Greetings and welcome to Monday, Sept. 7, 2026... Labor Day, as if the empty inbox and quiet phone didn't already tip you off.
My calendar says it's Labor Day. (Yeah, I know, no duh) It's also Beer Lover's Day, Grandma Moses Day, Neither Snow Nor Rain Day, New Hampshire Day, Acorn Squash Day, Salami Day, Google Commemoration Day, and the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies. So take the day off like the holiday demands, crack a beer, slice up some salami, and thank Google for existing — just do it outdoors, since the air's supposedly cleaner today and New Hampshire didn't earn its own day by staying inside.
Today in History:
1191: Richard I defeats Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf during the Third Crusade.
1533: Elizabeth I, the future queen of England, is born in Greenwich.
1776: The American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to a British warship in New York Harbor, marking the first combat use of a submarine.
1813: Meatpacker Samuel Wilson inspires the nickname "Uncle Sam" after stamping his Army beef shipments with his initials.
1822: Dom Pedro I declares Brazil's independence from Portugal.
1876: The James-Younger Gang's raid on a bank in Northfield, Minn., collapses when armed townspeople fight back, decimating the gang.
1901: The Peace of Beijing ends the Boxer Rebellion in China.
1936: Buddy Holly, born Charles Hardin Holley, is born in Lubbock, Texas.
1940: Nazi Germany launches the Blitz, the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing raids on London.
1963: The Pro Football Hall of Fame inducts its first class of 17 honorees, including Jim Thorpe, in Canton, Ohio.
1977: The United States and Panama sign treaties transferring control of the Panama Canal to Panama.
1978: Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov is fatally poisoned with ricin on a London bridge by an assassin using a modified umbrella.
1996: Rapper Tupac Shakur is shot in Las Vegas; he dies six days later.
2008: The federal government places mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship amid the financial crisis.
Birthdays Today include: Grandma Moses, folk artist; Peggy Noonan, author, columnist (The Wall Street Journal) and presidential speechwriter; Chrissie Hynde, musician and songwriter (The Pretenders); Gloria Gaynor, singer ("I Will Survive"); Evan Rachel Wood, actress (Westworld, Thirteen). If today's your birthday too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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You may notice, by the end of this column, that I'm not in a good mood today. Consider yourself warned now, rather than surprised later. I can't touch this subject without my blood pressure spiking to numbers my doctor would frame and hang on the wall as a cautionary example.
I've long marveled at how the global left claims to worship "world government" and treats the United Nations like a holy thing, while heaping violent words and actions on the one piece of UN work that actually mattered: the re-creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Funny how that particular UN achievement never makes it onto their highlight reel.
So imagine my face turning a bit red last night, upon reading Dana Horn's piece at the New York Post:
The coming week will be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday. But this week, I'll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting "Free, Free, Palestine!," "Jew, Jew, Jew!," and "Israel commits genocide!" No, I don't mean Columbia University in 2024. I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel — thereby averting the world's eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden.
Yeah. With that funding source, you could've knocked me over with a feather — or, given who was signing the checks, maybe with a fully loaded 767.
As Dana suggests, not much has changed in the 25 years or so since then. And clearly New York voters have forgotten 9/11. If anything, the anniversary snuck up looking less like a memorial and more like a status update.
Understanding the trends here is critical, I think.
Consider this: the NYPD's own numbers, released this week, show hate crimes across the five boroughs up 15.8% over the past year — 425 incidents in the first eight months of 2026, versus 367 over the same stretch last year. More than half of all confirmed hate crimes in New York City this year have targeted Jews, who make up roughly 10% of the city's population. Zoom out to the national numbers, and it gets worse, not better: Jews are the target of 63% of anti-religious hate crimes across the entire country, while accounting for less than 3% of the population. Durban's organizers would probably call that a "mission accomplished."
And then there's the mayor of the city where all of this is happening, and where the UN is headquartered. When a Jewish man was stabbed this summer by an attacker who reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" mid-assault, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first instinct wasn't to call it what the NYPD's own hate-crime task force would eventually confirm it was. His instinct was to reach for "mental health." Not hate. Not antisemitism. Mental health. The same all-purpose explanation Chicago and San Francisco reach for when they'd rather not say the word "crime." And interestingly, that's the very same defense being used in the case of the equally murderous Lindsay Clancy. Funny how nobody has noticed that parallel, isn't it?
A mayor who's spent the better part of a year positioning himself against Israel in the loudest terms available found, in the one moment that actually called for moral clarity, absolutely none of it. Nor have his supporters.
That's the "not much has changed" Dana's talking about. That UN-sponsored event in Durban just four days before the 9/11 attacks gave the world a rehearsal in 2001:
Launder an old hatred through the language of human rights, let a bloc of member anti-Israel, anti-Jewish states run the show, and count on the rest of the world being too polite, too distracted, or too invested in the fiction of a unified "international community" to call it what it is. Twenty-five years later, the venue's changed from a convention center in South Africa to a bloody subway platform on the Upper West Side, and the script barely needed rewriting.
Which brings me back to my original point about the worldwide left and its love affair with what they call “global governance” and what I call “world domination.” Or, if you prefer, a “world caliphate.”
The UN is now an institution that let a coalition funded in part by the bin Laden family stage-manage a conference ostensibly about fighting racism; it is not an institution anyone serious should still be citing as a moral authority. We’re talking about an organization whose collective good idea was to place Iran's ambassador in the chair of the Human Rights Council's Social Forum, which is exactly the kind of procedural stable carpeting that makes UN defenders sound outright insane. Appearances aren't lying in this case.
Just this April, Iran was nominated— alongside Cuba and Nicaragua — to the UN's Committee for Programme and Coordination, an ECOSOC body that helps shape UN policy priorities. The U.S. was the only country objecting; the UK, France, Australia, and Canada were all among the nations that allowed the nomination to proceed by consensus. This is the one the Jewish Chronicle flagged as "mind-boggling," and it happened while Iran was fresh off carrying out the most executions in the country in almost four decades — at least 1,639 people in 2025 alone, better than four a day. Well, those are the ones we actually have on record, anyway. We don't really know how many of Iran's citizens were killed for dissent. Where is the UN's collectivist outrage with that? I'm not seeing any at all.
The UN got one thing right in 1948: the restoration of the State of Israel. Its most persistent efforts since that time have been attempts to reverse that action, violently.
Here's the truth of the matter:
Israel is the only country in modern history that had to fight for its existence, win that fight, repeatedly fight off those trying to erase it, and then endure lectures from the very international body that helped set the stage for its re-creation. I mean, none of this is new. Not a bit of it. The script never changes.
Israel gets attacked? The UN calls for “restraint.”
Israel defends itself? The UN calls for an investigation.
Israel wins? The UN calls it an “occupation.”
Israel builds a barrier to keep terrorists from murdering its citizens? The UN discovers a sudden and passionate interest in real estate law.
Israel retaliates against people who deliberately murder civilians? Out come the emergency meetings, the condemnations, the resolutions, the solemn faces, and the inevitable international chorus insisting that the Jews have once again had the audacity to survive in a manner insufficiently convenient to their enemies.
Meanwhile, the people openly dedicated to eliminating Israel from the map get the deluxe treatment. Their grievances are endlessly recycled through committees, agencies, conferences, special sessions, commissions, and resolutions until the entire UN bureaucracy begins to resemble a diplomatic recycling center devoted exclusively to processing anti-Israel outrage.
Well, this is MY anti-UN outrage.
The most annoying part of this is that I've not had to editorialize much at all to this point. Here's where that changes:
Why on earth we continue to put up with the HQ of what has turned out to be the biggest collection of antisemites in the world being in our country, much less continue to claim membership in it and pay the lion's share of its bills, I have no idea, beyond the notion that it’s a group Zohran Mamdani approves of. Which, come to think of it, may be the most damning thing of all.
There.
In the words of the poet, "I'm feeling much better now."
Thought of the Day: The dignity of labor was never supposed to require a middleman.
VIP members: Your turn. Your voice matters. You know what to do.
Take care today, gang. Enjoy the day. I'll be here tomorrow and hope you will as well.
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