From Cain and Abel to the Third Anniversary of October 7
The first murder in the Bible takes place in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Cain kills his brother Abel, and God asks him a simple question: “Where is Abel your brother?”
God already knows the answer. The question gives Cain an opportunity to acknowledge his crime. Instead, Cain replies, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
With those words, the first murderer in human history also becomes the first to attempt to redirect the narrative away from his victim. God asks about Abel. Cain makes the conversation about himself, challenging the very notion that he bears responsibility for his brother.
God refuses to follow him.
“What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”
Abel is dead. He cannot describe his suffering, challenge Cain’s account, or defend his memory. Cain remains alive, free to explain himself and change the subject. But God insists that the victim’s blood speaks louder than the murderer’s words.
Cain and Abel by Marc Chagall (1960)
There is an extraordinary detail in the Hebrew. God refers to demei achikha, literally “your brother’s bloods,” in the plural. Rashi, drawing on rabbinic tradition, explains that the words encompass Abel’s blood and the blood of all his descendants who would never be born.
The first murder extinguished generations of possibilities. Children, grandchildren, families, and entire futures disappeared with Abel.
Combine these two ideas – the living control the narrative and the dead include generations – and one can see that the murderer will attempt to frame history for all time.
These opening chapters of Genesis offer a striking perspective on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdered 1,195 people, and abducted 251 hostages. Families were slaughtered in their homes, young people were murdered at a music festival, and entire communities were devastated.
Three years later, the struggle over how to commemorate the massacre has become a struggle over whose story is being told.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged the Hamas killings in his anniversary statement before shifting substantial attention to Israel’s subsequent military campaign and Palestinian suffering. Several leading democratic politicians did the same.
And just two days after the October 7 massacre anniversary, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations’ Navi Pillay, the woman who helped spread the genocide libel about Israel’s defensive war against jihadi terrorists. Seen together, the world is establishing the narrative that will prevail into the future, where the Bibas babies’ descendants who will never be born, will not be able to counter the charge.
The Bibas brothers with their mother, slaughtered by Gazan terrorists
Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as a diversionary tactic to invert the subject.
God never answers that question directly. Instead, He demands, “What have you done?”
Three years after October 7, the United Nations and too many politicians have learned to answer questions about the murdered by changing the subject.
On April 16, 1962, New Yorkers lined Broadway to welcome Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and Empress Farah. The ruler of a Muslim-majority American ally received a ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes. A plaque embedded in the sidewalk still commemorates their visit.
Marker on downtown Broadway sidewalk commemorating ticker tape parade for Shah of Iran and his wife (photo: First One Through)
Seventeen years later, the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini established a theocratic regime that called America the Great Satan, sought Israel’s destruction and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
America had welcomed a Muslim ally. The jihadists who seized power declared America their enemy.
Their war against the West did not remain in the Middle East. Iranian revolutionaries seized Americans in Tehran, while Sunni jihadists carried their violence to American soil. Just blocks from the Shah’s parade route, Islamist terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and destroyed its towers on September 11, 2001, murdering nearly 3,000 people.
World Trade Center memorial for those who died in the jihadi war on America on September 11, 2001 (photo: First One Through)
Different branches of radical Islam pursued their own visions of religious domination. ISIS declared a caliphate spanning national borders. Hamas, supported by Iran, sought an Islamist Palestine in place of Israel, massacring approximately 1,200 people and abducting 251 on October 7, 2023.
Three years later, masked demonstrators wearing green headbands marched along Lower Broadway displaying Hamas-associated symbols, with City Hall nearby and the rebuilt One World Trade Center rising behind them.
Young men with faces covered and Hamas headbands sporting jihadi flag, stand on Broadway before the World Trade Center to call for the continued war on Israel on the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 jihadi massacre in Israel (photo: Gideon Askowitz)
Within a few blocks, the Canyon of Heroes had become the setting for three extraordinary encounters: Americans celebrating a Muslim ally, mourning the victims of Islamist terrorism and tolerating demonstrators displaying the symbols of a jihadi movement responsible for massacring Jews.
For decades, America has welcomed Muslims as allies, immigrants and citizens, embracing religious freedom and coexistence. At the same time, jihadist movements have declared their own war against the West, seeking religious and political domination. They carried that confrontation beyond the Middle East, taking American hostages, destroying American landmarks and massacring American allies.
The intersections of narrow streets in downtown Manhattan seemingly have compressed history into a web of toxins poisoned by Islamic radicals. Coexistence will only be permissible “under the wing of Islam,” as their “struggle” is perpetual and voracious.
“under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.” – 1988 Hamas foundational charter
The West is in a defensive war against radical Islam. One can see the progression clearly on the streets of lower Broadway.
Three stories from three different parts of the world made headlines this week. Each involved intimidation, oppression or abuse by those exercising power. More revealing was how the institutions people counted on to defend human rights, international security and equality responded.
All have learned to accommodate the very behavior they condemn.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s radical Islamic regime continues its systematic subjugation of women. On October 8, the United Nations reported that at least 52 women and one girl had been detained for offenses including wearing makeup, colorful scarves, showing their hair or appearing in public without a male guardian. The UN also documented beatings, threats and verbal abuse.
The Taliban has already barred girls from secondary education, severely restricted women’s employment and imposed its interpretation of Islamic law on virtually every aspect of women’s lives. The religious fanatics who seized power in 2021 have turned Islamic supremacy into government policy.
The Taliban emerged from the ruins of the Soviet occupation and ultimately outlasted twenty years of American military intervention. Having watched the world’s two superpowers withdraw from Afghanistan, its leaders have little reason to fear another foreign intervention over their treatment of women. They can impose their radical Islamic ideology with near impunity. Afghan women pay the price. The UN documents the abuses, issues condemnations and appeals for change. The world shrugs.
In Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is using military force to threaten international commerce. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has attacked commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global energy supplies and driving up prices. The radical Islamic regime has turned a vital international waterway into an instrument of coercion.
On October 8, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would refrain from attacking Iran before the November 3 congressional elections, citing productive negotiations. His administration tied military restraint to the American electoral calendar.
Iran has discovered another source of leverage: the political cost of confronting its aggression. Rising gasoline prices and an unpopular war have become liabilities for Republicans approaching the midterms. Tehran can calculate that continued disruption increases pressure on Washington to reach an accommodation.
In Canada, 12 Jewish educators have filed human rights complaints against four Ontario school boards and two teachers’ unions, alleging antisemitic harassment, discrimination and retaliation.
Their complaints come amid a national surge in antisemitism. B’nai Brith Canada documented 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up 146% from 2022. Statistics Canada recorded 788 police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews that year, accounting for roughly 71% of religiously motivated hate crimes.
The teachers’ allegations include swastikas, Nazi references, intimidation and administrators failing to address complaints. The disputes also extend to Jewish educators discussing Zionism, displaying Israeli flags and posting appeals to bring home hostages abducted by Hamas. Two teachers allege heightened union scrutiny after teaching about Jewish identity and antisemitism, including instructions against using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
The complaints describe something more troubling than individual acts of hatred. They allege that institutions responsible for workplace protections tolerated harassment and, in some cases, turned against the people seeking protection. Jewish teachers must now pursue legal proceedings to obtain the protections their employers and unions were supposed to provide.
To cap this all off, Navi Pillay was just awarded the Noble Peace Prize. She has promoted the libel that Israel is committing a genocide against Gazans in its defensive war. The world has not only inverted victim and aggressor, innocence and evil, but has rewarded itself for doing so.
The lesson for those imposing their will is unmistakable. Persist long enough, inflict enough pain and make resistance sufficiently costly, and the world will eventually adjust. The victims must change their lives. The aggressors need only continue.
But accommodation does more than reward past abuses. It establishes a new baseline from which the aggressors can demand still more. Yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s accepted reality and tomorrow’s starting point for greater oppression.
The new normal does not merely tolerate evil. It creates the conditions for even greater evil.
Three years after Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered roughly 1,200 people, leading Democrats marked October 7 by remembering the murdered Israelis… but then immediately called out Palestinian Arabs who suffered in the war that they launched while condemning Israel.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) began appropriately. He described “Hamas terrorists intent on destroying Israel” who murdered, kidnapped and raped innocent civilians. Then he turned the anniversary toward Palestinians, calling civilian deaths and the devastation of Gaza “reprehensible,” demanding the “creation of an independent Palestinian state” and condemning Israeli settler violence.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) similarly remembered Hamas’s “heinous terror attack,” the 1,200 murdered and the hostages. Then came the turn: “Three years into the brutality of the war in Gaza,” followed by demands to stop the bombing, deliver aid and secure Palestinian self-determination.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) devoted most of his statement to the massacre and hostages, but his conclusion expanded the October 7 commemoration to “the aid and well-being of the Palestinian people,” Gaza’s devastation, reconstruction and Palestinian statehood.
Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer
Apparently, commemorating a terrorist massacre now requires remembering the people who suffered when the country that was attacked went to war.
Well… only when it comes to the massacre of Jews.
Just four weeks ago, Markey commemorated the 25th anniversary of 9/11. He remembered the nearly 3,000 people murdered, the families in Massachusetts who lost loved ones, America’s resilience and the need to prevent another terrorist attack. He used the anniversary to demand better funding for the TSA.
Afghans and Iraqis never entered his statement.
Jeffries has followed the same convention. His 9/11 statement remembered the 2,977 people murdered by Al Qaeda and then extended the remembrance to first responders who became sick from exposure at Ground Zero. He noted that more FDNY responders had died from 9/11-related diseases than were killed in the attack itself.
Iraqis and Afghans never entered his statement.
Schumer went even further this September. In a lengthy address marking 25 years since 9/11, he remembered the dead, their families, sick first responders, people who developed cancer after working at Ground Zero, the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan and America’s resilience.
Iraqis and Afghans never entered his statement either.
And there were plenty of them to remember.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people were killed directly in the major post-9/11 war zones, including more than 432,000 civilians. When indirect deaths from destroyed health systems, infrastructure, food insecurity and other consequences of war are included, Brown estimates 4.5 million to 4.7 million people died. More than 38 million people were displaced. Brown says the number wounded or made ill was higher still.
Yet nobody apparently told Jeffries, Markey or Schumer that a September 11 remembrance had to be balanced by those that Americans killed.
Because they knew that September 11 belongs to the people murdered on September 11. It belongs to the passengers who boarded airplanes that morning, the people who went to work in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the families who never saw them again and the firefighters and police officers who ran toward burning buildings.
There are other days to debate Afghanistan, Iraq, American military policy and the enormous suffering those wars produced. But not the anniversary of the heinous jihadi terrorism.
These leading Democratic politicians know that. But they don’t care to apply the same decency when Jews are slaughtered and raped.
Jews slaughtered in their homes must share their anniversary with an accounting of their country’s subsequent conduct. The young people murdered at a music festival in Israel must make room for Gaza policy. The women sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists must share the day with discussions of Palestinian statehood. The hostages dragged into Gaza become the introduction to a statement about Palestinian suffering.
These LEADING DEMOCRATS REVERSED THEIR BASIC HUMAN INSTINCT FOR COMPASSION in just a couple of weeks when the victims were Jews.
Why, when the victims are Jews, must the anniversary of their massacre become a day to remember everyone except just them?
In the 20th century, the term “G.I. Joe” was meant to describe the average American serviceman. He was the embodiment of a regular patriot fighting for America and American values.
Alas, today’s generation has Jihad Joe.
Pro-Palestinian man heading to protest Israel in front of City Hall in Manhattan on October 7, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
Jihad Joe celebrates the murder of Americans and American allies. He/ she uses anniversaries of the massacres of civilians – like 9/11/01 and 10/7/23 – to mock the death of thousands of innocent civilians. The Jihad Joes cheer ISIS, Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Anti-Israel protestors at City Hall in NYC on October 7, 2026 with posters mocking Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a Zionist and “Keep up the good work Iran! Down with U.S. Imperialism!” (photo: First One Through)
The crowd that gathered on October 7, 2026 at City Hall in New York City was mixed, with religious Muslims and anti-Israel Neturei Karta posing for the media. But there were also many White people in their 20s to 40s sporting Hamas headbands, chanting for the destruction of Israel, and that Jews are pedophiles.
Woman with press credentials sporting a keffiyeh walking to anti-Israel protest at City Hall on October 26, 2026, ahead of group from Neturei Karta holding a Palestinian flag (photo: First One Through)Woman getting ready to join the anti-Israel protest, pulling out her keffiyeh at City Hall on October 7, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
A group of students from nearby Pace University came by with placards to “Free Palestine” and “Zionism is not Judaism.” They joined crowds yelling things much more violent:
“Intifada revolution!”
“Zionism will fall!”
“Liberation is near!”
“We don’t want two states. We want ’48!”
“Mobilize the Intifada!”
Students from Pace University join an anti-Israel protest at City Hall on the anniversary of the slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in Israel and seizure of 251 hostages,on October 7, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
Today’s Jihad Joe doesn’t put his life at risk for America, American allies or American values. He mocks all of those things. Jihad Joe wishes them vanquished, celebrates their setbacks and chants for the jihadi vision for the U.S. and Israel, all from the quiet and comfortable streets that affords the freedom of speech and assembly not found in Islamic republics.
Jihad Joe sees G.I. Joe as an old and racist dead White man.
Two young men covering faces and sporting headbands with Hadiths for MohammedYoung men waving flag of armed Arab before Dome of the Rock
Imagine Canadians holding a march on September 11, 2026 cheering the work of the jihadists who killed nearly 3,000 people in the U.S., calling for the destruction of America. Yes, it is protected speech; but so what? It is repulsive and sick.
More, it reveals the depravity of a significant swath of Americans.
Crowd of people scream support for the antisemitic genocidal jihadists of Hamas, on third anniversary of the October 7 massacre (photo: First One Through)
Eighty years ago, America produced the Greatest Generation. G.I. Joe was its everyman: the ordinary American who put on his country’s uniform, crossed an ocean and fought against fascism and tyranny. Today we see a very different American archetype walking the streets of New York. He puts on the keffiyeh, embraces the symbols and slogans of foreign jihadist revolutionary movements, and mocks America, its allies and the rape and slaughter of its citizens.
In less than a century, we have descended from G.I. Joe to Jihad Jane.
The Green Party charted a new course in British politics, calling for an end of the Jewish State of Israel and demanding a boycott of the country until it allows millions of Arabs into the territory and become a binational state. The alt-left group was immediately rebuked by members of the other British political parties.
Labour’s Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister said the Green vote “crosses a line” and was “fundamentally wrong.” She explicitly connected her objection to the two-state solution saying “It is shameful to vote against a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”
David Pinto-Duschinsky, centre, and Bridget Phillipson, right, meet with Jewish school in London with the school’s headteacher
Conservatives shadow home secretary Chris Philp said of the Green vote “I think that’s completely wrong.” He called the resolution a “stereotypical and potentially antisemitic characterisation” and said the Greens needed to do more to combat antisemitism in their ranks. The Conservative Party subsequently issued an even more directly relevant statement through Philp: “British Jews should not have to disclaim a belief in Jewish self-determination and the existence of Israel.”
Liberal Democrats MP Luke Taylor MP said “This is a divisive motion that pours fuel on the fire of tensions in the UK,” and said it would leave many British Jews feeling less safe. Lib Dem foreign-affairs spokesman Calum Miller called the Green vote “deeply wrong” and a “deeply harmful failure of judgement.” Former leader Tim Farron said the Greens had been “captured.”
Green councillor Hau-Yu Tam (centre) pictured alongside Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski (left). Photo Credit: London Green Party
“Zionism is pure evil and must be abolished.” “Zionism was undoubtedly and unquestionably the Nazism of our time.” – Green Party’s Hau-Yu Tam
Perhaps it is therefore time to move beyond making statements about the Green Party vote and push forward clear countering platforms: one that unequivocally expresses support for British Jews and their heritage and history in the Jewish Promised Land. And a second that declares that every country – including Israel – has an unambiguous right to decide who to permit into its country and to admit as citizens. As such, there is absolutely no so-called “right of return” of descendants of Arabs who once lived in the territory of Israel.
The Greens put their position to a vote. Now Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats should do the same. At their next party conferences, each should introduce resolutions affirming these two simple principles.
Condemning the Greens is easy. Put the alternative on the ballot and let British political parties tell the country – and British Jews – where they actually stand.
On October 4, 2026, as Jews marked Simchat Torah and the third Jewish-calendar anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, Britain’s Green Party voted to declare Zionism a form of racism.
By 1,022 votes to 813, the party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and endorsed replacing Israel with a single Palestinian state throughout the pre-1948 region of Palestine.
An earlier vote at the same conference was even more revealing about the party’s attitude towards Jews.
Jewish Green member Sam Alston proposed an amendment protecting Jewish members from being pressured or disciplined because they belonged to synagogues and other Jewish institutions associated with Zionism. He warned that without such protection the policy could result in “indirect religious discrimination.”
The Greens rejected his safeguard, 1,026 to 684.
So at this same conference, Jewish members were provided a safe room because some feared for their safety during the debate about Jews and the Jewish State, while rejecting their proposed protection from its new racism policy.
“We continue to see antisemitic sentiment appearing with increasing frequency,” – Laurence Taylor, the head of counter-terrorism policing
There may also be a legal problem.
Adam Wagner KC, a prominent British human-rights barrister, has warned of a “strong risk” that the resolution contravenes the Equality Act 2010. British law protects qualifying philosophical beliefs, and Wagner argues that Zionism is likely capable of qualifying for that protection.
There is already precedent from the other direction. David Miller, the former University of Bristol professor, successfully established before an employment tribunal that his anti-Zionism qualified as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Greens for Palestine cited the Miller case in defending anti-Zionist beliefs before the conference.
British law may already protect both the anti-Zionist and the Zionist.
The Green Party is no longer a fringe environmental entity. Membership has surged above 200,000, tripling its total in a single year.
Their electorate also looks markedly different from Britain as a whole. Analysis of the 2024 Green vote found an average age of 42 compared with 49 across the electorate. Green voters were more female, much more likely to be university graduates and less likely to own their homes. They were also twice as likely to be Muslim – 6 percent versus 3 percent nationally – and considerably more likely to have no religion.
The two conference votes reveal something more troubling.
While the voters against Zionism and protection for Jews stayed roughly the same – 1,022 and 1,026, respectively – 16 percent of those supporting Israel did not vote on protections for Britain’s Jewish community.
That leaves a question extending well beyond this conference: As hostility to Zionism moves deeper into the politics of the alt-left, who will insist on protecting Jews whose religious and communal lives remain connected to it?
Two Iranian men – Salam Ahmadyan, 36, and Rahman Salehi, 34 – charged with attempting to bomb a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2026, one year after other Jews were stabbed to death in the city
This Simchat Torah, I keep thinking about what is missing.
For some families, the absence is unbearable and permanent. A child, a parent, a spouse, a friend who was alive on the last Simchat Torah before October 7 and is no longer here. Every holiday marks time, but an anniversary holiday also measures absence. Another year has passed. Another place at the table remains empty. Another circle forms with someone missing from it.
Aryeh Ziering with his parents, killed as he responded to the massacre by Gazans on October 7, 2023
Loss is embedded in Simchat Torah itself. We reach the end of the Torah and lose Moses.
The man who confronted Pharaoh, led us through the sea, brought down the commandments and carried an impossible people through the wilderness does not cross into the Jewish Promised Land. The Torah does not soften his death or pretend it did not happen. It records it and we read it aloud.
Moses seeing the Promised Land before he dies by James Tissot (1896-1902)
Over the past three years, other things have felt as though they have gone missing as well.
I have watched context disappear from too much of the media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. Iran can threaten Israel and the region through proxies, missiles and terrorism, yet somehow vanish from the frame through which individual events are reported.
I have watched the United Nations lose all credibility as an institution capable of treating Israel with the same standards it applies elsewhere. Its institutions can devote extraordinary attention to Israel while regimes and movements that openly threaten Jews and Israelis often recede into the background.
I have watched universities where “Globalize the Intifada” could become part of the vocabulary of protest after Jews had just experienced the deadliest day since the Holocaust. A recent report on American antisemitism could devote enormous attention to Israel, Palestinian Arabs, race and politics while ignoring the jihadist antisemitism that helped produce October 7 in the first place.
And increasingly, I wonder whether I am losing the Democratic Party I knew.
Senator Chris Coons is not someone I associated with the anti-Israel fringe. Yet he spearheaded legislation that would authorize American sanctions connected to construction in E1, including against foreign persons who simply submit bids for construction tenders. Threatening private parties with the force of the American financial system for bidding on residential construction near Jerusalem represents a place in that debate I never expected mainstream Democrats to reach.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons threaten financial retribution against firms considering building residential homes in Jerusalem suburbs
Some losses happened in a morning. Others have accumulated slowly enough that it took me time to recognize them.
Judaism does not ask us to pretend that loss isn’t real. The Torah certainly doesn’t.
Moses dies. But then we do something remarkable.
We don’t pause to mourn Moses on Simchat Torah. We stand up, sing and dance. We lift the Torahs and our children. And when we have read the Torah’s final words, we refuse to leave the scroll there. We immediately return to Bereishit, to the beginning.
We don’t erase the loss or manufacture comforting explanations for it. We don’t avert our eyes from the people and institutions we have lost or from the lessons their loss may teach us. But neither do we build our lives around the empty spaces.
That may be the lesson I need most this Simchat Torah.
Notice who is missing. Remember them. Look clearly at what else we have lost since October 7 and understand why. Fight where something worth preserving can still be preserved.
Then look around the circle and see who is still there. Hold them a little closer.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a 220-page report on September 26, 2026 on the explosion of antisemitism on American college campuses after October 7, 2023. Search those 220 pages for “jihad,” “Islamist” or “radical Islam” and you find nothing.
Columbia University’s SJP chapter featured “Islamic political activism”
That is an extraordinary omission because October 7 was not the opening battle in a campus dispute between supporters of Israel and Palestine. It was a massacre carried out by Hamas, a jihadist organization with a long history of explicit antisemitism. Yet the Commission largely interprets what followed through a political framework: Jewish and Israeli students on one side, Muslim and Palestinian students on the other, each reporting hostility and discrimination while universities struggled to balance Title VI, political expression and the First Amendment. Indeed, the Commission describes its own inquiry principally in terms of institutional and federal responses to allegations of antisemitism following the Hamas attack, with substantial attention to the distinction between unlawful discrimination and protected political expression.
In that framework, Jews increasingly become the pro-Israel constituency in an Israeli-Palestinian political dispute. What largely disappears is that some of what erupted on campuses reflected a very different phenomenon: jihadist antisemitism.
Brown University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine “by any means necessary”
Hamas’s history should have made that an obvious subject of inquiry. Its 1988 founding covenant placed the struggle within an Islamic religious framework, declared that there was “no solution” to the Palestinian question except jihad, trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories and invoked a hadith envisioning Muslims fighting Jews.
Gazan jihadist calls parents to celebrate his slaughter of Jewish civilians
Nor did Hamas remain thousands of miles away from the American campus debate as an abstraction. The Commission itself received evidence of faculty-sponsored protests featuring “Long Live Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 operation, along with a flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the report identifies as a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Berkeley celebrates the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre, named for the Islamic shrine atop the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem
The Commission saw the evidence but never seriously followed the ideological trail.
Consider “Globalize the Intifada.” The phrase appears only once in the report, in its discussion of Rutgers. Yet contemporary campus reporting documented it many times among the very universities the Commission selected for study. At Stanford, students chanted “From Stanford to Gaza, globalize the Intifada.” At Cornell, protesters chanted both “globalize the intifada” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
SJP chapter for D.C., Maryland and Virginia
Cornell was not some campus the Commission lacked information about. The university supplied nearly 2,000 pages of material and received one of the longest individual university treatments in the report. Yet “Intifada Revolution” appears zero times.
Cornell professor said he was “exhilarated” by the October 7 massacre of Jews. The NY Times reported a story about Jews taking away public funds from students.
The gap becomes even more striking when compared with the Commission’s treatment of other ideological sources of antisemitism. The report examines far-right antisemitism, describing Jews portrayed as conspiratorial financial elites, competitors with white Americans and secret manipulators of political power. It discusses neo-Nazis and white nationalism. It also examines antisemitism arising from the political left, including depictions of Jews as privileged, capitalist or oppressive and the intersection between those ideas and hostility toward Israel.
Where is the corresponding examination of jihadi antisemitism?
Where is the history of Hamas’s antisemitic ideology, the examination of Hamas rhetoric about Jews, or the investigation of how the language and symbols of violent extremist organizations appeared in American campus protests immediately after October 7?
The Commission instead devotes considerable attention to deciding when anti-Israel rhetoric should be understood as political speech rather than discrimination. It examines “From the River to the Sea” at length, including competing interpretations of the slogan. It notes that “Intifada” can be frightening while remaining protected expression. At Rutgers, for example, it records “Globalize the Intifada” among the protest activity Jewish students said made them feel unsafe.
Imagine – feeling unsafe around a jihadist cry to kill non-Muslims everywhere.
Rutgers “Glory to the martyrs”, praising the jihadists murderers
But cataloguing whether a slogan is legally protected is different from investigating the ideology being expressed by the people using it. The First Amendment can protect vile political speech. That does not make its ideological origin irrelevant to a federal investigation trying to understand antisemitism.
The omission is particularly consequential because the language of the campus protests did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. American universities have increasingly employed professors who view Israel through a settler-colonial framework. In its most categorical form, that theory casts Jews as foreign colonizers and Palestinians as the indigenous population resisting them. This screed is about Jewish presence in their homeland, not particular Israeli policies. It attempts to sever Jews from the land at the center of their history, religion, language and national identity and then uses that manufactured foreignness to challenge Jewish national self-determination. It is rank antisemitism that provides a logic other than Islamic supremacism to excuse Muslims preventing Jews from living and having self-determination “in any part of Palestine.”
“The conflict is cast in western circles as a local conflict over land between Jews and Arabs which can find compromise, but radical Islamists see it as a global religious matter between Muslims and Jews.” – First One Through July 2025
In such distorted worldview, October 7 becomes “resistance.” Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” becomes liberation. The intifada becomes something to globalize. Zionists become people to exclude, while Jews who object to any of this are reduced to the pro-Israel participants in a contentious political debate.
This is where the Commission missed the virulent strain of antisemitism it was supposed to investigate. The fear that swept through many Jewish communities after October 7 was not simply that Palestinian students disagreed with Jews about Israeli policy or conduct. Jews had watched an organization steeped in antisemitic ideology slaughter Israelis and take hostages. They then watched people in the West celebrate or rationalize the attack with the vocabulary of “resistance,” “intifada” and “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
While the Commission’s own evidence contained pieces of that story, its analytical framework never assembled them.
Columbia University encampment with “Intifada Revolution”
That failure has consequences. America has learned to recognize white-supremacist antisemitism – your father’s antisemitism – as an ideology rather than merely a collection of offensive statements. A swastika does not need to be accompanied by a dissertation on National Socialism before institutions understand the hatred behind it. The same intellectual seriousness should apply when antisemitism emerges from another extremist tradition.
Instead, this federal civil-rights report has provided universities with a framework that can make jihadist antisemitism remarkably difficult to see. While Jew hatred expressed in the vocabulary of white supremacy arrives already classified as extremism, similar hostility wrapped in the language of decolonization, resistance and intifada can be processed as politics, scholarship or protest. The Jewish student confronting it becomes the “pro-Israel” participant in a dispute, rather than a target of noxious hatred.
Jihadi antisemitism does not become benign when its vocabulary is translated for an American campus. Leaving that vector out of a federal investigation leaves universities less prepared to identify it, challenge it or protect the Jews it threatens.
The Commission set out to expose the forces driving contemporary campus antisemitism and instead helped preserve one of their safest hiding places: the assumption that when hatred of Jews arrives speaking the language of “resistance,” it is merely politics.
Major news organizations covering the extraordinary Flydubai incident have omitted a striking piece of context: five days earlier, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader warned that if Iranian aircraft could not use regional airports, nobody else should expect to fly either.
On September 25, Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s former acting president and current adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared:
“Flight in the region is either free for all, or for no one.”
He added: “If Iran is denied the possibility of flight and access to airport services, no country in the region will have this possibility either.”
Days earlier, another senior Iranian official, Mohsen Rezaei, had issued a similar warning concerning neighboring airports.
Five days after Mokhber’s statement, a Flydubai aircraft carrying mostly Israelis from Dubai to Tel Aviv suffered an attempted hijacking. The captain was attacked, the aircraft rapidly lost altitude and the flight made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The motive remains under investigation. There is no immediate evidence connecting Iran to the incident.
But Iran’s warning is missing from major coverage reviewed from Reuters, the Associated Press, the Guardian, Al Jazeera and The National. Reuters had itself reported Mokhber’s statement when he made it.
That omission is difficult to understand. A senior Iranian official had publicly warned that regional aviation could be disrupted. Five days later, an Emirati aircraft carrying over one hundred Israelis is put at risk by an Omani pilot.
Consider that Al Jazeera and the Guardian continue to say that Israel is at war with Iran even though that hasn’t been true for many months. They insert Israel into the war against Iran while they leave Iran out of the discussion about a potential killing of nearly two hundred Israelis.
Readers are being lied to by acts of insertion and omission, especially about Israel and Iran. It is critical to understand those basic facts and begin to ask why.
