To read AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese, French and German go to nancyharteveltkobrin.substack On May 18, 2026, Caleb Vazquez and Cain Clark walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego and murdered three men. The victims were Muslim. The shooters were not jihadis. They were, by their own family’s account, young men radicalized by neo-Nazi and mass shooter imagery online, one of them on the autism spectrum, both of them lost. And yet the psychology was familiar to me. In

The unfinished self — and how it is being exploited by Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah This is the fourth piece in a series. The first, “The Visual Holds the Key,” examined how images of violence function as psychological weapons. The second, “We Need This Blood: Hamas’ Blood Charter 1988,” traced the ideological and symbolic roots of Hamas’s use of bodily spectacle. The third, “First the Blood. Now the Mind,” analyzed Iran’s penetration of Israel’s Institute for National Security

Iran’s assault on Israel’s interior front [AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese and French can be found at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack where this was first posted.] This is the third piece in what has become, without my fully planning it, a series about a single question: what does it mean to wage war not against territory, but against the human capacity to make sense of the world? The first two pieces looked at blood — at Hamas’s deliberate use of bodily spectacle as a w

The World Had the Document. It Chose Not to Read It. This post continues the argument from “We Need This Blood: Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind,” published on Substack May 2, 2026. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese, and French can be found in subsequent posts. Haniyeh told us they need the blood. The Covenant told us why — in 1988, in plain language, on a website at Yale Law School where it has sat for decades. The question was never what H

Body Parts, Primitive Mental States, and October 7th This blog post first appeared at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack. It was posted before "We Need This Blood". It is the first piece of a series. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese and French can be found at substack. A recent conversation with a colleague about the barbarism of October 7th prompted me to return to something I published nearly two decades ago — a forensic analysis connecting the imagery of jihadi attack site

Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind This post was originally written as post 48 of a series of War Blog Posts following October 7th. It is substantially revised and will be part of a series with the next blog posts. Elsewhere I have written about the way Hamas and jihadi terror reduce human beings to fragments and objects — how the body becomes weapon, message, and political instrument of horror. Today I want to go deeper, into something more inti

Sahm (Arrow): سهم Rad‘a (Deterrence): ردع [AI translation in Hebrew and Portuguese below. Posted at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack 24.04.26] Reading Michael Barak’s excellent analysis of Hamas’s internal psychological warfare prompted a closer look at something often left aside: the language itself. Recent reporting has described Hamas’s use of internal enforcement units with names such as Sahm (Arrow) and Rad‘a(Deterrence). These are typically presented as operational or se

Originally posted at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack 23.04.26 . AI translation into Hebrew and Portuguese found there. In the summer of 1978, before the Iranian Revolution dominated every conversation, I was introduced to the newly appointed chair of the comparative literature department at the University of Minnesota. I was just beginning my doctorate in Islamic literature, working within a comparative literature setting, and still learning the unspoken rules of academic life

The same symbolic and developmental structures that shape the regime’s use of force also limit its capacity to transform from within. [AI translation in Hebrew and Portuguese at nancyharteveltkobrin. substack 21.04.26] Recent reports that North Korea has again tested ballistic missiles equipped with cluster-munition warheads—designed to disperse multiple submunitions across a wide area—are not merely technical events. They are reminders of the kind of system we are dealing wi

[This was first published at nancyharteveltkobrin.su bstack with AI translation in Hebrew and Portuguese] Domestic Violence and Political Order: Women, Silence and Power in Gaza Recent reporting, brought to wider attention by the counterterrorism expert Noor Dahri and reinforced by accounts in Israel Hayom , describes women in Gaza beginning to speak about rape, sexual abuse, and extortion under Hamas rule. These testimonies include allegations of sexual coercion by men in po