Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.
By Sarah Kendzior | March 6, 2026
In 1989, terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane made a promise.
“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”
Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.
Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20th century who would define the 21st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.
Death threats were nothing new for Friedman. He’d been getting them from Israelis ever since he wrote the Kahane biography. Friedman had also angered the FBI by claiming they could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and correctly warning, years in advance, that the towers would be attacked again. Wary of institutional constraints, Friedman embraced the freedom of a freelancer. In 2002, Friedman died of cardiac arrest. He was 51.
He never saw the future he worked so hard to stop.
Red Mafiya gained a cult following during Trump’s first term. The book elucidates the structure of Trump’s life and presidency: a merger of organized crime, white-collar crime, and government by criminals who elude, then rewrite, borders and laws. Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives.
Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years.
The False Prophet, on the other hand, is largely ignored. It is in demand but hard to find: used copies of the out-of-print book sell for over $100. I bought mine before the Kahanists — Kahane’s acolytes — returned to power in Israel.
I’ve been wanting to write about The False Prophet for years. I held back since it scares me more than any other book. If it were only history, I would not be so frightened. But The False Prophet describes current events: the extremism that Kahane espoused, and Friedman documented, now dominates Israel and in turn, the United States.
I was born during the Iranian Revolution. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life listening to US officials call for war with Iran. In Israel, the calls are even louder, drowning out reasonable voices who know such a war would be apocalyptic.
The architects of the Iran War know that too, but do not care. Elderly fanatics — from Netanyahu to Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra villain who served in nearly every administration of my life — understand that the time to see their goals reach fruition is running out. Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle.
“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” Netanyahu said as the war began, thanking “the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military.”
Netanyahu now says openly what he said behind closed doors in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily.”
President Donald J. Trump is behaving more and more erratically these days, seeming to think he can dictate to other countries.
This morning, Trump told Barak Ravid and Zachary Basu of Axios that he needs to be involved personally in choosing the next leader of Iran. Speaking of Iranian politicians who are preparing to announce a new leader, Trump told the reporters: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.”
Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova of ONEST reported that in a call with Israel’s Channel 12 this morning, Trump called Israel’s president Isaac Herzog “a disgrace” and demanded Herzog pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “today” because Trump doesn’t want Netanyahu distracted from the war with Iran. Trump said Herzog had “promised” him “five times” to pardon the prime minister, and he appeared to threaten Herzog when he added: “Tell him I’m exposing him.”
In a statement, Herzog noted that “Israel is a sovereign state governed by the rule of law” and said the pardon is being dealt with by the Justice Ministry, as the law requires. After its ruling, Hertzog’s office said, he will examine the issue according to the law and “without any influence from external or internal pressures of any kind.”
In a conversation today with Dasha Burns of Politico, Trump insisted that “[p]eople are loving what’s happening” and said: “Cuba’s going to fall, too.”
The most astonishing example of Trump’s international aggression came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Although Trump initially said he attacked Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons, Leavitt yesterday explained that Trump joined Israel in a military attack on Iran because Trump had “a feeling based on fact” that Iran was going to attack the United States.
Trump’s assertion of power globally contrasts with increasing setbacks at home.
Since the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as unconstitutional, the administration has tried to slow walk repaying the $130 billion the government collected under those tariffs. But yesterday, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that companies that paid the tariffs are entitled to a refund.
After the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump immediately imposed new tariffs of 15% on all global trade, using as justification Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press noted, this is awkward because the Department of Justice under Trump argued in court last year that Trump had to use the IEEPA because Section 122 did “not have any obvious application” in fighting trade deficits.
Today the Democratic attorneys general of more than twenty states filed a lawsuit to stop the new tariffs imposed under Section 122. “Once again, President Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution to effectively raise taxes on consumers and small businesses,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Thursday.
The Department of Justice has also quietly backed away from Trump’s demand that it investigate whether former president Joe Biden broke the law by using an autopen to sign presidential documents. Yesterday, Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, and Alan Feuer reported in the New York Times that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., “were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen.”
They concluded there was no credible case to make against Biden. The journalists noted that “the failed inquiry has only added to the sense among many federal investigators that Mr. Trump has become increasingly erratic in his desire to use the criminal justice system to punish his political adversaries for behavior that comes nowhere close to being criminal.”
Trump had been so invested in his attacks on Biden over his quite ordinary use of an autopen that he replaced a White House picture of Biden with one of an autopen, so the prosecutors’ shelving that investigation has to sting. Likely even more painful, though, is today’s news that Trump’s hand-picked National Capital Planning Commission has put off a vote to approve the ballroom Trump is proposing to replace the East Wing of the White House that he suddenly tore down last October.
At a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, Trump called attention to his ballroom and boasted: “I built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.” But the American people do not share Trump’s vision. The chair of the commission said “significant public input” has caused him to delay the vote until April 2. Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post say that of the more than 35,000 comments the commission received, more than 97% were opposed to Trump’s plans for the ballroom.
But perhaps the biggest setback for the Trump administration showed in the testimony of now-former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem before Congress this week. There, days after Trump launched a major military operation in the Middle East without consulting Congress, angry lawmakers of both parties exposed the lawlessness and corruption taking place in the department under Noem’s direction. But their stance was about more than Noem: her lawlessness and corruption represented the larger lawlessness and corruption of the Trump administration.
Noem testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. In both chambers, Democrats jumped right to a central feature of the way in which Noem and the administration are setting up the idea that anyone who opposes the actions of the Trump administration is participating in “domestic terrorism.”
They tried to get Noem to walk back her statements that Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by federal agents acting under her authority in Minnesota, were “domestic terrorists.” Noem refused to do so. She has not actually called them “domestic terrorists” but has said they were engaged in “domestic terrorism,” a distinction that reveals the administration’s attempt to criminalize political opposition. Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center explained that “[t]o actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist, an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on. Good and Pretti, and the many others administration officials have accused, do not fit that description. But on September 25, 2025, Trump’s NSPM-7 memo claimed that those opposing administration policies are part of “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” and that those who participate in them are engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Noem refused to back away from the idea that Trump’s opponents are engaging in “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” by, for example, opposing the behavior of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Leaving that definition behind would undermine the administration’s entire domestic stance.
Democrats slammed Noem for her handling of detentions and deportations, ignoring court orders, and detaining U.S. citizens. In the House, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said she “turned our government against our people, and…turned our people against our government.”
Republicans also called Noem out. Noem’s poor handling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has left North Carolina still suffering after terrible storms in 2024, and Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) went after her.
He highlighted a letter from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who said the department’s leaders have “systematically obstructed” the work of him and his staff. He identified eleven instances in which the department had refused to provide records and information. In a criminal investigation with national security implications, the department would permit him to access a database only if he revealed details of the investigation of individuals who might be related to the investigation.
Tillis said: “Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the [Office of Inspector General] in this agency to come out and do this publicly? That is stonewalling, that’s a failure of leadership, and that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”
Lawmakers also focused on the corruption in DHS, which now commands more than $150 billion thanks to the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Lawmakers referred to a November 2025 ProPublica story in which reporters traced a $220 million contract for an ad campaign featuring Noem. The contract went first to a brand new small company organized by a Republican operative just days before winning the contract, and then to a subcontractor, Strategy Group, owned by Noem’s former spokesperson’s husband and closely associated with Noem’s advisor and reputed affair partner Corey Lewandowski.
Noem insisted she had nothing to do with the contract award and claimed Trump had signed off on the ad campaign. About the contract, Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) commented in apparent disbelief: “You want the American people to believe that this is all above board, that $143 million of taxpayer money just happened to go to this one company that doesn’t have a headquarters, doesn’t have a website, has never done work for the federal government before, and is registered apparently or attached to a residence from a political operative, and of course one of the subcontractors of that contract, as you know, is a political firm that’s tied to, to you back when you were governor of South Dakota?”
Since Noem’s testimony, the Strategy Group released a statement saying it received only $226,137.17 for its work on the ad campaign.
Also under scrutiny was Noem’s purchase of a private plane with a luxurious bedroom in it, which brought up questions about whether, as is widely reported, she is having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. She refused to answer, and insisted Lewandowski had had no role in approving contracts. Joshua Kaplan and Justin Elliott of ProPublica promptly fact-checked her: in fact, Lewandowski has signed off on a number of contracts.
Lawmakers’ indictment of Noem for her extreme partisanship, disregard of the law, corruption, and lying condemned similar behavior from the administration in general. Today Trump told Steve Holland and Ted Hesson of Reuters that he “never knew anything about” Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, suggesting she lied to Congress under oath. This afternoon, just before she went on stage to speak, Trump announced by social media post that he was replacing Noem with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
This is an assertion of power the president does not have: he can nominate Mullin, but the Senate must confirm or reject his appointment.
Apparently unaware she was fired, Noem proceeded to give a speech in which she recited a false quotation from George Orwell, the writer who devoted much of his work to the importance of manipulating language to facilitate authoritarianism, a fitting end to Noem’s career in the Trump administration.
But Noem is not likely to disappear from the news. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker recorded a video saying: “Hey, Kristi Noem, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Here’s your legacy: corruption and chaos. Parents and children tear-gassed. Moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face. Now that you’re gone, don’t think you get to just walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) was more direct: “Turns out lawlessness is not a winning strategy,” he posted. “See you at Nuremberg 2.0.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
How do understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.
These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. Given that we have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient democracy, and given the behavior of Trump and his allies in general, this must be an interpretive method for these attacks.
The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under specific conditions favorable to the party in power. This is utterlypredictable and should be easy to halt and indeed to reverse.
The American propaganda about our foreign policy motivations is impossible to believe as such. But it does lead us, indirectly, to the second possible interpretive framework: personal corruption.
The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.
But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.
The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?
It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.
Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.
And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.
None of this is a defense of the murderous regime in Teheran. The Iranian government has been engaged in the mass murder of peaceful protestors. The scale of that slaughter has not really sunk in. One can certainly imagine ways of addressing Iranian authoritarianism and corruption. We could combine a patient campaign of pressure and sanctions with support for the opposition and proposals to help address growing ecological problems such as the horrifying lack of water that stands behind much of political opposition in the country. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on offer, or could be on offer, from the Trump administration. All that it has to offer is its own authoritarianism and corruption.
A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.
War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.
On to Epstein! This section of the Q & A is for Michael T, Mark S, Rebecca, Patricia, Frances, John K, Bill C, Barbara, Robert, Leslie, Donna, and anyone whose name I’ve missed. I’ve shortened and simplified your overlapping questions. My answers are briefer than my thoughts, so feel free to discuss more in the comments section.
Will the Epstein files bring accountability?
SK: Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US. We’ve seen predators face arrest in other countries. In the US, we’ve seen them resign from jobs. This gives me little hope since MeToo produced more backlash than justice, and many who lost power later regained it. I do think the release has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades. What’s revealing is that they view redacted emails by predators as more credible than consistent statements by victims. There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt.
What can we do to help bring justice?
SK: Save documents, curate them, and comment on them thoughtfully and with respect for the victims. The Trump admin has already deleted some documents, is withholding many more, and relies on media to normalize sadism and bury crime in spectacle. Reject that. The breakdown of search engines means we need responsible curation more than ever. This applies not only to Epstein but to ICE or any act of mass abuse. One of the greatest threats we face is the deletion of history. Everyday folks can help preserve it if they organize information together. Nick Bryant and others have been pooling resources on Epstein’s network. I have little faith in our representatives, seeing as they knew about Epstein all along and did nothing, but there is still stigma in being a pedophile protector. Pressure officials for truth and accountability and call them a pedophile protector if they resist.
Will the rest of the files be released?
SK: As I’ve said before, I think they were waiting to release an Epstein trove once: 1) they felt they had consolidated power 2) AI was so ubiquitous that the veracity of the evidence would be questioned. That moment is now. We have seen a lot of emails, though one period of interest — the time around 9/11 — is largely absent. We have not seen much video. I believe the most damaging information is on video. We know Epstein had rooms wired with cameras to film pedophiles assaulting victims. I will not watch that if it comes out. But it may come out, and should that happen, the assaulter will claim it’s fake. This wouldn’t have been a convincing excuse a decade ago, but it will be now due to AI. I’ve wondered if Grok posting child pornography on demand shortly before the Epstein files were released was a trial run for this tactic.
How much was Bill Barr involved?
SK: Probably a lot: he’s been called “The Cover-Up General” since the early 1990s, when he buried Iran-Contra and other crimes as Bush’s AG. Epstein and Maxwell are closely linked to Iran-Contra through a number of vectors, but mainly Maxwell’s family: her father, operative of Israeli espionage Robert Maxwell, and her siblings and their government surveillance tech deals. Barr is the guy you call to bury things.
Barr was likely pulled out of private practice to bury the Epstein evidence for Trump, since emails show increasing worry from Epstein’s cohort when MeToo erupted. Barr became Attorney General in late 2018, right after the Kavanaugh confirmation, when MeToo was at its height. In addition, Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, hired Epstein to teach at a private school in the 1970s, which helped facilitate his ties to high finance. Donald Barr also wrote sci-fi fantasies about intergalactic pedophiles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. (What kind of deranged “coincidence” has all that?!) I cover Barr and Epstein in depth in Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.
SK: Treat the Rothschild family like you would anyone that is like the Rothschild family: any billionaire, multinational banking family involved in corruption and war for centuries. Their history needs to be meticulously investigated, and that should not be controversial. It does not mean every Rothschild is guilty by default, and illicit activity in the family is not rooted in Judaism. It’s rooted in entrenched power that breeds impunity, much like the British Royals. There are people afraid to examine the Rothschilds for fear of being labeled antisemites, and there are also antisemites hurling baseless accusations. Both approaches are bad and dangerous.
The role of Rothschild family members with ties to Epstein and Maxwell should be examined. Work that the Maxwell and Rothschild families did for foreign states should be scrutinized for overlap. Common ties, like Alan Dershowitz or various banks, should be investigated. It is irresponsible to drop the topic out of fear. But do not lump in all Jewish folks with Epstein and the Rothschilds — and never do it in my newsletter in the centennial year of Mel Brooks! That’s no different than lumping in all Muslims with Al Qaeda or Catholics with predator priests. Or all Americans with Trump! Keep digging, but don’t smack bystanders with your shovel on the way down.
What’s up with Zorro Ranch? And his UK bank statements? And other stuff?
SK: I’m a big picture person: I can only see the forest for the treason. Details are best examined by people living near where the crimes took place, who know the land and institutions. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez lives in New Mexico and has been tracking ranch activity and recommending local journalists. As for the UK, Carole Cadwalladr knows the Epstein case and might know the answer.
That’s the gist of the Epstein questions! He lurks throughout the rest of the Q & A as he does in real life. But on to other topics:
Sylvia: I have heard you speak about the dangers and terrible influences of AI. Yet I find myself reading the simple comparisons of products that pop up when I look for info on something like how to keep squirrels from eating tulip bulbs. Whatever AI search that comes up has a lot of useful suggestions I can follow up on and products I’ve never heard of, and I can then ask for a comparison list. Can you say anything about AI uses for helping us sort through huge masses of information?
SK: I don’t trust AI for answers on anything. Here is an example of why:
SK: Malachai and Isaac are not my children — they are the main characters of the 1984 horror movie Children of the Corn! Children of the Corn is hilarious; I watch it every Halloween and have talked about it online. As a result, AI says I live in a cornfield with my demon spawn. I’ve decided AI is the real “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”: no one knows why it’s there, but [ . . . ]
