Latest Analysis and Commentary
by Guy Millière • October 4, 2026 at 5:00 am
"The French Left has waged war on schools while building an alliance with Islamist leaders who hope to radically transform them. For both, the fight starts with the schools. 'Clearly, religious and politico-religious organizations "work on" these pupils, sometimes from primary school, as well as their family, their social milieu and their neighborhood, and some try to set them against the school,' the Education Ministry inspectorate's June 2004 report on religion in schools said." — Michael Shellenberger, October 2, 2026. "What brings Islamists and the revolutionary left together is their intention to tear down Western civilization. The French Interior Ministry's May 2025 report on the Muslim Brotherhood described the movement's project in France as 'a long process of political conquest' with 'systematically priority investment at the local level.'" — Michael Shellenberger, October 2, 2026. [W]hen thousands of French citizens said they could no longer afford both the fuel to travel to work and the food to feed their families, [French President Emmanuel] Macron replied that while some people might struggle with money, he must take care of something more important: "the risk of facing the end of the world". Deindustrialization continues full-on. Punitive regulations have caused factories to close. They are replaced not by other businesses but by an increasingly costly welfare system, which now accounts for more than 40% of total public spending. [S]uccessive French governments have pumped up spending without restraint.... This enormous difference means that the French government continues to spend far more than it raises in revenue.... Interest payments on the debt have been devouring an increasingly large share of the country's annual budget and, as in the United States, now exceed the national defense budget. The difference is that the US may still be able to grow its way out of such a hole -- $40 trillion, with interest at $7.1 billion a day -- whereas France, crushed by overregulation, cannot. On another front, while Macron, in 2020, denounced "Islamist separatism," he has done nothing to prevent, or even slow down, the Islamist conquest of France. For a decade, the full-powered Islamization of the country has stormed on. Millions of people from the Muslim world have settled in France, both legally and illegally. Most Muslims in France do not assimilate, and a growing proportion -- roughly 38% -- place Islamic sharia law above the laws of the Republic.... No-go zones, where radical imams and Muslim gangs hold sway, have grown since 2016. They now featured in the suburbs of the major cities of France. Muslim gang members raid and go looting several times a year, In recent years, Macron has also been increasingly targeting freedom of expression, making use of Arcom — an institution he created in 2022 to regulate and control French audiovisual media — to do so.... CNews was fined twice in 2026: once because a guest stated that anthropogenic global warming does not exist; another time because a guest stated that "history shows that Islam is still a religion of conquest." Macron might want a successor who would continue his programs, such as they are, but that does not seem about to happen. Marine Le Pen, for the first time in her political career, leads in polls, which indicate that in 2027 she could win.... All of her legal troubles, however, appear to have had no effect on her voters, who appear to understand that justice in France has now been politicized. If Le Pen is elected president in the spring, the shockwaves will be heard across Europe. A Le Pen presidency would mean a victory for a political party that champions Western civilizational values — a party that every incumbent leader in Western Europe -- except Italy's Giorgia Meloni — seeks to keep out of power by any means necessary. The situation in France differs little from the general situation in Western Europe. Many other Europeans are just as dissatisfied with their leaders as are the French. They all see the economic destruction, the ongoing Islamization of their countries, the threat from China to undercut their automobile industries, and the growing impossibility of discussing certain subjects without being demonized or put on trial. Many Europeans see Islamization gaining ground in their countries and enjoying support from Marxists: each thinks the other will bring it to power. They see their leaders doing nothing to remedy a situation that has become increasingly alarming. They appear to prefer having their Western civilization protected and saved.
The French government was reportedly "taken by surprise" when students began rioting roughly two weeks ago. Many Europeans see Islamization gaining ground in their countries and enjoying support from Marxists: each thinks the other will bring it to power. They see their leaders doing nothing to remedy a situation that has become increasingly alarming. Pictured: Municipal workers clean up around Marcel Sembat Secondary School in Rouen, France on October 1, 2026, after it was torched by rioters. (Photo by Guillaume Saligot/AFP via Getty Images)
"Who didn't see that coming? Oh yeah ....the politicians," noted "The Great Gats" on X. The French government was reportedly "taken by surprise" when students began rioting roughly two weeks ago to protest conditions — overcrowded classes, dilapidated buildings, vermin and rats, lack of heating and air-conditioning, shortage of teachers — in their schools. "But," American journalist Michael Shellenberger writes, " French schools have more money per pupil today than at any earlier time.... The French government spends 4.5% of gross domestic product on educational institutions, and Germany spends 3.7%.
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by Amir Taheri • October 4, 2026 at 4:30 am
The Iranian economy isn't going to collapse as Bessent hopes, for several reasons. First, we don't have an economy in the normal sense of the term in any of its versions. An ersatz diplomatic accord of the kind successive US administrations have craved will only prolong the regime's shaky tenure.
Pictured: A currency exchange booth in Tehran, Iran on February 22, 2026. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
By the time you read this column, the Iranian economy will have just one week before it collapses, thus bringing down the regime established by Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. That is, if you believe US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who last week predicted the collapse in two weeks' time. Don't tell anyone, but I don't believe that is going to happen. At the same time, I am glad that Bessent has replaced War Secretary Pete Hegseth as the talking head on the stalled war with Iran. Why am I glad? Because it halts wanton but far from adequate military action that has turned this war into a series of tragicomic gesticulations while inflicting untold hardship on Iranian people and doing serious damage to the world economy. At the same time, the halt in bombing deprives the leftover Khomeinist regime of a chance to wrap itself in the patriotic tricolor masquerading as defender of the nation rather than the faith.
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by Ahmed Charai • October 4, 2026 at 4:00 am
On October 2, the U.S. Treasury announced action against what it described as a sophisticated, multi-year Hamas financing network that used purported humanitarian charities and cryptocurrency to transfer more than $2 million to Hamas. ... It demonstrates how infrastructure supporting terrorism can operate across borders and inside structures that outwardly appear legitimate. The terrorist organization itself is therefore only one part of the security problem. Governments must understand the broader enabling ecosystem: financiers, facilitators, recruiters, institutional networks and ideological movements that can sustain, excuse or legitimize violent extremism. The next phase of counterterrorism must be international. The United States, Europe and America's Arab partners should build a permanent architecture integrating financial intelligence, law enforcement, aviation security, intelligence cooperation and prevention of radicalization to violence. That means following money across borders, including through charities, intermediaries and digital assets. It means following networks rather than merely organizational labels. And it means confronting the insider dimension of security—not by treating employees as suspects because of religion, nationality or political belief, but by ensuring that institutions can identify credible indicators of radicalization toward violence while respecting law, due process and individual rights. It requires confronting those who finance violence, those who facilitate it and the ideological environments that allow violent extremism to reproduce itself. The United States has begun moving upstream — from terrorists to the financial and institutional networks surrounding them. Arab governments should do the same. Europe should do the same. These efforts should become part of a common security architecture.
What happened aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 should concern every government, intelligence service and airline in the world. Pictured: The rescue flight carrying passengers from flydubai flight FZ1073 arrives at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport on September 30, 2026. (Photo by Erik Marmor/Getty Images)
What happened aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 should concern every government, intelligence service and airline in the world. The official investigation is continuing, and we should not prejudge its findings. United Arab Emirates authorities are examining the circumstances and motives, including whether the incident involved terrorism, prior planning or direction. But one strategic conclusion does not require waiting for the investigation: what happened aboard that aircraft could have happened on another airline, under another flag, on another route. That should change the conversation.
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by Majid Rafizadeh • October 3, 2026 at 5:00 am
Coming from a Muslim family and being raised in Syria and Iran, I am all too aware of politicians and influencers such as Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani and others who carry that same formative identity. Americans should be clear-eyed: Islamist politicians and influencers in the United States will never place their first loyalty with America. It will not happen. Do not even think about it. The first reality is that when you grow up under Islamist religion, teachings and doctrine, as I did, your identity is not your nationality. It is not "American" or "German" or any other geographic label. It is entirely the particular version of Sharia and Islamic doctrine you were taught. That is where all allegiance is rooted. Everything else — citizenship papers, the Constitution, the flag — is secondary, to be used to protect and expand this primary identity. The second reality is the doctrine of exclusive truth we were taught. We were raised to believe our path is the only correct one and that everyone else is on the wrong path, destined for hell because they are not favored by Allah. Shia Islam was presented as the final, perfect religion; all others as incomplete or corrupted. This premise produces a sharp view of the world as "us versus them." We were taught that a person who does not affirm the shahada... before the end of his days, or who never believed it in the first place, does not enter heaven. This teaching instills in one a sense of moral superiority: we are the good; everyone else, unless he converts, is deficient. From this vantage point, America, which predominantly does not adhere to these beliefs, is the realm of the wrong path, the infidel way. To look at such suffering [on 9/11] and declare it "deserved" requires a depth of inhumanity, a contempt for the victims as human beings with feelings, passions and wishes, just as they have. Such a statement is possible only when these victims are first reclassified as people on the wrong path, people who do not merit ordinary human sympathy, or even as less than people at all: merely objects. Historically, the pattern begins with promises of a better life: socialism, free necessities such as water and electricity, benefits such as housing for the poor, women's rights, full religious and ethnic rights, and so on, just as the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, promised the people of Iran. When power is secured, the actual program is revealed. The loyalty of these individuals remains solely to Islamist rule and their version of Sharia. It will never transfer to America.... America, by embodying the opposite [values], becomes an existential affront to the identity itself. Hatred follows automatically. These individuals also show little gratitude or appreciation. The same voices that say America deserved 9/11 or that gain influence and prosper in America rarely acknowledge that America gave their family a home, the freedom to criticize anything without going to prison, and the generous chance to move up.... Instead of being grateful to America and Americans, the host society is owed no gratitude: nothing. Everything is filtered through the same Islamist identity: this life and the next depend on fidelity to it. America is never a priority. It is an opulence to speak freely — to have the complete liberty to write these words or to remain silent — that only America affords.
Americans should be clear-eyed: Islamist politicians and influencers in the United States will never place their first loyalty with America. Their worldview is what underlies statements such as the claim that America "deserved" 9/11. Hasan Piker, the influential streamer who has campaigned alongside candidates including Abdul El-Sayed, said "America deserved 9/11." Pictured: Poster boards of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and online influencer Hasan Piker on easels before a press conference with New York mayoral candidate and former Governor Andrew Cuomo on September 9, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Coming from a Muslim family and being raised in Syria and Iran, I am all too aware of politicians and influencers such as Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani and others who carry that same formative identity. Americans should be clear-eyed: Islamist politicians and influencers in the United States will never place their first loyalty with America. It will not happen. Do not even think about it. For some, the feeling goes further into genuine hatred of America, Western civilization and the freedom individuals have to choose how they live. The pursuit of office and influence is driven by the aim of advancing their core identity, not of strengthening the nation that granted them the opportunity.
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by Lawrence Kadish • October 2, 2026 at 5:00 am
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have achieved fusion ignition, producing more energy from a reaction than the lasers delivered to it. The question is no longer whether fusion can work, but who will turn it into a working power plant first. Pictured: The National Ignition Facility, in northern California. (Photo by Lawrence Livermore National Security/Wikimedia Commons)
For decades, fusion energy has been dismissed by cynics as always being 30 years away. Those cynics have become irrelevant to our national pursuit of energy independence. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have achieved fusion ignition, producing more energy from a reaction than the lasers delivered to it. Private fusion companies have attracted billions of dollars from investors who have no patience for "thirty years." National laboratories and universities are steadily solving the engineering problems that once seemed insurmountable. The question is no longer whether fusion can work, but who will turn it into a working power plant first. The recently introduced "American Leadership in Fusion Act" is how the United States makes sure that the answer is us.
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • October 1, 2026 at 5:00 am
The chants matter because they reveal what speeches about peace and reconstruction conceal. These slogans raise a fundamental question for anyone discussing the future of the Gaza Strip: What exactly has changed? The answer is particularly important because the international framework for the Gaza Strip explicitly calls for something very different. US President Donald J. Trump's 20-point peace plan states that Gaza is to become a "deradicalized terror-free zone" that poses no threat to its neighbors. The plan calls for the decommissioning of weapons, demilitarization and the establishment of an International Stabilization Force. It also envisages a process intended to change Gazan mindsets and narratives by emphasizing tolerance and peaceful coexistence. On paper, the objective is peaceful coexistence. Public gatherings are proclaiming that Gaza belongs to Hamas and rejecting international forces. This is the main problem facing any attempt to transform the Gaza Strip. Reconstruction can rebuild buildings. It cannot dismantle an ideology. The answer will determine whether Gaza's reconstruction becomes part of a genuine transition toward stability, or whether reconstruction takes place alongside the reorganization of the same forces that brought the Hamas terrorists to power in the Gaza Strip and the region into war. Has the ideological and military foundation for another October 7 massacre actually been removed? On the eve of the October 7 anniversary, the world should pay close attention when people in the Gaza Strip say they want the October 7 massacre to happen again. It is crucial to remember what senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said shortly after the October 7 massacre: "The Al-Aqsa Flood [what Hamas calls the October 7 massacre] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."
Chants can be heard in the streets of the Gaza Strip during funeral processions for Hamas commanders and members killed by Israel: "October 7 will return! It is coming back!" Pictured: The funeral procession for Hamas commanders Izz al-Din al-Beik and Mohannad Abu al-Foul in Gaza City on September 29, 2026. (Photo by Faiz Qreqa/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Nearly three years after Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdered roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251, some of the voices emerging from the Gaza Strip are sending a disturbing message: October 7 is regarded by Hamas and its supporters as an operation they plan to repeat. Chants can be heard in the streets of the Gaza Strip during funeral processions for Hamas commanders and members killed by Israel: "October 7 will return! It is coming back!" Others include: "Eid [holiday] for you, Eid; October 7 is the day of the Eid," and "Gaza is all Hamas... Gaza is all Hamas." At one recent funeral, Hamas supporters chanted: "Listen, listen, all the people, all of Gaza is for Hamas, no international forces, only eternal Hamas." At another funeral they chanted: "Put sword against sword... we are the men of Mohammad Deif!" (Referring to the slain commander-in-chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades).
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by Pierre Rehov • September 30, 2026 at 5:00 am
The word was "subservient." It was chosen.... Vice President JD Vance said that the United States "cannot let our Middle Eastern foreign policy be subservient to the State of Israel." Vance argued that America's most -- perhaps only -- reliable ally, Israel, and every American relationship, must be rooted in American interests, adding: "Donald Trump is the one president of the last 40 years who's been willing to say 'You know what, yeah Bibi's a good partner, but also Bibi and I have a different opinion on this,' or 'Bibi's wrong about this...'" Incredibly, Vance actually said that after the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Estonia and Spain had all refused to help America even minimally in its effort to constrain Iran. Within a day, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee replied: "America has never defended Israel. Not one time... has America ever put boots on the ground for Israel.... When we are partnering against Iran... we're defending the United States.... Israel is maybe the appetizer, but we're the entrée." America, successfully using "shock and awe" once again, had been winning. Trump was at last ending a war that Iran's regime had been waging on America, Israel and Western civilization since the Islamic Republic was established in 1979. They have been chanting "Death to America" for 47 years -- and they mean it. "Death to America is not just a slogan," the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, "It is a policy." Trump warned in June: "You give them a nuclear weapon, they'll use it within the first hour – and we're not going to let that happen." "If they had a nuclear weapon," Trump said this month, "I'd be calling the Supreme Leader, and I'd be saying, 'Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?' as opposed to bombing the crap out of him." Trump is the first president, out of seven, who actually decided to end the threat from Iran. There was only one hitch: Trump, Washington Post columnist Thiessen stated, had run the ball "to the 20-yard line" – and then stopped! What Israel brings to America's side in this fight is something Washington has rarely found in the region: an ally that defends not only itself, but is also sacrificing its youth to defend western civilization – including the countries that are now denigrating and undermining it. "Historically, approximately 74 percent of U.S. military assistance to Israel was required to be spent on American-made defense goods and services. Under a special arrangement known as Offshore Procurement, Israel was permitted to spend up to 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing allocation within its own defense industry. That exception is being phased out." — Colonel John Spencer (ret.), chair of urban warfare studies at West Point's Modern War Institute, June 11, 2026. "By 2028, 100 percent of FMF assistance must be spent in the United States on American-made defense goods and services. No other major recipient of American military assistance operates under a similar arrangement. The money does not leave the American economy. It circulates through American factories, American supply chains, and American workers. In practice, much of what critics describe as foreign aid flows directly to American defense companies, American workers, and the industrial base that also equips the U.S. military." — John Spencer, June 11, 2026. The $38 billion the Congressional Budget Office counts as the cost of the current war against the Islamic Republic of Iran is being spent against a regime that has been murdering Americans since 1983 and uses "Death to America" as both an official slogan and an official policy. Vance may have chosen his recent words as part of a fantasy that if the US just closes its eyes to foreign threats and concentrates on building up America domestically, the rest of the world, for good or ill, will somehow take care of itself. The vice president seems unaware of what Europe, and later America, found out the hard way -- that what happens in Sudetenland does not stay in Sudetenland. The thinking in 1938 was that if Europe just forced Czechoslovakia to give Germany's Adolf Hitler the territory he was demanding from them, he would be happy and go away. Only Britain's Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt accurately foresaw at the time that giving the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany would be just the "appetizer," and the rest of Europe would be the "entrée."
Vance may have chosen his recent words as part of a fantasy that if the US just closes its eyes to foreign threats and concentrates on building up America domestically, the rest of the world, for good or ill, will somehow take care of itself. The vice president seems unaware of what Europe, and later America, found out the hard way -- that what happens in Sudetenland does not stay in Sudetenland. Pictured: Vance speaks during at a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on September 18, 2026. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The word was "subservient." It was chosen. Addressing the All-In Summit month in mid-September, US Vice President JD Vance said that the United States "cannot let our Middle Eastern foreign policy be subservient to the State of Israel." Within a day, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee replied: "America has never defended Israel. Not one time since [Israel gained independence in] 1948 has America ever put boots on the ground for Israel.... When we are partnering against Iran, we're not defending Israel, we're defending the United States.... Israel is maybe the appetizer, but we're the entrée."
Huckabee insisted that no one had nudged or deceived the president into confronting Iran, and that Israel "never begged anything":
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by Con Coughlin • September 29, 2026 at 5:00 am
The deal [to sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia] has already generated a great deal of controversy, not least because of warnings from American intelligence that it could result in Beijing using its ties with Riyadh to acquire the F-35's top-secret stealth technology. [T]he deal "could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party." — US Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), member of the House Intelligence Committee. A recent warning issued by US intelligence and cybersecurity agencies highlighted an aggressive campaign by Chinese AI developers to extract "proprietary functionalities and capabilities" from American frontier AI models to advance the development of their own models. "China-based AI companies are engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale," the report stated. While China is indulging in these practices to win the AI race with the US, there is no doubt that it will attempt to obtain F-35 technology. The Trump administration therefore needs to proceed with the utmost caution before signing off on any deal that could enable highly sensitive technology, whether it relates to AI or stealth fighter jets, to fall into Chinese hands.
US President Donald Trump's decision to sell state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia seriously risks undermining his efforts to secure America's technological advantage over China, both in national security and the battle for global AI supremacy. Pictured: The Chinese and the Saudi flags fly in Riyadh, on December 7, 2022, ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the Saudi capital. (Photo by Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)
US President Donald Trump's decision to sell state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia seriously risks undermining his efforts to secure America's technological advantage over China, both in national security and the battle for global AI supremacy. Trump initially agreed to sell the Saudis 48 F-35s in a deal worth an estimated $24.3 billion when he hosted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House in November 2025. The administration has now approved the sale, giving the go-ahead for a deal that will provide Riyadh, which enjoys close diplomatic and trade ties with China, access to some of the American military's most advanced technology. The deal has already generated a great deal of controversy, not least because of warnings from American intelligence that it could result in Beijing using its ties with Riyadh to acquire the F-35's top-secret stealth technology.
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • September 28, 2026 at 5:00 am
In a pre-recorded speech played at the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas presented an extraordinarily positive picture of the reforms he claims his government has carried out. According to Abbas, the PA has fulfilled the commitments it made to the international community. Last year alone, the United States determined that these payments ["Pay-for-Slay" rewards to the families of terrorists and "martyrs"] had amounted to $156 million — including to 5,000 families in Lebanon — much of which was enabled, fungibly, from the European Union. The US State Department, however, had reached a very different conclusion from that of Abbas. In a September 16, 2026 statement, the State Department said that the Palestinian Authority was "continuing to pay stipends to terrorists and to glorify acts of terrorism and terrorists in public pronouncements and school textbooks." The Palestinian Authority, the State Department added, had once again failed to live up to its commitments to the US, including its commitment concerning terrorism and reform. Last April, the State Department had already been even more explicit in a report to Congress. The report noted that despite changing the mechanism and ostensibly replacing the old system of paying prisoners with a new system supposedly based on welfare needs, "the Palestinian Authority continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through new mechanisms and under a different name." The report concluded that changing the mechanism did not amount to ending the payments. In November 2025, the European Commission also acknowledged its assessment that payments and benefits to terrorists and their families were continuing. If accountability and rule of law have been strengthened to the degree Abbas claims, why are Palestinian human rights organizations still documenting such cases? The contradiction becomes even more disturbing when it comes to education. Abbas told the UN that the Palestinian Authority has continued reforming its education system in accordance with international standards and in cooperation with UNESCO. The findings of IMPACT-se's report on the PA curriculum tell a very different story: "Our comprehensive review of the Palestinian Authority's 2025–26 national school curriculum, analyzes 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides used in West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem schools (including UNRWA). The study finds the materials substantively unchanged from prior editions and documented recurring patterns across subjects: promotion of jihad and martyrdom, glorification of terrorism, incitement of antisemitism, rejection of peacemaking and the two-state solution, and erasure of Israel from maps." IMPACT-se also found textbooks and teacher guides that continue to present armed struggle and violent figures in a positive light. If the international community is serious about bringing democracy and accountability to the Palestinians, it should demand verifiable reforms rather than accept declarations of success.
Pictured: A pre-recorded speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is played at the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, on September 24, 2026. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)
In a pre-recorded speech played at the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas presented an extraordinarily positive picture of the reforms he claims his government has carried out. According to Abbas, the PA has fulfilled the commitments it made to the international community. "We have completed the national reform program to which we committed ourselves before our people and the international community," Abbas announced. He went on to say that the Palestinian leadership had "strengthened institutional governance, public financial management, transparency, accountability, the fight against corruption, and the rule of law."
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by Pierre Rehov • September 27, 2026 at 5:00 am
For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions. The Muslim Brotherhood grasped the possibilities long before Washington did. Millions of Muslims have no interest in seeing political Islam govern anyone, and many may have even crossed an ocean to escape it. The organizations that claim to speak in their name are another matter, and their central achievement has been to make the two indistinguishable, so that a political network registers as a whole population. The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power. While countries in the West are always nonchalantly accused of imperialism and colonization, how come no one ever mentions the Islamic imperialism and colonization of Christian Byzantium – now Turkey – let alone the entire Ottoman Empire? How come no one ever mentions the Islamic colonization of the Coptic Christian country of Egypt, or of northern Cyprus in 1974? Or the formerly Buddhist countries of southeast Asia, such as the Maldives, Malaysia or Indonesia? The Islamic colonization now underway in Europe and the United States carries no racial or demographic content.... The territory being taken is ideological: it changes hands whenever a political movement discovers that open institutions can be used more profitably than if they were attacked, or whenever foreign money purchases standing inside institutions that form the next generation of American elites, or whenever two movements with incompatible values find they can trade access for votes. Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule. The process is arithmetic: small concessions, each too minor to be worth a fight, accumulating across institutions, phrases and political territory until reversing the situation would demand a confrontation no one wishes to have. Europe crossed this threshold without even noticing it. America has not. The interval, however, in which recognizing the problem still costs less than reversing it is not indefinite.
A 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum, later entered into evidence by federal prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, described the movement's work in North America as a "civilization-jihadist process" aimed at "destroying Western civilization from within." Nihad Awad, co-founder and national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), previously worked with the Islamic Association for Palestine, one of the groups named in the memorandum. Federal prosecutors listed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case. Pictured: Awad speaks at a press conference to support US Representative Ilhan Omar, on March 6, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions.
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by Amir Taheri • September 27, 2026 at 4:00 am
In 2009, the October surprise worked in the opposite direction. A coalition of pro-American Islamic politicians and clerics fomented a popular uprising in Tehran in the hope that incoming Democrat President Barack Obama would offer a helping hand, as Carter had done in February 1979 against the Shah. To their disappointment, Obama expressed no sympathy for the protesters, who were savagely crushed by the regime. In fact, with a nod and a wink, he indicated sympathy with the mullahs... The mullahs continued to seize American hostages across the region and organized the Hezbollah terrorist attack on a US Marines barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 Marines, the single biggest American military loss since World War II. Would Trump be gullible enough to trust a turbaned Pinocchio, who sold a bill of goods to seven US presidents over almost half a century? The key reason for US failures in Iran is the assumption that one is dealing with a normal nation-state rather than a vehicle for an ideology. As a result, the US and others dealing with Iran have fallen into the trap of half measures: half-serious diplomacy, half-imposed sanctions and now half-forceful war on a big scale. They threatened "maximum pressure" but stopped before bones started to creak. They boasted about regime change but signed with an unchanged regime.
Pictured: Iranians storm the US embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)
"October surprise" is a shibboleth that denotes a foreign intervention affecting the result of an American election that is always held in November. It was popularized by Gary Sick, a CIA analyst who served as an adviser on Iranian affairs in the Carter administration in the late 1970s, and who penned a 1991 book on his theory that Carter lost the presidential election in November 1980 after the regime in Tehran delayed the release of American diplomats held captive because of a secret deal with the Republican Party, in exchange for promises made by Ronald Reagan's election team. No one has produced evidence that such a secret deal existed. But the fact is that hostages were not released until the day President Reagan started his term of office. The delay was suspicious because President Carter had negotiated the release of hostages with Iranian mullahs by acceding to all their demands, notably a promise never to prosecute hostage-takers or their puppeteers.
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by Majid Rafizadeh • September 26, 2026 at 5:00 am
A dangerous trend is unfolding in America: please do not let what happened in my home country happen here. Many people refuse to see the gradual creep of Islamist ideology into nearly every sector of American society: media, politics, community organizing, education, and public discourse. These are what the stages of an Islamic revolution look like. It advances quietly and methodically -- an ideology that prioritizes its religious doctrine over national identity, Sharia constitutions over non-Islamic ones that are made by made by man, not by Allah. "The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers..." – Mohamed Akram, for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America." Today, some of the most prominent voices rising in American politics and culture are far more open about placing Islamic identity, community priorities, or sharp criticism of the United States above national and American loyalty. Hasan Piker, the influential streamer who has campaigned alongside candidates including Abdul El-Sayed, said on a 2019 livestream, "America deserved 9/11, dude." An Islamist, however, regards religious doctrine as the only high authority. Religious projects take precedence, and the country's broader interests -- freedom, prosperity, women's rights -- are subordinated. Iran is the clearest modern example. Sadly, these promises have often accompanied movements whose real aims were quite different. Look at the former Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela. Once in power, the core ideology does not dissolve. It asserts itself. Every vote for these jihadists sends the country hundreds of years backwards -- just as happened in Iran after 1979, when they seized power in a matter of months and imposed their full Sharia rules. They evidently would like to do the same in the US.
Islamist-leaning influence is growing in America, in media, activism, local projects, and electoral politics. Consider figures such as Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York City; Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan; Imtiaz Mohammad, a Republican candidate for the Florida House; and the influential streamer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned alongside these kinds of candidates. Pictured: El-Sayed speaks at a press conference on September 22, 2026, in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
A dangerous trend is unfolding in America: please do not let what happened in my home country happen here. Many people refuse to see the gradual creep of Islamist ideology into nearly every sector of American society: media, politics, community organizing, education, and public discourse. These are what the stages of an Islamic revolution look like. It advances quietly and methodically -- an ideology that prioritizes its religious doctrine over national identity, Sharia constitutions over non-Islamic ones that are made by made by man, not by Allah.
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by Ahmed Charai • September 25, 2026 at 5:00 am
Behind the familiar Trump theater, however, was a serious demonstration of how this administration understands American power: establish leverage, define the limits, then negotiate. Kushner's presence is significant. From the Abraham Accords to Gaza, Ukraine, and now Iran, he has... concentrat[ed] on ending conflicts and building what comes after them. It is diplomacy conceived less as process than as an attempt to produce an outcome. Iran matters far beyond the nuclear question. The confrontation touches the Strait of Hormuz, global energy markets, Israel, Gulf security, Yemen, and the calculations of China and Russia. The objective is not simply an agreement. It is a regional balance capable of surviving one.
Behind the familiar Trump theater at the United Nations this week was a serious demonstration of how this administration understands American power: establish leverage, define the limits, then negotiate. Pictured: President Donald Trump speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
At the United Nations, President Donald Trump offered a revealing demonstration of American power: pressure, dialogue, and the leverage to know when to use each. For one week every September, New York becomes the capital of the world. Motorcades replace taxis, presidents replace tourists, and behind the speeches at the United Nations, governments search for meetings that may matter more than the speeches themselves. This year, the stakes were particularly high: war with Iran, the continuing war in Ukraine, instability across the Middle East, tensions with China, and growing doubts about whether international institutions can still manage a world increasingly shaped by hard power.
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by Bassam Tawil • September 24, 2026 at 5:00 am
Instead of talking about "reconciliation" with Hamas and other terrorist groups, [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas should be demanding that they surrender their weapons, answer for their actions, and disappear from the Palestinian arena. There are several problems. One is that Hamas and PIJ do not accept Abbas's conditions. Another is that Abbas is not at all interested in requiring accountability. A third problem that should not be overlooked is: Who is requiring accountability from the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself? Abbas cannot present Fatah and the PA as the "responsible" alternative to Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Abbas and the PA, however, have their own deeply troubling record, including authoritarian rule, suppression of dissent, and a longstanding system of payments and benefits for Palestinian terrorists and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis, known as "pay-for-slay." US State Department and Congressional reports have confirmed that the PA continued making millions of dollars in payments to terrorists and their families during 2025 and 2026. In 2025 alone, the PA provided $156 million in payments and benefits to terrorists and their families: $126 million to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and those released from prison, and $30 million to the families of Palestinian terrorists who died while committing their acts of terrorism. According to Palestinian Authority television, the prioritization of "pay-for-slay" above all other PA budget expenses has caused the PA healthcare system to be "on the verge of collapse." Without "pay-for-slay" salaries, one released terrorist declared on PA television, it would be impossible to recruit terrorists. Abbas announced the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council to appease Western aid donors. He just wants more of their money. The elections will not improve the situation for Palestinians: the choice for them remains between two bad parties: Fatah and Hamas. The United States and the Europeans should demand that Abbas stop paying terrorists and their families. That is more important than holding elections. Abbas's proposed "reconciliation" should not be presented as a choice between a supposedly "moderate" Fatah and a supposedly extremist Hamas. That Hamas is simply worse in certain aspects does not make the Palestinian Authority's conduct acceptable. If Abbas's conditions are genuine, all the terrorist groups would first have to undergo a fundamental transformation, including the Palestinian Authority itself. This change would include recognizing Israel's right to exist and dismantling the armed wings of Hamas and all the other Palestinian terrorist groups. Only then could they operate under Abbas's stated principle of "one state with one set of institutions and one weapons and without militias." Meanwhile, Abbas gets to retain his multi-million-dollar "pay-for-slay" program. Bringing a terrorist group such as Hamas into a political arrangement, however, hardly constitutes reform. For years, Fatah and Hamas have competed for power while Palestinians have paid the price of political division, repression, corruption and armed conflict. The political contest in the PA is not about who will bring democracy and a strong economy to the Palestinians. It is still a contest over power, money and control. The Palestinians do not need another photograph of Fatah and Hamas officials shaking hands and hugging each other in Cairo. They need functioning institutions. They need accountability. They need freedom from political repression. They need a political system in which no faction can maintain private armies or militias. A Palestinian political system that incorporates Iran's terror proxies – Hamas and PIJ – means that Palestinian leaders still view these terrorist groups as legitimate actors.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, however, have their own deeply troubling record, including... a longstanding system of payments and benefits for Palestinian terrorists and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis, known as "pay-for-slay." "[I]f we have only a single penny left," he said in February 2025, "it will go to the prisoners and the martyrs. I will not allow a reduction in our commitments to them." (Image source: MEMRI) On the eve of the third anniversary of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is seeking "reconciliation" (musalaha) with Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Instead of talking about "reconciliation" with Hamas and other terrorist groups, Abbas should be demanding that they surrender their weapons, answer for their actions, and disappear from the Palestinian arena. Instead, during a recent visit to Cairo, Abbas said in an interview with Egypt's Akhbar Al-Yom newspaper that he wanted "reconciliation" with all Palestinian factions and that a "reconciliation conference would soon be held in the Egyptian capital under the umbrella of the PLO and with Egyptian sponsorship."
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by Pierre Rehov • September 23, 2026 at 5:00 am
Hamas is being offered political survival in exchange for its guns. There is little reason to believe the movement that built Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, regards this trade as a defeat. Hamas has never disguised its parentage. Its 1988 founding charter describes the group as "one of the wings of [the] Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine." Britain reached the same conclusion after a two-year internal review whose findings Prime Minister David Cameron laid before Parliament in December 2015. The review found that the Brotherhood's foundational texts call for the moral purification of Muslim societies and their eventual unification in a caliphate under Islamic sharia law. The movement itself is "deliberately opaque, and habitually secretive." The Brotherhood's opacity is deliberate.... Every Western government that has since tried to act against the Brotherhood has collided with this ethereal architecture. Israel's Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism published a survey of the Brotherhood's European wing in February, identifying five organizations at the core of its continental structure: an umbrella council of national federations, a body issuing religious rulings for Muslims living in Europe, a youth and student federation that has received more than a million euros from Qatar since 2016, a seminary, and a property trust whose real estate holdings finance the others. American campuses supplied their own measure of how far the movement had already traveled. On the October 7, 2023, as Hamas was still massacring Israelis and before Israel had fired a shot into the Gaza Strip, 34 Harvard student organizations signed a statement holding "the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence...." The speed is the point. A declaration drafted, circulated and signed by three dozen organizations within hours of a massacre draws on arguments assembled long beforehand, in seminars and student unions and advocacy campaigns that no air force can reach. Jordan, which understands the movement better than any European parliament, moved only when weapons could be seen. On April 23, 2025, its interior ministry outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood outright and confiscated its property eight days after security services arrested 16 men trained and financed in Lebanon who had planned rocket and drone attacks inside the kingdom. The Brotherhood had operated openly in Jordan for decades through charities, professional syndicates and the largest party in parliament. None of that produced a ban. Explosives did. Conflating violence and religion has always been the Brotherhood's most dependable shield. The movement's earliest victims were Muslims who opposed it: Egyptian journalists, Syrian professionals, and Jordanian reformers who watched their own unions taken over from the inside. The verification committee established under the Board of Peace's roadmap for Gaza will count what can be counted. Rifles carry serial numbers. Tunnels have entrance shafts. Weapons production lines occupy floor space and can be photographed before and after they are destroyed. Nothing in the framework obliges anyone to inventory a fatwa council, a property portfolio or a student federation in Brussels receiving Qatari subsidies. Hamas will sign for the rifles. The buildings, the trusts and the curricula will appear on no one's list.
Pictured: US President Donald Trump speaks at the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
On July 30, the Board of Peace announced an agreement for the staged decommissioning of Hamas weapons in the Gaza Strip. Heavy arms and tunnel networks are to be surrendered under international verification while Israeli forces are to withdraw in phases. Now, however, Hamas says it will hand over nothing until Israel first pulls back. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu notes that Israel never accepted those terms. The sequencing is unresolved and may remain unresolved for months. The shape of the deal is not. Hamas is being offered political survival in exchange for its guns.
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