J-Wire

One of the most pernicious effects of the Soviet system of mind control was what’s called today “gaslighting,” the belief that you are guilty of the insanely preposterous things of which you are being accused but of which you are in fact innocent. In the Soviet-style war of defamation that’s been waged against Israel ever since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish people have been relentlessly gaslighted.

This past week, my wife Frimet and I, along with our family and friends, marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre that took the lives of our 15-year-old Melbourne-born daughter Malki, our next-door neighbour’s daughter Michal, 16, and fourteen additional innocents. A view of the aftermath of the Sbarro Pizza bombing in Jerusalem on Aug 9, 2001. Credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO.

Hamas has lost significant public support among Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip, while imprisoned Fatah figure Marwan Barghouti emerged as the clear front-runner in a hypothetical Palestinian Authority presidential election, according to a new survey.

We are living at a time when truth is inverted, facts are mangled, and history is rewritten. Michael Kuttner George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, in which he predicted all these realities, has in fact become a standard feature of life in 2026.

NSW Opposition Leader and Member for Vaucluse Kellie Sloane MP met with survivors of the Bondi Beach terror attack this morning, at an event held at Central Synagogue and organised by Shoshana Eisner of Operation Golda. Sloane had been among the first on the scene at Bondi in the immediate aftermath of the attack, arriving with Rabbi Mendy Litzman of Hatzolah. “I didn’t go as the member for Vaucluse or the leader of the opposition.

The hatred came first. The target came later. That is Henry Ergas’s bleak reading of Australia after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. The antisemitism that followed, he argues, was not simply a reaction to the war in Gaza. It was the release of forces that had been gathering for years. Ergas has spent a lifetime studying why institutions succeed, why they fail and what happens when public policy loses contact with evidence.

CHANGE Twice the Book of Devarim says, “Do not add to the words which I command you or remove any command from the Torah” (Devarim 4:2 and 13:1). And yet it seems obvious that over the years we have done both. Both added and removed laws. Some people often assume that Halacha, Jewish law, is fixed and immovable. But to make the point of flexibility, this week we have a very important statement about the judicial and theological systems. Some laws in the Torah look like options.

Israeli defence technology companies are being encouraged to pursue opportunities in Australia and New Zealand through local partnerships, licensing and dual-use applications, as traditional routes into government defence procurement become increasingly difficult.The push follows a defence-tech conference in Haifa organised by HiCentre Ventures in collaboration with the New Zealand Israel Innovation Hub (NZIIH), which brought Israeli investors and technology companies together to examine...

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) issued an urgent call on Wednesday to major social media companies to step up their removal of antisemitic content after a new study revealed significant gaps in the enforcement of policies intended to protect Jewish communities.Data published by the organisation, detailing the responses to 754 reports submitted by Jewish community members across Europe from February 2025 to April of this year, indicates that eighty-one per cent of the reported content remained...

A former jihadist is backing a crackdown on hate preachers and pushing for a greater focus on deradicalisation programs, contradicting arguments from experts. A jihadist-turned-counter-terrorism agent is warning against letting radical ideologies fester and leaving hate preachers out in the open. Mubin Shaikh disputed suggestions of some expert testimony heard at a royal commission probing social cohesion this week.