The Permission Slip Macklemore Got in 2014

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In May 2014, Macklemore walked onto a Seattle stage wearing a large prosthetic nose, dark wig, beard and black suit. Then he performed “Thrift Shop,” a song about being cheap.

Macklemore in Jewface in 2014, singing about being cheap

It would be difficult to construct a more recognizable antisemitic spectacle: the exaggerated Jewish nose, the beard, the dark clothes, all while singing about bargain hunting. Actor Seth Rogen mocked Macklemore’s explanation that it was merely a random disguise: if someone were instructed to assemble an antisemitic Jewish costume, Rogen wrote, “they’d have that exact shopping list.”

As criticism mounted, Macklemore apologized. He acknowledged that the outfit could be understood as a Jewish caricature but maintained that no Jewish stereotype had crossed his mind.

Yeah, right. That should have been a simple moment for the Anti-Defamation League to clearly denounce the spectacle.

Instead, the ADL chose absolution.

“We take him at his word that he did not have any ill intent,” then-ADL director Abraham Foxman said, “and unreservedly accept his apology.” And then Macklemore gave the ADL a promotional shout-out. “Through this situation I’ve got hip to some incredible groups like the ADL,” he wrote, encouraging people to check out their “great work.”

The country’s best-known antisemitism organization publicly and “unreservedly” accepted his apology and also his advertisement. It is unclear whether there was a quid-pro-quo and whether the ADL was trying to promote its antisemitism study it released the week before.

As they say in text-land: “WTF?”

Twelve Years Later

It is now 2026, and antisemitism is raging through American public life. Much of it no longer arrives wearing a fake nose and beard. It travels under political banners, frequently through rhetoric about Zionists and Israel.

And Macklemore is back on a concert stage.

Opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, he told tens of thousands of people why he had joined the tour: so that he could stand in stadiums and say, “Free Palestine.” He accused Israel of genocide, performed “Hind’s Hall” against a backdrop of footage from pro-Palestinian campus encampments and turned part of the concert into a political demonstration.

This time, the ADL wasn’t offering absolution.

“They came for a concert, not performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism’ from his opener, Macklemore,” the organization declared. It pointed to what it describes as his record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.

When Macklemore was subsequently removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s tour, head of ADL Jonathan Greenblatt applauded the decision, saying that “for years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes and demonized Israel and Israelis.”

What a difference twelve years makes.

The Permission Slip

The problem in 2014 wasn’t only that the ADL accepted an apology. It was that it seemingly confused forgiving the man with minimizing the act.

America’s leading antisemitism organization effectively told the public that Macklemore’s updated and revised intentions settled the matter. A concocted and forced apology after multiple attempts to satisfy the offended, became another chip on the accused – I’m sorry you were offended, not I’m sorry that I have done something terrible that offended you.

Jews are the subject. Always. The antisemite is a victim of Jewish sensitivity.

The ADL granted a permission slip of sorts to this vulgarity and inanity. Permission for American culture to treat an astonishingly recognizable Jewish caricature as something that could be quickly explained away if the right person said he hadn’t meant it.

Now, the ADL that once took Macklemore at his word is no longer particularly interested in his assurances about what he means. It considers impact. The false charge of “genocide” against Israel in Israel’s defensive war is a common pretext to attack Jews today. Macklemore’s appeal to thousands wasn’t a call for peace but incitement to pogrom.

But that was precisely the lesson the ADL could have taught in 2014.

There is an important role for forgiveness in fighting hatred. People must be allowed to recognize mistakes, apologize and change. That is what the Ten Days of Repentance we are in right now is about.

But forgiveness without the party internalizing the matter coupled with contrition is meaningless. It is actually much worse. It is a wink with a get-out-of-jail card. Carry on with spreading antisemitism; we’ll only call it out when the situation becomes intolerable.

Neither October 7, 2023 nor October 8 appeared magically. First One Through has been writing about this phenomenon nearly every day since those same days in May 2014, when it wrote about the UN’s Richard Falk stating that Israel’s “criminal intention [toward Palestinians] is genocidal.”

Does that word have a familiar ring to it? The UN has been using it constantly for well over a decade; before the wars of 2014, 2021 or 2023.

Antisemitism is now systemic. It has been fed into the bloodstream of western education, the arts, jihadi education and the United Nations. And for far too long, it was given a permission slip by the very organizations tasked with confronting it.

After the Shofar, the Klezmer

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At the Beacon Theatre, Itzhak Perlman offered a reminder that Jewish memory is not only something Jews mourn; it is something they dance to.

Four days after New York marked the 25th anniversary of September 11, and just after Rosh Hashanah ushered in another Jewish year, Itzhak Perlman sat at center stage at the Beacon Theatre and played klezmer.

The concert celebrated Perlman’s 81st birthday and roughly three decades since In the Fiddler’s House, his landmark embrace of the music of his Jewish roots. Perlman said he wanted people “to dance in the aisles.”

Itzhak Perlman, with members of the Klezmatics and Andy Statman at the Beacon Theater September 15, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

That is where klezmer belongs.

The word comes from the Hebrew klei zemer – “vessels of song” – but klezmer was never simply a genre of music. It was music woven into the life of Eastern European Jews, played at celebrations and, most famously, weddings.

It sounds like the world that created it. The violin can plead like prayer. The clarinet can cry, tease and laugh. A melody can begin in longing and, almost without warning, become a demand to get out of your chair.

Klezmer can sound sad without being sad music. It carries memory into celebration.

Even more, klezmer turns Jewish memory into Jewish motion.

Much of the Eastern European Jewish world that created this music was eventually destroyed. Whether Jews fled pogroms of the 19th and 20th century or were wiped out in the Holocaust, the ground which birthed klezmer has lost almost all of its Jewish feet.

But the music crossed oceans and generations. Jewish immigrants carried it to America, where later musicians recovered and revived the tradition. Andy Statman, who joined Perlman on stage at the Beacon, became one of its great modern interpreters. Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House brought klezmer to audiences who knew him primarily as one of the world’s greatest classical violinists.

That makes the choice itself significant.

Perlman could have celebrated his birthday playing Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Instead, he gathered klezmer musicians at the Beacon to play the music of Jewish weddings and Jewish celebrations.

And there was something particularly striking about hearing it in New York at this moment in time.

The city outside the Beacon has been experiencing a terrible surge in antisemitism. Jews have been harassed and assaulted on New York streets, while antisemitic incidents have repeatedly represented a disproportionate share of reported hate crimes. America’s youth has largely moved away from Israel and the Jewish State, leaving the future very uncertain.

That was the world outside the theater doors.

Inside was a different New York.

The audience appeared predominantly Jewish and older. For many, these melodies likely carried associations extending beyond a night at the Beacon: to parents and grandparents, weddings and synagogues, holidays and communities. To the Yiddish language rarely spoken anymore – let alone sung by a woman in public.

But the audience was not exclusively Jewish or old. The handful of younger people mostly wore kippahs or were Asian. Some may have come for klezmer; others simply for the opportunity to hear one of the greatest violinists alive.

And then Perlman got his wish. People got out of their seats, filled the aisles and danced.

Crowd at the Beacon took to the aisles and started dancing around the theater as Perlman and the band played wedding music (photo: First One Through)

The scene captured something that yet another speech condemning antisemitism could not. Outside were the streets of a city where Jewish identity has increasingly been met with hostility and Jews hid their identity. Inside, an 81-year-old Jewish violinist who cannot walk himself, was playing unmistakably Jewish music inherited from communities that no longer exist – and Jews and Asians alike were on their feet celebrating it.

Dancing in the aisles at The Fiddler’s House to music by Itzhak Perlman and the Klezmatics at The Beacon in NYC, September 15, 2026

The timing made the scene still richer.

The Jewish year had just begun with the blast of the shofar. Rosh Hashanah demands reflection. Yom Kippur will demand repentance and fasting. But the Jewish calendar does not end there. It moves to Sukkot and then Simchat Torah, when Jews take the Torah from the ark, hold it in their arms and dance.

That progression says something essential about Judaism. It remembers the good and the bad. It prays. It fasts. It builds. It dances.

And it refuses to make sorrow the destination.

On a September night in New York, with antisemitism again confronting Jews on the streets outside, an old Jewish musical legend lifted his violin and played old Jewish melodies. And Jews clapped and danced in the aisles.

Itzhak Perlman and Andy Statman at The Beacon in NYC for Itzhak’s 81st birthday (made by First One Through with AI)

Related:

Time to Say Goodbye, With Love and Sorrow (December 2025)

Back to School in Somalia: The Jihadi Classroom

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Summary: Millions of children do not attend school in Somalia; many of those who do are trained in jihad to fight “infidels” by al Shabab. It is a terrifying story of radical Islamic terrorism mapped for generations.

“I was always worried when they were at school,” a Somali mother told Human Rights Watch after her 17-year-old daughter was abducted by Al-Shabaab during a school tea break in Mogadishu. “Every day you get your child back at the end you are thankful.”

For parents in most countries, back to school means teachers, books, friends and homework. In parts of Somalia, it can mean wondering whether the child who left for school in the morning will return in the afternoon – or whether the school itself will become the beginning of a journey into jihad.

“I was with al-Shabaab for three months in 2010…. They wanted to train us to fight and I was afraid. I didn’t want to kill people. I wanted to go back to school and learn.” – Amare A. (not his real name), 10-year-old boy from Mogadishu, living in Kenya, June 2, 2011

Somalia has one of the world’s most severe education crises. UNICEF says more than three million Somali children are out of school, while its more recent educational work puts the out-of-school rate at approximately 65% for primary-age children and 75% at the secondary level. Poverty, displacement, drought, insecurity, distance and a shortage of teachers all contribute to the enormous educational vacuum.

Into that vacuum has stepped Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.

The European Union Agency for Asylum estimated that Al-Shabaab controls around 30% of Somalia’s territory, including large rural areas and numerous district capitals, while exercising influence or forms of co-governance well beyond the territory it directly controls. Its leadership remains intact, and the group has continued making territorial gains.

That combination should be terrifying: millions of children disconnected from conventional education alongside a jihadist organization controlling substantial territory and building an education system of its own.

A “Jihadi Worldview”

The Hiraal Institute, a Mogadishu-based security research organization, examined Al-Shabaab’s education system in a report appropriately titled The Fighters Factory. Its description should receive far more attention than it has.

“Children are indoctrinated in the Islamic institutes and made to understand current affairs through a Jihadi worldview. Additionally, the illegitimacy of the Somali government and the obligatory nature of the AS Jihad are ingrained upon them. Quran teaching is done at a faster pace than in traditional schools in order to make time for Jihadi literature. Most children graduate within two years, with many being sent directly to a training camp if they have passed age 15, the Islamic age of maturity.” – Hiraal Institute

The objective is not hidden. Hiraal concluded that Al-Shabaab built the system to create “a steady stream of ideologically pure fighters.”

The U.S. State Department independently documented what that ideology means inside Al-Shabaab-controlled schools: that students should wage war against those the organization considers “infidels,” including people in neighboring countries as well as Somalia’s federal government and international forces.

Consider the progression.

A child does not begin with an assault rifle. He begins with an explanation of the world.

The government is illegitimate. Jihad is obligatory. There are infidels against whom war should be waged. Martyrdom is honorable. The organization providing the lesson possesses religious authority.

This is hatred taught; prejudice as obligation.

Children learning to read the Quran at the Gaabow Islamic school in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, August 2013. (photo: REUTERS/Ismail Taxta)

From Classroom to Training Camp

The distinction between education and recruitment consequently begins to disappear.

Hiraal reported that children educated entirely inside the Al-Shabaab system could become some of its most ideological and fanatical fighters because they had never been exposed to an opposing argument.

American and international reporting describes what can happen next.

The State Department has repeatedly documented Al-Shabaab raiding schools, madrassas and mosques, coercing families and clan elders and recruiting children into its ranks. Children in its camps have undergone physical and religious training alongside weapons training. They have been used to carry ammunition, gather intelligence, plant explosives, fight in combat and serve as human shields and suicide bombers.

The State Department reported that training has even included forcing children to punish and execute other children.

This is not merely recruitment of child soldiers – already a war crime. It is the attempted manufacture of a worldview capable of reproducing violence from one generation to the next.

Young child in al Shabab training camp in Somalia

The Lesson Does Not Stay in Somalia

The categories taught in the classroom can become categories for selecting who lives and who dies. “Infidel” is not merely an ugly word; it is placing a target according to religion to facilitate murder.

That is why the education system deserves to be studied as part of Al-Shabaab’s terrorist infrastructure.

The Jihad Factory

The individual facts have been documented for years. What has been missing is the decision to put them in the same frame.

  • One institution records children out of school.
  • Another documents Al-Shabaab’s curriculum.
  • Another counts child recruitment.
  • Another records religious persecution.
  • Terrorism researchers count the dead.

Each is describing a different station along the same potential pathway: educational vacuum, ideological instruction, identification of the infidel, glorification of jihad, weapons training, recruitment and violence.

Al Shabab fighters in Somalia

That is why Al-Shabaab’s schools matter far beyond Somalia’s education statistics. A terrorist killed on a battlefield is one fewer terrorist. A child taught a “Jihadi worldview” represents something altogether different: a wager that the ideology can survive the men currently fighting for it.

Millions of Somali children remain outside school today. Across substantial territory, the organization positioned to exploit that vacuum has already demonstrated what it wants children to learn and, in documented cases, what it has subsequently demanded that children do.

The frightening question is therefore not how many Al-Shabaab fighters can be killed this year. It is how many replacements are sitting in classrooms.

1979: The Year Terrorism Changed and Jihadism Became Impossible To Ignore

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Look at the world’s prominent terrorist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s and something is striking: religion is largely absent.

The PLO and its factions pursued Palestinian nationalism. The IRA fought over Northern Ireland. ETA sought Basque independence. The Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany and Japanese Red Army embraced revolutionary leftist ideologies.

An analysis by RAND captures what happened next. In 1968, it identified zero religiously motivated international terrorist groups. In 1980, there were two among 64. By 1992 there were 11 among 48. By 1995, 25 of 58—43 percent—were religiously motivated.

Some point to 1979 as the pivotal year, when radical Islam found permanent footholds and inspiration.

In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic. Political Islam had demonstrated that it could overthrow a western-aligned government.

Iranian revolution of 1979

Iran then exported its revolutionary ideology and supported armed Shiite Islamist movements. Hezbollah, established in Lebanon in the early 1980s, became its most consequential manifestation.

Then came Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979. Resistance to a non-Muslim foreign army occupying a Muslim country became an international Islamic cause. Saudi and other Gulf money flowed to the “resistance.” Pakistan became its essential staging ground. The United States supplied extensive assistance as part of its Cold War campaign against Moscow.

Afghanistan became a transnational incubator for Sunni jihad. Militants from different countries met, fought together and developed recruiting, financing and logistical networks. Osama bin Laden joined this world, and al-Qaeda eventually emerged from it.

Fondapol calls the Soviet-Afghan war the “matrix of contemporary Islamist terrorism.”

Other events show 1979 to be a pivotal year.

Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, denouncing the Saudi monarchy as corrupt and insufficiently Islamic. The episode helped push Saudi Arabia toward greater religious conservatism just as it entered an intensifying competition with revolutionary Iran for leadership and influence across the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, Egypt and Israel made peace. Along with it, secular Arab nationalism, which had dominated much of Middle Eastern politics, began to lose prestige. Islamist movements increasingly presented themselves as the alternative. [Think of Hamas’s 2023 attempt to disrupt the expanding Abraham Accords].

The consequences of radical Islamism entering global terrorism developed gradually and then exploded.

Fondapol records 2,194 Islamist terrorist attacks and 6,817 deaths from 1979 through 2000. From 2001 through 2012, it records 8,265 attacks and more than 38,000 deaths. From 2013 through April 2024, the toll surged to more than 56,000 attacks and roughly 205,000 deaths.

Altogether, its database catalogs 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks killing nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024.

And this is not principally a story of Muslims attacking the West. Nearly 89 percent of those deaths occurred in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda became the five deadliest organizations in the database.

The transformation was both ideological and geographic. Al-Qaeda built affiliates. ISIS built provinces. Boko Haram devastated communities around Lake Chad. Al-Shabaab entrenched itself in Somalia and East Africa. Jihadist organizations spread across the Middle East, South Asia and increasingly Africa.

Iran demonstrated the revolutionary potential of political Islam; Afghanistan created the great transnational Sunni jihadist network; Mecca exposed another radical Islamist current; and the decline of secular Arab nationalism created room for Islamism to expand.

1979 was the year several forces converged and the center of gravity began to shift.

We readily study how nationalism, communism, fascism, white supremacy and other ideologies produced political violence. Jihadism has become the leading driver of terrorism in the world and must have the same intellectual clarity.

At the UN, Borders Are Inviolable, Except Israel’s

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At the closing of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its president, Annalena Baerbock, offered a final defense of the international order.

At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.

Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.

Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023

If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.

Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.

Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.

The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.

The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.

Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023

The UN’s Jihadi Exception

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Twenty-five years after September 11, the United Nations remembered the 2,977 people murdered in what it called the “heinous terrorist attacks” of September 11, 2001, “an assault on humanity itself.” It declared that “the fight against terrorism is a shared, unfinished task.”

But something rather important was missing.

Who were the terrorists? What did they believe? Why did they do it?

There was no al-Qaeda. No Osama bin Laden. No Islamist extremism. No jihadism. Nothing about an ideology whose most famous declaration called for jihad against “Jews and Crusaders.”

Perhaps the United Nations simply avoids attaching ideologies to terrorism. It does not.

After a white supremacist murdered 49 Muslims at two Christchurch mosques in 2019, the UN spoke explicitly about “anti-Muslim hatred,” “anti-Islamic sentiments” and Islamophobia. Secretary-General António Guterres described the Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre as the “worst antisemitic attack in the history of the United States.” Discussing the Halle synagogue attack and related violence, the UN warned about “antisemitic hatred,” “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and their “poisonous ideology.”

That is exactly what an institution confronting extremism should do. Terrorism is an act; ideology can explain its motivation.

Then consider Sri Lanka.

On Easter Sunday 2019, radical Islamist suicide bombers attacked churches and hotels, killing roughly 270 people. Sri Lanka subsequently told the UN that the terrorists had been “inspired and indoctrinated” by extremist organizations including ISIL/Daesh and had “specifically targeted churches.”

Yet on the seventh anniversary in 2026, the UN remembered the victims of the “Easter Sunday attacks.” Not terrorist attacks. Not ISIS-inspired terrorism. Not jihadism or Islamist extremism. Not anti-Christian hatred. The killers’ ideology had vanished.

That makes the 9/11 omission considerably harder to dismiss as an unfortunate choice of words. When Muslims are murdered by an anti-Muslim extremist, the ideology matters. When Jews are murdered by antisemites or neo-Nazis, the ideology matters. But when jihadists murder Americans or ISIS-inspired suicide bombers slaughter Christians at Easter, the UN retreats into the bloodless vocabulary of “terrorism” and “attacks.”

The problem is not that the UN says Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacy or neo-Nazism. The problem is its apparent inability to apply the same principle to jihadism.

That is no longer merely a question of consistency.

A 2024 study by the French think tank Fondapol catalogued 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks since 1979, killing nearly 250,000 people. Roughly 243,000 of those deaths occurred after 2001. Almost 89 percent of the dead were killed in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda accounted for more than four-fifths of the victims.

“Islamist attacks around the world are more numerous today than ever before.” – Fondapol study

Jihadist ideology is therefore hardly an extinct doctrine being dredged up to explain a 25-year-old atrocity. Al-Qaeda survives. ISIS and its affiliates survive. Jihadist organizations continue to recruit and kill around the world, with Muslims overwhelmingly among their victims.

Calling that ideology jihadist or Islamist extremism no more condemns Muslims generally than calling an ideology neo-Nazi condemns Germans. In fact, refusing to make that distinction does Muslims no favor. It obscures an extremist ideology that has slaughtered enormous numbers of Muslims themselves.

Nor are the extremists coy about what they believe. They publish it, preach it, recruit with it and murder in its name. It is the international institutions confronting them that increasingly seem afraid to repeat what the killers themselves say.

So the UN should answer a straightforward question: Why can it say “white supremacist” and “neo-Nazi,” but not “jihadist”?

Has fear of accusations of Islamophobia—or pressure from states and organizations determined to shield Islamist ideology from scrutiny—become so powerful that jihadist supremacy alone receives a linguistic sanctuary at the United Nations?

Whatever the explanation, the consequence is dangerous. An ideology does not become less lethal because international institutions refuse to name it. It simply becomes harder to confront.

When terrorists can proclaim their ideology more plainly than the United Nations can describe it, sensitivity has crossed the line into surrender.

Related:

Pick Your Jihad; Choose Your Infidel (September 2014)

CAIR’s 9/11 Curriculum: Erase the Jihadists, Center Muslims as Victims

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On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people. They were followers of Osama bin Laden, who had declared jihad against the United States and explicitly invoked religion, Jews and “Crusaders” in explaining the war he believed he was fighting.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a guide for teaching September 11 to American children in grades 6 through 12. Its approach to that history is remarkable: don’t call the people who committed 9/11 “jihadists,” but make sure students learn extensively about Muslims as victims after 9/11.

CAIR’s Remembering and Reflecting on Sep. 11, 2001 in the Classroom tells educators to avoid language that “associates” the mass murder with Islam and Muslims. It specifically identifies three terms it considers “inaccurate and inflammatory”: “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists” and “radical Islamic terrorists.”

“Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims. For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “radical Islamic terrorists.”” – CAIR teaching guide

The objection to “jihadists” is particularly revealing. The word does not describe Muslims generally. Quite the opposite: it distinguishes a radical movement from the enormous population of Muslims who do not subscribe to it. Likewise, adding “radical” to Islamic terrorism is an explicit qualifier. A teacher can explain precisely what al-Qaeda believed while simultaneously making clear that its ideology was rejected by countless Muslims.

CAIR instead recommends removing the distinction.

That might seem like a dispute over terminology until one reaches the guide’s recommended reading list. Then the editorial direction becomes unmistakable.

Among the eleven articles CAIR recommends are “Commemorate 9/11 by Confronting Islamophobia,” “9/11 at 10: Lessons Learned From Anti-Muslim Haters,” “Muslims in America, post 9/11,” “Hope and Despair: Being Muslim in America After 9/11,” “How Being Muslim In America Has Changed Since 9/11,” “Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks,” and “How 9/11 Caused An Increase In Islamophobic Hate Crimes.”

Seven of the eleven titles are explicitly centered on Muslims, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim discrimination. Another recommended reading concerns federal civil-rights engagement with Arab and Muslim communities.

The videos follow much the same path. Students are offered “How 9/11 Shaped the Lives of American Muslims,” “Minorities targeted in 9/11 ‘revenge attacks,’” “9/11 Changed Life For American Muslims,” and “Post 9/11 Detention Of American Muslims.”

What is conspicuously absent from CAIR’s article list is a comparable body of material about why September 11 happened in the first place and who conducted the heinous acts of mass murder.

There is no recommended article devoted to al-Qaeda’s ideology. None to the development of jihadism. None examining bin Laden’s religious declarations. None exploring why al-Qaeda spoke of Jews and “Crusaders,” or why its followers believed their mass murder of civilians was justified as jihad.

Instead, CAIR explicitly tells teachers what they should add: Muslim condemnations of the attacks, solidarity from Muslim-majority countries, Muslim leaders joining President George W. Bush at a mosque and Muhammad Ali participating in a fundraiser. When discussing the aftermath, teachers are instructed to include hate crimes and bigotry against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs and other minorities.

Those are legitimate subjects. Americans who attacked innocent Muslims, Sikhs or Arabs after September 11 committed reprehensible crimes. Muslim Americans who died in the World Trade Center deserve to be remembered alongside every other innocent victim.

But that is precisely why the imbalance matters.

A history lesson should be capable of holding two ideas simultaneously: radical Islamists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people on September 11, and innocent Muslims subsequently became targets of bigotry by people who wrongly held them responsible.

In fact, accurately naming the first proposition makes the second easier to understand. “Jihadist” separates the extremists from Muslims generally. “Radical Islamist” identifies an ideology rather than an ethnicity or an entire faith. Students can then examine that ideology, understand why most Muslims reject it and understand why blaming ordinary Muslims for al-Qaeda’s crimes is both factually wrong and morally indefensible.

CAIR takes the opposite route.

Religion becomes something educators should carefully detach from the perpetrators, even though the perpetrators themselves repeatedly invoked it. Then religious identity becomes central when discussing the victims of the aftermath.

The inversion is extraordinary.

Consider what a student following CAIR’s bibliography is encouraged to encounter. The student can read about anti-Muslim haters, Islamophobic hate crimes, Muslim life after 9/11, Muslim heroes, Muslim victims, Muslim detention and civil rights for Muslim communities.

But where is the corresponding invitation to study the jihadists?

Where is bin Laden’s worldview? Where is al-Qaeda’s theology? Where are its declarations? Where is its obsession with “Crusaders” and Jews? Where is the intellectual history that transformed religious extremism into airplanes crashing into buildings filled with civilians?

September 11 did not begin with Islamophobia. It began with an ideology and 19 men prepared to murder thousands of strangers in the name of radical Islam.

CAIR is not asking schools merely to protect Muslim students from collective blame. It is asking educators to perform something far more consequential: strip the perpetrators of the language that identifies their radical ideology while repeatedly directing students toward the victimization of Muslims that followed their attack.

That is not historical sensitivity. It is historical inversion.

And it invites conspiracy theories that Jews committed 9/11, when the slaughter was done in the name of genocidal jihad.

Graffiti in London in 2019 claiming that Jews did 9/11, or that another mass murder is coming for Jews

CAIR’s approach leaves students with a grotesquely rearranged history: the Muslims who suffered bigotry after 9/11 retain their religious identity, while the jihadists who caused 9/11 are stripped of theirs.

CAIR calls that responsible teaching. A better description is laundering the ideology of the killers out of the history of their crime.

Related:

Your Neighbors Are Celebrating December 7, 9/11, and October 7 (December 2024)

On 9/11, Commit To Blocking Iran and Saudi Arabia From Ever Possessing Weapons Of Mass Destruction (September 2022)

Trends in Anti-Muslim and Anti-Semitic Attacks Post-9/11 (September 2021)

Read Bin Laden. Don’t Whitewash What He Said.

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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a good rule for teaching history: let students read primary sources.

So when it teaches September 11, students can encounter Osama bin Laden in his own words. That should make the origins of 9/11 unusually difficult to sanitize.

Bin Laden’s 1996 document was a Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. Its principal immediate grievance was the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina. He condemned the Saudi government for permitting what he called an army of “infidels” into land containing Islam’s holiest places and called on Muslims to drive them out.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission described the document plainly. Bin Laden objected to “an army of infidels in a land with the sites most sacred to Islam.” He saw himself as following in the footsteps of the Prophet and organizing a new kind of war against America.

This was not simply a dispute over where the Pentagon stationed troops. Their being non-Muslims was central to the offense.

He became even more clear about his objection in his 1998 fatwa, written with Ayman al-Zawahiri under the banner of the “International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders.“

Not Israelis. Not Americans. Not NATO.

Jews and Crusaders.

The declaration said Muslims should kill Americans, including civilians, wherever they could be found.

“The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”” – 1998 Fatwa

Then came the jihadi terrorist attacks of September 11.

That is where Gilder Lehrman’s lesson becomes peculiar.

Its current historical background accurately identifies al-Qaeda as an “international terrorist group.” But its explanation of bin Laden’s motivation says he “claimed that he was defending Islam” before quickly translating the dispute into political language: “He blamed the United States for supporting Israel and oppressing Muslims around the world.” It adds his opposition to American support for governments such as the Saudi monarchy.

It never uses the word “jihad” a single time, even when Bin Laden’s own 1996 and 1998 declarations both use “jihad” in the titles. The narrative is recast as a political dispute rather than a religious holy war.

The American presence in Saudi Arabia wasn’t objectionable to bin Laden merely because he disliked an American military deployment. His declaration treated an army of infidels in Islam’s sacred land as an offense demanding jihad.

His organization didn’t subsequently call itself the International Front Against American Middle East Policy. It invoked Jews and Crusaders – both words never used in the GLI lesson plan.

The curriculum directs students toward questions about American foreign policy. Its broader narrative proceeds rapidly from the attacks to American intelligence failures, the Patriot Act, surveillance, Guantánamo Bay, civil-liberties concerns, anti-Muslim discrimination, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Those are all legitimate subjects in a history of the War on Terror, AFTER 9/11.

But before asking about American actions after September 11, students should understand why 19 men believed murdering thousands of civilians was righteous in the first place. It does not require blaming Islam or all Muslims for September 11.

The distinction is straightforward: Islam is not al-Qaeda, and Muslims are not responsible for al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda is a jihadist movement whose leaders explicitly justify their violence in religious terms.

There is another revealing asymmetry.

Gilder Lehrman makes sure students learn that hate crimes and discrimination against Muslim Americans increased after September 11. That belongs in the history. President George W. Bush’s insistence that America’s enemy was terrorism rather than Islam belongs there too.

But if prejudice against a religious group after the attack deserves explicit attention, surely the religious ideology of the men who carried it out deserves the same scrutiny.

Imagine reading a Declaration of Jihad filled with God, Islam, infidels, sacred territory and martyrdom—and being trained to search everywhere except religion for the explanation.

On September 11, 2022, only three American embassies in the Middle East posted commentary about the horrific jihadi attacks in the United States in 2001 – Israel, Egypt and Yemen – seemingly trying to avoid upsetting the Muslim majority countries

Gilder Lehrman’s great educational principle is that students should encounter history through original documents rather than having someone else tell them what happened. But here, the documents are presented and then the lesson redirects students toward American foreign policy and the subsequent War on Terror. It shifts the center of the 9/11 story from genocidal jihadists murdering thousands of innocent Americans to Muslims suffering from American policies, wars, discrimination and backlash.

That is an extraordinary inversion. And an insult to thousands of Americans who were murdered.

The Audience Has Changed

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On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim walked out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They were young Israeli Embassy employees and a couple. Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose.

Alas, Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian anarchist, fired approximately 20 rounds at the couple shouting “free Palestine.” Inside the museum afterward, he allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Rodriguez had brought an explanation with him.

His manifesto, Explication, dated the previous day, defended the “morality of armed demonstration.” He wrote that he had considered such violence justified during the 2014 Gaza war, but understood that most Americans then would have found it “illegible” and “insane.”

By 2025, he believed America was different. “I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

In his mind, the violence had not changed. The audience had.

Rodriguez described armed action as “theater and spectacle.” He had watched enormous demonstrations against Israel, accusations of genocide become commonplace and supporters of Israel portrayed as complicit in mass killing. Yet, he complained, “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.”

The violence would be the spectacle. The manifesto would tell the audience how to read it.

Especially because of the timing: May 20, 2025.

Rodriguez penned his manifesto on the same day that UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid reached them.

The claim was completely false. The comment was a distorted derivative of a report that approximately 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children might occur over the next year. And he placed all of the blame on Israel.

The accusation spread quickly. That afternoon, CAIR issued a call for action after the UN said 14,000 Palestinian babies could die under what CAIR called Israel’s “forced starvation campaign.” Genocide supplied the larger charge.

Shortly before his murder the next day, Lischinsky reportedly shared criticism of Fletcher’s claim that called it a “blood libel.” The blood libel was much more than a charge of accusing Jews of killing children; it gave license to an audience to kill Jews in their defense.

Rodriguez had another word for encouraging the crowds to murder: Legible.

And he was right.

Eleven days later, in Boulder, Colorado, prosecutors say a man attacked a peaceful gathering supporting Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine.” One victim died.

In August 2026, popular pro-Palestinian podcaster Hasan Piker said that if American Jews continued publicly associating themselves with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Keep associating with those falsely accused of genocide, and people will come for you.

Anger and frustration are being harnessed through podcasts and manifestos to inflame passions and violence. The audience is all too happy to join the spectacle these days.

Because the violence is legible.

So crowds cheer on the killer of a United Healthcare executive, gunned down in the streets. They listen to their alt-left congressman shout on the streets that the rape of Jewish women never happened, to turn the victims into aggressors. They watch an Ariane Grande video of a frustrated musician cutting old white men to pieces to rapture and applause.

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the alt-left Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman, November 2025. (start at 52:00)

Legible.

Once upon a time – say 2010 – the mass murder by an angry person was viewed through a lens of pity and disbelief. What did we do as a society that enabled isolation and frustration to turn into heinous violence? Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is a cry out of pain – for the victims and the shooter. There are no winners, just anguish.

No longer. The audience has changed. We revel in the spectacle. If the dead are cast as privileged and powerful, part of a caste that keeps people down, the revolution will celebrate the rolled heads.

More, they will want to participate.

There has always been violence, assassinations and terrorism. But we are no longer appalled universally, only selectively. The crowds have read the jihadi-socialist manifestos and they appallingly read “sane.” LEGIBLE.

James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, spoke to the United Nations in June 2023 – months before the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Gazans – and bemoaned “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” He warned that the mob – his own people – had become so twisted that they were itching for Jewish blood.

That same deformity showed itself on American university campuses right after October 7. It has continued to spread outward to American streets as false charges of genocide and mass starvation make the violence “the only sane thing to do.“

And it is no longer just the alt-left drowning in the empathy swamp. All of those little screens that we carry every waking second make us an addicted audience, barraged by posts and podcasts, amplified by bots and armies of American foes. We listen to idiots and lies openly and frequently, and have lost our moral compass in the process.

We have reached a point where the reluctant assassin may become more willing to join the anarchy, believing the crowd might finally understand and appreciate mass murder as a noble cause, rather than a heinous crime.

We have crossed the tipping point of moral collapse. Sensing the panic, we point a finger at artificial intelligence as the problem, willfully blind that the toxin is already in the bloodstream. AI is just an accelerant, not the root of the sickness.

We are entering a new year in the Jewish calendar. As we read from the special Rosh Hashanah prayer book and ask God to have mercy on humanity, consider how many people have internalized very different – and deeply evil – texts and messages. Pray that the sound of the shofar will not only reach Heaven, but awaken the audience on earth from the hypnotic spell that has deformed their moral judgment.

Related:

The End of Old Politics: Attention Has Replaced Trust (August 2026)

Normalized Violence (April 2026)

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

The Asynchronous Audience At Jihadists’ Auto-da-Fe (November 2023)

Britain’s Only Acceptable Ethnic Cleansing

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Britain is suddenly alarmed about supposed “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.

The British government warns that Israeli policies could force Palestinian Arabs from parts of Judea and Samaria. It is sanctioning Israelis, condemning “settlements” and portraying demographic change in territory claimed by Palestinians as a grave moral offense.

Britain has seen ethnic cleansing in this territory before. Its reaction was very different.

In 1948, The Kingdom of Transjordan crossed the Jordan River and conquered Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. It then destroyed and expelled the Jewish communities that had lived across the territory. The ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jews. Jews were then barred from their holiest sites, as synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.

Interior view of a ruined building with crumbling walls and debris, featuring an archway and a soldier standing amidst the ruins.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in 1949

The result was remarkably complete: the territory Jordan occupied was ethnically cleansed of Jews. And less than two years later, Britain formally recognized Jordan’s union with the territory it had invaded and conquered, one of the only countries in the world to do so.

Jordan then made the demographic principle explicit. Its 1954 nationality law extended Jordanian nationality to former Palestinian citizens residing in the kingdom while expressly carving out “the Jews.”

Jordan expelled and excluded the Jews in its holy land, and Britain’s response was recognition.

In 2005, Britain would celebrate again, this time in Gaza.

Israel decided to dismantle every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers physically removed roughly 8,000 Jews from their homes and twenty-one Jewish communities disappeared. A Jew-free Gaza emerged.

Britain did not describe this as ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “courage” and offered Britain’s “full support” for the withdrawal. His foreign secretary called it a hugely significant step toward peace.

Now consider 2026.

Britain warns against the possible displacement of Palestinian Arabs from Area C of the West Bank, territory that has remained under Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework pending a final agreement. It speaks of forcible displacement, imposes sanctions and treats the prospect of Palestinian Arabs losing their communities as intolerable.

The moral principle sounds admirable. It would be more convincing if Britain had ever applied it equally to Jews in the region.

When some Palestinian Arabs might be displaced from territory it hopes to use in a future Palestinian state, Britain suddenly discovers that removing a particular ethnic population from its homes is beyond the pale. Instead, England demands that the region be ethnically cleansed – of Jews – citing the antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

There is a British consistency here: ethnic cleansing is only appropriate when Jews are removed.

For generations, British policy has treated the removal of Jews from disputed territory as compatible with peace. A Palestinian Gaza without Jews was progress. A Jordanian West Bank without Jews was acceptable. A future Palestinian state is still routinely imagined as a place where Jewish communities cannot remain.

Only the possibility of some Arab relocation produces moral outrage.

That exposes the deeper problem with the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding the conflict. “Two states” has quietly come to mean one multicultural Jewish state containing a large Arab minority alongside one Palestinian state expected to contain no Jews. One and one-half states for Arabs; half a state for Jews.

England understands the ethnic cleansing of Jews – it did it itself in 1290 – the only minority group to ever be expelled from the country. It seems to continue to only have a taste for that kind of hatred and ethnic cleansing, including in the Jewish homeland.