October 7: Claims vs. the Record

• The Official Audit of October 7 Contradicts United Hatzalah’s Account — 2026-07-01

• The Lies That Israel’s Enemies Couldn’t Have Written Better Themselves — 2026-04-23

• How Some Jewish Organizations Lied about 10/7 to Raise Money — 2026-02-27

• When Tragedy Becomes a Fundraising Strategy — 2025-12-14

• Eli Beer Fabricates Facts to Donors Abroad — 2025-09-08

• False Witness: Eli Beer’s Fabricated Baby Stomach-Cut Story Confirmed False by IDF Source — 2025-09-07

• מנכ״ל איחוד הצלה שגזל תהילה מהנופלים — 2025-09-07

• Magen David Adom Tells the Truth About 10/7 — 2025-09-03

• United Hatzalah’s President Stated Volunteers Took Down 100+ Terrorists on October 7th — 2025-09-03

• Helping Nachman Seltzer Fact-Check ‘Angels in Orange’ — 2025-09-02

• United Hatzalah’s Biggest Lie - EXPOSED — 2025-09-01

• United Hatzalah’s CEO Who Stole Valor From the Fallen — 2025-09-01

• Did Misleading Stories Push the Sandbergs Toward United Hatzalah? — 2025-08-31

• The Holocaust Survivor Who Doesn’t Have a Name — 2025-08-31

• United Hatzalah Used Ben Shapiro’s Show, Morning Joe to Spread False Rape Story — 2025-08-31

• Did United Hatzalah Claim Magen David Adom Failed on October 7th? — 2025-08-29

• When Conferences Elevate False Witnesses, Israel Suffers — 2025-08-24

• The Strategic Blunder: Why Every Lie Feeds the Enemy — 2025-08-12

• שקרים בצל הטבח — 2025-08-08

• Lies in the Shadow of Massacre — 2025-08-08

• Israel’s Self-Inflicted Wound After October 7th — 2025-07-29

Finances, Fundraising and Governance

• Corporate Salaries, Zero Accountability — 2026-10-22

• The Charity With the Good Branding and the Bad Math — 2026-03-26

• Who’s Watching the Money? — 2026-01-13

• United Hatzalah’s Emergency Appeal, Investment Reality — 2025-09-08

• United Hatzalah’s Vanishing Ambulance Episode — 2025-09-05

• United Hatzalah’s Leadership in France — 2025-09-04

• Behind the 19% Boost — 2025-09-03

• Ambulance Chasers: The Marketing of United Hatzalah, Chapter One — 2025-09-01

• When Nonprofits Become Performative — 2025-08-31

• The “100% Volunteer” Mirage at United Hatzalah — 2025-08-31

• Did United Hatzalah Mislead Robert Kraft With Inflated Numbers? — 2025-08-29

• United Hatzalah’s Geneva Leadership — 2025-08-28

• Questions in Orange, Dollars in Real Estate — 2025-08-28

• Don’t Ask, Just Donate — 2025-08-28

• The Orange Wings Question — 2025-08-28

• United Hatzalah’s Global Puzzle — 2025-08-27

• When Transparency Saves More Lives — 2025-08-27

• Emergency Medicine by the Numbers — or by the Marketing Team? — 2025-08-25

• Something is Off With Israeli Fundraising — 2025-06-16

Emergency Services, MDA and the 1221 Number

• Duki Greenwald, Founder of Hatzalah in Israel, Dies at 57 — 2026-09-29

• Israel Moves to Consolidate Emergency Response Under MDA — 2026-08-05

• The Truth about Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) Response in Israel — 2025-12-09

• United Hatzalah Chairman Accused MDA of ‘Killing People’ After Court Rejected the Claim — 2025-09-05

• United Hatzalah Responds: ‘You Don’t Deserve to be Jewish’ — 2025-09-03

• United Hatzalah, 1221, and the Emergency Number Workaround — 2025-08-29

• “United” or Divided? What’s Behind the Hatzalah Name — 2025-08-28

• Judge Rules (2021): MDA Didn’t Kill — But United Hatzalah’s Words Did Damage — 2025-08-28

Donors and the Draft Question

• Likud Minister Under Investigation — 2025-08-25

• The Draft Crisis Is Not a Fundraising Gimmick — 2025-08-22

• Are American Donors Enabling Draft Evasion in Israel? — 2025-08-12

Broader Nonprofit Accountability Coverage

• Federal Judge Demolishes Botach: Defenses Stricken, Counterclaims Dead, Default Judgment Entered in Fontainebleau Case — 2026-09-17

• DOJ Opens Criminal Probe into Simad Holdings and the Shabsels Brothers — 2026-07-28

• ZAKA Board Member Sues Organization, Claims $26 Million in Post-October 7 Donations Went Missing — 2026-06-28

• America’s Most Litigious Rabbi — 2026-04-22

• What Tyler Oliveira Got Dangerously Wrong About Hatzalah — 2026-02-24

• Nick Shirley’s Lesson for the Jewish World — 2026-01-06

• The Lie That ‘Unity’ Requires Silence — 2025-12-25

• Unity Without Integrity Is a Lie: The Jewish Community’s Moment of Reckoning — 2025-12-02

A federal magistrate judge in Miami has ruled that the Fontainebleau Miami Beach may subpoena four artificial intelligence providers for Shmuley Boteach's chatbot conversations about the hotel, its lawyers and its staff. The ruling comes as the hotel pursues uncapped punitive damages that, by its own calculation, could exceed $20 million.

In a 25-page order entered October 21, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein overruled Boteach's blanket objections to the requests in part. She held that the work-product doctrine "Does Not Categorically Protect" his AI communications. The hotel may serve subpoenas on the four AI service providers, but only for communications since December 3, 2024, "concerning or relating to (a) the Fontainebleau Hotel; (b) counsel for Plaintiff; or (c) any employee, owner, or representative of the Fontainebleau Hotel."

A day later, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey T. Kuntz denied Boteach's motion to reconsider two earlier sanctions orders. Kuntz wrote that "both orders are based on Defendant's social media posts."

The case, Fontainebleau Florida Hotel, LLC v. Botach, No. 1:25-cv-20251, is a defamation suit in the Southern District of Florida. Court papers name the defendant as Jacob Shmuel Botach, also known as "Shmuley Boteach."

The order did not give the hotel everything it wanted. Elfenbein sustained Boteach's objections to requests for his AI chats about the litigation itself and about the judges, among others. She also denied the hotel's motion to compel Boteach to sign consents authorizing the providers to release his records. Any subpoenas, she wrote, "remain subject to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45," and nothing in the order "compels a nonparty provider to produce information or resolves objections that may be raised by a subpoena recipient." Boteach may withhold materials he claims as work product if he provides a privilege log. The order does not name the four providers.

The stakes are high. Boteach is already in default on liability after the court struck his answer as a sanction for repeated violations of a social media gag order, according to court filings and Law360. What remains is damages.

In a supplemental brief filed October 12, the hotel said it "is seeking uncapped punitive damages" against Boteach, whom it described as "a very wealthy person and trust fund beneficiary." Citing an Eleventh Circuit decision upholding a punitive-to-compensatory ratio of 9.2 to 1, the hotel argued that such a ratio "would permit the Fontainebleau to obtain a damages award against Botach in excess of $20 million." That figure is the hotel's projection, not a finding by the court.

Florida normally caps punitive damages. Under section 768.73(1)(c) of the Florida Statutes, the cap does not apply where the factfinder determines the defendant had "a specific intent to harm the claimant" and did in fact harm the claimant. The hotel argues that Boteach's AI prompts, revisions and related communications "may reveal his intent, motive, and efforts to continue or amplify the alleged harm," as Elfenbein summarized its position.

Elfenbein agreed that some of that material is relevant. She wrote that Boteach's culpability and his alleged specific intent to injure the hotel "are not collateral matters" in the damages phase. She added that her ruling does not establish malice or specific intent. It determines only that the communications bear a sufficient relationship to the remaining damages issues.

Kuntz's ruling on reconsideration was procedural. He denied the motion "without prejudice for lack of jurisdiction pending the disposition of the Defendant's interlocutory appeal." Boteach filed the motion on October 19, the same day he appealed a September 18 order that revised the gag order restricting his social media references to the hotel and its counsel. Because the two sanctions orders "build on one another," Kuntz wrote, ruling on either would alter the status of the issue now before the Eleventh Circuit.

Elfenbein said the pending appeal does not stop damages discovery, which concerns issues distinct from the appeal. She directed the parties to meet and confer on how the providers should handle potential work-product objections. A follow-up discovery hearing is tentatively set for October 26.

A jury trial on damages is scheduled for February 2027.

Their lawyers are asking for 15 years each.

The recommendations are disclosed in a 155-page joint sentencing memorandum filed October 13 in Manhattan federal court, ahead of the brothers’ scheduled October 27 sentencing before U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni. The defense calls the proposed terms “cruel, unprecedented, unprincipled” and argues that they go far beyond what is necessary to punish the brothers or protect the public.

The numbers are probation’s recommendations as described by the defense, not sentences Caproni has imposed. The memorandum challenges both the calculations behind them and the justification for prison terms that would extend well beyond the brothers’ lifetimes.

The brothers were convicted on March 9 of multiple federal sex offenses, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Eleven women testified during the trial that one or more of the brothers sexually abused them. Oren and Tal were prominent luxury real-estate brokers who co-founded Official. Alon worked as an executive at a private security company.

After the verdict, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said the evidence and testimony showed that the brothers conspired to repeatedly lure, drug and rape young women. In a statement announcing the convictions, he called their conduct “chilling, reprehensible, and unacceptable” and praised the women who testified.

The defense memorandum does not concede the crimes. It says the brothers “steadfastly maintain their complete innocence” and continues to deny rape, sexual assault and secretly administering drugs to women. Their request for 15 years is a sentencing argument made despite those denials, with the jury’s convictions standing against them.

Much of the fight over the recommended punishment concerns the scope of the conspiracy and how additional allegations should affect each brother’s sentence.

According to the filing, probation divided the conduct into 13 sentencing groups for Oren, 12 for Alon and 11 for Tal. The defense argues that only three groups should count for Oren and Alon, and four for Tal. Its position is that probation attributed additional sex-trafficking conduct to the brothers that the jury did not specifically find each defendant committed.

The lawyers challenge the reliability of some of those allegations and argue that the conspiracy verdict does not establish every act probation included in its analysis. They identify that treatment of the conspiracy as a driving force behind the 180- and 195-year recommendations. They also dispute sentencing increases involving vulnerable victims, force, physical restraint and computer use.

Caproni will have to weigh those objections when determining the appropriate sentences. Probation officers investigate defendants’ backgrounds and offenses and recommend punishment to the court, but the judge makes the sentencing decision. Federal law requires a sentence sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to meet the purposes of punishment, deterrence, public safety and rehabilitation.

The defense argues that 15 years would satisfy those requirements. It describes that term as the minimum permitted by certain statutes under which the brothers were convicted, while stressing that it would still mean a prolonged separation from their families.

All three have young children. The memorandum devotes substantial space to their roles as fathers and the effect their imprisonment has had on their households. The lawyers argue that a 15-year term would already cost the brothers much of their children’s childhoods. They also contend that family responsibilities and changes in the brothers’ lives before their arrests make further offending unlikely.

The brothers have been held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since their arrests in December 2024. Their lawyers insist that the years they seek should not be mistaken for a light punishment.

“A fifteen-year sentence is a frightfully long and serious sentence,” they write.

Whether Caproni accepts that argument will be determined at sentencing. The punishment probation has proposed, as the defense describes it, would leave none of the three brothers alive to complete his term.

The unsigned agreement called for a company, Hospitality House, LLC, to receive 50 percent of the gross benefit from any business obtained through people or institutions connected to Rwanda’s government. It was sent to Botach Inc. on March 19, 2017, and was the subject of a dispute two days later, according to emails and the draft contract reviewed for this article.

The documents do not name Boteach as a signatory to the agreement or establish that he personally drafted or approved it. But a New Jersey corporate-status report dated September 18, 2026, lists Jacob S. Botach as Hospitality House’s reported principal. A 2026 federal court order identifies Jacob Shmuel Botach as “a/k/a Shmuley Boteach.” The state report uses the same 394 East Palisade Avenue address in Englewood, N.J., that appears in the 2017 agreement. It identifies Hospitality House as Boteach’s LLC. The report also says the company’s Division of Revenue suspension began in 2006 and ended in 2023. It therefore does not resolve the company’s corporate or operating status when the agreement circulated in March 2017.

The documents also do not show that Kagame, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations or any other Rwandan official knew of the proposal, or that any resulting business was conducted.

The overlap raises a conflict-of-interest question that can confront leaders of nonprofit and mission-driven organizations: whether relationships cultivated in a public, charitable or diplomatic capacity can be privately monetized through an affiliated business. The materials reviewed do not include World Values Network board minutes, conflict-of-interest policies, disclosure forms or evidence that the organization’s resources were used in the proposed arrangement. They do not establish an ethical or legal violation. They do, however, place a Boteach-linked LLC’s proposed 50 percent fee beside Boteach’s public role in building and displaying the Rwanda relationship.

But the documents and a series of public posts place the proposed fee arrangement alongside Boteach’s campaign to promote a May 21 World Values Network gala that honored Kagame, invoked the legacy of Elie Wiesel and featured a roster of political, diplomatic and public figures. The material shows how a relationship celebrated in public was, at least in the proposed agreement, being positioned as a potential private business asset.

On March 8, Boteach advertised the World Values Network’s “5th Annual Champion of Jewish Values International Awards Gala” on X, calling it “a special tribute to Elie Wiesel z”l” and urging people to save the date, May 21. The next day, the Jewish Standard reported that the organization, which it described as founded and led by Boteach, would honor Kagame at Cipriani in Manhattan with the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Award for Outstanding Friendship with the Jewish People.

On March 19, Boteach’s daughter, whose name is not used in this article, sent the Hospitality House agreement to a Botach Inc. representative. It described Hospitality House as a business consultant and facilitator that would make introductions for potential deals involving people affiliated with, and institutions comprising, the Rwandan government. Exhibit A to the agreement identified a single contact category: “The Government of Rwanda.”

The financial terms were broad. Botach would pay Hospitality House “Fifty percent (50%) of the monetary value of any gross benefit received from Confidential Contacts,” the document said. A contact identified by Hospitality House could become “confidential and proprietary” to the facilitator if Botach did not object within two business days. The proposal barred Botach from using or disclosing those contacts for three years and, for five years after the agreement’s term, from bypassing Hospitality House to deal with them directly. It also contemplated an accountant’s review of Botach sales records to verify payments.

A Botach representative pushed back in an email dated March 21. “50% of the gross is way too high,” he wrote, offering instead “25% of the net profit.” He called the agreement “totally one sided” and said a potential audit of internal records was “unacceptable and ridiculous.”

Boteach’s daughter replied: “You already agreed on 50% why are you going back now”. The quotation is reproduced in full, but her name is omitted.

The same day, Boteach was promoting the public event. In a March 21 post on X, he wrote that the gala would commemorate Wiesel’s “life and legacy” and directed readers to the event’s website. The overlap does not establish that the public gala and the private proposal were coordinated. It does establish that the dispute over a 50 percent fee unfolded on the same calendar day that Boteach was promoting a Wiesel-branded gala for Kagame.

The public campaign continued into May. Promotional materials for the event list Boteach as “Master of Ceremonies” and Elisha Wiesel as keynote speaker. They name Martin Luther King III, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, Alan Dershowitz, Ron Dermer and others as presenters or honorees. Kagame is listed as the “Special Recognition Honoree,” receiving the Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Friend of the Jewish People Award.

On May 1, Boteach wrote that the event would complete a Sefer Torah “on Elie Wiesel’s name,” “marked for people of Rwanda from the Jewish people.” A week later, he said he had met and invited Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations to the gala honoring Kagame. On May 14, he again promoted the writing of the Torah’s final letters in Wiesel’s name. Four days later, he highlighted a Ron Dermer message saluting the gala and its tribute to Wiesel.

Kagame’s official website records his May 21 appearance at the World Values Network gala in New York. The president’s prepared remarks name Boteach as the organization’s president and thank “Rabbi Shmuley and the World Values Network.” Kagame said Rwanda looked forward to collaborating on an international genocide center in Kigali.

At 10:52 p.m. that night, Boteach posted on X: “Presenting @PaulKagame with our gala Torah.”

The agreement was unsigned, and the supplied record contains no evidence that Botach entered a Rwanda-related transaction, paid Hospitality House or used any of the contacts identified in the draft.

Still, the documents establish the essential sequence. A high-profile gala placed Boteach, Kagame and the Wiesel legacy at the center of a public presentation of friendship between Rwanda and the Jewish community. In the weeks before the event, Botach Inc. received a proposal that would have given Hospitality House half of the gross benefit from access to Rwandan government contacts. The proposed arrangement appears to have failed. Its terms, however, offer a rare view of the private commercial value that someone sought to attach to those introductions.

The defendant, Saleem Alzaq, is accused of helping run that operation from Gaza with an unnamed associate in France. Prosecutors say the two raised about $1.75 million between January 2020 and December 2025 through campaigns that appeared to support humanitarian causes. Roughly $626,000 of that total, the indictment says, came from U.S.-based donors.

Prosecutors say it was not one secret account or route. Instead, they describe public pleas for food, winter supplies and animal sacrifices, social-media reach across borders, and payment methods swapped out when old ones drew scrutiny.

Alzaq is alleged to be a long-time Hamas member and a battalion deputy in the Photography Department of the Shujaia Brigade’s media office. The indictment says he used his social-media accounts to circulate Hamas propaganda and to raise funds. Hamas has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States since 1997. Prosecutors contend that the charitable campaigns, whatever their public presentation, supplied money to the group.

The French co-conspirator, identified in court papers as CC-1, allegedly served as the overseas collection point. In late 2021, prosecutors say, Alzaq asked CC-1 to open a PayPal account because of difficulties using the service amid sanctions related to Gaza and Hamas. The plan was for CC-1 to control the account, report back on the donations and send accumulated money to Alzaq through Western Union.

The arrangement, prosecutors say, was meant to leave fewer obvious tracks. Donors were sometimes told to send money to relatives of CC-1. Alzaq allegedly offered different names for people in Gaza who could receive the transfers. That would make it harder, the indictment says, for French authorities to see one person repeatedly sending money to Gaza and for Western Union to block the account.

Then came cryptocurrency. Alzaq allegedly asked CC-1 to use Bitcoin or another digital currency, saying it would obscure the sender, recipient and final location. After an exchange questioned the source of money in 2023, CC-1 allegedly changed platforms.

The indictment gives particular attention to the days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel. Prosecutors say Alzaq posted graphic images and videos from the attack on Snapchat and sought contributions for a fresh campaign on a French crowdfunding site. The campaign purportedly was for Gazans injured on October 7 and closed within days.

In messages described by prosecutors, Alzaq reportedly tried to manage the different audiences on different platforms. He allegedly told CC-1 that Telegram could carry material showing killings and attacks against Jews and Zionists, while Snapchat would focus on Palestinian suffering. The reason, prosecutors say, was practical: he did not want the Snapchat accounts shut down. He also warned that prospective donors worried about being linked to terrorism.

Less than a week after the attack, CC-1 registered a French organization called Organization-1, according to the indictment. It said it would provide aid to people in Palestine, principally Gaza. Prosecutors say it was created at Alzaq’s suggestion to collect money for him. That contrast, between the organization’s stated relief mission and the government’s account of its purpose, sits at the heart of the case.

There is also an allegation about coded language. In 2025, an undercover officer posing as a Hamas supporter in New York contacted Alzaq on Snapchat. Alzaq allegedly spoke of giving money to “the Green,” a reference to Hamas, and used phrases involving “bread,” “bakeries” and “buy bread.” He also allegedly advised the officer to learn the language and delete messages. In exchanges with another U.S.-based Hamas supporter, prosecutors say, he used similar terms and said he could deliver whatever amount was wanted.

Alzaq faces four conspiracy counts: providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering and defrauding the United States. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of assets tied to the alleged conduct.

26cr425 Sealed Indictment Redacted

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The original Hatzalah concept was created in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Rabbi Hershel Weber in 1965. Weber recognized that in a medical emergency, local volunteers with proper training could often arrive faster than an ambulance. What began as a neighborhood service grew into a model copied by Jewish communities around the world. Greenwald brought that same sense of urgency and communal responsibility to Israel.

A Jerusalem Post article from 2006 identified Greenwald as chairman of Hatzolah, a haredi paramedic organization operating ambulances and first-aid motorcycles throughout the country. The organization also worked closely with Rabbi Moshe Halberstam, who answered halachic questions involving medicine and helped make sure its activities followed Jewish law. Greenwald described Halberstam as someone who was respected by a wide range of religious Jews, from religious Zionists to Sephardim.

Greenwald’s contribution was not simply organizational. He helped make emergency response a personal obligation for volunteers who were prepared to leave what they were doing and go where they were needed. The system he built has saved lives and continues to serve people across Israel. He leaves behind his family, his community, and a standard of service that will be difficult to replace.

Related coverage

• Israel Moves to Consolidate Emergency Response Under MDA

• The Truth about Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) Response in Israel

• United Hatzalah Chairman Accused MDA of ‘Killing People’ After Court Rejected the Claim

• The Official Audit of October 7 Contradicts United Hatzalah’s Account

More: United Hatzalah: The Full Investigation

U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore struck Boteach’s answer and all of his affirmative defenses, threw out his civil rights counterclaims with prejudice, and entered default judgment against him on liability in the suit brought by the Fontainebleau Miami Beach. There will be a trial in February 2027, but it won’t be about whether Boteach did anything wrong. That question is settled. The jury’s only job now is to put a number on it.

The 23-page order, which refers to Boteach by his legal name, Jacob Shmuel Botach, reads less like a legal ruling than a running tally of a man’s worst decisions. Moore wrote that Boteach showed “zero indicia of someone who plans to comply with Court orders.” He referred to Boteach’s “record of misrepresentations.” At one point he described Boteach “feigning incredulity” that anyone could accuse him of breaking the rules.

Some context is owed here, because the beginning of this matters. In December 2024 a guest named Faiz Akbar walked up to Boteach in the hotel lobby, called him a “baby killer,” and used other language that even the Fontainebleau, in its own complaint, concedes was “easily interpreted as antisemitic.” Akbar is not the good guy in this story. Boteach had a real grievance and a real reason to be angry.

He just didn’t stop there. According to the hotel, he shouted “Allahu Akbar? Are you going to blow yourself up or something?” at the man. And then he took what should have been a bad night and turned it into a year and a half of conduct a federal judge eventually found to be dishonest, harassing and beyond the court’s ability to control.

A short list. Boteach asked for a protective order, got it, and posted surveillance footage the next day anyway. He posted it again a few months later and got hit with a $15,000 fee sanction. He told the court his back was too bad to sit for a deposition, then posted videos of himself ice skating, kayaking and riding a bike. One of his lawyers sent the other side what Moore called “a three-page non-sensical rant” demanding $100 million and got referred to the grievance committee for it. Boteach also tried to serve a third-party defendant at an address he knew was the man’s child’s.

So in February, Moore ordered him to “cease such harassing conduct and social media references to Plaintiff and its counsel.” The judge’s own account of what came next: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, Defendant continued to post.”

Ten different days. Posts calling the hotel antisemitic. Posts saying its billionaire owner, Jeffrey Soffer, who is Jewish, was using his money to rig the case. And the ugliest of them, a series of posts tying the hotel’s lawyer, Sean Burstyn, to the Jeffrey Epstein files and asking what role lawyers like him played in pushing Virginia Giuffre toward suicide.

Boteach’s defense of that one was that his assistant had accidentally republished an old draft while setting up a new phone. Both of them swore to it. Moore didn’t buy it. The declarations were “not credible,” he wrote, pointing out that the post sat up for weeks and went out within hours of a separate violation. Read plainly, the court found that two sworn statements filed on Boteach’s behalf were false.

Then, somehow, it got worse. On June 11 and 12, after the hotel had already filed its motion for case-ending sanctions and while Boteach’s own lawyers were writing his response to it, he posted that Burstyn had committed extortion, intimidation and witness tampering and should “stop billing hours and start interviewing criminal defense lawyers.” Moore wrote that the “temerity” of doing this mid-briefing “would strain credulity” if he weren’t already so familiar with how Boteach operates.

Boteach’s objections went nowhere. He said the February order violated the First Amendment. Moore pointed out that court orders have to be followed “regardless of the ultimate validity of the order,” and that if you think an order is wrong, you appeal it. You don’t ignore it. He said the order only covered harassing posts. Moore said fine, the Epstein posts and the extortion posts were harassment under any definition. He said nobody warned him his pleadings could be struck. Moore cited two written warnings that said exactly that. He said his fight against antisemitism justified what he did. Moore wrote that it does “not give him a license to disregard” the court.

Then the line that will stick: “The Court has tried the carrot. Now, faced with a party who is ‘repeatedly and stubbornly defiant’... the Court must try the stick.”

Moore also noted something Boteach’s followers might want to sit with. Online, Boteach presents himself as a Jew being bullied into silence by a powerful hotel. The man making that claim, the judge observed, had posted a photo of the opposing lawyer’s wife and accused the lawyer of complicity in a woman’s death.

None of this will surprise anyone who has watched Boteach’s career. The man who calls himself “the most famous rabbi in America” has built that fame in large part by picking fights, and he is not selective about whom he fights. In this case alone, according to his own posts quoted in the order, he went after a Jewish hotel owner, a Jewish attorney, a Jewish influencer and a Jewish media outlet, all while casting himself as antisemitism’s lonely defender. That is the pattern. He makes enemies inside the Jewish community as easily as outside it, treats every critic as a traitor or a bigot, and has done it for years without paying any real price.

Akbar said something vile. Boteach answered by spending nineteen months proving to a federal court that he could not obey an order, could not be trusted in an affidavit, and could not put the phone down. When the history of this era of American Jewish life is written, he will be remembered as one of its most damaging figures, a man who turned the fight against antisemitism into a personal brand and burned through allies, institutions and credibility along the way, always with seeming impunity.

On Wednesday, for the first time, the impunity ran out.

Fine. People sue over commissions all the time. What makes this one worth your attention is that to claim the commission, Boteach has to explain what he was selling. And he’s very clear about it.

The arrangement, according to his own complaint, was that “Plaintiff would use his unique personal relationship and influence, his publishing expertise, his reputation, his access to the Adelson family, and his efforts to help Defendant obtain and monetize Miriam Adelson-related work.” He calls himself a “relationship broker.” He says there was a “mutual understanding that Plaintiff was not expected to provide introductions, relationship access, publishing advice, and closing assistance for free.”

Not for free. That’s Shmuley’s position, in a pleading his lawyers signed.

Some context for anyone who hasn’t followed this. Boteach runs a 501(c)(3) called the World Values Network. For years its biggest donors, by a good margin, were Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. In 2017 they gave $750,000, which was close to forty percent of everything the organization took in. Boteach has written about them the way you write about family. Sheldon was warm and charming and one of the smartest men he’d met. Miriam was a dear friend. Those weren’t fundraising relationships in his telling. They were the real thing.

And maybe they were. But the complaint shows what else was going on. It says Boteach and Williams “already had a course of dealing in which Plaintiff would use his contacts, publishing experience, public stature, and relationship capital to help Defendant obtain writing or ghostwriting opportunities, with Plaintiff receiving a percentage or fee.” He quotes a message he sent Williams in 2012 about an earlier book: “If I pull off this deal, I’m going to take a 15 percent agency fee.”

Then the Adelsons. In 2013 Williams wrote Boteach a to-do list for a Sheldon Adelson autobiography. One item: “Report to Sheldon on the above, so he understands that this book would be a valuable project.” Another: get a “curtain-raiser” story into Israel Hayom, the paper the Adelsons own. In 2014 Williams asked him to “revive the book idea with the Adelsons - but with the book being a memoir by MIRIAM, rather than Sheldon.” Boteach says he did that too. Williams pitched Miriam directly at $750,000, for a book that would carry “only her name as author,” and promised he “would not disclose his involvement.”

Nowhere in 24 pages does the complaint say the Adelsons knew their friend had a 25 percent stake in the writer’s fee. I don’t think that’s an oversight. I think nobody involved thought it mattered.

Here’s why it matters to me. When someone funds your organization at that level, they’re not just buying a table at the gala. They’re letting you in. They take your calls, they read what you send them, they trust that when you say “you should meet this person” you mean it. That trust is theirs. It came from them. The idea that the executive director of the charity they’re funding was quietly charging a ghostwriter for the privilege of being walked through that door, and asking to be paid a quarter of the fee for it, is about as slimy a thing as I can imagine a nonprofit leader doing to a donor. It’s not a gray area. You don’t sell access to your friends.

And then there’s how the money was supposed to move. The complaint says the fee was to be “given to him or his Israel-based children as beneficiaries.” Williams at one point proposed “that he deposit money directly in Chana’s Israeli bank account.” Boteach’s lawyers even hedge that if the 25 percent was “owed to Chana separately,” he’s still the “equitable owner” of it.

The complaint says “Dr. Adelson is not accused of wrongdoing.” No, she isn’t. She was the thing being sold. The Adelson’s are arguably the greatest philanthropists in the history of the Jewish people and Boteach stooped so low as to sell access to their trust.

If you give serious money to an organization built around one person, this is the filing to keep in your desk drawer. Ask yourself what else you’re handing over when you write the check.

Vance’s relationship with Tucker Carlson is a public and politically consequential alliance, not an obscure association unearthed by opposition researchers. Carlson elevated Vance during his 2022 Senate campaign and pressed Donald Trump to select him as vice president in 2024. Vance calls Carlson a friend, concedes they have disagreements, and argues that a podcaster with millions of listeners cannot be cast outside conservatism merely because people dislike his views.

That proposition is evasive and revealing. The question is whether a movement retains any moral or intellectual boundary at all. Carlson’s popularity does not absolve him of cordially platforming Fuentes, an influencer who makes jokes and remarks about the Holocaust in ways that cast doubt on whether it occurred. It does not erase his hosting of Holocaust apologists or make smears of Jews and conspiratorial insinuations about Israel a mere disagreement among friends. These are judgments about fellow citizens, historical truth, and the legitimacy of hatred.

The vice president’s answer, delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition, was the answer of a man who wishes to preserve every option. Asked where he draws the line on appearing with figures including Carlson, Rogan, and Fuentes, Vance declined to address Carlson. He said he would not speak to a man who had attacked his wife or said Hitler was good, but that, outside a few “bright lines,” he tries to speak to as many people as possible.

This is not moral seriousness. It is moral idiocy, because it establishes a grotesque hierarchy of offense. A personal attack on the vice president’s wife is, rightly, beyond the pale. But a powerful friend can circulate anti-Jewish smears, host Holocaust apologists, and lend credence to the false conspiracy theory that Israel knew of the 9/11 attacks in advance and concealed the knowledge from America, and Vance cannot bring himself to say the friendship has reached a bridge too far. What, exactly, are his bright lines bright enough to illuminate? They appear to become visible only when the insult arrives at his own doorstep.

A national leader should not need a family grievance to recognize a moral obscenity. Fuentes does not become unacceptable because he insulted Usha Vance. He is unacceptable because he makes a political project of degrading Jews, minorities, women, and the constitutional idea of equal citizenship. Carlson does not become beyond criticism merely because he supported the Republican ticket. He becomes a grave problem when he uses a vast platform to dignify the undignified and then treats objections as proof of an establishment conspiracy.

This is where the influencer class deserves the contempt it has earned. Its vice is not that it is right wing, left wing, populist, libertarian, or contrarian. It has made transgression into a business model and cowardice into a pose of bravery. The influencer makes the offense itself the product, converts outrage into attention and subscriptions, then calls the predictable disgust censorship. Every boundary becomes a challenge. Every rebuke becomes content.

It is also a profoundly thoughtless class, one that mistakes risk-free provocation for courage. Most influencers will say the outrageous thing if it flatters their audience or enrages a designated enemy. They seldom take a genuinely controversial stand when the target is a profitable ally, a fellow traveler, or a host with a larger platform. Ben Shapiro, and a small number of others, have been willing to say no to this filth even when doing so risks friendships, bookings, and audience goodwill. That is the exception. For too many of their peers, the money and clout are simply too compelling. Principles are permitted only when they do not endanger the brand.

The result is a politics of permanent adolescence. They demand the privileges of power while refusing responsibility. They want to shape millions of minds, but not to distinguish argument from defamation. They want to be taken seriously as tribunes of the people, yet hide behind irony and questions when their words carry consequences. They invoke free speech as an exemption from moral judgment.

A free society has no obligation to be fooled by this performance. Calling a spade a spade is not censorship. It is civic hygiene. A man who casts doubt on the Holocaust is not a dissident intellectual. An antisemitic conspiracist is not simply an America First patriot with unusual foreign-policy views. A broadcaster who gives such a person a warm, lengthy platform is not practicing fearless journalism. He is granting legitimacy to poison, then charging the public admission to watch it spread.

Too many politicians cannot say these plain things because they are captive to the audience machines that decide their standing. They fear a hostile clip, a viral pile-on, a donor’s displeasure, or lost access to a massive microphone. So they substitute atmospherics for judgment. They praise “dialogue” and invoke “coalition-building.” The euphemism is not sophistication. It is surrender.

Vance faces a straightforward choice, not a complicated balancing act. He can value Carlson’s strategic usefulness over principles Carlson has repeatedly treated as disposable. Or he can say that no political coalition is strengthened by offering respectability to anti-Jewish hatred and racial extremism. He can be grateful for past assistance while refusing present complicity. Adults are capable of that distinction. Presidents must be.

The larger conservative cause also has a choice. It can become a movement in which every moral limit is negotiable if the offender has enough followers, enough clout, or enough willingness to hurt the right enemies. Or it can recover the elemental truth that political power is not an end in itself. A coalition willing to excuse bigotry for reach will eventually discover that the bigot is not joining the coalition. He is consuming it.

Fuentes is right only in the narrow, ugly sense that he recognizes the transaction. Vance wants the energy without the stench. But the stench is not incidental. It is the thing being sold.

Daniel Mael sits down with John Ziegler, host of the Death of Journalism podcast and the investigator behind With the Benefit of Hindsight, to re-examine one of the most infamous stories in sports and media history. Ziegler makes the case that the conventional version of the Penn State scandal is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong - and he walks through why the details surrounding Mike McQueary’s testimony, the date of the alleged incident, and the role of Joe Paterno matter far more than most people ever realized.

You’ll discover:

• Why Ziegler says the famous McQueary shower story collapses under basic scrutiny

• How the alleged date of the incident changed by more than a year, and why that matters

• Why he believes the prosecution, media, and Penn State all got swept into a moral panic

• What he thinks really drove the accusations against Sandusky

• How the Joe Paterno firing changed the entire public narrative overnight

Ziegler also breaks down the role of Aaron Fisher, the Second Mile charity, and victim number 10 Ryan Rittmeyer, arguing that the case was shaped by vulnerable people, questionable incentives, and investigators desperate to build a story that fit the moment. He explains why Penn State folded so quickly, why Paterno’s family has remained divided, and why he believes the true story has been buried under years of public certainty.

If you followed the Penn State scandal, remember Joe Paterno’s downfall, or want to understand how media narratives harden into “truth,” this conversation is essential listening. It’s a provocative re-examination of a case that still shapes how people think about journalism, institutions, and due process.

The commercial showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark knocking golfer Alexis Miestowski down as she moved to touch a co-branded Callaway driver. It was a parody of Obsession, a film about irrational fixation. The result was a joke without wit and an image without judgment. It should never have left the edit. Callaway approved it and later admitted that approval should never have happened.

The ad deserved to be pulled, and both companies owed an apology. But a tasteless skit is not a creed. It proves neither that Clark endorses violence against women nor that Good Good despises women in golf. Those threatening Miestowski in women’s safety’s name are merely bullies with a pretext.

Clark’s response should not be waved away as a satisfactory apology. He called the ad “super dumb,” “terrible,” and “not the greatest idea,” and said he does not support domestic violence or abuse. Necessary words.

The revealing part came when he explained how the catastrophe began:

“Good Good marketing team reached out to us, and they said, ‘We have this idea to essentially recreate or do a spinoff of the movie Obsession.’”

There it is. The obligatory escape hatch. The marketing team had an idea. The marketing team created the premise. The marketing team, apparently, is the real protagonist in the story of how Garrett Clark found himself starring in a Good Good advertisement as Garrett Clark.

That is not accountability. It is accountability in costume.

Clark is not a summer intern handed a script five minutes before filming. He is a co-founder and public face of the company. The spot used his persona, bore his company’s name, and cast him as its central figure. Foolish ideas are cheap. The question is who had the standing and obligation to stop it before it became public.

His own words make the evasion worse:

“Once I watched it back and it got posted, my skin was crawling. I was cringing.”

“It got posted.” As if the video were a thunderstorm. As if no human being chose to release it. As if the co-founder who performed in the commercial had no voice until the internet informed him of its existence.

No one needs to pretend Clark personally pressed the upload button to recognize the absurdity of that posture. Senior leaders do not get to be passengers in disasters built around their own faces. If he saw a finished ad and thought it was, in his words, “the worst ad known to man,” the question becomes sharper, not softer: why did he allow the world to see it before the world forced him to regret it?

Clark eventually said, “Good Good messed up by promoting a very poor taste ad that was not good in any way, shape, or fashion.” Correct. But “Good Good” is not a fog bank. It is people, reporting lines, judgment calls, and leaders. His video asks the public to identify a collective failure, then provides an unmistakable hint about which collective should carry the embarrassment.

The first law of leadership is not complicated. Credit rises; blame rises faster. A leader may praise his team when things go well. When they go badly, he does not point to the people beneath him and call it context. He absorbs the blow. He protects the people he leads in public, resolves personnel questions in private, and says plainly: this happened on my watch, I participated, and I failed to stop it.

Clark did not do that. He offered contrition, but he salted it with alibis. He apologized, but he did not fully own the decision. A real apology does not need a culprit waiting in the wings.

Callaway should be judged by the same standard. It approved the ad, let Good Good take much of the first hit, and only later acknowledged its role. More than one adult can fail at once.

Clark should not be treated as a perpetrator of real violence. Good Good should not be run out of golf. Miestowski should not be harassed for appearing in a bad production. Those are obvious truths.

So is this: a company can survive a bad ad. It cannot thrive for long if its leaders treat responsibility as a burden to be divided downward once the cameras start rolling.

Clark’s problem is not that he made one stupid commercial. It is that, when asked to account for it, he sounded like a man trying to explain why the people behind him failed to protect him from himself.

That is not leadership. It is cowardice dressed up as crisis management.

The children must never disappear from this story. They were innocent. They were entitled to safety in their own home. The manner of their deaths is appalling, and no diagnosis can make it otherwise.

Murder violates the most basic moral law. The commandment not to murder does not come with fine print. It speaks to the gravity of taking innocent life. The law, however, asks a separate question. Did the defendant understand the reality and wrongfulness of her actions, and could she govern her conduct? A crime can be monstrous and still require that inquiry.

Matt Walsh has no patience for it. In an August 12 post, he wrote: “I don’t care if she had postpartum depression. I don’t care how many psychiatric drugs she was taking.” He followed that with: “My sympathy for your depression dries up completely the moment you strangle your child to death.”

He is not asking jurors to scrutinize the defense. He is not weighing competing medical evidence. He is announcing that the state of Lindsay Clancy’s mind is irrelevant. A commentator can have that view. A jury cannot. The entire case turns on it.

Prosecutors say Clancy acted intentionally, rationally, and with planning. They point to her conduct before the killings and to testimony from a treating psychiatrist who did not observe psychosis. Those facts are grave, and the jury has a duty to reckon with them.

Dr. Paul D. Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who evaluated Clancy days after the deaths, gave the jury a sharply different account. Zeizel testified that Clancy had bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. In his opinion, she had “no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act” and was “unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law” because of “a mental disease or a defect.”

Zeizel said he spent more than 35 hours with Clancy over dozens of visits and reviewed her records. He described a woman who had gone to a perinatal clinic believing that her brain was damaged, fearing she would never get better, and feeling she should kill herself. She was paranoid that other people could hear her thoughts. She feared losing her children.

The public picture of psychosis is usually cinematic. Someone must speak nonsense, lose the ability to dress herself, or stare at imaginary figures in a corner. Zeizel told the jury that people suffering psychosis may still carry out ordinary tasks. They can drive, search the internet, speak coherently, and tend to a daily routine. None of that proves a healthy mind.

He testified that psychological testing did not suggest Clancy was pretending or exaggerating. He said he was present when she told Patrick Clancy by phone, from her hospital bed, that she had heard a male voice ordering her to kill the children and then herself.

Prosecutors have every right to challenge Zeizel. They pointed to errors in his report, his work with the defense, and the absence of earlier medical records documenting command voices. Those questions are part of the trial. The fact that they exist does not erase his testimony or permit the public to act as if nothing has been offered in Clancy’s defense.

The testimony of people who knew Lindsay Clancy long before this catastrophe cuts against the easy label of cold-blooded killer. Susan Clancy, her former mother-in-law, told the court that Lindsay was “begging for help.” She described insomnia, anxiety, sadness, and loss of appetite. She said Lindsay was trying to get better and see doctors. She called her “a very nurturing, very loving” mother.

Susan Clancy is Patrick Clancy’s mother. Her son lost three children. Her testimony does not decide the case, but it deserves more respect than the certitude of people who know the family only through grim headlines and viral clips.

Lindsay’s mother, Paula Musgrove, gave similar testimony. Her daughter had disclosed thoughts of harming the children. “This isn’t me. I’ve never been like this before,” Musgrove recalled her saying. Musgrove described paranoia, memory problems, and a daughter who wanted to get well enough to enjoy her children again.

The image that emerges is not of a mother who casually shed the duties of motherhood in pursuit of ease or self-indulgence. It is of someone once described as devoted to her children, frightened by her own deterioration, and reaching for help as her life narrowed into desperation. That does not prove an insanity defense. It makes contemptuous certainty impossible to defend.

Walsh has also treated postpartum suffering as a referendum on character. In another post, he argued that much of the “depression” parents experience after childbirth comes less from hormones than from demanding children who require adults to subordinate their desires. “The more selfish you are,” he wrote, “the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.” He later claimed that the real source of Clancy’s depression was “a selfish hatred of her children.”

Calling a serious medical crisis selfishness is not blunt honesty. It is medical ignorance dressed as moral seriousness. Postpartum depression is not a fashionable term for resenting responsibility. The CDC distinguishes it from the passing turmoil of the “baby blues” and lists persistent sadness, anxiety, anger, and feeling distant from one’s baby among its symptoms. The Mayo Clinic states that postpartum depression is not a character flaw or weakness. Genetics, physical changes, emotional strain, and sleep deprivation can all be part of the picture.

Postpartum psychosis is rarer and more severe. It can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal thinking, and a break from reality. Most women with postpartum mental-health conditions are not violent. The rarity of violence is precisely why the Clancy case should not be forced into a crude story about bad mothers or selfish women.

Clancy had repeated psychiatric appointments, medication changes, intrusive thoughts, serious sleep problems, and a voluntary psychiatric hospitalization shortly before the killings. She and Patrick Clancy have filed lawsuits alleging failures in her treatment. Those claims have not been adjudicated. Her attempts to obtain help are not in dispute.

A jury may decide that Lindsay Clancy retained criminal responsibility. It may decide that she did not. Either verdict must rest on the full evidence, not on a pundit’s claim that the evidence does not deserve attention.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan were the first victims, and no one else’s suffering belongs on the same scale as their lost lives. Their father is a victim, too. Patrick Clancy lost his three children, his marriage, and the family life he believed he had. His parents lost three grandchildren. Lindsay’s parents lost their grandchildren and, in a different but still devastating sense, the daughter they knew before her psychiatric collapse. The families will carry the absence of those children into every birthday, holiday, school year, and quiet ordinary day that follows.

Lindsay Clancy does not escape the consequences of what happened. She is paralyzed from the waist down after her suicide attempt. She is divorced. She remains alive with the knowledge that she caused the deaths of her three children. If the jury concludes that she was not criminally responsible, that finding will not undo any of this or send her back to the life she had. It will determine the setting in which she is confined and treated.

There are punishments that a courtroom can impose, and there are punishments that no courtroom could create. A life spent physically broken, estranged from the life and people one loved, and burdened by the knowledge of having destroyed one’s own family may, in moral terms, be more terrible than a death sentence. It is not mercy. It is tragedy without release.

The deaths of the Clancy children demand more from the public than a quick villain and a louder punishment. A society that refuses to understand how a loving, previously devoted mother could descend into such terror will have learned nothing from their loss.

The directive, Circular 3/2026, replaces a 2017 framework that was supposed to govern how Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah work together in operating Israel’s national first-responder network. What the new circular makes clear, in a way the old one apparently did not, is that MDA runs that network. UH operates within it. Those are not the same thing, and the Ministry has spent seven pages spelling out the difference.

MDA is Israel’s national rescue organization, established by law in 1950. It runs the national dispatch center. United Hatzalah, founded in 2006, operates a network of volunteer EMTs, paramedics, and doctors, along with a fleet of motorcycles. On paper, the two organizations have been cooperating for years. In practice, UH had been functioning more and more like an independent emergency service, advertising its own number, running its own dispatch, and sending out its own volunteers. The new circular puts a stop to that.

On the number specifically: all public emergency calls go to MDA. If someone calls UH directly, UH transfers the call to MDA immediately. UH’s dispatch center stays open, but its job is to support MDA’s operation, not to run a parallel one. The circular is explicit that UH must stop any public promotion of its own emergency line. No exceptions are listed.

The dispatch process itself has been redesigned to make clear who is in charge at each step. When MDA identifies UH volunteers as potential responders to an incident, it sends preliminary information to the UH dispatch center. UH reaches out to those volunteers, gets confirmation they can respond, and tells MDA. MDA then officially dispatches them through a new joint mobile application. Once that happens, MDA tracks the UH responders the same way it tracks its own, as part of its command and control operation.

UH dispatch does get one narrow form of input. If it spots a volunteer closer to the scene or better suited for the call that MDA has not identified, it can flag that person to MDA. MDA then decides whether to dispatch them. That is the extent of UH’s independent authority in the process. Nothing goes out without MDA’s sign-off.

The circular also bans the informal information sharing that has been a persistent problem in Israeli volunteer emergency response. No WhatsApp groups. No mass broadcasts. No passing incident details through any channel outside the official dispatch mechanism. The rule is stated flatly and without qualification.

MDA has six months to build a joint mobile application connecting both organizations’ dispatch systems. After that, there is a two-month pilot under Ministry of Health supervision before full rollout. Until the app is ready, MDA will proactively contact UH dispatch for CPR and unconscious-patient calls, asking them to locate and send up to two responders. UH is responsible for making sure no one else shows up.

The accountability section is where the circular gets pointed. Every six months, UH’s Medical Director and organizational head have to submit a declaration, verified by a lawyer, confirming that their active responders meet all training requirements. If UH’s official list of responders does not match who is actually in the field, or if training documentation is missing or incomplete, the Ministry of Health can pull UH’s operating authorization. Not suspend it. Pull it. That consequence is written into the circular, not implied.

MDA has its own reporting obligations. Monthly reports to the Ministry covering incident volumes, which organization each dispatched responder belongs to, and any other data the Ministry requests. A dedicated Ministry supervisor will oversee compliance. Periodic review meetings will include both organizations.

The circular is signed by Director General Moshe Bar Siman Tov. A copy went to the Minister of Health.

What this amounts to is the Ministry putting in writing something that was always supposed to be the case. MDA is the national coordinator. Every other organization in Israel’s first-responder landscape works within that structure. UH has a role in the system, and the circular defines it precisely. What UH does not get to do is advertise its own emergency line, send out its own volunteers without MDA’s involvement, or present itself to the public as a standalone emergency service. The 2017 circular was supposed to establish that. It clearly did not stick. Whether this one does will depend on how seriously the Ministry’s supervisor takes the job.

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He is right that extremist settlers have committed genuine crimes in the West Bank. Some of it is ugly. Mosques burned. Palestinian property torched. People killed. He is right that Defense Minister Israel Katz has refused to use administrative detention against suspected Jewish extremists, the same legal tool that gets applied to Palestinian suspects without much hand-wringing. These are real failures and no serious person should pretend otherwise.

But Stephens does not stop there, and the further he goes the shakier the ground gets.

He calls what is happening in the West Bank “anti-Palestinian settler terrorism.” He says it threatens not just Palestinian lives or Israel’s reputation but Israel’s security, its statehood, and Zionism itself. He warns of a third intifada. He invokes the specter of Lebanonization. These are not small claims. They deserve scrutiny, not just agreement.

Take the 867 figure. The IDF recorded 867 incidents of “nationalistic crime and settler violence” in 2025. Stephens cites this as evidence of a crisis that has become routine. What he does not tell you is what actually gets counted in that number. The Israeli security establishment’s definition of a nationalistic incident is broad: graffiti, trespassing, grazing disputes, property damage of various kinds, alongside genuine violent attacks. The IDF’s own internal assessment puts the number of hardcore perpetrators at around 70 people. Seventy. In a settler population of several hundred thousand. Netanyahu called them roughly 150 juvenile delinquents, which is politically convenient, but the underlying data is not as far from that description as Stephens implies. This is a fringe. A dangerous, under-prosecuted fringe that should face the law. But calling it a systemic terror campaign is a different claim entirely, and the numbers do not support it.

The terrorism label itself deserves a harder look. Terrorism has a meaning. It is the deliberate targeting of civilians to produce political fear through violence. October 7 was terrorism. The Palestinian Authority’s martyr payment program, which has been sending monthly checks to the families of people who murdered Jewish civilians for decades, is institutionalized terrorism. When settlers burn a mosque or attack a stonecutting factory, those are serious crimes. They are not a terror campaign. Conflating the two does not clarify anything. It erases a distinction that Israel’s defenders have spent decades trying to establish and hands that erasure to people who have been working toward it for years.

Then there is the question of Matan Vilnai. Stephens leans on the letter Vilnai organized, signed by retired senior officers, as evidence that serious security professionals are alarmed. Vilnai was at Entebbe. He served in a previous Netanyahu government. The biography is real. What Stephens does not mention is that Vilnai has spent his post-military career chairing Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization that has been pushing for Israeli territorial withdrawals for years and whose positions, by any honest accounting, track closely with the Israeli left’s platform. These are not reluctant professionals stepping forward with a verdict they wish they did not have to deliver. They are political actors who have been in sustained opposition to the current government and who found in settler violence a cause that gives their opposition a moral weight it otherwise struggles to claim. Read the letter. Do not treat it as an oracle.

Stephens argues that a government capable of assassinating a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse ought to be capable of stopping Jewish thuggery in the West Bank. It is a rhetorically effective line. It is also a false comparison. Covert operations against a foreign terrorist organization operating in a hostile state are not the same instrument as domestic law enforcement in a territory whose jurisdiction, civil administration, and military command are divided by decades of Oslo-era agreements. Netanyahu is not choosing impotence. He is governing a parliamentary coalition under wartime conditions, with real political constraints that did not appear from nowhere. That is not a defense of every choice he has made. It is a description of the environment in which he is making them.

On David Zini’s avoidance of the phrase “Jewish terror,” Stephens treats it as institutional cowardice. Consider a different reading. Zini runs an organization whose operational effectiveness depends on legal and definitional precision. “Terror” carries specific implications for how suspects are handled, prosecuted, and surveilled under Israeli law. Applying it to a category of conduct that ranges from graffiti to arson to murder creates procedural problems that a serious intelligence professional has every reason to avoid. A columnist finds the word “frictions” unsatisfying. A Shin Bet director has to actually manage the problem.

The Lebanonization warning is the most dramatic element of the column and the one that falls apart fastest. The IDF compiled and published the statistics Stephens is citing. Israeli security forces arrested more than 130 people in a single weekend following the most recent West Bank violence. The IDF’s own commanders went on record about their frustration with their inability to contain the problem. That is not what state collapse looks like. That is what a government with real failures looks like when it is still functioning well enough to document and arrest.

Israel spent two years managing a hostage crisis that consumed its government, its military, and its public, while watching Iran close in on a nuclear threshold and facing a Hezbollah arsenal that would test most standing armies. Its real enemies are in Tehran, in Beirut, in whatever is left of the tunnel network under Gaza. A column that frames 70 extremists in the hills of Judea as an existential test for Zionism, while those threats remain, is not warning Israel. It is looking away from what is actually coming.

On July 29, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein issued a 48-page Report and Recommendation concluding that Boteach willfully defied a direct court order by continuing to post about the Fontainebleau Hotel, its owner, and its lawyers on social media for months after being told to stop. Her recommendation: strike his legal defenses, dismiss his counterclaim with prejudice, and enter default judgment against him on the hotel’s claims. In other words, he loses.

The underlying dispute is almost beside the point now. The case began after a December 2024 confrontation in the Fontainebleau’s lobby between Boteach and another guest, Faiz Akbar. Boteach says he was threatened with murder in an antisemitic attack and that the hotel blamed him for provoking it. The hotel sued him for defamation, alleging he made false statements about the incident and the hotel’s response. Boteach filed a counterclaim asserting civil rights violations.

What happened next is where things went sideways.

By February 2026, the District Court had seen enough. The communications between the parties had become “toxic,” the court said, driven in large part by Boteach’s online activity. On February 20, the court issued an order that was hard to misread: it was “deeply disturbed by Defendant’s conduct,” including his “continued social media attacks aimed at Plaintiff and its counsel,” and it expressly directed Boteach to “cease such harassing conduct and social media references to Plaintiff and its counsel during the course of this litigation.”

Six days later, Boteach was back online.

In a video posted February 26, he described himself as a “Mordechai Jew” who would not submit, discussed a “world-renowned establishment” trying to “break” him through litigation, and accused unnamed Jews of being “self-hating” sellouts helping his enemies. The Fontainebleau was not named, but the court found it was unmistakably the subject.

Then came March. The day after his deposition, Boteach filmed himself standing outside the hotel. When a woman in the video said that a visibly Jewish person would be unsafe in London but that things were “completely different here,” Boteach turned, pointed directly at the Fontainebleau, and said: “that hotel — I’m not going to get into it — that would prove otherwise.” He then added, pointing at the building again, “I know it’s here because of what happened to me there and what’s happened to me now because of what happened here.”

The very next day, still in front of the hotel, he told his followers: “I’m here in Miami Beach, where I had business with the Fontainebleau Hotel yesterday. It’s right behind us. You guys all know the story of the Fontainebleau. I’m not going to get into it. Sad story.” He then added: “I had a tough day yesterday. Legal issues. I’m not going to get into them. But I’m a Jew that’s never going to cower or bend to antisemites or those that seek to protect antisemites.”

The judge found this sequence particularly revealing. Boteach acknowledged the court’s restrictions, said he wouldn’t discuss the case, and then discussed it anyway. That, the court noted, “demonstrates Defendant’s contemporaneous understanding of the District Court’s directive.”

It kept going. On March 24, Boteach posted a video ostensibly about a Broadway play on wrongful convictions, during which he asked: “Could you imagine that I’m in court, the victim of an antisemitic hate crime, being sued by people of overwhelming and endless financial power. Is the American judicial system fair? We hope so. But is it really if you’re a billionaire?”

Then came May 24, which the court called “perhaps the most egregious violations.” Boteach named the hotel’s attorney, Sean Burstyn, by name, questioned whether Burstyn appeared in materials associated with Jeffrey Epstein, raised questions about Burstyn’s connection to the death of Virginia Giuffre, and signed off by declaring that Burstyn “is the reason that 84% of Americans believe that attorneys are scumbags.”

Boteach’s explanation for those posts: a technological glitch. He said old drafts accidentally published themselves when he restored data to a new phone. The court wasn’t buying it, noting that even if that were true, it did nothing to explain the dozens of other posts he had deliberately published in violation of the order.

And then, on May 28, the same day his lawyers conferred with opposing counsel about a potential sanctions motion, Boteach posted: “June 29th Rabbi Shmuley’s Trial Against ‘that Hotel’ in Miami Begins. He will absolutely defeat the antisemitism-deniers. We need your support. Shmuley.com.”

At his deposition, Boteach admitted under oath that his posts were intended to cause the hotel and its lawyers to reconsider their litigation strategy. The court called this what it was: using social media as “an extrajudicial litigation tactic designed to influence whether, and under what conditions, Plaintiff continued to prosecute its claims against him.”

Boteach’s lawyers tried a creative legal argument to get him off the hook. The February 20 order used the word “DIRECTS” rather than “ORDERS,” they argued, meaning it was merely a suggestion he was free to disregard. Judge Elfenbein was not impressed. “Let there be no doubt,” she wrote, “that the District Court entered a judicial order on its docket containing a mandatory directive.” The choice of verb, she explained, “did not diminish the mandatory nature of the command or convert an enforceable judicial order into a nonbinding suggestion.”

This is not Boteach’s first sanctions problem in this case. He was previously ordered to pay $15,000 after leaking confidential surveillance footage of the hotel incident to his Instagram followers, who numbered over 90,000. That payment was made by his insurer, Chubb Insurance Company of New Jersey, a fact the court found significant. Because someone else paid the last penalty, the court reasoned, another monetary sanction would not deter him.

That insurance backstop may not be available this time. Liability policies routinely exclude coverage for intentional misconduct, and a federal judge has now found on the record that Boteach acted with “willful and blatant disregard” of a court order and used his violations as a calculated litigation tactic. Convincing an insurer to cover damages flowing from conduct a court has characterized that way would be a very difficult argument to make. He brought this on himself, and the bill may land squarely on him.

The parties have 14 days to file objections before the recommendation goes to District Judge K. Michael Moore for a final ruling.

The probe is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which has already requested documents from the company. Simad also disclosed awareness of a separate civil investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York into potential Paycheck Protection Program fraud. The company says it is cooperating with both.

Michael Shabsels and his wife Alyssa serve on the US National Board of United Hatzalah.

The collapse has been fast and ugly. Simad raised roughly $200 million from Israeli bondholders in December, then missed its first payment in May. It later emerged that about $34 million of that money had been funneled to companies controlled by the Shabsels brothers. The company demanded repayment. Michael Shabsels agreed, then said he couldn’t follow through.

Both the company and the brothers personally filed for bankruptcy in June. Simad, now run by a restructuring officer, is in the process of selling off its camps, including Mohawk Day Camp, Camp Chen-A-Wanda, and Camp Achim.

The Shabselses built their empire almost entirely on borrowed money. They held over 80 real estate assets and structured deals to achieve near-100-percent financing. They also accumulated more than $230 million from merchant cash advance lenders, the kind that can pull funds directly from a company’s bank account if payments stop. The bankruptcy filings stopped those withdrawals. Prosecutors are still piecing together what happened to the rest.

That is what made JD Vance’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s show more than an embarrassing performance. It was an abuse of public trust. Vance used the loose, clown-show atmosphere of the program to make grave claims about Israeli manipulation, divided loyalty and Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed intelligence connections. He spoke with the authority of the vice presidency, then took refuge in the casual evasions of an ordinary podcast guest.

The legitimate issue was foreign influence. Time reported that Israel hired Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X for a $1.5 million monthly digital campaign. Such activity deserves scrutiny, and criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic.

Vance went well beyond the reporting. He described a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” against the administration’s Iran policy. He claimed that American influencers had “quite literally” been paid through an operative funded by elements of the Israeli government. Yet the article said the amount received by creators remained unclear. Parscale denied that Israeli contract money paid influencers or financed opposition to the Iran agreement.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry denied interfering in American policy. Senator Tom Cotton’s response was harder to dismiss. Asked about Vance’s charge, he said, “I’m not aware of any intelligence regarding a secret influence operation aimed at changing American public opinion on negotiations under the MOU.”

Vance named no Americans supposedly purchased by this operation. He relied instead on phrases such as “certain elements” and “some people.” This is the coward’s form of accusation. No name to defend. No claim precise enough to test. Only a cloud of suspicion cast over anyone who disagrees.

Rogan then suggested that Israel spies on American politicians and that some of those politicians are aligned with Israel rather than the United States. Vance said he “definitely” understood the concern. He did not accuse American Jews as a group of disloyalty. He did something more practiced. He accepted the frame of espionage, money and divided allegiance, added a few qualifications and allowed the audience to draw the ugliest conclusion for itself.

At a time when antisemitic incidents remain at historic levels, a vice president should understand the danger of scattering the old clues of secret money, hidden control and dual loyalty. He need not utter the crudest version. The audience knows how the story ends.

When challenged, Vance cast himself as the victim. Accusations of antisemitism were “insane,” he said, because he had “a ton of respect for the Jewish religion.” That is not an answer. It is a gaslight. Jewish listeners are expected to ignore the insinuations they have heard for generations and accept a profession of respect as absolution. Respect is measured by conduct, not by a disclaimer attached after the damage is done.

Defenders said Vance was meeting a conspiracy-curious audience where it lives and guiding it back toward reason. He guided no one back. A vice president may answer foolish questions. He may not validate their premises for political effect. The office demands a clear line between knowledge and suspicion. Vance blurred it because the blur served him.

The Epstein exchange made the method impossible to miss. Vance proudly called himself “one of the OG Epstein conspiracy theorists.” When Rogan said most people believed Epstein was Mossad, Vance answered, “Yeah, Mossad or CIA or some other deep state,” perhaps both. He said Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence” and speculated about a left-of-center “Israeli deep state.”

Epstein cultivated powerful people. His relationship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was extensive and discrediting. Released records document contact with Yoni Koren, an Israeli intelligence veteran. An FBI memo records an informant’s belief that Epstein was a “co-opted Mossad agent.” But the memo records an allegation. It does not establish an FBI conclusion, and none of the millions of released documents proves that Epstein was an intelligence asset.

Vance admitted that he had asked whether there were “documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s.” The answer was no. That should have settled the matter. Instead, he argued that if such proof had existed, “it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

There is no argument that can survive that logic because there is no evidence that can defeat it. Documents would prove the conspiracy. Their absence proves the cover-up. A relationship becomes a connection, the connection becomes an operation, and the operation becomes a “deep state.” When pressed on what his own allegation meant, Vance shrugged: “I don’t know what that means.”

He also reminded listeners that he has “effectively unlimited access to information.” That boast makes the performance worse. He invoked extraordinary access while admitting he lacked direct proof. He could only insist, “I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there.” Belief is not intelligence. Suspicion is not evidence. A vice president has no moral right to pretend otherwise.

Vance’s offense was not criticism of Israel. It was using the vice presidency to launder rumor into something that sounded like official knowledge. He gave prejudice the language of patriotism and conjecture the authority of the state. Then he relied on the podcast’s unseriousness to escape responsibility for what he had said.

He knew where the evidence ended. He kept talking. That is not candor, and it is not courage. It is a failure of judgment unworthy of the office he holds.