Middle East Insider · Issue 069 · Monday, October 26, 2026

The Mailbag, Vol. V

Good afternoon. Yesterday’s Long View made the case for a constitution, and Israel votes tomorrow. This afternoon, the mail. Between the Sunday the CAIR essay went out, September 27, and ten o’clock this morning, 169 letters reached [email protected] from 131 of you. Among them: Jon, back with pistols instead of rifles; twenty letters on the October 4 essay, half of them saying I was too quick to call it a failure; a San Diego publisher who asks whether the definition CAIR wrote is wrong on its merits or only in how the city adopted it; a historian in Haifa and a 101-year-old in Australia on the election and the republic; and 31 donors who could not get into Premium. Eight questions answered, your replies on arming Iranians, one argument I refuse from both sides, the Lightning Round, the Number, the Dates and the Ask.

I was not advocating for arming the Iranian citizenry with rifles, but rather cheap and easy-to-transport pistols. Once citizens are shooting mullahs and IRGC personnel in the back of the head on the streets, the regime defections of which you speak will increase. It would not happen in mass protests, which are easily put down by extreme regime violence, and it would be inexpensive. It is still surprising to me that this option is not discussed more.

Jon, a lawyer in California, read Vol. IV’s answer and says I argued against a plan he did not propose. He is right that a pistol is not a rifle: it weighs under two pounds, it hides in a coat, and a thousand of them cross a border in one truck. The plan he describes is not an uprising with weapons; it is a campaign of killings, one Revolutionary Guard or Basij man at a time, by Iranians who would then have to live on the same street.

Two facts bear on it. First, Iranians are already doing a version of this without American pistols. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah, told the network he calls the Immortal Guard in March to wear down the regime’s “machinery of repression by every possible means,” and he described its work as striking the institutions the regime uses to spread fear. Second, Tehran’s answer to armed opposition has not changed in forty years. Kurdish groups have fought the Guards with rifles since 1979 and the Baluch for two decades; the hangings that follow each attack are the regime’s argument to everyone else for staying home. In January, when the crowds were unarmed, protests reached 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces, security forces fired on them, a human rights group verified 3,090 deaths within three weeks, and the United Nations’ rapporteur said the toll may pass 20,000.

So the question is not whether a pistol can reach Tehran. It is whether killings by civilians make the Guards stop firing sooner than unpaid salaries, Israeli strikes on the units that shoot protesters, and open doors for deserters, which was the answer in Vol. IV. The regime’s armed men have answered gunfire with more of it every time. Nobody has yet found a way to make them work without pay. Where Jon and I agree: the choice of means belongs to the Iranians who will carry the risk, and the United States should fund, inform and shelter them. Pistols are the one part of Jon’s plan they can get without us.

Iranians have spent 47 years “in the desert,” being raised as radical Islamists. What is the evidence that the majority of them oppose their government?

No survey inside a police state is exact, so the evidence comes in three kinds, and they point the same way. The first is polling. GAMAAN, a group of Iranian social scientists in the Netherlands that reaches people inside the country through the anti-censorship software Iranians use, asked 158,395 of them in December 2022 how they would vote in a referendum on the Islamic Republic, a sample it weights down to the statistical equivalent of 1,696 respondents: 81 percent said no, about 15 percent yes. Its June 2024 survey of 77,216 respondents found about 70 percent against the regime’s continuation and about 20 percent for it. Its survey this June, after the war began, found 47 percent who want the regime gone before anything else changes, 23 percent for a transition away from it, and 13 percent who choose the Islamic Republic. These are online samples of literate Iranians, weighted to the census, and GAMAAN says so on every page; nobody has better numbers.

The second kind is the regime’s own numbers. In the March 2024 parliamentary election, the interior minister reported turnout of about 41 percent, the lowest since 1979, and the first round of the June 2024 presidential vote drew about 40 percent. A regime whose own figures put its supporters at 40 percent of eligible voters, in elections with no opposition on the ballot, has told you the rest. The third kind is what people did when they could. The protests that began with shop closures and strikes in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on December 28, 2025, spread to 27 of 31 provinces in three weeks and were ended by gunfire. The schooling Henry describes produced the generation that marched in January.

Vol. IV asked. Four of you answered, and the vote was one yes, three no.

Beth: no. “Logistics are too difficult.” Iranians should “devise their own weapons,” from slingshots and armed kites to drones, “until more sophisticated weapons can be imported somehow.”

Mickey: no. “1m rifles would be logistically impossible to smuggle in.” Instead, destroy one power plant a week until “it will be dark 10 hours/day,” and the people will stop working and “bang the pots, undetected by the IRGC.” I would not do it; hospitals and bakeries lose power before the Guards do, and the January protests began over prices, not darkness.

Olga: yes, “but they’d need a lot of cover,” village by village, with American and Israeli help. She asks why the regime was not finished in March. The October 4 essay is my answer: I thought it had been, and I was wrong.

Gerald: no. Pinprick weapons mean “mass slaughter yet again.” He wants what President Truman delivered in 1945, unconditional surrender followed by occupation and rebuilding, and he wants a ground assault to get there. His letter also faults the President’s business dealings; I answer the argument, not the insult. The United States has not chosen a ground war, and the President ruled out ground troops and nuclear weapons on October 15. What remains is the blockade, the strikes the President has said may follow November 3, and the Iranians.

The October 4 essay drew twenty letters. Half were about the paywall; of the rest, most said I was too quick to call it a failure.

Simms: “You called failure way too soon.” Tehran’s rulers are broken, food is running out, the currency is worthless, Iran exports no oil, and “sooner or later this regime will collapse.” David: “The war is not yet over, BUT the regime is near collapse.” Roy assumes “the vulnerability of your plan was relying on Trump to do the right thing.” Charles says the details drive nothing, that ideology does, and that the analysis “has no soul or heart in it.” Ed asks: “What was the program and who was the partner?” Eugen appreciates “your fessing up.” Mickey, after the Phillies and the Eagles: “Gregg Roman is still the man, despite one or two efforts that didn’t work.” Michael, in Phoenix, says the President “had/has the chance to finish iran,” and that “it didn’t take long for us to forget hiroshima.”

What the essay said had failed was a forecast of mine, not the war. In March I said the regime had been changed on the first day; within ten days the dead leader’s son held his office, and the Guards still hold the country. Simms and David may be right that the pressure breaks the regime; the blockade holds, and Iran appears to have loaded no crude onto tankers in September, by Bloomberg’s account. I do not know when it breaks, and in March I wrote as if I did. That is the failure the essay was about. Ed’s question has the answer the essay gave: the program will not be graded in public before the colleagues who built it have had their say, and the partner is not named because a poor fit is not a fault. Both stay unnamed here.

On the President, Roy and a reader who served six years as an enlisted man fault his judgment. The essay faulted mine. The President set the goal, no Iranian bomb; stopped the strikes in April; wrote on October 8 that no American strike would come before the midterms; and said on Sunday that the choice is a deal or to finish the regime. The Forum holds that finishing it is the only lasting answer, and the disagreement is about policy, not the man. Michael’s Hiroshima: the United States does not need one. The President has ruled out nuclear weapons, and what ends this regime is its own armed men deciding the paychecks have stopped. Charles is owed a straight answer too: the details are what I can check, so they are what I print.

Are there any objectionable features to the “Islamophobia” definition written by CAIR? Controversial? Or is this article simply saying that the procedure by which the city council adopted the definition is suspect?

The article was about procedure: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, drafted the text; the resolution named no author; the advisory commission that reviews such measures never voted on it; and the measure went to the police. Donald asks the other question, and it has an answer. The core sentence, about hatred of Muslims and their property, follows the form of the antisemitism text the city adopted in March, and no one should object to a government saying it opposes bigotry against its residents. The trouble is in three of the ten examples.

Example 4 lists “portraying Muslims as inherently violent, extremist, disloyal, uncivilized, or incompatible with democratic society.” Example 8 lists treating Muslims “as presumptive security threats solely because of their religion.” Example 9 lists “promoting conspiracy theories alleging that Muslims seek to undermine democratic institutions, secretly control government, or impose religious rule.” Taken as written, about Muslims as a group, each describes bigotry. Taken as the author intends them, they reach further. The day after the vote, CAIR’s San Diego director said on public radio: “Law enforcement now has a framework when somebody is called a terrorist, out in a public event or out on the streets. This framework provides what is and is not to be defined as Islamophobia.” Two governors have called CAIR a terrorist organization; a federal judge found “ample evidence” of its association with Hamas; a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum, later a government exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation trial, called the group’s work in America “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” A text that lets its author decide whether reporting those facts is a “conspiracy theory” about Muslims is the objectionable feature.

The antisemitism definition the city adopted in March has the sentence San Diego’s new text lacks. It says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The September resolution draws no such line for an Islamist organization. CAIR’s own draft went further: its twelfth example made government policies that burden Muslims without justification a form of “Islamophobia,” and the city’s lawyers moved that sentence into the preamble rather than strike it. So, to Donald: the documents prove the procedure, which is why the story was about it; the content is why it mattered.

The definition is extremely similar to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Do you oppose that also?

No. The form is similar by design; CAIR’s draft copied the structure of a core sentence followed by contemporary examples. Four things differ. First, authorship. The antisemitism text was adopted by the 31 governments of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in Bucharest on May 26, 2016; the State Department has used it since; and San Diego’s March resolution carries the alliance’s name in its title. The September resolution names no one, and the drafter was an advocacy group whose San Diego canvasser created the file. Second, the sentence quoted above: the alliance’s text says what antisemitism is not, and the new one has no equivalent. Third, process: the commission voted on the first text ten months before the council did and never voted on the second; its September meeting was cancelled for lack of a quorum. Fourth, the law around it. President Trump’s December 2019 executive order on antisemitism told agencies to consider the alliance’s definition, and its examples only as possible evidence of discriminatory intent, and to “not diminish or infringe upon any right protected under Federal law or under the First Amendment.” Both of San Diego’s resolutions call their definitions non-binding and carry a free-speech clause, in the same words. The difference is who wrote it, what the public was told, and where each text says criticism ends and hatred begins.

Neither CAIR nor any of the Brotherhood’s other U.S. front groups has ever committed a single act of kinetic violence against Americans. What they do is far more dangerous to our Republic: subversion, which is not a crime under Title 18 and is protected under the First Amendment until it crosses into sedition, material support or treason. Until we realize that it is subversion that will destroy us, not terrorism, they will continue to make inroads, and it is all legal.

Clare is right on the facts, and the courts have been saying so. No CAIR entity has been charged with a crime. In 2007 prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case; the charity’s leaders were convicted of financing Hamas, the group itself was never tried, and the appeals court, ruling for a group listed beside it, called such a listing “an untested allegation of the Government.” The two individuals most often cited were a onetime communications employee who pleaded guilty in 2004 to firearms and explosives charges for helping others reach a Pakistani terrorist training camp, and a man who helped found the Texas chapter and was convicted for his work at the charity, not at CAIR.

The designations rest on that history. Texas’s governor designated CAIR a foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organization on November 18, 2025, under state law; the group sued two days later, and eleven months on the court has ruled only on discovery. Florida’s governor did the same by executive order in December; a federal judge blocked it on March 4 with the sentence “This the First Amendment does not permit”; the state designated CAIR again on September 29 under a new statute, with effect from November 5, and a new suit followed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on September 22 that for a domestic organization “you have to find a link.” A designation is a political act a court can undo, and two courts are being asked to.

The tools that reach CAIR are the ones Clare names, and the Forum uses them. Disclosure: San Diego’s city attorney wrote “information provided by affected third parties” where the name CAIR belonged, and the fix is a rule that a resolution drafted by an outside group says so on its face. Tax law: CAIR’s website says it takes no foreign financing, and a multilateral bank whose top shareholders include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Qatar reported $7.7 million toward a building meant to pay the group rent for decades; registrations and returns can be checked by any clerk. Election law: the Forum’s September report on nonprofit electioneering is below. None of it is terrorism, and a court cannot erase a filing deadline the way it can undo a designation. That is Clare’s point, and mine.

Before the vote, not after; the backroom that was a public file; and a petition.

A reader named Gregg writes that sending the report after the vote “is not helpful” and that he will support organizations that catch “ATTEMPTS to normalize anti-Semitism before the attempts become fait accompli.” He is right about the timing. The council voted on September 15 and the mayor signed the resolution on the 28th; the Forum filed its records request on the 19th, received 1,880 pages on the 22nd and 76 more on the 29th, and published on October 5. The documents could not have run before the vote. The draft could have: CAIR’s text sat on the city’s website from early September, and a reader of the commission’s agenda would have seen it. The Forum now reads those agendas.

Several of you called the adoption a “backroom” deal. It was the opposite: the draft, the author’s name in the file properties, and CAIR’s letter naming its authors were all posted in public, and nobody looked. Ellen, in Los Angeles, asks for a petition drive; MEF Action, the Forum’s advocacy affiliate, has her note. One reader, who has since asked to leave the list, compared the report to objecting to “AIPAC defining antisemitism.” The comparison fails on one fact: an alliance of 31 governments wrote the definition the city adopted in March, and the resolution said so in its title.

So will the IRS remove their 501(c)(3) status?

Probably not, and the history says why. The Forum’s September report on the Michigan Senate primary found imams at tax-exempt mosques telling congregants whom to vote for, and two of them hosting the candidate at services; it measured that conduct against the IRS’s own training course and asked the agency to apply the excise taxes and revocations the law provides. The law is plain: a 501(c)(3) organization is barred from participating in any campaign for or against a candidate, and the penalty can be revocation.

The enforcement is another matter. The IRS has revoked a church’s exemption for campaigning once, in 1995, after the Church at Pierce Creek bought full-page newspaper ads against Bill Clinton four days before the 1992 election; an appeals court upheld the revocation in 2000 and called it the first in the agency’s history. In July 2025 the IRS told a Texas court that a house of worship speaking to its own congregation through its usual channels does not violate the rule; a judge refused to enter that agreement in March and dismissed the case, and the appeal was undecided at the end of September, so the agency’s position is a statement of intent and not law. Yale adds that anyone tracing Washington’s money to Islamist groups should “pay attention to state pass-throughs.” The October 21 edition did: the roughly $45 million that federal spending records list for the Islamic Center of Detroit since 2017 was almost all Agriculture Department child-nutrition funds routed through Michigan’s education department, and the Forum has asked under the Freedom of Information Act what they paid for.

Israel votes tomorrow. Four readers on whether Iran strikes, and one on why the vote feels like survival.

Jared, in New York, sees “an Iranian October Surprise” that is “a twofer”: a missile strike tomorrow would unsettle a close vote, the last polls he saw give Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc 54 seats, and any Israeli answer would then have to be timed around the American midterms. Gadi: “The opposite, Gregg. Iran has no reason to attack Israel. Israel has a reason to attack Iran.” Hillel: “I was imagining that Israel would strike THEM on Election Day.” Michael, in Phoenix, wants the regime finished now.

The intelligence reported in Israel supports Gadi and Hillel. Israel’s army chief, Eyal Zamir, told a private meeting he sees no operational need to strike Tehran before the vote; Ynet’s defense analyst wrote last week that there is “no concrete intelligence” that Iran or Hezbollah intends an attack before or after the election and that the danger is a miscalculation. President Trump wrote on October 8 that the United States would not attack Iran before November 3; ABC reported on the 22nd that the two allies have drawn up plans for joint strikes after the midterms; and on Sunday he said the choice is a deal or to “finish them off.” If a strike comes, the dates put it after November 3 and in American and Israeli hands, not Tehran’s. Jared’s warning stands on its own terms: a regime planning against Americans, by the intelligence director’s letter reported on Saturday, can choose a date too, and tomorrow’s vote has rules for a siren. On the seats, the Forum’s poll of polls had the blocs at 53 each when the blackout began Friday night; the result is in Wednesday’s brief.

Amatzia, a historian in Haifa who fought in Israel’s wars from 1956 to 1994 and lost his younger brother on the Suez Canal on the first night of the Yom Kippur War, answers yesterday’s question of why Israel treats every election as a matter of survival: “It never did. Now it does, with reason.” His first example is the mushroom cloud: “No PM ever showed us a nuked Tel Aviv.” He lists three more charges against the prime minister, which are the opposition’s case, and he writes that he has never felt this way before October 7. Yesterday’s edition argued that the rules make every election a survival vote, whoever wins, because 61 votes can rewrite them; Amatzia says the man does. Israelis settle that tomorrow. I take no side in their vote, and I read his letter twice.

I am an old Jew who will be 101 years old on Saturday. I used to feel an attachment to Israel. Now I feel Israel imitates the countries in which we Jews have been persecuted. It does not have the separation between state and religion which I believe is essential in a country which is democratic. It has not only a favored religion but a favored sect within that religion. There cannot be a Jewish republic. In a republic, the religion of its people is not the business of the government.

David writes from Australia, and his objection is the oldest one in Israel’s constitutional file. In 1950 the Knesset chose to write its constitution “chapter by chapter” because David Ben-Gurion wanted none in writing and the religious parties would accept only the Torah; religion and state is the chapter that has stopped every attempt since. Yesterday’s edition used “Jewish republic” to mean Israel with rules that are written, entrenched and above any one government, and it said the structure is Israel’s to choose. David wants the American rule, a government with no religion. None of the constitutional planks in yesterday’s edition proposes it. What the Israel Democracy Institute’s draft proposes instead is to keep marriage, conversion, the Sabbath and kashrut out of the courts’ reach, which leaves them where they are now, with the majority in the Knesset and the parties that hold it. David’s sentence is the standard a constitution would be measured against; a supermajority would have to decide how far short of it Israel is willing to stay, and that decision, made once by 80 votes, beats the present arrangement, in which 61 can remake it every four years.

Yale sent a draft constitution of his own. He names four problems: coalition deals that hide from voters what their vote buys, splinter parties formed by men who “see a future prime minister” in the mirror, a judiciary with “essentially no checks or balances,” and a rabbinate with governmental power and no accountability. His remedy is a legislature of three houses, one by ideology, one by religious community, one by territory, with a prime minister chosen from the first, ministers confirmed from outside the Knesset, a term limit, and the courts and the rabbinate brought under the government. The four problems are the ones the parties’ own platforms name. The closest precedent is South Africa’s parliament of 1984 to 1994, which had three houses, one each for whites, Coloureds and Indians, with the black majority in none, and the arrangement ended with the regime that built it. The texts the parties have worked from are President Herzog’s framework of 2023 and the Eitan committee’s 9,000 pages; a draft like Yale’s belongs in the next Knesset’s constitution committee, and I will send it there if he agrees.

Tucker Carlson’s viewership is heads and tails above everyone else’s, he hardly ever agrees to be interviewed by people who push back, and his persistent lies about Jews and Israel in every podcast are easily one of the top three drivers of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the world. His lies need to be called out in a verifiable, systematic way, every single time. I was considering creating my own podcast to do it. I don’t think I’m cut out for this, but I think it’s necessary for this to be done by someone. I wanted to get your thoughts.

Part of it is done, and Kaivan can use it. In October 2025 I wrote that the Heritage Foundation’s president had failed a leadership test by defending Carlson’s two-hour interview with the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; he later told his staff, “I misread the situation.” In March I reviewed Carlson’s two broadcasts on the first week of the Iran war claim by claim. The same week, after he accused the Chabad movement of seeking a religious war, President Trump said that “Tucker has lost his way.” On Friday I wrote about his April line that “President Trump is a slave to Israel.” Others have done the rest of the checking. JNS went through his February interview with Ambassador Mike Huckabee on the USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard and Christians in Qatar. Carlson retracted his claim that Isaac Herzog had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island after a letter from the Israeli president’s office. Snopes left his account of a private conversation with President Trump unrated for lack of any evidence beyond his own recollection.

On the podcast: his audience does not watch rebuttals, it watches him. The useful form is the one Kaivan describes and then talks himself out of, a dated file of claims, each with the transcript, the source and the correction, that reporters and his own guests can use. That takes a lawyer’s habits, not a broadcaster’s. If Kaivan builds it that way, I will read it and cite it.

The month’s mail brought the same argument from both directions. From one side: “There are no moderate Muslims,” in five words from one reader. A reader in Houston sent a longer version under the title “Why ‘Moderate’ Muslims are Unicorns”: “All Muslims are on the Jihadi education pathway to violence,” and “The 1st Amendment does not protect Muslims just because they are not yet violent.” A retired Marine proposes that sharia be declared not a religion and that those who follow it lose welfare, bank accounts, driver’s licenses and the internet. Another reader wants “a total ban on preaching Islam.” From the other side, a man who signs with a Muslim name writes that Allah will punish “these Zio pigs” with eternal burning. He is the only one quoted here, and it is his only line.

The founders answered the Houston letter before I could. Jefferson wrote that his Virginia statute on religious freedom was meant to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination,” and the First Amendment took the same view: Islam’s practice is protected as Judaism’s is, and neither shields a believer who breaks the law. The Forum’s standing rule is that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. The people who prove it are the ones the Forum works with: Zuhdi Jasser’s organization in Phoenix; Raheel Raza, who told Congress that “CAIR does not speak for me or most Muslims”; the Muslim woman who organized the iftar with Israel’s embassy that the council then attacked; and the reformers the September 27 essay described. A letter that erases them does the Islamists’ work. So does a letter that promises them hellfire. Both go unanswered after this.

The short ones.

Garth asked three. Yes, Canada has a CAIR equivalent: the National Council of Canadian Muslims was founded in 2000 as CAIR-CAN, renamed itself on July 6, 2013, and says it has “always been a separate and independent organization from CAIR in the United States” that “initially chose to operate under a similar brand”; the Forum wrote about the name change at the time. No, the Kurds are not America’s sole proxy in the region; Washington’s partners include Israel, Jordan, the Gulf states, Iraq’s Kurdistan region and the Kurdish-led forces in Syria, and the Kurds are the one partner without a state. “Proxy” fits Tehran’s militias, which fight for Tehran; the Kurds fight for themselves. On tribes against sects, both lines run through this war: Sunni Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan stand against Shia Iran, while the Houthis, who are Shia, fire at Riyadh, and the Kurds, mostly Sunni, fight Sunni Turkey. Without the oil, Americans would care less; Garth set Israel aside, and Israel is the reason we would still care.

Les, in Toronto, answers Allyn’s question from Vol. IV with two names: Beit Halochem USA, which now operates as Warriors of Israel, the same tax-exempt corporation under a new name, and Beit Halochem Canada. Both fund the Beit Halochem rehabilitation centers of the Zahal Disabled Veterans Organization in Israel.

Bob wants Marines ashore at Bandar Abbas. The 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit left San Diego aboard the Makin Island on September 28 and arrives by the end of November, and the President ruled out ground troops on October 15. No.

Rick, in Edmonton, writes that warning intelligence “rarely reaches the decision-maker in time, in their original form.” The best case for his point is King Hussein’s flight to Tel Aviv on September 25, 1973, to tell Golda Meir that Syria’s army was in “pre-jump positions”; Israel’s intelligence rated the warning vague, and the war came eleven days later.

Madeleine asks whether Washington is billing Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for their defense. The Patriot batteries are theirs, bought with their money; the carriers and the escorts in the strait are ours. I would send the bill for the escorts first.

Barry calls the October 7 essay on the warnings before the massacre “mostly conjecture with a smattering of facts,” and says Iran “will secure a nuclear bomb” one way or another. The paper, the dates and the hearing in that essay are documented; the part about the months ahead is a forecast and reads as one. On the bomb, the Forum’s position has not moved: the permanent guarantee against it is the end of the regime.

Gene writes of the October 2 edition: “It’s the USS TR! Not FDR!!!” That edition named the USS Theodore Roosevelt once in full and three times as the Roosevelt, and never printed FDR. Peter, a defense analyst, says the October 15 edition was “delighted” that the Houthis sank two ships. That edition reported two ships sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, with the Guards’ mine claim and a drone assessment beside it, and attributed the sinkings to Iran, not the Houthis; the next day it corrected one of them after UKMTO, the British navy’s shipping advisory, said the Cape Dao was not sunk. There was no delight in it, and the correction ran before his letter arrived.

A reader who served six years enlisted objects that the President would “ask Turkey to intercede” with the Houthis. The October 13 edition reported it in the President’s words, “President Erdogan, I think, would do as I ask,” and reported Erdogan’s call to the Saudi crown prince the same day. His objection was in print the day before he sent it.

Solly, Rachelle, and Joe and Renanah object to three words: “settlers,” which Rachelle would replace with “Jewish residents”; “Palestinian,” which Joe and Renanah say “supports the jihad lie”; and the October 16 report that settlers beat a Washington Post photographer, which Solly says may be “the usual lies arranged by the murderous Palestinian Arabs.” The brief uses the words its sources use and names the sources. “Settler violence” is the Times of Israel’s phrase for what Israel’s army chief said on October 14 “must be condemned and eradicated”; Israeli police arrested ten Israelis three days after the beating; and “Palestinian” is the word in the agreements Israel signed. The words stay.

Peloni, who edits a pro-Israel news site, asked to repost the election guide with attribution and a link. Yes.

Lynne, in Pennsylvania, drove past a halal food festival in a King of Prussia parking lot with lines three blocks long and asks whether I know of it. I do now. A food festival is a food festival; the Forum’s report is about what imams said from the pulpit.

Henry also asks whether “we are in the Third Crusades.” No. The crusades were wars for territory under a cross. This is a war against a regime, with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Emirates on the same side as the United States.

Anne asks that a YouTube commentator be added to the sources. The brief links to documents and to outlets whose reports can be checked against them; a video that shows a document can be cited, and a video that describes one cannot.

Three readers sent books: Jeanne, Saideh Bonab’s account of her husband’s conversion from Islam; Eliyho, his own, “Auschwitz on the Potomac”; and Larry, Craig Frank’s “Is AI Good for the Jews,” with a suggestion that the Forum invite the author. The suggestion is with the Forum’s events team. Jeffrey, a professor in Vermont, on the Forum’s report that October 7 did not create the alliance of the far left and the Islamists: “True. It has been operative in various forms for decades.” Joseph, an editor in Seoul, republished a Forum release in his paper. Harvey, Keith, Susan, Sue, Ellice and Fran and Barry wrote to say thanks, in six different ways. Noted, with mine.

Thirty-one of you wrote 43 letters saying the same thing: I give to the Forum, the October 4 essay stopped at a paywall, and the site offered me a credit card form. Vol. IV had seven such letters. The rule has not changed: every Forum donor receives Insider Premium with the Forum’s compliments, reset each January 1 to match who gave. The cause, in most of the cases we traced, is an address: the gift came from one email and the brief goes to another, or one spouse gave and the other reads. The fix is to reply to this email with the name the gift was made under and the address you read at, and your access is turned on by hand, with no card and no form. Marc, Joe, David, George and Iven were done this month. Gifts by check, bank transfer, qualified charitable distribution or donor-advised fund are the ones our matching misses most often, so say which. Peter suggests the upgrade page carry the line “Already a subscriber? Log in here.” It will.

Gary, in Toronto, asks for a recorded version to listen to in the car. Every edition has one: the “Listen online” link at the top of the email and the player at the top right of every page at mefinsider.meforum.org. Karen asks where the full podcasts live; the index is the Forum’s YouTube channel. Valerie answered the invitation to send one question by asking “But where?” Here: hit reply to any edition, or write [email protected], which the Corrections Desk prints at the bottom of each one. Sari gets two copies of every email, which means two addresses are subscribed; reply with both and one goes. Peter sees messages “cut in half from top to bottom”; that is a narrow email pane, and the “Read online” link at the top opens the full page. Floyd finds the paragraphs “clumped” with little white space and suggests an editor. The paragraphs carry their sources, which is why they run long; from this week the longest are split in two. Patrice asks for a French edition. There is none; a browser’s translate button works on the web version, and the audio does not.

Letters that arrived between the Sunday the CAIR essay went out, September 27, and ten o’clock this morning Eastern, from 131 of you. Vol. IV answered 87 in a month. Forty-three of this month’s letters, from 31 readers, were about Premium access; six of you asked to change an address and four to leave the list. The welcome poll, the one question every new subscriber answers, stands at 1,542, up 9 since September 28: 124 who set or advise on policy, 132 in the press, 63 in government or on the Hill, 119 donors, and 1,104 paying close attention.

Israel votes tomorrow, Tuesday, October 27; the result is in Wednesday’s brief. The United States votes on Tuesday, November 3. The Forum’s Michael Rubin gives lunch briefings in Philadelphia, November 5; Washington, November 6; Miami, November 18; Boca Raton, November 19; and Palm Beach, November 20. My own, on the midterms, Iran and Israel: Palo Alto, November 9; San Francisco, November 10; Los Angeles, November 13; San Diego, November 16; and in December, Sarasota, December 14; Boca Raton, December 16; Palm Beach, December 17; and Miami, December 18. Benjamin Baird, who directs MEF Action, the Forum’s advocacy affiliate, speaks in New York, December 3. To meet, or to host an evening for the Forum, reply to this email.

Corrections Desk. Two items. Jerry, whose friendship with Zvika Greengold ran in Vol. IV, writes that he knew Greengold for a short time about fifteen years ago and that they have since lost touch; “friend” overstated it, and he wanted that said. He also sends the closing line of Greengold’s Medal of Valor citation: בעמידתו האיתנה, אגב גילוי גבורה עילאית, עיכב ומנע את התקדמות הסורים לעבר נהר הירדן. In my translation: by his steadfast stand, displaying supreme heroism, he delayed and prevented the Syrian advance toward the Jordan River. Second, Frank, in Australia, caught an error in a Forum article of October 5: its opening paragraph dated an Emirati claim to three Gulf islands to September 25, 2026, named the wrong official, and linked to a 2022 report of a different speech. The sentence now reads September 28, 2026, and names Khalifa Shaheen Al Marar, who made the claim at the United Nations that day; the original wording survives in a syndicated copy. The article carries no correction note. This is the note. When this brief gets something wrong, write [email protected]; corrections run in print.

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Reply and tell me: after November 3, a deal with Tehran or finish the job, and what would each one cost the United States? The best answers, and the strongest disagreements with anything above, run in Vol. VI. New reader? The frameworks behind these answers are explained in the Field Guide.