מי שיש לו יארצייט ובנו מתפלל לפני התיבה במקומו בתור שלוחו, האם יש להבן דין קדימה על אחרים

יקרת מכתבו הגיעני, וע"ד ששאל היות כי אביו יחי' לאי"ט, אין בכחו

להתפלל לפני העמוד כשיש לו יארצייט, ומע"כ יחי' בנו מתפלל

במקומו בתור שלוחו, האם יש לו דין קדימה על אחרים וכאלו אביו

בעצמו היה מתפלל או לא.

א) הנה בשו"ת רמ"א (סי' קי"ח) מבואר, דבן הבן אומר קדיש בשביל

זקנו ומשום דחייב גם בכבוד זקנו, אלא ששאר אבלים על אביו ואמו

יאמרו ב' קדישים, ובן הבן יאמר פעם אחת עיין שם, והובא בקצור

במג"א (סי' קל"ב סק"ב). נמצא דיש למע"כ נ"י זכות בשיעור שליש,

אף אם לא יהא בגדר שליח לאביו אלא מטעם בן הבן. ובאליה רבה

(או"ח סי' קל"ב דיני קדיש אות ט') הביא משו"ת בנימין זאב (סי' ר"א), דאף

היכי שיש אבלים על אב ואם, אינם יכולים למחות במי שאומר קדיש

בשליחותו של בן משום דשלוחו של אדם כמותו עיין שם. ומשמע

דהיכי שהוא שלוחו של הבן יש לו זכות גמור כמו לבן עצמו. וא"כ

בנדון דידן, אף אם מצד זקנו יש לו זכות רק בשליש, אבל מצד שלוחו

של אביו יש לו זכות שלימה כמו אביו.

ב) אולם בס' מטה אפרים (דיני קדיש יתום סעיף ט') כתב, דהיכי שאומר

קדיש בשליחותו של הבן, אין שאר האבלים יכולין לדחותו כיון שהוא

שליח הבן, ומ"מ נראה שיש לעשות פשר שלא יאמר רק חלק שליש

עכ"ד. והיינו משום דבהגהות אלף למטה שם (סק"י) פקפק על סברת

הבנימין זאב שכתב דשייך בזה שלוחו של אדם כמותו, דלא נהירא,

דאטו אם אחד יאמר לחבירו שיקרא קריאת שמע ויתפלל ויברך ברכת

המזון עבורו והוא ילך לו, פשיטא דלא יצא כלל, וכמש"כ בתוס' רי"ד

קידושין רפ"ב (מא א) דבמצוה שחל על גופו לא שייך שליחות. ושוב

כתב ליישב דברי הבנימין זאב, דלא דמי קדיש לבהמ"ז וקריאת שמע,

דבקדיש הטעם הוא משום דזכות הוא לאביו שיתקדש שם שמים על

ידי זרעו, וא"כ הוא הדין כשמתקדש ע"י שליח זרעו יש לו זכות בזה,

ומ"מ מסיק דשליח הבן יש לו זכות רק שליש משאר אבלים עיין שם

באריכות.

ג) ולענ"ד יתכן ליישב קושית המטה אפרים על הבנימין זאב - דעל

אמירת קדיש לא שייך שליחות משום דהוי מצוה שבגופו וכמו דלא

מהני שליחות בק"ש וברכת המזון ותפלה - ונראה עפ"י מה שכתב

הקצות החושן (סי' קפ"ב סק"א) הטעם דבמצוה שבגופו לא מהני

שליחות, דלא אמרינן שלוחו של אדם כמותו אלא במידי דעשייה, דאז

הו"ל מעשה השליח כמעשה המשלח, אבל במידי דליכא עשייה לא

אמרינן שלוחו של אדם כמותו, וכמש"כ הרא"ש בנדרים (עב א) הטעם

דשמיעת האפוטרופוס לא הוי כשמיעת הבעל לענין הפרת נדרים,

דאע"פ שהבעל עשאו שליח להפר, מ"מ השמיעה דהוי מידי דממילא

לא שייך בה שליחות, ועל כן דוקא בשחיטת פסח וקידושין וגרושין

מהני שליחות, דמעשה השליח נחשב כאלו המשלח עצמו עשה את

המעשה, והוי כאלו הוא עצמו שחט וקידש וגירש, אבל בתפילין

כשהשליח מניח תפילין, הנחה זו שהיא עשייה חשוב באמת כאלו

עשאה המשלח דהא על מעשה שייך שליחות, אבל אכתי לא הניח

את התפילין על ראשו וזרועו של המשלח אלא על ראשו וזרועו של

השליח, דאין גוף השליח נעשה כגוף המשלח כיון דבמידי דממילא

לא שייך שליחות, ומשו"ה בציצית ותפילין וסוכה נהי דהו"ל עשיית

השליח כעשיית המשלח, מ"מ כיון דגופו של השליח לא הוי כגופו של

המשלח נמצא שלא עשה מעשה בגופו של המשלח אלא בגופו של

השליח, אבל בפסח וקידושין וגירושין, הנה שחיטת הפסח ומעשה

הקידושין והגירושין הוי כאלו עשאו המשלח והרי נגמר המעשה עיין

שם. ומבואר מזה, דגם במצוה שבגופו מתייחס המעשה אל המשלח

וכאלו עשאו המשלח בעצמו, והא דלא יצא המשלח, היינו משום דהוי

כאלו הניח את התפילין על ראשו וזרועו של השליח, דאע"ג דמעשה

ההנחה נעשה על ידי המשלח, אבל המשלח הניח את התפילין על

ראשו של השליח, והרי בעינן שיניח את התפילין על ראשו של עצמו.

ומעתה כשעושה שליח להתפלל ולברך, הוי ליה כאלו המשלח מתפלל

ומברך בפיו של השליח, ועל כן לא יצא כשעושה שליח לקרוא את

שמע או להתפלל או לברך ברכת המזון, דהתורה חייבתו שיאמר

קריאת שמע ויתפלל ויברך בפיו של עצמו ולא בפיו של שלוחו.

ד) ומעתה נראה, דכשעושה שליח לומר קדיש, נהי דהוי כאלו המשלח

אומר קדיש בפיו של השליח, מכל מקום איכא זכות בזה גם להמשלח,

כיון דהוא הוא האומר את הקדיש, ודוקא בקריאת שמע ותפלה וברכת

המזון לא מהני שליחות, דודאי דלענין לצאת ידי חובת ק"ש ותפלה

וברכת המזון לא סגי אם יאמר הברכות והתפלות בפיו של השליח,

אלא דדינא הוא שצריך לאומרם בפיו של עצמו, אבל אמירת הקדיש

שתועלתו היא משום שעושה מצוה וזוהי זכות לאביו, וכמש"כ בתשו'

בנימין זאב שם (סי' ר"א) "דזה הקדיש אינו מצד קורבה, אלא משום

שהבן הוא כל כך ישר עד שמתקדש שם שמים על ידו, ועל כן הבן

מזכה האב שזכה ויצא ממנו זרע שמתקדש שם שמים על ידו", א"כ

אף כשאומר קדיש על ידי פיו של שלוחו, הוי גם כן זכות לאביו, כיון

דעכ"פ הבן המשלח גרם שיתקדש שם שמים, דאי לאו שעושה שליח

לאמירת קדיש ליכא קידוש שם שמים. ואף על גב דלענין תפלות

וברכות לא יצא ידי חובתו בכהאי גוונא, כיון דבעינן שיאמר את

התפלות והברכות בפיו של עצמו, מ"מ לענין קדיש, דשם ליכא ענין

של חיוב לצאת ידי מצוה, אלא דענינו רק שתיעשה מצוה של קידוש

שם שמים, וזוהי זכות לאביו הנפטר, א"כ גם היכי שהוא מקדש שם

שמים בפיו של השליח הוי ג"כ זכות, ואף דאין יוצאין ידי חובת תפלה

וברכה בכהאי גוונא, זכות מיהת הוי, ושפיר שייך גם בזה שלוחו של

אדם כמותו. כן נראה לענ"ד ליישב דברי הבנימין זאב ז"ל. ובאמת כל

זה נכלל בדברי האלף למטה הנ"ל, שבקדיש שמתקדש ש"ש על ידי 

שליח זרעו יש לו זכות בזה.

ה) ובעיקר דברי הקצה"ח ז"ל (סי' קפ"ב), דבמצוה שבגופו לא שייך

שליחות משום דהוי כעושה מצוה בגופו של השליח והוי מידי דממילא

דלא שייך ביה שליחות, מצינו בזה סתירה בדברי הקצה"ח ז"ל עצמו

לקמן (סי' שפ"ב סק"א), שכתב בטעם דלא מהני שליחות במילה, וכתב

על פי דברי התוס' רי"ד קדושין (מא א) דבמצוה שבגופו לא מהני

שליחות עיין שם, וקשה דלפי דברי הקצה"ח עצמו לעיל (סי' קפ"ח)

שפיר מועיל שליחות במילה, דמעשה השליח נחשב כמעשה המשלח

והוי כאלו המשלח עצמו מל את הבן וצ"ע. ועיין באלף למטה שם

מה שהאריך בזה. ועיין בזה בס' נתן פריו עמ"ס נדרים (עב א) ואכמ"ל.

ו) ומעתה יוצא, דהיכי שנעשה שליח לומר קדיש, יש לו זכות שלימה

לדעת שו"ת בנימין זאב. ואף לדעת המטה אפרים דבשליח אין לו אלא

חלק שליש, מכל מקום בנדון דידן יש למע"כ נ"י זכות נוסף מצד זקנו,

דהא גם בבן הבן איכא זכות חלק שליש וכמבואר בשו"ת הרמ"א הנ"ל.

וכיון דאתי עלה משום שני צדדים, דהיינו משום זקנו ומשום שליח

הבן, א"כ יש לו זכות כמו שאר החיובים. כלומר שיש לו עכ"פ חצי

זכות, דהיינו לא פחות מזכות שיש להחיוב השני, שגם להשני איכא

חצי זכות, דכיון דבסך הכל יש שני חיובים א"כ לכל אחד מגיע חצי

זכות. ואם יש ג' חיובים מגיע לכל אחד שליש חיוב. ואין לומר דממה

נפשך, דאם הוי שליח אביו א"כ אין לו זכות של זקנו - דהא ליכא זכות

עבור זקנו אלא היכא דליכא בן, אבל בדאיכא בן או ששליח הבן אומר

קדיש אז ליכא זכות להנכד עבור זקנו - וא"כ בנדון דידן ליכא אלא

שליש זכות לדעת המטה אפרים. ברם נראה דזה אינו, דלדעת המטה

אפרים שאין להשליח אלא שליש זכות, נמצא דהוי כאלו הבן אינו יכול

לומר קדיש בשלימות, שהרי חסר לו מזכות זו מה שיש לשאר אבלים

זכות יותר משליש, שהרי לא נתנו לשליחו אלא שליש אחד וחסרים

לו השאר, ונמצא דלגבי הזכות שהוא יותר מן השליש הוי כאלו ליכא

בן, ואז ממילא מתעוררת זכות הנכד עבור זקנו בתורת בן הבן, דהא

היכי דליכא בן איכא זכות להנכד. ומעתה יוצא דבנדון דידן יש להנכד

זכות שלימה, או משום דנקטינן כהבנימין זאב דשלוחו של אדם כמותו

והוי כאביו ממש ויש לו זכות שלימה, ואם ננקוט כהמטה אפרים

דבתור שליח אין לו שליש, נמצא דחסר לאביו זכות מה שהוא יותר מן

השליש, והוי ליה לענין כזה כאלו ליתא לאביו כאן, וממילא יש להנכד

זכות גם על היותרת מן השליש, כמו שאר אבלים, דהרי היכי דליכא

אב איכא זכות להנכד ודו"ק. ונמצא דבנדון שאלתנו יש למע"כ זכות

שלימה לקדיש ותפלה כמו שאר חיובים. והנלע"ד כתבתי.

ז) שבתי והתבוננתי דזכותו של הנכד היא פחותה מזכות אבל אחר,

דאף דהנכד אתי עלה מצד שני זכותים, דהיינו בתורת שליח ובתורת

בן הבן, מכל מקום כל אחת משתי הזכותים האלו אינם נותנים לו אלא

שליש אחד, דהא מצד בן הבן ליכא אלא שליש וכתשו' הרמ"א, ומצד

שליח אביו ליכא אלא שליש לדעת המטה אפרים, ונמצא דבסך הכל

יש לו שני שלישי זכותים, ואילו אבל אחר יש לו זכות שלימה, והשתא

כשבאים להתחלק, זה בא מכח זכות שלימה וזה בא מכח שני שלישי

זכותים, א"כ זה שבא מכח זכות שלימה יש לו יותר, וכמבואר במשנה

בבא מציעא (ב א) זה אומר כולה שלי וזה אומר חציה שלי זה נוטל

שלשה חלקים וזה נוטל רביע, ופירש"י דזה שאומר חציה שלי מודה

הוא שהחצי של חבירו ואין דנין אלא על חציה הלכך נוטל כל אחד

חציה של חצי עיין שם. והכי נמי מכיון שלנכד יש רק זכות של שני

שלישים, נמצא דהשליש השלישי שייך בודאי להאבל האחר ועל זה

ליכא חלוקה, ולא נשאר לחלק אלא שני שלישים, וא"כ נותנים להנכד

שליש אחד ולאבל האחר שליש, ונמצא שהאבל האחר מקבל בסך

הכל שני שלישים והנכד שליש אחד. ומ"מ כיון דלדעת שו"ת בנימין

זאב יש לשליח זכות שלימה, יש לעשות פשר וליתן להנכד יותר

משליש ופחות מחצי. (שו"ת להורות נתן חלק ח סימן א)

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The Temporary Friends of Islam

The first half-century of Islam’s history is soaked in blood. Not the blood of outsiders, but the blood of Muslims killed by other Muslims. Caliphs were assassinated. Cities were besieged. Sacred spaces were violated. Entire armies, all praying the same prayers and reciting the same scripture, slaughtered one another in conflicts that erupted almost immediately after Islam’s founding figure died.

When Muhammad died in 632, there was no agreed-upon mechanism for succession. No council had been established. No institutional separation existed between spiritual authority and political command. Whoever led the community would control the army, the treasury, the law, and the right to speak in God’s name, all at once.

Several Arab tribes responded to Muhammad’s death by withholding allegiance from Medina. Importantly, some of them did not even reject Islam as belief. They continued to pray. They continued to identify as Muslims. What they rejected was subordination to a new central authority. They no longer recognized Medina’s right to command them or extract loyalty and tribute.

Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, declared these tribes apostates and launched what became known as the Ridda Wars. Tens of thousands were killed. The issue was not disbelief, but it was allegiance. The crime was not holding the wrong ideas about God; it was refusing to obey the center after the founder’s death.

The second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, presided over a rapidly expanding empire. Under his rule, Islamic armies conquered vast territories, absorbing populations, resources, and power at a pace unmatched in the region’s history. When Umar was assassinated in 644 by a Muslim, it was not over theology. It was the consequence of tensions created by rapid expansion, centralized authority, and the distribution of power and wealth.

His successor, Uthman ibn Affan, inherited an empire already straining under its own success. Accusations of nepotism, corruption, and favoritism circulated. Opposition grew not around doctrine, but around governance, who controlled appointments, who benefited from conquest, who commanded loyalty. In 656, Uthman was besieged in his own home by Muslim rebels and murdered.

The murder of Uthman detonated the first full-scale Islamic civil war. Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, became the fourth caliph. Almost immediately, his authority was challenged. Aisha, Muhammad’s widow, led forces against him in what became known as the Battle of the Camel. Muhammad’s own wife fighting Muhammad’s own cousin, each commanding Muslim armies, each invoking legitimacy.

Ali’s conflict with Mu‘awiya, the governor of Syria, escalated further. Tens of thousands died. Ali’s legitimacy was weakened. A radical faction known as the Kharijites emerged, insisting that any ruler who compromised was illegitimate. They were not theological innovators; they were absolutists of authority. One of them assassinated Ali in 661.

Within a single generation, Islam’s first four leaders were either killed by Muslims or died amid violence caused by Muslims. Hundreds of thousands had already been killed. The community was fractured, traumatized, and bloodied.

The breaking point came at Karbala in 680. Hussien, Muhammad’s grandson, challenged the legitimacy of the Umayyad ruler Yazid. His force was small, symbolic. He was intercepted, surrounded, and massacred along with his family. The killing of the Prophet’s grandson shocked the Muslim world and permanently divided it.

From this event emerged the Sunni–Shia split, not as a theological debate about God, but as a moralized memory of power. Shia identity crystallized around dispossession and martyrdom. Sunni identity crystallized around order, continuity, and obedience to whoever held authority.

Only now, after decades of bloodshed, did theology harden into distinct traditions. Belief followed history. Doctrine followed power. At no point did Muslims fight over the nature of God, the structure of revelation, or the mechanics of salvation. They fought over who ruled, who obeyed, and who commanded in God’s name.

Where Division Begins Matters

Christianity’s earliest and most consequential splits emerged from sustained theological disagreement. Long before Christianity had armies, states, or emperors enforcing doctrine, Christians were already arguing intensely about belief. What exactly was Jesus? Fully divine? Fully human? Both? How could one God exist as Father, Son, and Spirit? These questions went to the heart of what Christians thought salvation even meant.

The disputes were slow, grinding, and public. Bishops wrote letters. Schools formed around interpretations. Councils were convened to argue, not to conquer. The Council of Nicaea in 325 did not respond to a civil war over who would rule Christianity. It responded to a doctrinal crisis over the nature of Christ. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 did not settle a power struggle between rival kings. It attempted to resolve a theological contradiction that Christians could not reconcile on their own.

When Christianity eventually fractured institutionally, it did so because theological disagreement had become irreconcilable. The Great Schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in 1054 followed centuries of debate over doctrine, authority, and church structure. The break formalized disagreements that had already matured intellectually. Violence did not create the division; it followed it.

The Protestant Reformation follows the same pattern. Martin Luther did not raise an army. He wrote theses. He argued against indulgences, against the authority of tradition over scripture, against the theology of salvation promoted by Rome. His challenge spread through sermons, pamphlets, and debate. Only later did princes and states turn these theological fractures into political conflicts. Once again, belief came first. Power followed.

Judaism provides an even sharper contrast. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Judaism lost political sovereignty altogether. There was no king, no army, no state to fight over. What followed was not civil war, but the sprouting of the oral law. Rabbinic Judaism emerged as a system built around argument, law, and commentary. Disagreement was not eliminated; it was preserved. Minority opinions were recorded alongside majority rulings. Authority became textual and communal rather than coercive.

Judaism survived precisely because belief did not depend on unified political control. No single ruler could enforce orthodoxy by force. Theology remained primary. Power was peripheral.

These examples establish a baseline. When religion fractures because theology matters most, disagreement looks a certain way. It is slow. It is argumentative. It produces texts, councils, schools, and traditions. Violence may intrude, but it is not the engine.

Islam’s history does not follow this pattern.

Returning to Islam’s early decades, the contrast is immediate. Disagreement escalates into violence almost instantly. There is little patience for prolonged debate. Authority crises are treated as emergencies, not conversations. Once violence resolves the contest, theology hardens around the outcome.

This is why apostasy occupies such a central place in Islamic law and imagination. Apostasy in Islam is not primarily understood as holding the wrong ideas about God. It is understood as abandoning allegiance. The apostate is dangerous not because he thinks differently, but because he refuses to submit.

In a system where belief and authority are fused, withdrawal of loyalty threatens the entire order. If obedience becomes optional, the system collapses. Apostasy must therefore be criminalized as treason. Disbelief is less threatening than disobedience.

This logic explains why Islamic law treats political rebellion, heresy, and apostasy as overlapping categories. The concern is not internal conviction. The concern is public defection. A person may privately doubt, but public withdrawal of allegiance cannot be tolerated.

Once this logic is understood, the early civil wars take on a different meaning. The Ridda Wars were not about defending theological purity. They were about reasserting centralized control after the founder’s death. The murder of Uthman was not the result of doctrinal innovation. It was a revolt against perceived illegitimate rule. Ali’s conflicts were not theological schisms. They were battles over authority.

The Sunni–Shia divide, often portrayed as a theological split, is better understood as a dispute over legitimacy. Shiʿa held that leadership should remain within the lineage of Muhammad, while Sunnis came to accept rule by those who successfully seized and maintained power.

This pattern does not end in the seventh century. It repeats throughout Islamic history. Dynasties rise claiming legitimacy. They consolidate power. Rivals are crushed. Scholars align with authority or are sidelined. Theology stabilizes the new order. When legitimacy erodes, violence returns, and the cycle repeats.

The Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ottomans, and Safavids all follow variations of this script. Civil war precedes doctrinal clarification. Power determines orthodoxy. Theology rationalizes outcomes.

What is missing, consistently, is the kind of internal theological revolution that redefines belief independently of power. Islam does not experience a Reformation because its structure does not allow belief to float free from authority. To challenge authority is to challenge the system itself.

Political ideologies demand loyalty. They moralize obedience. They treat dissent as betrayal. They rewrite history to sanctify victory and demonize defeat. Belief serves unity. Unity serves power. In such systems, ideology does not emerge from debate. It emerges from consolidation. Once power is secured, doctrine is fixed. Once doctrine is fixed, dissent becomes illegitimate. Islam’s internal history fits this model.

Religion is not the engine of the Islamic system. It is the surface language through which power is organized, enforced, and justified.

Temporary Friends

In Christianity, non-negotiable claims are theological: who God is, what salvation means, how grace works. Authority exists to serve those claims, and when authority collapses, belief continues, often fragmenting, arguing, reforming, but persisting independently. Christianity can survive institutional failure because belief is not structurally dependent on centralized coercion.

In Judaism, the non-negotiable element is covenantal law interpreted through argument. Authority is distributed, not concentrated. Disagreement is not a threat to survival; it is a condition of continuity. Judaism endured exile precisely because it did not require political sovereignty to function.

Islam’s non-negotiable element is different. It is not a specific theological proposition that cannot be questioned. It is submission, obedience, allegiance, alignment with authority that claims to rule in God’s name. Belief matters, but belief alone is insufficient. What matters most is whether one submits.

This explains why Islam is uniquely capable of coexisting, tactically and temporarily, with doctrines that openly contradict its own moral and theological claims, so long as allegiance is not threatened.

Islam does not require its allies to believe in its theology. It requires that they do not challenge its authority, legitimacy, or expansion. This is a feature of a system in which submission, not belief, is the non-negotiable core.

Historically, Islamic rule has shown a remarkable ability to tolerate internal contradiction when it serves power. Non-Muslim populations were permitted to retain their religions, customs, and even internal legal systems under Islamic empires, not because Islam embraced pluralism, but because submission had already been secured. As long as the hierarchy was acknowledged and authority remained unchallenged, belief could be managed. Theology was secondary to order.

The same logic operates in Islam’s relationship with the contemporary Western left.

The modern left advances doctrines, sexual liberation, gender fluidity, secular morality, rejection of divine law, that are fundamentally incompatible with Islamic theology. Yet this incompatibility does not disrupt the alliance, because Islam does not evaluate allies primarily by belief. It evaluates them by alignment. As long as the left directs its energy against Western sovereignty, national identity, liberal institutions, and civilizational confidence, Islam has no incentive to confront its doctrinal deviations.

From Islam’s perspective, these deviations are temporary, contingent, and ultimately irrelevant. What matters is whether power structures are weakened, whether resistance is neutralized, and whether opposition is delegitimized. Belief can be corrected later. Authority must be secured first.

This mirrors Islam’s historical treatment of internal dissent. A ruler who governs effectively and enforces order may be tolerated despite personal impiety. A believer who challenges authority, even while professing correct doctrine, is treated as a threat. The priority is stability and control, not moral coherence.

This is why Islamic actors rarely expend energy condemning the left’s beliefs with the same urgency they reserve for critics of Islam. Criticism represents defiance. Defiance threatens authority. Doctrinal error among allies does not.

The left, for its part, often misunderstands this dynamic. It interprets Islam’s silence as tolerance or convergence. In reality, it is conditional acceptance. As long as the left functions as a shield, deflecting scrutiny, suppressing criticism, delegitimizing opposition, it is useful. Once it ceases to do so, the contradiction will no longer be ignored.

This logic also explains why figures on the right, or leaning toward the right such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Dan Bilzerian, and others are being celebrated today by Muslims across social media for standing with Islam against Israel. Of course, these figures are using Islam as a weapon against Israel, but Islam is using them too.

They are valuable to Islam because they attack Israel and weaken Western moral confidence. Carlson’s and Owens’s massive platforms are a gift to Islamic propaganda. Fuentes is useful because he reframes hostility toward Jews in civilizational terms rather than explicitly religious ones. Bilzerian, whose lifestyle violates virtually every Islamic moral code, is useful because he publicly aligns himself against Israel and amplifies Islamic narratives to millions of followers.

From a religious standpoint, this should be scandalous. From a theological standpoint, it should be disqualifying. From the standpoint of a system organized around allegiance and utility, it is entirely coherent.

What matters is not personal virtue, doctrinal consistency, or moral discipline. What matters is whether a figure advances the cause of Islam. A man who drinks, gambles, and lives in open defiance of Islamic law can still be embraced if he directs hostility outward, toward the correct targets.

In systems where belief is primary, alliances are built around shared truth claims. In systems where power is primary, alliances are built around shared enemies. Islam’s history shows that it belongs to the latter category.

Islam’s temporary friends are playing with fire, they treat it as harmless. A tool. A convenient weapon in a cultural war against Jews, Israel, or the liberal West. They assume they are in control, that they can instrumentalize Islam without consequence, deploy it rhetorically, and then walk away. What they do not understand is that they are not using Islam; they are being used by it. Useful idiots, on both the left and the right, temporarily shielded by their usefulness, blind to the nature of what they are empowering.

A system built around power rather than belief does not distinguish between friends and enemies in the moral sense. It distinguishes only between assets and obstacles.

This is why the danger is existential. Empowering a system whose core logic is domination rather than truth, allegiance rather than belief, is not a game that can be played selectively. The same force used against one enemy will eventually turn on all others. Those who help weaken the West in the name of a temporary alignment should not assume they will be spared by what comes next.

Dan Burwami

The Ovens Of Auschwitz Are Still Warm

I used to say that when I was born, a decade after the end of World War II, the ovens of Auschwitz were still warm.

Since then, I believed, they had cooled to the point of extinction.

I was wrong.

The crematoria are still very warm and rapidly getting hotter.

The Holocaust never completely ended. That is my conclusion seven months after the Hamas attack of October 7th, attending funerals and shivas in Israel, visiting the families of hostages and sheltering from incoming rockets, and in the United States, interviewing on news channels, meeting with Jewish students, and addressing audiences from coast to coast.

The Holocaust continues, I have concluded.

Of course, the camps were liberated, and Nazi Germany was destroyed, but what persists is the hatred that made the Holocaust possible. What metastasizes daily is the systematic dehumanization of the Jews. 

If one of the manifestations of antisemitism is an unhealthy obsession with Jews, the Gaza war is a 24/7 example. No conflict in recent history — not the massacre of 500,000 people in Syria; 400,000 in Yemen; or the vicious civil war still raging in Sudan today — achieved a fraction of the media’s fascination with Gaza. And who remembers Ukraine?

When Assad’s tanks mow down thousands of Palestinian refugees outside of Damascus, nobody in the media notices. But when Israel tries to defend itself against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians and numbers of those civilians regrettably get killed, the headlines gush.

Those headlines, too, are rife with antisemitism. Many still euphemize as militants the mass murderers, immolators, and rapists who would otherwise be labelled terrorists if their victims were not Jews.

Similarly, the press regards as credible the number of civilian casualties published by Hamas’ Health Ministry, though its figures are infamously inflated and include both dead terrorists and civilians killed by short-falling rockets, solely because the people purportedly causing those casualties are Jews.

The impulse, however subliminal, is to downgrade the importance of Jewish life while emphasizing Jewish disregard for the lives of others. The once-meticulous Committee for the Protection of Journalists has claimed that dozens of reporters have been killed so far in Gaza — almost as many as in all of Vietnam and World War II — while confirming only a handful of them. The CPJ’s purpose is to prove that the Israelis — really, the Jews — deliberately target the press.

The media’s treatment of Israel incorporates the classic antisemitic myths of the original sin, the Massacre of the Innocents, and the blood libel. Like the Nazis who pursued the Final Solution even at the cost of their war-effort, the Jews kill civilians — so the antisemites say — even at the expense of their own war effort, as calls for a ceasefire multiply.

Shylock-like, Jews relish the role of flesh-robber — that is the subtext. It is inherent in the ceaseless press coverage of Palestinian suffering, and especially in the death rate among Palestinian children. Yet it also informs the statements of avowedly pro-Israel American leaders who reflexively “expect” Israel to fight Hamas in accordance with international law.

Of course, in its efforts to avoid inflicting civilian casualties, the IDF exceeds all other Western armies, including that of the United States. Still, “far too many Palestinians have been killed,” declared U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken. “Far too many have suffered.”1 That could only have happened, the secretary implied, because the Jewish army insufficiently valued human life.

Nevertheless, all these references to classic antisemitic tropes would not suffice to dehumanize all the Jews. Merely accusing them of being bloodthirsty, even for the blood of children, would not be grounds for deeming their lives worthless, and the taking of them praiseworthy. 

Establishing that pretext was the mission of the many university faculty and student petitions blaming Israel for the horrors of October 7th and absolving Hamas of all culpability — on the contrary, lionizing the terrorists as freedom-fighters.

It is the thrust of all the demonstrators who accuse Israel of perpetuating the genocide that Hamas actually tried to commit, who deny October 7th, 2023, much like those who deny October 7th, 1943, the day that Transport 47c, departed from Vienna for Auschwitz.

“The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative,” one of the participants in a recent Oakland, California, city council meeting declared. “Many of those killed on October 7th, including children, were killed by the IDF.”

Another attendee opined, “There have not been beheading of babies and rapings. Israel murdered their own people on October 7th.” And yet another, “To hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife-beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back.”

The council, it should be noted, was debating whether to include in a call for an immediate ceasefire — precisely Hamas’s goal — a single sentence condemning the wholesale butchery of Jews.

And still, this demonization of the Jews and the valorization of those who slaughter them, the satanic portrayals of Jews and the justness of their suffering, cannot substantiate the claim that the Holocaust to this day continues. That requires looking beneath the memes — the “tools” as I call them — for annihilating an entire people.

One such tool, wielded by the extreme pro-Palestinian Left and its intersectional allies is to label Israeli toddlers “White colonial settlers” or equating the Israeli peace activists living within the Green Line with the Afrikaners who supported apartheid.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the neo-Nazis denounce the Jews for opening America’s gates to immigrants of color who will replace the country’s White, Christian rulers.

In both cases, the Jew-haters assign the worst possible qualities to Jews, rendering them irredeemable. Eradicable. It is Palestinian mega-influencer Gigi Hadid sharing a video to her 79 million followers on her Instagram stories accusing the Israelis of harvesting the organs of assassinated Palestinians. It is the Nazis equating Jews with Bolsheviks and likening them to parasites and rats.

Perhaps the best evidence for the dehumanization of the Jews, and for the heating up of Auschwitz’s ovens, is the feminist reaction — or non-reaction — to the rape of Israeli women. Captured Hamas terrorists have confessed to having been encouraged to rape their Jewish captives, irrespective of their ages, even if they were already dead. Eyewitness and forensic evidence showed that women were raped repeatedly, some until their legs and pelvises were shattered, and then shot in the back of the head.

Yet the reaction of the world’s feminist organizations was silence at best but in many cases asserting either that the victims — White, colonialist, genocidal — deserved to be violated or that the rapes were an Israeli fraud.

The Sisters Uncut movement went further by insisting that the mere accusation of rape was an “Islamophobic and racist weaponization of sexual violence.”2 In other words, Jewish women cannot be raped because they are not really women and those who do rape them are immune from criticism because they have performed an act of justice. Jewish women are worse than de-feminized; they are sub-human.

Neither by accident does the Hamas charter evoke the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” nor that Arabic translations of “Mein Kampf” have been found in a Hamas base in Gaza.3 Hamas has taken a page from the Nazi handbook and improved on it.

The Nazis were forbidden to have relations with Jewish women because they belonged to an inferior race, yet for the same reason, Hamas terrorists were enjoined to do so.

Either way, Jews are considered outside and beneath the human race. Once we have been reduced to unsalvageable, the minute our murder becomes both necessary and laudable, the Jews are ripe for extermination.

Many readers may question whether my thesis goes too far and even diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust in history. If so, I ask those readers to ask themselves whether, on October 7th, the terrorists had not been stopped in southern Israel but would have pressed their rampage eastward and north, to Beersheba, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.

What if they had butchered and burnt not 1,200 Israeli Jews but 7 million, outdistancing the Nazis, and broadcasting their accomplishments to the world? Would the world have acted much differently? Would the Oakland City Council be passing a different resolution and demonstrators cease hoisting posters of “Keep the world clean” and chanting, “From the river to the sea…”?

Or would the reaction be quiet empathy at best and, at worst, a sense that we Jews had it coming. For being White colonialist settlers, the underminers of Christian America, the traffickers in livers and hearts, for being, once again, rats. 

Fortunately, the terrorists were stopped, first by intrepid civilians and finally by the IDF. The Jewish people of today are not those of the 1940s and for the simple reason that we have a state which is socially and militarily robust, able to field a reservist force of 360,000.

We have a state which, even after its serial failures of October 7th, still offers the world’s surest protection for Jews. But it is also a state that serves as a magnet for Jew-haters and the justification for dehumanizing Jews everywhere. The state that was created to ensure “Never Again” is being used to legitimize “Once More.”

In spite of Israel or because of Israel, either way the mass dehumanization of Jews that produced the Final Solution is being widely replicated today. And we, the Jewish people, can neither afford to ignore it or leave ourselves unprepared.

The ovens of Auschwitz are still warm and getting hotter. The vast conflagration we call the Holocaust was never fully extinguished. It burns, rather, beneath mounds of Jewish ashes, an ember ready to reignite.

This essay was originally published in “Clarity,” Michael Oren’s Substack.

1

“Blinken denounces civilian toll in Gaza, says ‘far too many Palestinians have been killed.’” CNN.

2

“MeToo unless you’re a Jew.” UnHerd.

3

“Herzog: Arabic copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ found on Hamas terrorist shows what war is about.” The Times of Israel.

No Jews - No News

 In the last two weeks, hundreds of Iranians have been killed for the crime of protesting their own government.

Anyone who knows anything about anything understands that we are not talking about a government that has made its society among the happiest, healthiest, or most productive in the world.

We are talking about one of the most inhumane autocracies on the planet — an Islamist regime that governs through fear, criminalizes dissent, censors speech, jails journalists and activists, runs sham courts, extracts forced confessions, executes at one of the highest per-capita rates in the world, brutalizes women through state-enforced morality laws, persecutes ethnic and religious minorities, criminalizes LGBTQ existence, indoctrinates children, collapses its own economy through corruption and mismanagement, surveils and intimidates its citizens at home and abroad, shuts down the internet to hide its crimes, and exports chaos by funding militias, terror organizations, and proxy wars that have set the Middle East on fire.

Since late December, activists report that at least 490 protesters have been killed across Iran. More than 10,600 people have been detained. Hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed, with bodies piling up and families desperately searching for missing loved ones. One report describes a 5-year-old shot to death in his mother’s arms. Children, bystanders, and ordinary civilians have been killed. To ensure the world would not witness these crimes, the regime shut down the internet and cut phone lines, severing Iranians from the outside world at the very moment they most needed to be seen.

And yet, there have been no mass demonstrations in Western capitals. No student encampments. No emergency United Nations sessions. No viral hashtags. No breathless TV news panels. No celebrities posting solidarity symbols or tearful monologues. No movements explaining why this violence is uniquely urgent. No “Gays for Iran” or “Queers Against the Islamic Republic.” No feminist collectives marching for women beaten, jailed, and killed for refusing compulsory veiling.

No decolonial theorists rushing to contextualize why shooting your own population is somehow “resistance.”

Four words explain the reasons why: No Jews, No News.

This phrase is not a conspiracy theory; it is an empirical observation. When Jews, and especially Israel, are part of a story, much of the world roars into action. When Jews are absent, even mass death can pass almost unnoticed.

The asymmetry is striking. A rumor of a child killed in Gaza or the West Bank — typically later corrected, typically never verified — seems to bring the world to a halt. Streets fill with protesters. Media outlets run wall-to-wall coverage. Hashtags trend globally within hours. A child killed by his own government in Iran, shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? No demonstrations. No outrage. No sustained coverage.

This is not how human rights advocacy should work, but it is how the modern outrage economy functions. What passes for humanitarianism today is often theater: costless outrage performed in public, rewarded with moral validation, and abandoned the moment complexity intrudes. Causes are chosen not by the scale of suffering, but by narrative convenience. Villains must be familiar, symbolic, and safe to condemn. Victims must fit pre-approved identity frameworks. Sadly, Iran’s protests offer no such simplicity.

Iran is especially inconvenient. The oppressor is not Western or “white.” The ideology driving the violence is Islamist, not colonial. The victims are not easily racialized into fashionable categories. And the brutality cannot be blamed on Jews. Iran breaks the activist worldview, and so it is quietly ignored.

This selective blindness is not unique to Iran. Yemen has endured years of devastation under Houthi rule with minimal sustained outrage. Bashar al-Assad slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians and remains a footnote. China’s repression of Uyghurs flares briefly and disappears. Sudan and Nigeria burn largely in silence. These are not marginal conflicts; they are humanitarian catastrophes. Yet without Jews at the center, they fail to catch the mainstream public’s attention.

Part of this silence is hypocrisy. Part of it is cowardice. Israel is easy to attack. Iran is not. Jews argue back; the Islamic Republic arrests, tortures, and kills. Moral courage is tested by risk, and much of the West prefers targets that pose none.

This dynamic matters far beyond media coverage, because Iran is not just another repressive regime. The Middle East has long been organized around two competing logics: pragmatism and ideology.

Pragmatic alignment is transactional. It rests on negotiable interests such as security cooperation, intelligence sharing, economic integration, technological exchange, and opposition to common threats. Stability is the main metric. This camp increasingly includes Arab states that have learned, often painfully, the cost of Islamism. Today, it is these Arab governments educating the West about the dangers of radical ideology. Just this weekend, the United Arab Emirates announced that it has curtailed subsidies for Emirati students attending UK universities, citing fears they will become radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood. The irony is pungent.

Opposing this stands an ideological bloc centered on Iran, encompassing Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad’s Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. This network does not depend on prosperity or governance. It depends on grievance, mobilization, and permanent confrontation — above all, with Israel and the United States. Resistance is identity. Struggle is virtue. Persistence is proof of moral standing. Economics, civilians, and stability are acceptable costs.

And, of course, brutality is not coincidental to this worldview; it is a prerequisite.

October 7th was its clearest recent expression. The Hamas-led massacre and kidnappings were not militarily rational; they were ideologically necessary. Violence was used to veto normalization, derail Saudi-Israeli convergence, and remind the region that integration could still be blocked with blood. It worked. Saudi Arabia no longer treats entry into the Abraham Accords as urgent. Pragmatic Middle East politics lost momentum.

Since then, the ideological bloc has absorbed significant blows. Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has fallen. Israel has degraded Hezbollah. Hamas has suffered massive (though incomplete) defeat in Gaza. Yet the system remains operational because its core remains intact: Iran.

A collapse of the Iranian regime would not merely change Iran; it would dissolve the ideological bloc as a coordinated system. Local militias might persist, but the funding, training, doctrine, and strategic direction would fracture. That is why Iran’s protests matter so deeply — and why their suppression matters even more.

And yet, because Israel is not directly involved, so much of the world looks away.

Iranians in the UK are so furious at the BBC’s near-total blackout of the protests that they have demonstrated outside its headquarters, waving Iranian flags and chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” They understand what much of the West pretends not to see: Silence is not neutrality, it is complicity.

The bitter irony is almost comical. Jews are accused of controlling the media, yet when Jews are absent, the media goes quiet. Jews are accused of manipulating global attention, yet the only conflicts that reliably dominate attention are those involving Jews. Jews are accused of moral exceptionalism, yet Jewish suffering (and Jewish alleged wrongdoing) are treated as uniquely world-historic. It is as if the world wishes its darkest fantasies about Jews were true, not because they are, but because without Jews there would be far less to scream about.

Iran is burning. Its people are dying. Its regime is violently suppressing dissent in a society with arguably the most valid reasons to protest. And the self-appointed “humanitarians” of the West are nowhere to be found. Indeed, much of the Left has not merely lost its compass, but inverted it — sliding into an illiberal, coercive politics that now poses a deeper danger than the forces it claims to resist.

A significant segment of Western activism operates within what has long been called the Red–Green alliance: a convergence between segments of the Left and Islamist movements, united less by shared values than by shared enemies. Liberal ideals (free speech, women’s rights, secular governance) are quietly subordinated to a politics of opposition to the West, capitalism, “settler-colonialism” and, most certainly, Israel.

In this framework, regimes like Iran are not judged by how they treat their own people, but by whom they oppose. Their repression becomes inconvenient, their victims politically useless. Condemning Iran would fracture the narrative, force a reckoning with Islamist power, and expose the contradiction of aligning with a theocracy that executes dissidents, imprisons women, and criminalizes homosexuality. So the abuses are minimized, ignored, or rationalized — not because the facts are unclear, but because true humanitarianism would require breaking ideological ranks.

Ironically, this is how the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s started: as a broad, populist uprising against the Shah’s authoritarianism, corruption, and reliance on Western powers. Students, intellectuals, workers, secular activists, and leftist groups mobilized in streets and universities, calling for justice, equality, and political freedom. Many Iranians hoped for meaningful reform.

The clerics, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were initially just one faction among many, but they had a decisive advantage: organization, discipline, and a coherent ideological vision. While secular and leftist groups debated, fractured, or underestimated the mullahs, Khomeini’s followers acted decisively, framing themselves as the guardians of the revolution’s moral and spiritual legitimacy. They used religious rhetoric to appeal to the masses, presenting themselves as the only force capable of protecting the nation from Western influence and moral decay.

Through a combination of mass mobilization, propaganda, and strategic intimidation, the clerics consolidated power. They co-opted revolutionary councils, sidelined or imprisoned secular leaders, and eliminated rival factions, often violently. Revolutionary courts were established, dissenters were publicly punished, and the rhetoric of divine authority turned into a mechanism of political control. What had started as a diverse, multi-ideological uprising became a theocratic system in which the clergy monopolized power under the guise of protecting the revolution’s values.

In short, the mullahs hijacked the revolution by exploiting the very energy that had fueled it. They converted popular anger into ideological discipline, co-opted the narrative of freedom and justice, and transformed a movement for reform into one of rigid religious authoritarianism — a regime far more intrusive, far more violent, and far more permanent than the one it replaced.

And yet, this tragic story is not confined to Tehran. It is currently taking place in London, New York City, Paris, and other Western cities. But it goes largely ignored because so many people can only see injustice when Jews are involved.

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