The Free Press

When reading the news and listening to debates about the war with Iran, it is nearly impossible to understand what this conflict is truly about.

If you ask most of its supporters, this is a campaign to halt the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear weapon and end its violent repression of a population that overwhelmingly rejects its extremist ideology. Through the lens of its critics, it is a war of choice over oil and power, one that the United States was dragged into by Israel. And, in certain circles, it is framed as an effort to punish Iran for its support of the Palestinian cause.

Yet zoom out, and a very different picture comes into focus. At its core, this is not a geopolitical conflict launched by the U.S. or Israel just over three weeks ago. Rather, it is the continuation of a holy war to export Islamist ideals, weaken the West, and eliminate Israel—a war that has been waged by the Islamic Republic and its proxies for decades.

After years in which Jewish and Israeli students at University of California, Berkeley were told that their exclusion was merely the product of political disagreement, a Title VI case brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a settlement. It requires the university to end student group practices that excluded “Zionists,” and finally affirms that what Jewish students experienced was, in fact, discrimination.

The settlement forces the university to confront what it had long denied: that Jewish students’ experiences of discrimination and harassment were real. Though the problem accelerated after Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, Kenneth L. Marcus—founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which brought the suit—accused Berkeley law students in 2022 of having “institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups.” He listed clubs as diverse as women’s groups, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student organizations, all of which had altered their bylaws to exclude “Zionist” members and speakers.

For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, before the American press, on campuses, and in a corpus of op-eds, I have spent most of my time defending the state of Israel. Though not always keen to justify its policies, I never lost faith in the justness of the Zionist project and the public’s openness to its case.

Challenging even in the quietest of times, standing up for Israel became especially daunting after October 7, when the victims of a verifiable genocide were baselessly accused of perpetrating one. Still, there remained my bedrock belief that most Americans, when presented with the facts, would come down on Israel’s side. But while the hostility in much of the media was nothing new, the open-minded audiences I usually addressed had changed. Conspiracy theories once considered fringe had become mainstream, and age-old antisemitic tropes had resurfaced in a not-so-subliminal presumption of Jewish wickedness. Inexorably, I came to understand that the cogent nation I once knew and appealed to, where a basic rationality could always be assumed, had fallen into lunacy.

“And are you Jewish?”

That’s the first, short, tightening of the screw in a new Broadway play about children’s author Roald Dahl, called Giant. The show, recently brought over from London, takes place in 1983, in the makeshift dining room at Gipsy House, Dahl’s countryside estate.

Dahl—played by John Lithgow, is about to publish his novel, The Witches. He’s already had huge hits in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and The Twits. And The Witches is set to be one, too—except that Dahl has just published a review of a book of photographs about the war in Lebanon called God Cried. In it, he gives his assessment of Jews: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” He then wonders: “Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?” Outrage from the public ensues.

In the last two weeks, over 700 South African refugees received phone calls from the government asking about their experience with resettlement in the U.S. The outreach efforts were prompted by an investigation in The Free Press, which found that newly arrived Afrikaner refugees had been largely left to fend for themselves in places like Detroit, Chicago, and San Jose, California.

Three refugees told me that they witnessed drug deals and prostitution while living for weeks in motels. One refugee said she ate just one meal per day as her initial government stipend of about $2,000 was quickly depleted paying for her extended motel stay, while others were shown cockroach-infested apartments in unsafe areas.

For decades, nonprofit organizations have been responsible for helping refugees find safe and clean temporary housing, sign up for food stamps and Social Security numbers, and seek employment. These intermediary nonprofits disburse government money to regional refugee resettlement offices throughout the country. Those regional offices are where the breakdowns occurred for some of the South African refugees.

Investors should be used to the whiplash by now. The pattern ought to be familiar: The president makes a bold pro-Israel military move in the Middle East. Israel’s principal adversary retaliates by restricting the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. The economic consequences look so grim—the nightmare combination of stagnation and inflation—that the president hastily switches to diplomacy.

I want nothing to do with the juvenile journalistic debate about whether, by postponing on Monday his threatened attacks on Iranian power plants, Trump “chickened out” the way he rolled back the tariffs in April last year—the way he always chickens out. Please. He doesn’t always chicken out. He carries out roughly half of the threats he makes, which is a pretty effective strategy in game theory, so long as your adversaries are risk averse, which most of them are. Trump most certainly is not. (When the guy who used to run George Soros’s hedge fund says that Trump has “a very high risk tolerance, much higher than mine,” that’s telling you something.)

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

A very senior Israeli official told me last night, “It’s highly doubtful that the Iranians’ minimum will meet Trump’s maximum.” To put it simply: Expectations in Israel for a negotiated end to this war are currently close to zero—and here’s why.

President Donald Trump has said something consistently about Iran for years: They have never won a war, but they have never lost a negotiation. So why would he suddenly leave his home field—the battlefield, where he is the strongest player in the world—to play a road game, negotiations, where the Iranians are world-class operators? He would only do so if there were a great deal to gain.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where teachers’ unions are now running their own Middle East policy, misgendering gets you hauled in front of a tribunal, and we’re importing doctors and nurses from the U.S. Let’s jump in!

In recent weeks, Canada has seen a spate of gunfire directed at synagogues, and the government has issued a warning that a terror attack against the Jewish community was a “realistic possibility” within the next six months. Unsurprisingly, Canada’s Jews are questioning whether they could still be safe.

Canada’s teachers are on the case, and they have a message for their nation’s Jews: Sanction Israel. At its annual general meeting, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions, passed a motion on March 16 endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Some attendees wore buttons declaring “BDS Saves Lives” and “BDS Saves Kids.”

BDS resolutions are not new in Canada—they’ve long circulated in student unions and parts of the labor movement—but it’s the first province-wide endorsement by a K–12 teachers’ union. And it reflects a broader shift in schools across the country, which have become increasingly hostile to Jews.

It’s Tuesday, March 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Madeleine Rowley interviews the men behind the White House meme team. Aaron MacLean asks: Are boots on the ground in the cards? Amit Segal on why Trump reversed course in the Strait of Hormuz. And much more.

But first: Cuba calls its best defenders.

Today the lights are off in Cuba for the third time in a month, and the communists in charge are having a hard time explaining it away. President Miguel Díaz-Canel deployed the regime’s perennial excuse over the weekend, blaming U.S. pressure for the entirety of Cuba’s woes. He said President Donald Trump is “cruelly squeezing energy resources,” referring to the blockade that has kept Venezuelan oil out since the U.S. seized that country’s strongman in January.

With protests roiling Havana and Trump’s sights set on the island as his next target, what can Cuba’s rulers possibly do to save themselves? The answer is to rely on progressive influencers. Like many anti-American regimes before it, the government Castro built is betting that friendly publicity in the Western press can save it like no weapon or subterfuge could.

Cuba helped bring in left-wing journalists, influencers including streamer Hasan Piker, ex-politicians like former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Irish band Kneecap, to defend them from Trump and sing the praises of the Castros. James Kirchick describes the absurd spectacle of Cuba’s useless idiots in his column for us today. Read his piece on an island with no electricity—and the stars of the international left-wing internet who arrived to save Cuba with their posts.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to stare down the Cuban dictatorship and hasn’t blinked yet. Martin Gurri believes that an attempt at regime change is inevitable, and the only questions are how and when. On one hand, Cubans are more than ready for a change—more than 20 percent have fled in the past five years alone. But the regime won’t fold as easily as it did in Venezuela, due in part to an anti-American zeal that has festered for decades.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

And ICYMI, watch Coleman Hughes, MLK biographer Jonathan Eig, and civil rights legend Ambassador Andrew Young in conversation in Atlanta on “Nonviolence in a Violent Age.”

• Leonid Radvinsky, the reclusive billionaire owner of OnlyFans, died at 43 on Monday after a battle with cancer that he kept secret from the public. The Ukrainian American entrepreneur acquired the platform in 2018 and was reportedly in talks as recently as last year to sell a majority stake of the porn-driven company.

• ICE agents lent a hand to TSA at more than a dozen airports across the country Monday, including New York City’s JFK and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, as a weeks-long partial government shutdown has left 50,000 TSA officers working without pay and thousands calling out sick. Border Czar Tom Homan said the agents will handle crowd control at entrances and exits—rather than screenings—though it remains unclear whether they will also conduct immigration sweeps.

• Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni conceded defeat Monday in a national referendum on judicial reform, marking a major blow to her right-wing coalition. Around 50 magistrates packed a Naples courthouse to watch the results come in, and broke into the anti-fascist resistance anthem “Bella Ciao” when it became clear the government had lost.

• Two pilots were killed and more than 40 people injured Sunday night when an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. Air traffic control audio from the incident reveals a controller clearing the truck to cross the runway before, seconds later, admitting: “I messed up.”

• The Trump administration installed a statue of Christopher Columbus over the weekend on the White House grounds—a replica of one toppled and thrown into a harbor in Baltimore by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” a White House spokesperson said.

• Prediction market Kalshi will ban athletes, coaches, and politicians from betting on their own sports and campaigns, respectively, Axios reports. The planned crackdown comes on the heels of a lawsuit against Kalshi filed in an Arizona court last week alleging the platform operates an illegal gambling business.

Last weekend, hundreds of left-wing activists and politicians from around the world descended on Cuba. As participants in the Nuestra América Convoy, they brought with them some 20 tons of humanitarian aid ostensibly to help a population suffering under President Donald Trump’s merciless oil embargo. Because the Cuban people apparently haven’t suffered enough, high-profile delegates included former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Ryan Grim of Hamas-friendly Drop Site News, the shrieking harpies of Code Pink, the ubiquitous internet streamer Hasan Piker, and Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

There’s a good chance you’ve already heard about the convoy due to the ample social media activity of its members, who spent more time broadcasting their exploits to millions of followers than doing anything that might actually help the average Cuban. A highlight of the trip was a motorized tour through downtown Havana during which guests could take pictures of destitute Habaneros and Habaneras as if they were zoo animals. The same day as a “humanitarian performance” by Kneecap—an Irish rap group named after one of the Ireland Republican Army’s grislier forms of punishment and known for holding a Hezbollah flag at one of their performances last year—the country’s electrical grid went out. Luckily, the luxurious Gran Hotel Bristol Meliá Collection, where some comrades reportedly spent the weekend, was one of the few buildings on the island to maintain power, a telling fact that appeared not to have made an impression on anyone.