundo’s unconventional imprisonment would last until the appellate court adjudicated the government’s appeal in July 2024. As Judge Carney lamented, “It bothers me. It doesn’t matter whether Mr. Rundo is a good man, a bad man, whether he did something wrong here or not. We’re all entitled to our Constitution, and no one’s following the rules, and I’m at a loss to understand it.” Rundo, ECF No. 373 at 10:15–19. He continued, “throwing out fundamental criminal rules of procedure and going out to arrest someone without pending charges, that’s frightening to me.” Id. at 10:24-25, 11:1.

The Ninth Circuit ultimately reversed Judge Carney’s second dismissal, and the prosecution of Rundo continued. The issue of his arrest on an improper warrant was never fully adjudicated due to the pending appellate proceedings. After six years of legal battles, he pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act. The court sentenced Rundo to 24 months in federal prison and two years of supervised release, though he already served his prison term across the multi-year struggle.  He is now, at last, free, albeit on probation (which will end in December of this year).

In sum, Mr. Rundo spent 725 days in custody in four different countries, 147 of which were spent with no pending charges at all. The Constitution said he had rights. The government disagreed. Just as the U.S. attorneys sought Mr. Rundo’s re-arrest out of an “abundance of caution,” activists must similarly be cautious of unaccountable judicial overreach. Further, dissidents must remember what the government official told Rundo:  your rights exist only insofar as you can ensure their enforcement. The Free Expression Foundation stands ready to advocate for your First Amendment rights and demand enforcement of the law impartially.

 

Voy Polloi: Mankind and Morality in These Darkening Days

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Dr William Pierce was a stale pale male who lived in West Virginia. Monika Kim is a vibrant Korean-American who lives in Los Angeles. What do they have in common? Very little, of course. Nevertheless, I thought of Pierce when I was reading Kim’s second novel. It was the title of the novel that caught my eye: Molka. And the eyes eyeing the title — they caught my eye too. Here’s what I’m talking about, the front cover of Molka:

The eye-catching cover of Monika Kim’s Molka (2026)

What does Molka mean? I had no idea, so I picked up the book and found out on the back cover: “molka (n): the Korean term for spy cameras secretly and illegally installed, often to capture voyeuristic images and videos.” Yes, I’d read about those scandals in Korea. And here was a novel based on them. A horror novel set in Seoul. Well, that sounded interesting, so I got a copy of the book and began reading. But while I was reading, I was reminded of Dr William Pierce, the neo-Nazi mystic who headed the hate-group National Alliance until his death in 2002. More specifically, I was reminded of something Pierce once said about cruelty. He said that a man’s true character is revealed in the way he treats those weaker than himself.

High tech and low deeds

That’s “weaker” in the full sense: unable to defend oneself or call on defenders. Pierce was talking about cruelty to animals, but his point has much wider relevance and resonance. How do we behave when we think there would be no consequences for bad behavior? That’s a true test of character. The molka scandals in Korea have answered the question on behalf of large numbers of sometimes very ordinary men. Their true character is bad, because advanced technology has allowed them to invade women’s privacy without fear of retribution. Some of those men were wrong not to fear, because they’ve been caught and jailed. Not enough men and not for long enough — that’s what Molka says. But being caught doesn’t alter the psychology of the voyeurs: they thought they wouldn’t get caught, so they chose to behave badly. That’s certainly the reasoning of a male character called Junyoung in Kim’s novel (inter alia, Junyoung means “Handsome Excellent One” in Korean). He installs spy-cameras in the women’s toilets at the company he works for, so that he has on-demand private porn at the desk where he supposedly devotes all of his time to computer security.

Men have really behaved like that in Korea. And in lots of other countries. I wrote about one example from Britain in my article “A Clown Called Chleo,” where I described how I had been puzzled in 2025 by a headline that read: “Woman jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi.” Woman? I thought. But women don’t do that sort of thing to men. My instinct was right: it wasn’t a woman, it was a male pervert called John Leslie Graham who claimed to be a “transwoman” called Chleo Sunter. OK, maybe there are real women who have installed spy-cameras and gotten depraved thrills by watching unaware men use the toilet. But there can’t be many.

This kind of voyeurism is what feminists call a “gendered crime.” It’s overwhelmingly carried out by men and overwhelmingly directed at women.[1] Hoi polloi, “the many,” is a Greek term for the great mass of ordinary men and women.[2] But “Voy Polloi,” the great mass of voyeurs created by modern tech and the internet, are overwhelmingly men, not women. That “gendered criminality” is the basis of Monika Kim’s novel Molka, which describes how an ordinary Korean woman called Dahye (“Many Graces” or “Much Intelligence”) strikes back at the patriarchy after being the victim of video’d voyeurism, first by the toilet-camera installer at her place of work, then by her rich and manipulative boyfriend Hyookjun (“Radiant Handsome One”).

“Castrate cruel males”

Molka was described as “wildly original” by the New York Times, but that isn’t a good description. Contra the myths of Clown-World about White racism and White male sexism, Monika Kim enjoys non-White privilege and female privilege, so she’s been praised beyond her merits and has been successful beyond her due. “Wildly original”? Nope. I’m not an expert in or an aficionado of female-revenge fiction and films, but I can describe Molka as like a cross between a book from 1991 and a film from 2000. Molka has the “all men are bastards” and “castrate cruel males” of Helen Zahavi’s novel Dirty Weekend from 1991 and the “vengeful ghost of unjustly killed woman” of Robert Zemeckis’s film What Lies Beneath from 2000. And although I finished Molka easily enough, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

I kept asking myself what I increasingly ask myself nowadays: How much of this was written by AI? Then again, maybe AI would have done a better job. The prose was bland and uninspired, conjuring little before the mind’s eye and conveying no strong sense of place or character. And there was a big wodge of woke in the mix. Although Molka is set entirely in Korea, the first cruel male defeated by the Korean heroine Dahye is a White American called Bobby. He tries to force fellatio on her in a Seoul nightclub and doesn’t reckon on the sudden appearance of a vengeful female ghost, that of Dahye’s dead sister Eunhye (“Kind Blessing”). A cruel Korean male had made Eunhye pregnant and she’d committed suicide by jumping in the Han river that runs through Seoul.

Not monsters, just men

Her watery death means that the imminent appearance of her ghost is announced by dripping taps and leaking ceilings. Has that been used in a horror-film before? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been used in lots of films and is even a cliché. It’s certainly something designed for the camera and microphone: a close-up of a suddenly and mysteriously dripping bathroom tap as a ghost prepares to manifest to presently oblivious living characters. Or a sudden drip-drip-drip in the darkness of a bedroom where an oblivious living character slumbers. Like so much fiction since the rise of cinema and TV, Molka was written with a cinematic or televisual sensibility. It’s about screens and was shaped by screens. But if the novel isn’t a good read, it is an interesting one. Modern technology has given the human race much more opportunity and flexibility to do bad things. And lots of humans have seized that extra opportunity.

More precisely, lots of men have done so. And not just as individuals. Modern technology allows bad men to find each other and collaborate in ways that were once impossible. And when I say “bad men” I don’t mean monsters like Jeffrey Epstein. No, I mean perfectly ordinary men whose true character was revealed by what they thought was the opportunity to do bad things without consequences. Molka reminded me indirectly of William Pierce. It also reminded me directly of Gisèle Pelicot. She’s the French woman whose husband Dominique drugged her and pimped her out to male strangers for nearly a decade of nocturnal rape and voyeurism. In Molka, Dahye is drugged and pimped out by her bastard-of-a-boyfriend, which is another reason for her to chop off his penis at the end of the book.

“An international network of rapists”

But condign castration is feminist fantasy. The real victim of cruel drug-rape, Gisèle Pelicot, didn’t want to behave like that. Instead, she behaved with dignity and courage after being stripped of dignity by the man she thought she could trust. That was part of what made her story so uncomfortable for me as a male. I didn’t like to think that perfectly ordinary men could behave like that. Even less did I like to think that perfectly ordinary White men could behave like that. I was both disturbed and fascinated by what had been done to Gisèle Pelicot. So I followed the court-case, trying to understand what had gone on and wondering whether I should write about it for the Occidental Observer. But there was no apparent racial or religious angle, no way to contrast the bad behavior of White men with the worse behavior of non-White men or Muslim. The same is true of similar cases now receiving attention across the world: see articles like “‘Truly international’ network of drug-facilitated rape uncovered by UK crime agency,” which describes how “offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships.”

That’s an article at the Guardian, because it’s the left that are most heavily covering and condemning these crimes. After all, they support the leftist world-view, don’t they? Men are evil, women are innocent. Well, I think these cases expose the contradiction in the left’s world-view, the double-think I’ve summed up in the phrase “Preach Equality, Practise Hierarchy.” The crimes themselves are masculine in a way that can’t be denied by any honest observer, but the leftist response to them is moralized in a way that can’t be justified by a core leftist principle. How so? Well, think of how a core leftist principle explodes the left’s moralism about the White “enslavement” of Blacks. If human beings are indeed all “The Same Under the Skin,” there’s no way to justify a hierarchy where one group, such as women or Blacks, is morally superior to another group, such as men or Whites. If egalitarianism is true, good behavior and bad behavior are contingent on circumstances outside any individual’s control. As I said in “Destroy the Goy,” the leftist principle of human equality entails omnia ex alea — that “all things come from the dice,” from the unchosen and undesigned contingencies of geography, environment and history, which are effectively random from the ethical point of view.

Disgust or temptation?

By leftist principles, we can’t pass judgment or erect a moral hierarchy because Whites enslaved Blacks and because men are preying on and perving over women. It would be like saying that someone who rolls 10 with three dice is morally superior to someone who rolls 5 with one dice. If history had been different, Blacks would have enslaved Whites (Blacks have no problem enslaving other Blacks in Africa) and it would be women preying on and perving over men. As it is, even in our present time-line leftist principles entail that vice or virtue can’t belong wholly to one side or another. If we’re all the same under the skin, our propensity to bad behavior is the same, whether or not we express it to the same extent. As groups, Blacks can behave badly towards Whites and women can behave badly towards men. And will indeed be doing so, if we look. But leftists don’t look. And don’t report on the findings of those who do look: “Studies finding anti-female bias are shouted from the rooftops [while] those finding no bias or bias against men are reported in a whisper or simply ignored.”[3] That’s something I didn’t expect to see in the New Statesman, that other citadel of British leftism where the disgusting crimes committed against Gisèle Pelicot have been extensively covered.

And I do find those crimes disgusting. But what if she had been younger, more attractive, and her husband had been offering her not to a group of men but just to me? Even as it is, I have to think “There but for the grace of God go I” about Dominique Pelicot. If I imagine a younger and more attractive Gisèle Pelicot, disgust starts to dwindle and temptation starts to rise. In my defence, I can say that I consciously chose not to look at the “topless” photos of Kate Windsor, the Princess of Wales, during the furore about paparazzi intrusion in 2012. I thought: “She wouldn’t want me to look, so I won’t.” But it was easy to think like that, because I’ve never found Kate Williams attractive and never wanted to see her naked. Would I have resisted the temptation to perve if I did find her attractive?

“First endure, then pity, then embrace”

I hope so, but I don’t know so. I would certainly have resisted if I’d known I’d have to face consequences for perving. But consequence-free perving is what modern tech and the internet have offered in abundance for decades. Or so millions of men have thought. Most of them have been right, because most tech-aided voyeurs and most consumers of illegal porn aren’t in prison. They couldn’t be: there wouldn’t be room. The bad character of millions of men has been revealed by modern porn in a way that was once impossible. That’s because modern porn is much easier to find and much more stimulating to view than the older kind. I’m glad that I grew up before the internet and gladder that I had little exposure to porn as a teenager. I wasn’t glad at the time, mind you. I wanted to see naked women. If I’d grown up in the internet age, I would have seen women not just naked but doing nasty things that I would’ve regretted seeing. But maybe I wouldn’t have regretted seeing them for long. Using porn is like taking drugs: you don’t know what you’re doing to yourself until after you’ve done it. As the poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) so wisely, and unsettlingly, wrote:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. (Essay on Man, 1733)

Like the depraved baby-rapist Jamie Varley, the depraved wife-pimper Dominique Pelicot was probably conditioned to depravity gradually by using porn. It’s improbable that either man started with the worst first. The worst porn would probably have repelled them at the beginning. In the end, they were embracing the worst and acting on it. That’s why Dominique Pelicot is world-infamous and Jamie Varley should be world-infamous. It’s easy to explain why he isn’t: he committed a worse crime than Dominique Pelicot, but his crime wasn’t suitable for leftist propaganda. Leftists are very happy to talk about straight men drugging, raping and pimping their wives or girlfriends. Leftists are not happy to talk about homosexual men raping babies to death.

So they don’t talk about it and they ignore the probability that baby-rape is more common, maybe much more common, among gay men than among straight men. If it is, I don’t think that makes straight men morally superior to gay men. Instead, it makes them differently depraved. And I don’t think women are morally superior to men because it’s men who are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual violence and women who are overwhelmingly the victims of it. Monika Kim and her novel Molka do assume moral superiority for women, but can’t justify it by their own leftist principles.

The wingless and the stingless

As a man, I don’t like to see men behave so badly with spy-cameras or collaborate so disgustingly in sex-crimes. But stats are stats. And these stats don’t lie. For obvious biological reasons, men are much more likely to become perverted and to practise perversions. But men don’t choose their biology any more than moths do. In some species of moth, the males are winged and the females are wingless. Is that pernicious patriarchy at work, literally denying females the freedom to fly?

Pernicious patriarchal aptery? The winged male and (almost) wingless female of the Winter Moth, Operophtera_brumata (Wikipedia)

No, it’s not patriarchy. The female moths are wingless for the same reason as male bees are stingless. The biggest hate criminal of all has been at work. It’s that giant racist, sexist and homophobe called Mother Nature. And she’s still at work in the tech-nourished and tech-aided human depravities of the twenty-first century. Biology doesn’t allow us to excuse men’s crimes and perversions, but it does allow us to understand them better and to see through the left’s attempts to exploit them not for the benefit of women but for the benefit of leftism. The Christian doctrine of original sin is also an antidote to leftism. The doctrine states that we all inhabit a Fallen World and all inherit the moral fallibility of Adam and Eve. We all sin, because we’re all the children of sinful Adam and Eve.

I think that’s a metaphorical truth, not a literal one, but it’s a metaphor that’s soon going to become inescapable. Israel’s war on Iran is not going to end well. If it crashes the world’s economy and leads to mass starvation, depravity will become everyday reality. If we escape the worst, we’re still going to see seismoclasms and surges in sin. My advice to myself and others remains the same: Seek Sophia, not stimulation. Sophia is the divine personification of wisdom; “stimulation” is the mind-numbing and morality-sapping in all its forms, from drugs to porn to television. William Pierce sought Sophia, not stimulation. He would be a good man to follow in these darkening days.

[1]  It is possible that homosexual voyeurs are using spy-cameras much more than we’re aware of, but there seems much less incentive for homosexuals to behave like that. Sex is much more easily available to homosexual men than to heterosexual men, including in toilets. Plus, invading men’s privacy is, for men, less of a transgressive thrill than invading women’s privacy.

[2]  “Hoi polloi” was one of my earliest introductions to how much literacy has frozen English pronunciation. I first encountered it spoken as “hoy floy” by someone who wasn’t very educated and had presumably never encountered it in print. That kind of phonetic change is natural enough for a foreign term (p- in English is aspirated and can easily be misheard as f-). It would have altered English a lot more without literacy.

[3]  That claim is made in the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams’ A Billion Years of Sex Differences, a book about biological sex reviewed by a “gender-critical” feminist. The review is entitled “Ignoring sex differences harms us all.”

Meet the New Boss:  Andy Burnham

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King Charles III has just invited yet another Prime Minister (PM) to form a government of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The current monarch must be becoming accustomed to receiving these visits at Buckingham Palace. He had thought his coronation would just mean more visits to hospitals and mosques to take his mind off his appalling family, but new PMs are keeping him busy.

As for the latest Leader of His Majesty’s Government, when Charles assumed the throne, he must have been hoping for a stayer, a Thatcher or a Blair. They were the twentieth century’s longest-serving PMs, each in office for over a decade. But the King seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time granting the formal request every elected (or unelected, as we shall see) PM must make of the monarch to form a government. It wasn’t always like this.

Charles’ great-great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, reigned for 64 years, from 1837 to 1901, and saw 10 PMs pass through office. Queen Elizabeth II beat Victoria’s monarchical record, reigning for 70 years and seeing 15 PMs come and go, from Churchill to Liz Truss, whose 44-day tenure as Conservative PM is the shortest in British political history. Statisticians will note the ratio of monarchs to PMs over time increasing in favor of the latter. King Charles III has currently held the throne for a few weeks shy of four years, and four Prime Ministers have already exchanged the keys to 10 Downing Street in that time. One more, and that will be half the number in office during Victoria’s reign, which was 16 times as long, at the time of writing. Even Larry, the Downing Street cat and chief mouser, has seen off six PMs and is on his seventh. Britain is beginning to make Italy look politically stable.

This will be the UK’s ninth PM this century, the fourth in four years, and the fifth to enter office mid-term and unelected since the turn of the millennium. This compares with eight mid-term replacements during the whole of the 20th century, beginning in 1902 when Lord Salisbury handed over the office of PM to his nephew, Lord Balfour. Salisbury was 72 and in poor health, exacerbated by grief following the death of his wife. His name was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, and his exemplary act of political nepotism gave birth to a colloquialism which survives in England to this day; “Bob’s your uncle”. This means that something has worked out perfectly and to your advantage. “You want to arrange a mortgage? Go to the building society, fill in a form, and Bob’s your uncle!”. The new handover of power may lead to similar sayings being coined, but they are unlikely to be as affectionate.

All British Prime Ministers enter office with the promise of political change, but the most significant change this century was introduced with the last PM to enter office last century. When Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was elected Labour Prime Minister in 1997, however, the first thing he changed was his name. “Call me Tony”, he famously told an interviewer, and Tony Blair was born, the man veteran journalist Peter Hitchens never refers to as anything other than “the Blair creature”. British politicians are notoriously leery of looking as though they come from too many rungs up the class ladder, and Blair was not the first Labour grandee to ruffle up his name the way Boris Johnson ruffles up his hair. He wasn’t even the first Tony.

In the 1970s, Labour MP Anthony Wedgwood-Benn made the same diminutive move to obscure his origins, and was always known as Tony Benn (unless his name appeared in the Socialist Worker newspaper, which is just as hard Left as its title suggests). Benn’s family was in part descended from Josiah Wedgwood, whose pottery and ceramics are world-famous, and in the 1970s it was still deemed more authentic for Labour politicians to be miners’ sons rather than descended from the landed gentry. It is an incidental curiosity of American 19th-century English that “tony” was a slang word meaning something or someone who is fashionable, stylish, wealthy, and associated with high society. “Oh, they live in a very tony part of town”.

So, who is the latest British PM? Following the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer, who served the shortest term of any Labour premier in the century and a quarter the party has existed, a new PM has been voted in. Well, by around 25,000 of the electorate, anyway. This new PM will be Andy Burnham, whose CV reads: University, intern to an MP, policy adviser to an MP, MP, Mayor, MP. He has never been outside the Westminster bubble. Burnham was the former Mayor of Manchester, where despite being White English, he was nick-named “the first Muslim Mayor of Manchester” by uncharitable Right-wingers who found him over-friendly to the city’s Mohammedan hordes. Manchester also saw many, many White, underage girls raped and abused by groups of Pakistani-heritage men on Burnham’s watch (which gave him control over the police) in one of the most notorious “grooming gang” areas of the many spread across once-English cities. Manchester’s population has changed in line with Britain’s other main cities, and is now largely composed of Mirpuri Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. These are clan enclaves, and therefore valuable voting blocs for Labour. As Dr. David Starkey, the much-cancelled “historian of the Right”, puts it rather more acerbically:

The foothills of the Punjab have translated themselves into the villages of Manchester.

Burnham recently became a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) and thus eligible for the office of PM when he was handed a safe seat after the incumbent MP stepped down to make way for him. He duly won, and took office on July 20. The consensus opinion on the British political Right (such as it is) tallies with a line from the song Won’t Get Fooled Again, by English rock band The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Others are not so sure. Viewed in the terms of the neo-Marxist authoritarianism currently suffusing British politics, Starmer may just have been the warm-up act.

There are many reasons to find Burnham’s accession spurious. Firstly, he is unelected in anything but a local by-election. The MP who stood down in Makerfield to make way for Burnham was Josh Simons. As a member of activist think-tank Labour Together — now Think Labour — Simons asked the Intelligence Services to investigate journalists who wrote negative pieces about Labour Together. But in standing down in order to give Burnham both his seat and the premiership, Simons wasn’t acting solely for the good of the party. Burnham has allegedly guaranteed him a top position on twice the salary Simons made as an MP. The “quid” is famously slang for the British pound, but no one in British politics does anything without a quid pro quo. The horse-trading that goes on when a new administration is formed revolves around rewarding loyalty, especially after what was effectively a palace coup, as Burnham’s coronation clearly was. The famous “sources at Westminster” have been whispering that Burnham had been planning Starmer’s ouster for a year. As for his new administration, welcome to government by midwit.

Burnham has made some appointments which show that this going to be a government of none of the talents. Angela Rayner, who was formerly Deputy PM to Starmer, returns to her old portfolio as Minister for Housing. She was forced to step down from the role nine months ago when it was discovered that she had failed to pay stamp duty on her own property. Louise Haigh will be the new Deputy PM, and is also a convicted fraudster. Part of her new remit would have been to keep an eye on ethics and fraud in the public sector. This part of her portfolio has been quietly removed. David Lammy, a stupid Black man even by the standards which currently obtain, was the interim Deputy PM, as well as being the Justice Minister who set in motion legislation to remove the right to trial by jury. Burnham has removed him, sending him to the back-benches where he can continue to bleat about reparations. Burnham must have realized that even the public were aware that Lammy was a talentless DEI hire. Lammy has been replaced at the Justice Ministry by Alex Norris, who has no legal expertise or experience whatsoever, which should stop him getting in the way. As Norris takes office, his Ministry of Justice is fighting in the courts to prevent the release of data relating to crimes broken down by ethnicity which would embarrass Labour’s non-White voters. A Black face or two in high office used to be mandatory, but it is not so important now for PMs to have Blacks in their administration just for the optics. Muslims are this season’s fashion.

Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim MP and was Home Secretary under Starmer. As she says on record, she “puts Islam at the center of everything I do”. She stays in position. She and Wes Streeting, a homosexual who was a great friend of the disgraced Peter Mandelson and who is the new Defense Minister, were caught on a “hot” microphone laughing and joking about the government’s “early release” scheme, which will see 6,000 violent criminals back on the streets before their due time. Burnham has already had to apologize for that, doubtless at the suggestion of his new Muslim Wormtongue. Ali Milani is now working directly for Burnham as a policy adviser. He chairs the Muslim Network and was pictured campaigning with New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani. He calls the grooming gang scandal a “vile racist campaign” which “puts Muslims in serious danger”.

Dame Antonia Romeo, memorably described by Rupert Lowe as “the queen of woke”, supervised the Islamic network in the Home Office, oversaw “non-binary awareness workshops” (involving paid time off at the Home Office), organized a round of “LGBT allyship emails”, and made sure the Pride flag was flown from government buildings. She is now the cabinet Secretary, the most senior Civil Servant in the country. Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary is one of many members of the Fabian Society in the new Cabinet. Lucy Powell is Education Secretary. She described the grooming gang scandal, or rather any mention of it, as “dog-whistle politics”. Ruth Smeeth, now a senior Cabinet member, worked with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who work tirelessly to bring down Elon Musk’s X. The Comms team at Number 10 is stocked with technocrats with experience in the field of smothering information. Hayden Monroe, now a policy adviser, is the former campaign director for ex-New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. She it was who told the Kiwi public during Covid that they must trust the government as their “single source of truth”. Sarah Brown worked for Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London and clear fifth-columnist. She becomes Director of Communications.

Burnham’s Cabinet contains more Oxbridge graduates than any other, and this says as much about Britain’s most venerable universities as it does about government. Quite apart from the midwit gallery of Burnham’s newly appointed Cabinet, the important posts are to do with communications, and this is where the new PM’s appointments take a more sinister turn.

Matthew McGregor, Burnham’s new Director of Political Strategy, is a former director of HOPE not Hate (HnH). This is an activist smear group similar to America’s SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) and ADL (Anti-Defamation League). I have written about them many times here and elsewhere, as well as reviewing the last three editions of their annual report, State of Hate. Their tactics are questionable, to say the least. During the Southport riots, for example, the CEO of HnH, Nick Lowles, released a story that a Muslim woman had had acid thrown in her face. This was absolutely untrue and Lowles later admitted as much. But he justified his inflammatory lie by claiming that an anti-racist message was “put out there” as a result and the invented story was therefore acceptable. He then told the press that “Right-wing” marches were planned in a hundred towns. Again, this was total fabrication, but it kept the idea of the “far-Right” in the public consciousness. HnH do, on occasion, have to tread carefully. After the recent murder of Ann Widdecombe, their defamatory and inflammatory page on the former MP was quickly taken down.

McGregor has also worked with 38 Degrees, an online activist project which advocates for the banning of what they deem undesirable commenters from social media altogether, and the Good Law Project. They tried to block the Brexit referendum by petitioning the Supreme Court to rule that the vote was unconstitutional. They also worked on and for Obama’s campaign, in what seems like a clear breach of American law concerning election interference, and will have done nothing to improve the tattered “special relationship” Starmer did much to erode. McGregor is also on the board of the charity Reprieve, which actively lobbies against the stripping of British citizenship from so-called “ISIS brides”, such as Shamima Begum, who left Britain to go and marry an ISIS fighter, and is currently fighting to return to Britain. This policy of refusing to grant citizenship is deemed “fundamentally racist” by Reprieve, a stance McGregor presumably endorses as a board member. He is now in charge of government policy. McGregor — also said to be very keen on tackling anti-Semitism — is to be Burnham’s new Director of Political Strategy, effectively director of psy-ops.

Allison Phillips is also on the board of HnH, and is to be Burnham’s “Director of Transition”. She wrote a series of articles for Leftist warhorse New Statesman which shows that she has Nigel Farage and Reform UK as rent-free tenants of her every waking hour. Edward Dutton, of this parish, has produced many videos on HnH for his channel, The Jolly Heretic, and they repay inspection. This recent piece on McGregor shows exactly what HnH represent, and therefore the significance of what is a major appointment in Burnham’s incoming administration. Anyone deemed by HnH to be far-Right can expect an even rougher ride than they got under Starmer. Burnham’s new strategy team is full of what political commentator Conor Tomlinson calls “embedded apparatchiks.” HnH were always the unofficial government adviser on race and the largely mythical far Right. Now their operatives are installed at the highest levels of government and the Civil Service.

What of the British economy? Burnham is coming into office with an economy in debt to the tune of £3 trillion. The Treasury Labour have had the IMF (International Monetary Fund) on speed-dial for some time. Treasury officials, at their first meeting, will inform the new PM that inflation is gradually climbing, the national debt exceeds GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and £153 million is to be given to Pakistan in foreign aid. Even the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has warned against further tax rises, but it looks as though Burnham has no choice. The welfare bill in the UK recently outstripped the tax weal, £333 billion against £331 billion. This means exactly what it appears to mean: once welfare recipients are paid off, many of them illegal immigrants, there is no money left for the NHS, defense, infrastructure, public sector wages and all the other slices of the fiscal pie taxation is supposed to cover. With debt higher than GDP (a large slice of which is swallowed up just repaying interest) and personal taxation already at its highest level since Britain was rebuilding after World War 2, money has to be found somewhere, as continued borrowing at current levels is not sustainable. Burnham has indicated a new wealth tax, and it may come as a surprise to many to discover that they are suddenly “wealthy”. Fiscal responsibility was one of the first casualties of this century’s political program, and accountability wasn’t far behind.

Accountability is mentioned by the political class in inverse proportion to the level of accountability to which they are subjected. Burnham has already given every indication that he intends to avoid accountability as much as is possible. His coronation was neatly handled by the Labour Party, who have fineigled the accession so that Burnham became PM on the day that Parliament goes into recess for the summer. He won’t face the “opposition” until mid-September. His first interview was not with a lobby journalist or newspaper editor, but with Gary Lineker, an ex-England football player who is now a TV pundit who refers to the Falkland Islands by their Spanish name; Las Malvinas. However, despite attempts to assemble a communications and strategy team (far more important than the Cabinet, which is largely theatrical) under the radar, early appointments give a clear indication of Burnham’s plans.

Burnham is taking a baton a long time in the forging. The Labour Party we see dismantling White Britain today began its project proper with the “New Labour” government of Tony Blair. This change in direction was the ultimate result of a movement which, perhaps, began in 1968 with the student rioting in Paris which almost brought down De Gaulle’s government, and the Prague Spring. It is a type of neo-Communism, with its Marxist dialectic of oppressor/oppressed transposed from class to race. Labour’s current incarnation, under Andy Burnham, will be further to the Left than Starmer’s, which is why Burnham has been playing the role of a cheeky, chummy northerner. He quotes lyrics from and plays music by famous Manchester bands The Smiths and New Order. He dresses in black sports jackets and black T-shirts and is rarely seen in a tie. He loves football. He’s playing the “ordinary bloke” card which was one of the few bits of optics Blair could never quite pull off. But Burnham is not an ordinary bloke. He is an avowed Socialist, and made his affiliations clear with his appointments and acknowledgements in his first week in power, indeed with his very first speech.

After he was declared Labour Party leader, and therefore PM, by his Muslim Home Secretary, Burnham was clear as to who he wanted to thank first: “All our affiliated trade unions, all our Socialist societies”. It all sounds very working-class, but the White working class will not interest Burnham except to further deplete and demoralize them. As he is a northerner, Burnham may be familiar with lyrics other than those of 80s pop bands. One in particular is an old satire of the consequences of advancement, and will undoubtedly apply to the latest British PM:

The working class can kiss my arse.
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.

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Blaming the British Dystopia on “the Blob”

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In an interview with Trevor Phillips on Sky News, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson blamed the ‘Boriswave’ of migration on what he describes as liberal remain-voting civil servants. Boris is counting on the general public having a short memory. In 2018 interview with the Telegraph he argued that the Government should make the “liberal” case for immigration and warned that “a society that isn’t open to talent will die”:

That was why it was right to take back control. It’s not about migration, it’s about control. It’s about who calls the shots. I’m a proud descendant not just of Turks but God knows what. There are lots of people who voted leave who are very liberal on migration, who shared my point of view… If I, as a UK politician, believe there is a case for having talented workers in our country and being open and saying to the people of the UK, ‘Look, we need software people from Hyderabad…because they add massively to our culture’ then it’s up to me as an elected politician to make that case.

When asked “who is in charge”, former Tory MP Danny Kruger replied “It is the system, what we call the deep state”. He has argued that the British government is “pushed around like a child in a playground encircled by bullies”. But what does Kruger himself believe? Once the chief speechwriter for David Cameron, he helped craft the “modernising” project that transformed the Conservatives from a mildly patriotic centre-right party into a socially liberal one. Under Cameron, the government legalised same-sex marriage, increased foreign aid spending to a record-high, and oversaw a surge in net migration. Despite that, in 2013 Danny Kruger told The Guardian “I’d like to know where David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism has gone”. He confided to the paper his “fear” that the rhetoric of forthcoming elections might focus more on “bashing burglars”, “sending immigrants home” and targeting “skivers”. He changed his own rhetoric on immigration after the electoral chances of the Tory party plummeted and Reform UK rose in the polls. Even now, while blaming “the system,” Kruger continues to shield the individuals actually responsible, stating, “I don’t really blame individuals. In fact, I honor Boris Johnson.”

Other than Brexit, the Boris Johnson wing of the Conservative Party was in full support of every facet of liberal opinion. One of Johnson’s loudest and most persistent cheerleaders is Jacob Rees-Mogg. He has blamed “the blob” for the current state of the country:

The blob hates the right-wing of the Conservative Party, that is to say the Boris Johnson wing of the Conservative Party because it shatters their beliefs and gives the electorate control. The blob is all about control by the elite.

The function of Rees-Mogg is to provide a reassuring traditional face to a party that ushered in revolutionary change and to bamboozle right-wingers into voting for a liberal party. And yet even Rees-Mogg can’t keep up the charade. When asked by a Telegraph journalist whether demographic change in the UK was happening too quickly, Jacob Rees-Mogg responded with an air of nonchalance, “I’m not concerned at all”.

After her short and turbulent premiership, Liz Truss re-emerged as a self-styled right-wing critic of the political system. In an op-ed she penned for Fox News, she claimed her tenure as PM was “sabotaged” by what she described as the “deep state”. The actual reason was more mundane: her mini-budget included massive tax cuts buts but no spending cuts of any kind, leading to economic turbulence. Her time in office contrasts sharply with her current political stance. While she used some tough rhetoric for illegal migration, as Prime Minister she intended to increase legal immigration. She had campaigned for Britain to to remain in the EU. Her opinions were not notably different from those of the average civil servant. By her own admission, she had worked hard to secure the release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah — an Egyptian man who had tweeted “fucking hate white people… a blight on the earth” and described British people as “dogs and monkeys” — after the Tory government had granted him British citizenship.

For all their shortcomings, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have at least been forthright about the actual issue: politicians. Speaking on the Heretics podcast, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman lays the blame squarely on the decisions of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak:

I’m not one of those politicians who blames the civil service… On legal migration, we had come out of the European Union… We had the levers at our disposal… This is what I would say to the prime ministers: we’ve got an open goal on legal migration… You just need to give me the authorization and I will literally go and kinda press some buttons. Its a very very simple process…. My efforts were rebuffed and I was outnumbered in the cabinet. We went back to the electorate with unprecedented levels of net migration.

It does feel like Britain is governed more by human rights lawyers than elected politicians, but that state of affairs was created by parliament itself. If our elected representatives wanted the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, then the UK would leave. Robert Jenrick revealed to GB News that members of the Tory shadow cabinet told him “I will never serve in the shadow cabinet of someone who wants to leave the ECHR”. The policies of the Conservative Party were freely chosen, consciously and purposefully, over the course of 14 years.

Reform UK will be no different. During his years as a senior Conservative MP, Zahawi had argued for an amnesty for illegal immigrants and had loudly condemned America’s so-called “Muslim ban”. Seeking to justify Zahawi’s position in the party, Deputy Leader Richard Tice said:

We need a team of a range of talents across the board. And that includes the talents of knowing where the blob is. Knowing how to deal with the blob.

Zahawi is a strange choice for a party supposedly at war with the forces of political correctness within the civil service. When Keir Starmer appointed Antonia Romeo — a figure dubbed the “queen of woke” by the press — as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, Zahawi called it a “good appointment”.

Mark Littlewood, director of the right-wing PopCon organization, gave a sycophantic interview to Zahawi in which they discussed reforming the civil service. Littlewood blames the current state of the country on the “structural problem” of the “Blairite machinery of government”, an outlook that Zahawi conveniently agrees with. The blurb for the YouTube video reads:

“Is the UK legal system being weaponized against the will of the people? From judicial overreach to the rise of “activist lawyers,” the pillars of British democracy are under pressure. Nadhim Zahawi knows the unvarnished truth about where and why the system is broken”.

Zahawi has previously made the case that Britain must have mass immigration so that immigrants from third-world nations can send money out of the British economy back to their country of origin.

We cannot allow politicians to use the “deep state” as a scapegoat for their own shortcomings, or as a cover for their own liberal agendas.

Yemen’s Long History of Tension with the Jews

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On March 28, 2026, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at Israel and entered the war that the United States and Israel had opened against Iran a month earlier. The barrage set off sirens over Beersheba, near Israel’s main nuclear research center, and Israeli air defenses brought the missile down. Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the group’s military spokesman, said the strikes would continue “until the declared objectives are achieved, as stated in the previous statement by the armed forces, and until the aggression against all fronts of the resistance ceases.”

On June 8 the movement went further, declaring “a complete and total ban on maritime navigation on the Israeli enemy in the Red Sea.” Saree added, “We consider that all movements of the enemy to be a military target from the announcement of this statement.” The Houthis have pushed toward the water since. The Bab al Mandeb Strait separates Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea, narrows to roughly 19 miles at its tightest point, and carries the trade that moves between Europe and Asia through the Suez Canal. About 12 percent of the world’s seaborne oil crossed it in 2023, some 9.3 million barrels a day, though Houthi attacks on shipping cut that flow to roughly 4.1 million by 2024.

The strait matters more now than it did then. Iran has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia has re-routed some 70 percent of its energy exports through the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Bab al Mandeb is the way out, and Tehran knows it. Reuters reported on July 16 that Iran has asked the Houthis to stand ready to close the route should the United States strike Iranian power infrastructure, citing two senior Iranian sources and a regional source. One source close to the group told the agency that the Houthis have already massed missiles and drones near the strait and now await the order to fire.

Whatever leverage the strait affords, the movement wielding it is driven by something older than shipping lanes. As members of the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthi movement fights under a slogan coined in 2003 and painted across every wall it controls: “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

Yemen did not always speak of Jews this way, and for a long stretch it could not have. The highlands of Yemen once belonged to the kingdom of Himyar, whose elites converted to some form of Judaism around 380, and whose last independent king, Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, took the throne around 522 by putting to the sword the Aksumite garrison that Christian Ethiopia had installed. Also known as Dhu Nuwas, Yusuf was a Himyarite king of Jewish confession who killed miaphysite Christians at Najran and Byzantine merchants elsewhere in his realm in 523 CE.

Aksum came back in 525. Christian-Aksumite king Kaleb had sent an expedition into Himyar years before and installed a client king, only to watch Yusuf take the throne back by putting the Aksumite garrison to the sword. This time the Byzantine emperor Justin urged Kaleb on, and the second campaign proved fatal to Jewish rule in the region. Yusuf died that year. The traditions divide on how, some holding that he fell in battle, others that he rode his horse into the Red Sea rather than surrender.

The victors kept the pattern. The Book of the Himyarites records that Kaleb, having won, put to death a great many Jews who refused baptism. He set a Himyarite convert on the throne as his viceroy, left a garrison, and sailed home, and his general Abraha soon seized the crown for himself. Persia took the country in 572, and Islam claimed it in 628. Jewish rule in the Arabian penninsula ended for good.

Under Islamic rule, Jews became dhimmis who paid a tax for protection. The arrangement held for centuries, and for a long while it held well. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s own account states plainly that life was “relatively peaceful for Yemenite Jews” before the Zaydis—a branch of Shia Islam that sits closest doctrinally to Sunnism of all other Shia sects—arrived, with freedom of religion in exchange for the tax and little persecution from the Sunni rulers then in power. The turn came with the Zaydi imams, whose rule stretched more than a thousand years and strengthened dhimmi law against the Jews.

Around 1165 the ruler Abd al Nabi ibn Mahdi decreed a forced renunciation of Judaism and offered the Jews conversion or martyrdom, with many choosing the former. A Jewish apostate worked to bring the rest across, and a false messiah rose promising the opposite. The community’s leader, Jacob ben Nethanel al Fayyumi, wrote to Cairo for help, and Maimonides answered in roughly 1172 with the Iggeret Teiman, the Epistle to Yemen, urging the Jews of Yemen to stay true to their faith. The persecution ended when Saladin’s brother Turan Shah took the country by 1174.

The worst came in 1679. Zaydi and Shafii scholars argued the question at length and ruled that Yemen’s Jews, by embracing the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi in 1666, had broken their dhimma agreement and forfeited protection.

That was the legal form. The politics underneath ran deeper. Jane Hathaway places the exile at the juncture of Zaydi and Ottoman messianism, and Bat Zion Eraqi Klorman has traced how Jewish and Muslim messianic expectation ran together in Yemen. Zaydi rulers already suspected their Jews of favoring an Ottoman return, which would have opened a road to Eretz Israel, and Sabbatian fervor threw up local pretenders who talked openly of a Jewish kingdom rising in Yemen again, as Himyar once had. The scholars supplied the ruling. The imams already had the motive.

Al Mutawakkil Ismail confirmed the ruling and ordered every Jew expelled, then died in 1676 without doing it. His nephew besieged a cousin to take the imamate, won it, and finished the job. Al Mahdi Ahmad ibn al Hasan carried it out. He destroyed the synagogues, banned public prayer, and when the Jews refused conversion, ordered them deported overseas. The ships never took them. They were left instead on the salty ground outside Mawza, a scorched coastal district near Mocha, and there they stayed more than a year. Many died on the road. The rest met disease and starvation, and as many as two thirds of the exiles did not survive. Their manuscripts, communal books, and archives went with them.

Mercy came from Muslim neighbors, and it came twice. In the summer of 1679 Imam al Mahdi Ahmad narrowed the choice to conversion or death. Arab tribesmen who held Jews under their protection, and who counted an attack on a tribesman’s Jew as an attack on his own honor, petitioned the imam to trade the death decree for something lighter. He agreed and settled on banishment across the sea to Zeila on the African coast. Then, with the columns already moving through Arab towns toward the water, chiefs of the Sabaean tribes petitioned a second time, asking that the Jews not be made to cross at all. Send them to Mawza on the Yemeni coast instead, they argued, because Jews who converted to save themselves could be recovered from there more easily than from Africa. The imam agreed again. Yemen’s far eastern communities escaped the decree altogether, since governors that far from Sanaa could ignore the order without much cost.

Even the kindness ran on arithmetic, and a year later the arithmetic reversed. Arab governors and tribes complained that goods only Jews knew how to make had gone missing from the markets, and the imam let the survivors return. They came home to occupied houses and seized land. They built again outside the walls of Sanaa, on ground the city then called the hyena’s field.

Survival remained conditional, and the conditions extended to future generations. Zaydi law held that a Jewish child whose father died belonged to the state. The Orphan’s Decree took such children, converted them, and raised them Muslim. Enforcement ran uneven for generations and the Ottomans largely ignored it, but Imam Yahya revived the law and pressed it hard, and it became a chief reason Jews began leaving for Palestine. Families married children off young to grant them adult status, hid them with other Jews, or moved them to the cities.

Three days after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, Aden erupted. Between December 2 and 4, 1947, rioters and the Aden Protectorate Levies, the Arab Muslim force British governor Reginald Champion sent to restore order, killed 82 Jews. Rioters looted 106 of Crater’s 170 Jewish shops and burned both Jewish schools. Sir Harry Trusted’s Colonial Office inquiry found of the Levies that “Some were sympathetic to looters and fire-raisers and did little to discourage them.” It called many trigger happy and tied them to the deaths of many of the 31 Jews shot in their homes, on rooftops, and in the street. The force sent to protect the Jews of Aden did much of the killing.

The community understood the verdict. Between 1949 and September 1950 the JDC planned, financed and ran Operation Magic Carpet, chartering close to 450 flights with Alaska Airlines and carrying more than 48,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.

A few hundred remained, mostly in the north. The newly invigorated Houthis made sure to chase out the rest. In 2007 the movement drove the Jews of Al Salem out of Saada. In March 2021, 13 members of three families left Sanaa after the Houthis made their departure the price of freeing Levi Salem Marhabi, jailed since 2016 for helping smuggle a Torah scroll out of the country. “They gave us a choice between staying in the midst of harassment and keeping Salem a prisoner or leaving and having him released,” one told Asharq Al Awsat. “History will remember us as the last of Yemeni Jews who were still clinging to their homeland until the last moment. We had rejected many temptations time and time again, and refused to leave our homeland, but today we are forced.”

They left. The Houthis kept Marhabi anyway. A Houthi court had ordered his release in 2019 and they ignored it. This prompted a response from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who declared: “Mr. Marhabi is one member of an ever-shrinking community of Yemeni Jews, who have been an important part of Yemen’s diverse social fabric for thousands of years. We call on the Houthis to respect religious freedom, stop oppressing Yemen’s Jewish population, and immediately release Levi Salem Musa Marhabi.”

From its earliest recorded conflicts to the present day, Yemen’s relationship with its Jewish population has followed a single consistent arc: eventual expulsion or flight. The Houthis’ current actions are merely the latest expression of that ancient proclivity.

James Edwards Interviews Uwe Boll, Writer/Director of Citizen Vigilante

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The following is an exclusive interview conducted by talk radio host James Edwards with veteran filmmaker Uwe Boll. His movies have featured many prominent actors, including Academy Award winners Ben Kingsley and J.K. Simmons, as well as nominees such as Burt Reynolds and Eric Roberts. Other notable performers, such as Golden Globe winner Elisabeth Moss and legendary character actors Ray Liotta, John Rhys-Davies, and Michael Madsen, among many others, have also starred in Boll’s films. In this interview, he discusses his newest film, Citizen Vigilante, which he both wrote and directed.

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James Edwards: Citizen Vigilante has become a cultural phenomenon and a big hit this summer. Following its release in June, your film skyrocketed to the number one spot for movie purchases and rentals on both Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, while concurrently showing in select theaters. In this film, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, a wealthy American businessman in Europe who starts hunting down violent criminals and rapists that the legal system has refused to punish. Walk our listeners through what turns him into a one-man vigilante force.

Uwe Boll: I think he’s observing the unfolding events in Europe. Living there, he feels that people are not reacting logically to the crimes that are occurring, such as random stabbings and gang rapes. Since 2016, with the first wave of Syrian refugees, and continuing with arrivals from various places, citizens in Germany feel increasingly unsafe. For instance, we conduct extensive security checks during events such as fairs and Christmas markets. He questions why we must do this to ourselves.

I was very upset about everything that’s happening in Europe and how we seem to let it slide and I would say he is watching this kind of suicidal empathy, where perpetrators receive leniency, and excuses are made to avoid prosecuting violent crimes. But what about the victims? This situation inspired my film. I wrote it because I am furious about the political situation, but I am also furious about how the media responds to reality. There’s a tendency to sugarcoat the issues, claiming that migrants will contribute to pensions later, despite evidence to the contrary.

My character, Sanders, indirectly expresses my feelings. However, I am not advocating for violence. I view the movie as a warning about these discussions. Recently, I attended a ratings meeting in Germany where they screened the film. They still imposed a ban on streaming and home video releases, allowing them only in theaters for those aged 18 and over. I find this completely ridiculous. There seems to be a form of political censorship from the left. Historically, when I grew up, the left championed free expression and open discourse. Now, they are rigidly restricting speech.

In England, people can be imprisoned for simply saying something deemed inappropriate. In Germany, for instance, they sue people for their internet posts and have proposed a digital act within the EU that would allow surveillance of our conversations. They even want to limit the use of VPNs. It’s just unbelievable.

Edwards: In the opening scene, a mother and her young son are buying groceries. As they leave the store, a migrant approaches them with what appears to be a six- to eight-inch blade concealed behind his back. Given the recent murder of Henry Nowak in the UK, viewers can easily imagine how this scene might unfold. This moment serves as a powerful and gripping introduction. Why did you think it was important to immediately shake the viewers with such a striking scenario?

Boll: It’s a wake-up call. This will not be a comfortable movie to watch, and it’s also not fictional. I’m a fan of Jason Statham action movies, but I want to make it clear that this is different. This movie reflects reality and depicts what is a reaction to reality.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I remember films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now. They were blunt and concrete about the issues happening in society. Movies were influential during that time. However, gripping movies that provoke thought and discussion seem to be missing today.

For me, creating this movie—something concrete, blunt, and violent—was really for everyone who doesn’t feel represented today. It feels like, whenever a TV show starts, you’re just waiting for the moment when the diversity elements come in. Where is the transgender character now playing a cop? You can time it; every show makes sure to include all skin colors, religions, and genders. Otherwise, you won’t get funding from networks like Netflix.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Millions of people share this sentiment, and many also feel helpless about the current political situation.

Edwards: Citizen Vigilante does not shy away from showcasing migrant gangs, many of whom come from Muslim backgrounds, committing serious crimes. But you don’t stop there. Remarkably, the villains in this movie also include judges and even law enforcement agencies. Why did you feel compelled to dial it all the way up to that level?

Boll: Because we had judgments like this in Germany, right? In Hamburg alone, there were two judgments regarding gang rapes, and nobody went to jail. The rapists lived something like two blocks away from the victims. I find it cynical how judges tend not to be pro-victim. They often look for excuses to justify the perpetrator’s actions, such as blaming a bad childhood and emphasizing the need to protect them.

I believe in giving people a chance to reform, even if they have served time in jail. However, violent offenders are different. Shoplifting or breaking into a car to steal something is nowhere near as severe as rape or acts of violence. We frequently see people in cities running around with weapons like axes or knives. Sometimes they are subdued with tasers; other times, they just give up. But in some cases, they stab innocent people, as I illustrate at the beginning of the movie.

Imagine if you or a family member were randomly stabbed and died. What would you do then? I think we need to confront these uncomfortable questions. How much empathy should we extend?

I believe a lot of people are more empathetic with gangs, syndicates, rapists, and knife stabbers than with the victims, or, in general, the white people of a country who are more conservative and I feel that’s not acceptable.

I had a conversation with someone who hated the film and said that it was racist. I asked him about people demanding to pray in public spaces, particularly in German universities, where cafeterias are sometimes closed for prayer.

When I asked him about this issue, he insisted that he was the one conducting the interview, but I pointed out that I was just trying to ask a simple question. For me, it’s clear that we should not permit this practice. You can be a Muslim in America or Europe, but pray in a mosque or at home, because you’re not blocking the traffic. You can’t put up with this kind of threat because they will dominate the space. They’re saying, “We will have the power. We will grow. We are having more kids than you and they will have the majority in 30 years in England.”

How can someone who grew up in Germany or England and so on, think it’s a great idea that we all turn into Islamic countries where they have the majority and they will be the government? How could even one normal human being think this is a good idea? It’s insane to even consider and it makes me feel very uncomfortable about the future of our countries.

Edwards: To see someone popularize a movie with such a message seemed unimaginable before now. Elon Musk is promoting your film, and it has generated massive global news coverage. It’s a hit and one of the most talked-about movies of the summer. Have you considered what its legacy might be as a vehicle for positive change?

Boll: Yeah, that’s the thing. I want change. I think we are on the wrong track, and if we continue this way, it could lead to the downfall of Europe. It might take 30 years, but then everything will be completely different. I have children, so that’s unacceptable. That’s why I speak my mind, regardless of the consequences or whether people like me anymore.

I come from a place of deeply understanding the subject matter, having examined criminal statistics and seeing what is actually happening. I believe that the movie reflects this awareness. As the writer of Death Wish intended, it wasn’t just a revenge story; it was also a response to the dangerous situation in New York at the time when people felt unsafe to ride the subway. The film served as a reaction to that reality and ultimately contributed to increased security and police presence in the subways.

I feel that I am putting out an important film that aims to spark conversation and political change because the current approach won’t lead to a good outcome. Political parties often try to cover everything up and avoid discussing these issues, but the population is talking about them.

In Germany’s golden times, immigrants came in because they had jobs; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been allowed entry. Italians and Greeks integrated well while keeping their traditions, and they don’t exhibit crazy, radical, or traumatized behavior.

I grew up with a free-thinking mindset, reading extensively in philosophy, and I learned to doubt everything. I believe the most important lesson from studying literature is to question everything, including yourself. You need to let the facts speak for themselves and then make decisions based on those hard facts, not wishful thinking. A lot of politicians don’t do this. They prioritize getting elected over their beliefs and take actions that contradict their values just to gain support. That’s a big mistake.

Edwards: After your movie was banned in Germany, Elon Musk streamed it for free on X for 48 hours, sparking a surge in news coverage. Was that coordinated by your team, or was it essentially manna from heaven? How did Musk’s promotion of Citizen Vigilante come to be? Citizen Vigilante come to be?

Boll: No, I think that he noticed the traffic on X. I think he caught wind of the trailer or something like that. I’m not entirely sure how he first heard about the movie. My podcast partner, Gary Otto, with whom I’ve been working for about 15 years on the “Uwe Boll Raw” podcast, mentioned that Elon Musk sent him a direct message. At first, I thought it was a parody account or something—like, “You’re not serious. It can’t actually be Elon Musk reaching out to you.” But then it turned out to be the real Elon Musk. He liked the content and the film, and then he had the idea that the whole world should see it, especially given the ban that kept most people outside of the United States and Canada from seeing the movie.

There was a big explosion of discussion about the movie, and we felt the need to evaluate what it would mean in terms of paid content. We wondered whether everyone watching it for free would hurt our sales and be a disaster. However, we decided it was worth it and went for it. We embraced the opportunity.

Edwards: You can’t argue with the results. As I mentioned, Citizen Vigilante is at the top of Amazon’s rental charts and Apple TV’s Top Movies list. At the time of this writing, it is outperforming mega-budget films like the Michael Jackson biopic and Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary. I saw an online rumor that a sequel could be in the works, reportedly titled Citizen Vigilante 2: The End of Somali Scams.

Boll: I might like to do one set in North America. There are a lot of problems there, too. Of course, the Somali scam thing was kind of a funny thing. I was watching the Matt Walsh show and heard about the Somali scammers. It’s really sad, basically. It’s almost a satire. You see how all this money gets thrown out the window and people are getting away with it, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And it’s also another sign that this kind of migration doesn’t work. These people just take advantage of the system and are laughing all the way to the bank.

Edwards: Speaking of banks, you have another enjoyable movie called Assault on Wall Street. It came out in 2013 and follows a working-class guy whose life falls apart after the financial crash. His savings and investments get wiped out, his wife gets sick, and the insurance company denies coverage; the banks refuse to help. I think these circumstances of crushing economic hardship are very real today. If you’re a young person fresh out of college right now, you have very dim prospects of affording a home and raising a family. Assault on Wall Street and Citizen Vigilante both address vitally important issues. Nobody else in film is doing that right now.

Boll: Exactly. I remember watching Oliver Stone’s first Wall Street movie and absolutely loving it. However, when Wall Street 2 came out, it felt completely pointless. People didn’t hate it, but it had nothing to say.

I was particularly struck by the events surrounding the financial crisis when I saw Richard Fuld walking away after he had helped tank the entire economy. The statistics were staggering with over 100,000 Americans losing their homes, and something like 5,000 people committing suicide because of the fallout. That’s an unbelievable number of lives affected. It makes you think of the 1929 crash when people were jumping from the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.

Many individuals were completely devastated by this banking crisis, which stemmed from greed, yet the perpetrators walked away free. This injustice is what motivated me to create this film. I really sympathize with Dominic Purcell’s character in Assault on Wall Street.

If I were in his position and my wife committed suicide because we couldn’t afford her medical bills and she didn’t want to be a burden to me, I would not survive.

Edwards: Refocusing on Citizen Vigilante, during the closing credits, a message appears on the screen stating, “This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.” If someone like Michael Sanders existed in real life, this Batman archetype, do you think he would be embraced by the public as a hero, as this character is in the movie?

Boll: I cannot say I hope so. I think what Sanders is doing is really a last resort, and it shouldn’t have to come to that.

Situations like this have occurred various times, but never at this scale. For example, there have been attacks on migrant homes. However, I think it’s somewhat positive that we see citizen groups acting as “sheriffs.” They patrol neighborhoods because law enforcement is often absent, helping people avoid muggings and bullying, especially in places like the subway and railway stations. These organized security groups work to prevent robberies, which isn’t necessarily a bad situation. It’s similar to a neighborhood watch in public spaces.

Take the Frankfurt railway station, for instance; it feels like Germany has changed significantly there. You barely see any Caucasian people, and it’s very unsafe there, but people arriving in Frankfurt through the railway station are getting mugged or assaulted. If the police don’t show up, and people step in to protect one another, why not? However, I am strongly against any form of violent escalation.

I’ve dealt with similar subjects in my films, like Heart of America, starring Elisabeth Moss, which addressed school violence. Many people think that movies influence violent behavior, but studies have shown that this is not true. Individuals typically act out for personal reasons, such as drug addiction or past trauma—not because they saw something in a film or played a violent video game. Many kids today are prescribed antidepressants at an early age instead of being encouraged to participate in sports or spend time outdoors getting some fresh air.

We cannot lose the battle for our survival, and I remain hopeful that we will win. Many voters only start to react when their financial situations worsen, often realizing too late that they’ve voted for the wrong party. This is the current situation in Germany, and we have similar issues in England, where people are running out of money and struggling to get by. For instance, many must continue working until around age 65, as retirement isn’t an option for them. The population is growing tired of the politicians who have led them to this point.

I think this is the call of the movie. Not that you  want people to take these actions, as Sanders does, but that things like this could happen if we don’t have common-sense policies put forth by the government that should be there to protect the historic nations and the historic makeup of these nations.

Note: Citizen Vigilante is available on Apple, Amazon, Fandango, Google Play, and in select theaters worldwide.

This article was originally published by American Free Press – America’s last real newspaper! Click here to subscribe today or call 1-888-699-NEWS.

When not interviewing newsmakers, James Edwards has often found himself in the spotlight as a commentator, including many national television appearances. For more than 20 years, his radio work has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Media Matters has listed Edwards as a “right-wing media fixture” and Hillary Clinton personally named him as an “extremist” who would shape our country.