Founded in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is a coalition of 57 Muslim-majority nations, making it the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the United Nations. Stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Kazakhstan to Nigeria, it represents roughly a quarter of the world’s countries and speaks collectively on issues affecting the Muslim world.
OIC Member states
One of the organization’s longstanding positions is that extremist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam do not represent Islam. Over the years, the OIC has repeatedly condemned organizations such as:
ISIS (Daesh) — for attacks across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, all OIC member states.
Al-Qaeda — for attacks in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and other Muslim-majority countries.
Boko Haram — for its insurgency in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.
Al-Shabaab — for attacks centered in Somalia and extending into neighboring countries.
ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan Province) — for terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — for its campaign against the government and civilians of Pakistan.
The common thread is unmistakable. Every one of these organizations has waged war against governments, civilians, or institutions in Muslim-majority countries, mostly members of the OIC itself.
The OIC has consistently argued that Muslims have been among the principal victims of jihadist terrorism. These groups bomb mosques, seek to overthrow Muslim governments, and destabilize OIC member states are denounced as terrorists and rejected as contrary to Islam.
Yet one jihadi terrorist groups is not called out. It is embraced.
Hamas is an Islamist movement whose founding charter and rhetoric have long drawn on jihadist themes and whose October 7, 2023, attack deliberately targeted civilians. Nevertheless, the OIC has not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization or issued the kind of sweeping institutional condemnations that it has directed at ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, ISIS-K, or TTP.
The most obvious distinction is not the use of Islamist ideology or armed violence. It is the target: Israel, the Jewish State.
For an organization that frequently states that terrorism has no religion and that Muslims are among terrorism’s greatest victims, its record reveals a clear pattern. When jihadist groups attack the Muslim world, the OIC is unequivocal in its condemnation. When an Islamist movement wages jihad against the Jewish state, the organization’s response is support.
Standing before a grieving audience, Bono argued that the terrorists wanted more than bodies. They wanted souls. They wanted free people to surrender their openness, joy, and humanity. His message was simple: we cannot become monsters to defeat the monsters.
But that never meant the monsters should be left undefeated.
A decade later, Bono’s words resonate with renewed force. Islamist terrorists butchered hundreds at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October 7, 2023, turning a celebration of life into a killing field. Yet Nova has refused to surrender. The festival has returned, even as Hamas and its supporters continue to mock the victims and celebrate the massacre.
That is the challenge every free society faces.
Love is not an alternative to defeating evil. Without security, there can be no concerts, no festivals, no freedom to gather. Evil must be confronted and defeated, or it will make love, music, and joy impossible.
The West must therefore pursue twin imperatives: defeat those who seek to destroy civilization, while steadfastly embracing the values of love, creativity, and human dignity that make civilization worth defending. Terror must never be allowed to decide either who lives or how we live.
Noa Beer, one of the SuperNova X music and arts festival organizers.
Shopping used to be simple. You bought food because it tasted good.
Today, every purchase arrives with a moral résumé.
The coffee is Fair Trade.
The chocolate is Rainforest Alliance Certified.
The eggs are Cage-Free.
The tuna is Dolphin Safe.
Soon the carton will tell you whether the chicken enjoyed equitable access to leadership opportunities.
With such established groundwork, the assertive red-green alliance / socialist-jihadi umbrella will undoubtedly develop a new standard for consumers to evaluate purchases:
Ethical Jihad Certification™
I imagine the following questionnaire for companies and organizations to complete, developed by the International Ethical Jihad Standards Council (IEJSC).
Supplier Ethics and Sustainability Review
If your organization employs child soldiers, is recruitment gender-balanced?
☐ Boys and girls equally represented ☐ Nonbinary recruitment targets adopted ☐ Diversity metrics forthcoming
If child brides are supplied, are they ethically sourced?
☐ Local ☐ Organic ☐ Family-owned supply chain
If weapons are stored among civilians, are they distributed equitably across community institutions?
☐ Hospitals ☐ Schools ☐ Mosques ☐ Balanced portfolio across all three
If hostages are held underground, are the tunnels built with recycled concrete?
If political opponents require corrective kneecapping, please confirm that your organization follows an equitable enforcement policy.
☐ Applied without regard to race, religion, gender, or political affiliation ☐ Accessibility accommodations provided during the disciplinary process ☐ Impact assessment completed ☐ Stakeholder feedback incorporated into future kneecappings
If political opponents are subjected to “involuntary rooftop relocation,” (tossed off of rooftops) please indicate which governance standards were followed.
☐ Community stakeholders notified ☐ Staff received annual safety training ☐ Proper signage installed ☐ Liability waivers completed
How does your organization incorporate the LGBTQ+ community?
☐ Rainbow headbands replace green ones during Pride month ☐ Local imams considering ordaining transwomen ☐ Gay men’s decapitated heads disposed of in another jurisdiction
☐ International NGOs ☐ Foreign correspondents ☐ Western university researchers ☐ Social media advocacy networks
Has your organization retained celebrity spokespersons to improve international brand perception?
☐ Actor ☐ Musician ☐ Influencer ☐ Climate activist
Has your organization demonstrated continuous improvement in expanding the number of international agencies, committees, or special offices devoted exclusively to your cause?
☐ Year-over-year growth achieved ☐ Additional mandate secured ☐ Dedicated rapporteur established ☐ Additional entities under consideration
Before issuing historical claims, has your organization completed a Heritage Simplification Assessment?
☐ Archaeological evidence destroyed ☐ Conflicting evidence omitted ☐ Timeline reduced to a convenient starting date ☐ Approved historical narrative distributed ☐ Site renamed in Arabic with only Islamic grounding
Has your organization’s founding charter undergone an independent review for language that may be inconsistent with modern human rights standards?
☐ Terminology modernized without changing intent ☐ Currently undergoing reputation management with select NGOs ☐ Using reputational management software to block viewers from finding foundational charter ☐ We prefer not to revisit founding documents
Has your organization successfully persuaded international stakeholders that your adversaries have no legitimate historical connection, cultural heritage, or rights associated with the land?
☐ Global awareness campaign exceeded expectations ☐ Educational materials updated accordingly ☐ Approved terminology adopted ☐ Further stakeholder engagement required
Has your organization successfully repositioned itself from perpetrator to primary victim in international discourse?
☐ Independent observers persuaded ☐ Media narrative successfully reframed ☐ Stakeholder sympathy increased ☐ Further communications investment required
Successful applicants receive one of four ratings:
Bronze: Mass violence, in recyclable packaging. Silver: Child soldiers recruited inclusively. Gold: Hostage facilities powered by solar panels. Platinum: Calls for genocide delivered with a complete ESG report.
For foods, there is an addition to the consumer label. For example:
Nutrition Facts
Calories: 140 Protein: 4g Sodium: 120mg Carbon footprint: Low Gender equity: Certified Child soldiers: Inclusive Child brides: Ethically sourced Weapons near civilians: Institutionally diversified Support for genocidal jihadists: Values-aligned
May contain traces of sesame.
May also contain an entire moral civilization that has forgotten the difference between auditing evil and opposing it.
When Iran offered condolences after the death of former Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the gesture appeared incongruous. Iran had recently been firing missiles and drones at Qatar and across the Gulf. So why the words of consolation?
Iran was not primarily attacking Qatar as a Muslim or Arab society. It was targeting the American military presence on Qatari soil. The same pattern has extended across the region: U.S. facilities and assets in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, as well as American positions in Iraq and Syria, have come under Iranian attack. Recent strikes included an early-warning installation in Qatar, Patriot systems in Kuwait, a U.S. fuel depot in Bahrain and military facilities in Jordan.
That reveals the real fault line in the Middle East.
It is not simply Sunni against Shia, Arab against Persian or even Muslim country against Muslim country. It is increasingly a divide over how to handle the United States: between governments and movements determined to expel American power and those that invite it in and then seek to shape it.
Iran represents the first model. Since 1979, its hostility has been explicit. It calls America the enemy, demands the removal of U.S. forces and uses missiles, drones and proxies against American military positions. Its war is visible. It announces its contempt and fires at the flag.
Qatar perfected a more nuanced model.
Under Sheikh Hamad, Qatar financed and expanded Al Udeid Air Base, which became central to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the region. At the same time, Doha built influence inside the United States, financing American university campuses, purchased entry into American television distribution, invested in think tanks and businesses, hired lobbyists and cultivated political relationships. It also hosted anti-Western terrorist groups including Hamas leaders and Muslim Brotherhood figures, and used Al Jazeera to broadcast narratives often deeply hostile to the West and its allies.
Iran attacks American power from the outside. Qatar embraces it corrodes it from within.
anti-American Iranians
Iran seeks direct confrontation; Qatar seeks leverage.Iran’s weapons are missiles and militias. Qatar’s are money, access, prestige and indispensability.
The West is naturally more alarmed by Iran’s model. And Qatar’s model is harder to confront because it arrives as partnership.
The military base protects American interests. The university campus carries a prestigious name. The investment creates jobs. Each relationship is defensible in isolation. Together, however, they create influence on a scale no tiny monarchy could achieve through military power alone.
The broader contest is therefore not between countries that love America and countries that hate it. Iran and Qatar represent different tactics of genocidal jihadists. One strategy attacks the fortress. The other purchases rooms inside it.
Iran’s war is louder. Qatar’s may prove more insidious and enduring.
The death of Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani on July 12 marks the passing of one of the most consequential – and controversial – strategists of the modern Middle East.
Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani
When he took power in Qatar in 1995, he inherited a tiny Gulf monarchy with enormous natural-gas reserves but limited international influence. By the time he abdicated in 2013 in favor of his son, Qatar had become a global financial center, media power, diplomatic broker and investor deeply embedded in the institutions of the West.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres mourned him as a “visionary and transformative leader.” The question is what he transformed and toward what end.
For most Americans, the War on Terror was fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. The enemy was imagined as something external: terrorists hiding in caves, regimes sheltering them and armies that could be defeated on a battlefield.
Sheikh Hamad developed a different model. Qatar did not physically confront the West. It enmeshed itself.
That strategy began with security. The United States and Qatar signed a defense cooperation agreement in 1992, but the relationship expanded dramatically after Sheikh Hamad took power. Qatar financed the development of Al Udeid Air Base beginning in the 1990s. After September 11, the base became central to American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2003 the United States moved its regional air-operations command center there from Saudi Arabia.
Qatari military base
Thus, during Sheikh Hamad’s reign, Qatar became essential to America’s military posture even as Doha cultivated relationships with Hamas, the Taliban and leading Muslim Brotherhood figures. That contradiction was core to the strategy: become so useful to Washington that Qatar’s other alliances would be tolerated.
Qatar is Hamas’s largest and principal sponsor
At the same time, Sheikh Hamad built Qatar’s machinery of influence.
In 1996, he launched Al Jazeera, which transformed Arabic-language media and gave Qatar a powerful instrument for shaping political narratives across the region.
Beginning in 1998, Qatar also imported elite American universities into Education City: Virginia Commonwealth in 1998, Weill Cornell in 2001, Texas A&M in 2003, Carnegie Mellon in 2004, Georgetown in 2005 and Northwestern in 2008. Qatar was not merely sending students to America. It was paying prestigious American institutions to plant their flags in Doha and bind their faculty, administrators and reputations to the Qatari national project. Simultaneously, it began pouring billions of dollars into American schools and think tanks in America.
Then came direct entry into the American media market. In January 2013, Al Jazeera purchased Current TV from former Vice President Al Gore and his partners in a deal reportedly valued at $500 million. The real asset was distribution: the purchase offered access to approximately 40 million American homes, compared with fewer than five million previously.
This was not a collection of unrelated investments. It was a coherent doctrine.
Qatar hosted America’s military command structure, funded American universities, purchased Western media distribution, invested in landmark properties, supported think tanks and lobbyists, and cultivated Western political relationships. At the same time, it provided sanctuary and legitimacy to movements hostile to the West.
In 2012, Sheikh Hamad became the first head of state to visit Hamas-led Gaza and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to the terrorist enclave. Qatar also became a home for Hamas political leaders and a major platform for Muslim Brotherhood figures.
Saudi Arabia’s role in the rise of jihadism was more direct and more visible, as fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. The West responded with armies, invasions, intelligence operations and trillions of dollars in military spending.
Qatar’s jihadism arrived differently. Not as a bare bomb but wrapped in prestige, access and partnership.
It was a velvet bomb.
Its instruments were television studios rather than training camps, endowed programs rather than militias, lobbying firms rather than armies, and investment funds rather than explosives. Qatar learned that it did not need to defeat Western institutions. It could finance them, partner with them and make them dependent, while corroding their values from the inside.
That is why Guterres’s tribute is so revealing. To the United Nations, Sheikh Hamad was the visionary builder of a modern state. To his critics, he helped perfect a model in which a small authoritarian monarchy could use money, military protection and institutional legitimacy to amplify movements fundamentally hostile to the West’s own political order.
During Guterres’s tenure, the United Nations itself has increasingly appeared less like the guardian of the postwar liberal system and more like an arena in which the grievances and ideological priorities of the Global South are directed against the countries that built and financed that system.
Sheikh Hamad set that groundwork. He understood that changing the world did not require conquering it.
It required gaining access to its command centers, universities, media platforms, political networks and international institutions—and persuading the West to welcome the process as partnership.
That is his most consequential and controversial legacy.
Today, one corner of the internet insists Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t merely a criminal but part of a vast Mossad operation. It emerged in the mainstream as recently parroted by Vice President JD Vance.
Another conspiracy theory surrounds UFOs visiting Earth for decades, governments hiding crashed spacecraft, and ordinary Americans being routinely abducted in the middle of the night.
Oddly enough, these two groups have spent years talking past one another.
Until now.
Because once you’ve accepted both theories, there is only one remaining conclusion: Jews are from outer space, just as Mel Brooks told you years ago.
The conspiracy theorists spent years saying Epstein worked for Mossad and that aliens walk among us. Maybe Epstein wasn’t working for the Mossad as much as the Mossad was working for the aliens.
You think it’s a coincidence that Israel – a country smaller than New Jersey – has more technology startups per capita than almost anywhere else on Earth? Back on their home planet, Israeli cybersecurity is considered an eighth-grade science project. Artificial intelligence? Homework.
Israeli entrepreneurs don’t invent technology. They import it.
Because Israel isn’t merely a country. It’s the portal.
Jerusalem became holy because that’s where the first extraterrestrials landed. Long before Abraham, the Galactic Federation designated the site as Landing Zone One.
Humans eventually built temples there because they mistook the landing pad for sacred architecture.
The Western Wall? The only surviving section of the original intergalactic arrival terminal after the Romans demolished the rest during an unfortunate urban renewal project.
The Dead Sea Scrolls? Maintenance manuals.
The menorah? A seven-port charging station.
Moses didn’t part the Red Sea. He accidentally activated the anti-gravity system.
Today, the signals are in plain sight:
Cholent isn’t food. It’s fusion-reactor fuel. It cooks overnight because spacecraft recharge slowly.
Challah is braided because that’s the optimal shape for stabilizing wormholes.
The shofar isn’t a ram’s horn. It’s an beacon transmitting, “Landing corridor clear.”
Payot—the long curls worn by some Hasidim—aren’t a religious custom. They’re simply this season’s fashion on Planet Zion-7.
Hebrew reads from right to left because that’s how navigation displays work in the Andromeda Galaxy.
The “Chosen People” weren’t chosen by God. They were selected for the Interstellar Exchange Program.
“Next year in Jerusalem” isn’t a prayer. It’s the annual shuttle schedule.
Matzah is actually 3,500-year old space snacks.
Tzizit aren’t really ritual fringes. They are the remnants of the original interstellar safety harnesses.
Mobileye was originally invented to avoid comets.
Sounds too hard to believe? Jews introduced the world to staring up to the skies in prayer when everyone else looked straight ahead at idols.
Jeffrey Epstein and a space alien
Roswell is actually an Israeli startup incubator that experienced an unfortunate product launch.
NASA? Quietly run by rabbis since 1969.
University professors aren’t so much anti-Israel as they are frustrated that their grant proposal to study the portal was rejected.
The United Nations doesn’t pass so many resolutions about Israel because of geopolitics. It’s desperately trying to establish jurisdiction over extraterrestrial affairs.
As to Epstein being involved with underage girls: in space, it has long been legalized because of the time-gravity equation that someone that presents young on earth might in fact be quite a bit older.
Naturally, skeptics ask the same tiresome question. “If this is true, where’s the evidence?”
Exactly.
If archaeologists don’t find alien technology, that’s proof the cover-up is working. If they do find something unusual, it proves the aliens slipped up.
If experts disagree, they’ve been compromised. If experts agree, they’re coordinating.
If there is no evidence, that’s the strongest evidence of all.
As the theories converge, someone will release a multi-part podcast revealing these findings under a header “I’m just asking questions.” There will be a chart with forty-three arrows, twelve highlighted Bible verses, three satellite images, and a blurry photograph of a pigeon in Jerusalem.
Millions of people will solemnly connect the dots. They will call themselves the “idiots.”
Another voice from the void will likely ask a more subtle question: if Jews are really from space, why do the wait for the Messiah in coach in the back of the plane?
The English language is constantly changing. Sometimes a person’s or group’s name becomes a verb.
We boycott because of Charles Boycott. We lynch because of William Lynch. We pasteurize because of Louis Pasteur. We sandwich because of the Earl of Sandwich.
The verb survives because it captures something distinctive that no existing word quite conveys.
What if the same happened with Hamas?
At first glance, someone might say, “We already have a word. It’s called pillaging.”
But pillaging isn’t nearly enough to convey the particular depredation.
The Vikings pillaged. They raided villages, stole livestock, carried off treasure, and sometimes took captives. Their brutality was driven by conquest and material gain. History rightly remembers them as ruthless raiders.
Yet even “to pillage” fails to capture what the world witnessed on October 7.
If “to Hamas” became a verb, it would not simply mean to rob, raid, or kill.
It would mean to deliberately massacre civilians, rape and murder, burn families alive, and carry away even the bodies of the dead – not merely to deny burial, but to torment loved ones and use the dead as bargaining chips. It would mean celebrating those acts publicly, then, when the victims fight back, proclaiming yourself to be the true victim. It would mean embedding fighters among civilians, hiding like cowards behind women and children while forcing every effort to rescue hostages or defeat you into another propaganda opportunity.
Dead Israeli woman hauled back to Gaza by Hamas, spat on by local Gazans on October 7, 2023
The cruelty is not only in the violence itself. It is in the inversion.
“To Hamas” is to attack and demand sympathy for committing crimes against humanity. The hostage-taker claims oppression. The organization that began the war insists the people searching for their murdered and kidnapped relatives are the real aggressors.
Hamas genocidal jihadist in Israeli kibbutz, celebrating killing families
“To Hamas” is to invite the world to join the crime and taunt the victims. To call “globalize the Intifada” in the streets of the Global North. To say the victims are not welcome on street signs. To taunt worshippers working into prayer halls.
Language evolves because sometimes old words are no longer enough.
If someone someday asks, “Are you going to Hamas me?” they would not be asking whether you’re going to steal from them or rape them. They would be asking something far darker.
Vikings pillaged. English already has a word for that.
“To Hamas” is to commit heinous atrocities, run for physical and emotional cover, and call for support to exploit the victims further.
Many Jews are being Hamased daily. It is time to label it clearly.
Every graduation marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.
Parshat Devarim, read each year during the Nine Days before Tisha B’Av, opens at precisely such a moment. The Jewish people stand on the banks of the Jordan River. After forty years in the wilderness, they are finally ready to enter the Land of Israel. Moses is delivering his final address. One might expect him to unveil a military strategy, an economic vision, or a blueprint for nation-building.
Instead, he teaches history.
For three chapters, Moses reviews the defining moments of the previous forty years: the appointment of judges, the sin of the spies, the years of wandering, and the victories over Sihon and Og. This is not nostalgia but preparation. Before Israel can build its future, it must first understand its past.
Moses sees the promised land from afar, 1902 by James Tissot (1836-1902)
That lesson feels especially relevant for this year’s Jewish college graduates.
Like the Israelites, they are crossing into a new world. They are leaving the structured environment of school and entering workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities where they will make their own decisions and assume new responsibilities.
The past few years have given many Jewish students an education that extended far beyond the classroom. They witnessed campuses wrestle with antisemitism. They watched administrators make revealing choices. They saw professors, classmates, elected officials, employers, and civic leaders respond in different ways when Jewish students felt threatened or isolated.
Whether those responses inspired confidence or disappointment, they were lessons.
Moses understood that the moments just before entering a new chapter are precisely when history matters most. The question is not simply, What happened? It is, What have you learned that should shape the future you are about to build?
For today’s graduates, those lessons should inform more than career decisions. They should influence how they participate in civic and Jewish life.
Who has earned your trust through actions rather than slogans?
Which institutions proved resilient under pressure?
How will you respond if antisemitism appears in your workplace?
What kind of community do you want to help build?
Graduation should also mark the beginning of Jewish adulthood. That means becoming more than an occasional participant. Join a synagogue by becoming a dues-paying member. Vote in local, state, and national elections. Volunteer and mentor younger students. Strengthen the institutions that strengthened you, and build the ones you wished had existed.
The Jewish calendar reinforces this idea. Before we reach the season of renewal – before Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur – we pause for the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av. Before looking ahead, we look back. Before rebuilding, we reflect.
That is exactly what Moses was doing on the edge of the Jordan.
Every generation has its own Jordan River.
Before crossing into tomorrow, Moses offers one final piece of advice: study yesterday. Not to dwell on it, but to be equipped by it. History is not simply something to remember. It is something to carry forward as you begin writing the next chapter of your own story – and of the Jewish people.
The World Cup’s final stages are being played in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the diaspora. Jews fill stadiums and gather in homes, bars, and public squares to cheer for their favorite teams. Many of the Jewish fans are descendants of families who fled persecution in the final four team countries, who found refuge in America.
By a remarkable twist of history, three of the four semifinalists are themselves home to three of the five largest Jewish communities in the diaspora: France (#2), the United Kingdom (#4), and Argentina (#5). Spain, whose once-great Jewish civilization was destroyed by the expulsion of 1492, today has only a small Jewish community.
The four teams were not traveling to America alone. Each arrived with ghosts.
England’s ghosts date to 1290, when King Edward I expelled all Jews from his kingdom. A Jewish community that had lived there for generations was driven out and would not officially return for more than three and a half centuries.
Spain’s ghosts carry the keys of 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews to convert or leave. One of the world’s great Jewish civilizations disappeared almost overnight, scattering Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas.
France’s ghosts stretch from repeated medieval expulsions to the Vichy regime, when French authorities enacted antisemitic laws and helped arrest and deport tens of thousands of Jews. They include the children rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv before being sent east.
Argentina’s ghosts are more recent. After World War II, the country became a refuge for Nazi fugitives, including Adolf Eichmann. Then, in 1994, the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. More than three decades later, those accused of orchestrating the attack have never stood trial in Argentina.
Now these four nations compete for soccer’s greatest prize before enormous crowds in the very country where so many descendants of those earlier Jewish communities ultimately built new lives.
Jewish fans cheer for England, Spain, France, and Argentina. They wear the jerseys, sing the anthems, and celebrate spectacular goals like everyone else.
But perhaps there are other spectators in the stands. Quietly observing.
The rabbi who clutched Torah scrolls as England closed its gates. A Sephardic mother who had cried as she locked the door of her home in Toledo for the last time. A Jewish child wearing a yellow star in Paris. Families standing outside the shattered AMIA building praying for loved ones.
Those ghosts would see something they could scarcely have imagined: not only the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community hosting the World Cup, but thriving Jewish communities once again in England, France, and Argentina. Against every expectation, Jewish life somehow endured.
ABBI ELI CHITRIK watches a World Cup match, wearing a traditional Orthodox Jewish hat, even as a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh is among the other fans sitting nearby.(photo credit: Rabbi Mendy Chitrik)
Then, they would whisper.
They would remind us that England, Spain, France, and Argentina were all, in their own time, places where Jews believed they belonged until history proved otherwise.
Their warning would not be that America is destined to follow the same path. History never repeats itself so neatly. Their warning would be simpler: antisemitism rarely arrives all at once. It begins with words, exclusion, indifference, and the comforting belief that it cannot happen here.
As the Jewish descendants cheer from the stands, they wonder if they are hearing voices directed at them above the roar. The whispering ghosts watch too, not only the game, but today’s generation of Jews feeling both at home and increasingly distinct from their home countries.
The soccer tournament will end on Sunday. And Jews will consider their jerseys in a very different way than every other fan, in the days and weeks after they take theirs off and have to consider life beyond the game.
J Street has long described itself as “pro-Israel.”
This week, after the House vote on military aid to Israel, it celebrated what it called the end of the old Washington consensus.
It welcomed House Democratic leaders for taking “a stronger stance” by using American leverage to pressure Israel’s government. It called for ending the “blank check” of military support. It declared that the debate was no longer whether U.S. policy toward Israel should change, but “how it must change.” [bold in original]
Those are remarkable statements.
They are not expressions of disagreement with a particular Israeli policy. They are a lobbying agenda urging the United States to use its military and financial support to compel Israel’s democratically elected government to change course while Israel is fighting the most complex, multi-front war in its history.
That is no longer simply criticism. It is an organized effort to change Israeli policy through pressure from a foreign government.
Every organization has the right to advocate for the policies it believes are best. But organizations should also be honestly described by what they do.
If an organization’s central mission is persuading Washington to pressure Israel, reduce military support, and override the strategic decisions of Israel’s elected government during wartime as its enemies desire, it is fair to ask whether “pro-Israel” remains the most accurate description.
And that question should extend to the institutions that continue to grant it the legitimacy of the broader organized Jewish community, such as those which represent the pro-Israel consensus within umbrella organizations.
These umbrella organizations exist to build Jewish consensus and strengthen support for Israel.
If one member organization is actively lobbying the United States to use military aid as leverage against Israel during wartime, then the question is no longer merely one of ideological diversity. It is whether the organization’s mission remains compatible with the mission of the coalition itself.
Pluralism is an important Jewish value but so is intellectual honesty.
The organized Jewish community has a right—and perhaps an obligation—to decide whether an organization dedicated to lobbying against the policies of Israel’s elected government during war should continue to be presented as part of the mainstream pro-Israel tent.
As these pages wrote back in 2017, “the Jewish State and pro-Israel groups will never have uniformity of opinions, but it should have unity of purpose,” especially within umbrella organizations. J Street has affirmed that its mission is more akin to Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Israel Fund, who occupy a very different tent.
And it knows this, which is why it created its own umbrella group, Progressive Israel Network. It is why they banded together to boycott a major pro-Israel event in Washington, D.C. in 2024, sponsored by the other mainstream groups.
It was one thing for the Conference of Presidents and AZM to not admit J Street. Will Jewish groups which have J Street as a member organization, now finally ask it to leave?
First One Through 