Tax-exempt special interest groups like lobbyists and non-profits are exercising power with little democratic oversight

The repression that began under the Biden administration has accelerated under Trump. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by federal agents – reportedly Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – despite his legal, permanent resident status will probably have its intended effect. People will speak up less; their fear of the irreversible harm meted out by a vengeful state is justified. Now we are all left to contend with the wreckage of the first amendment to the US constitution, which used to guarantee the right to speech in this country.

Responsibility for the erosion of our rights is attributable – in part – to the bipartisan embrace of the non-governmental, non-profit sector. That’s because from the 1940s onward, the federal government has ceded much state authority to philanthropies and non-profits. Those groups, in turn, have acted to craft policy – everything from how to develop equitable housing or the benefits of inoculating children to ensuring that speech targeting Israel is punishable by law.

The reconstruction of the 1976 trial of voluble and charismatic leftist Pierre Goldman tackles antisemitism and history

French cinema has recently given us some sensationally good courtroom dramas, such as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall , both of which put ideas as well as individuals on trial; race, gender and class. Now, Cédric Kahn has reconstructed – with some fictional licence – the 1976 trial of revolutionary leftist Pierre Goldman, who had previously been convicted of killing two pharmacists in the course of an armed robbery. After publishing his polemical autobiography Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France while in prison – which made him a cause célèbre among the fashionable Parisian classes – Goldman secured a retrial on the basis that the investigation was flawed and he had an alibi for the date and time of the killings, though he admitted to earlier robberies.

And it is this chaotic, clamorous and engrossing second trial that Kahn puts on screen, a trial that brings in antisemitism and French history. Arthur Harari plays Goldman’s patient and longsuffering advocate Georges Kiejman, who, like his excitable client, is of Polish-Jewish background; Stéphan Guérin-Tillié is the court president; and Arieh Worthalter is Goldman, voluble, charismatic and contemptuous of almost every aspect of the proceedings, though not refusing to recognise its authority.

A new report confirms hate incidents have more than doubled. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial we stand united with all minorities under attack

• Jonathan Wittenberg is a senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism

I was walking down Lambeth Palace Road, on the way to make a shared statement against antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred and all forms of racism, alongside a senior imam and the archbishop of Canterbury, when a young woman stopped me. “I’m so relieved to see you here with your skullcap on,” she said. “I’m Jewish and I’m so afraid.”

Figures published on Thursday by the Community Security Trust, showing a soaring rise in antisemitism, five-fold in some places, are not mere statistics. They’re about lives, schoolchildren, students, Jewish people across the whole of society, including Holocaust survivors, who’ve felt isolated, shunned, blamed and targeted since the horrors of 7 October. This has nothing to do with their views. I have congregants who feel passionately supportive of Israel, or utterly distressed at the suffering of Palestinians caught between Israel and Hamas; or, like many of us, both these emotions at once. That’s not the issue. The target has been Jews, any Jews.

Jonathan Wittenberg is a senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism

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Many say they feel stuck in middle between far-right National Rally and hard-left France Unbowed

As France faces a high-stakes second round of elections on Sunday , French Jewish people say they are grappling with tough choices and feel caught between extremes amid concerns about rising antisemitism.

As part of her longstanding efforts to detoxify the image of the far-right National Rally (RN) – currently leading in opinion polls – Marine Le Pen, to the incredulity of many, has sought to present herself as a friend of Jewish people and Israel.

The pronounced antisemitism in recent protests is an unsettling phenomenon

Congratulations to the group of radical protesters who claim to be for the Palestinian cause in New York City. They brag online that they “shut down” the Nova exhibit on Wall Street and played out their day of rage throughout the subway system, against some museums and museum directors, and on the New York City streets and even hit some UN missions.

In reality, they didn’t shut down the Nova exhibit. The exhibit will probably get more attendees than anticipated and its presentation has been extended. The exhibit, which originated in Israel, presents oral history and artifacts of the horrific 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on thousands of mostly generation Z and millennials who were at a rave enjoying music, drugs and dance.

The four-time 007 described him as ‘the greatest’ while George Lazenby said he ‘can handle the stunts and all the ladies who love a man in a tux’

Pierce Brosnan has become the latest former 007 to give his blessing to Aaron Taylor-Johnson taking over the role of the spy.

Brosnan, who played the intelligence agent in GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, was speaking on RTÉ Radio’s The Ray D’Arcy Show, and discussed acting alongside the younger star in 2009 film The Greatest, in which they played father and son.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Contributor | Getty Images Europe )

Recently, Elon Musk has made it clear that he blames advocates speaking out about hate speech for plummeting ad revenue on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But today, Reuters published an exclusive interview with a former Twitter ad exec, AJ Brown, who seemed to push back on Musk's narrative.

The platform's former head of brand safety and ad quality suggested that X advertisers aren't just pulling back as a knee-jerk reaction to critics' claims that the platform has become increasingly toxic under Musk. Brown told Reuters that X shifting its content moderation policy to "limiting reach" of offensive content—rather than removing the content—"made it challenging to convince brands" that Musk's social media platform "was safe for ads."

"Helping people wrap their minds around the concept that violating a policy would no longer result in the removal of whatever was violating the policy, was a difficult message to communicate to people," Brown told Reuters.

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Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu Agency )

Last month, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sued a group of hate speech researchers in the United Kingdom, claiming that they had instigated advertiser boycotts that allegedly lost the platform "tens of millions" of dollars. Now, X owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue another group advocating against hate speech, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which Musk claimed did even more damage—allegedly causing X to lose billions in ad revenue.

Musk spent the long weekend posting on X about his concerns with the ADL. He claimed that the ADL "has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-Semitic," saying that "based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, the ADL seems to be responsible for most" of X's revenue loss.

"Our US advertising revenue is still down 60 percent, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!" Musk posted on X.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel )

In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.

Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and October 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic”—that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”

But from October 27 until February 9, 2023, the average was 12,762—an increase of 105 percent. In all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as “plausibly antisemitic” over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to February 9, 2023.

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