Charges of “Weaponizing Antisemitism” Versus Actual Violent Antisemitism

In May 2024, Time Magazine ran a story decrying “How Weaponizing Antisemitism Puts Jews at Risk.” This idea has become fashionable among progressives, Islamists, and campus radicals. According to this twisted narrative, the real threat isn’t antisemitism—it’s the accusation of antisemitism, supposedly being used to “silence” criticism of Israel. They cite the House Education Committee’s task force on antisemitism as proof, calling it a vehicle to crack down on “pro-Palestinian” protests rather than protect Jewish students. They lobby to prevent the IHRA definition of antisemitism to be accepted in government cases, because Jews shouldn’t be allowed to decide for themselves what defines antisemitism.

Who gave them such privilege?

The charge against Jews is explicit and comes from Jews and non-Jews. UC Berkeley associate professor of history and Jewish studies Ethan Katz was part of the Nexus Project which put words like “Intifada” into various buckets and grades of antisemitism, in an attempt to jettison IHRA’s widely adopted definition. Katz took aim at the House Education Task Force and said “the overarching motivation for many of these people [Republicans on the committee] is to use this as a way of attacking higher education. This means that they are using Jews as a kind of pawn to play a political game.” It’s as though antisemitism doesn’t exist or politicians (read THOSE politicians) couldn’t possibly care about Jews.

We are being reeducated: Jews aren’t victims; they’re tools. Republicans don’t care; their racists using Jews to attack minorities and liberal institutions.

Worse, Jews are no longer victims in this reading but complicit in attacks on progressive causes. The expectation (read demand) from the socialist-jihadi alliance is therefore for Jews to accept the indignities, harassment, intimidation and discrimination lest they speak up, and victims of preference possibly be held responsible or pay a price.

This inversion of reality is extreme – and deadly.

The true weaponization of antisemitism is not rhetorical; it is literal. It is found in the chants of mobs in Western capitals calling to “Globalize the Intifada“—code for bringing the murder of Jews from Israel to the streets of New York, London, and Toronto. It is etched in graffiti that reads “Gas the Jews” in Paris and Melbourne. It is breathed into masked agitators who storm Jewish neighborhoods, businesses, and houses of worship.

*Car in Australia with antisemitic graffiti*

It is not new. For over a century, Arab leaders have worked to deny the Jewish people their rights. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited riots in the 1920s and 1930s to prevent Jews from praying at their holiest site, the Temple Mount. In 1929, that incitement culminated in the massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron. His riots from 1936 to 1939 kept hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe to die in the Holocaust.

Fast forward to 2023 to Hamas’s October 7 pogrom—an antisemitic massacre that was a direct descendant of that same ideology. Jews, in the Hamas worldview, are not simply an occupying force—they are an infestation. Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for Muslims to fight and kill Jews wherever they may be. The 2006 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas won a majority, validated and empowered that genocidal ethos.

*A majority of Gazans have always supported killing Jewish civilians in Israel, according to every Palestinian poll taken since 2000*

This hatred has never been about borders or policy. It is about Jewish existence. Jewish presence.

Palestinian Arabs are almost uniformly antisemitic according to Antidefamation League (ADL) polls. They have weaponized their antisemitism and come to ethnically cleanse the land of Jews.

For calling out Muslim antisemitism, the three million-member powerful National Education Association (NEA) teacher union voted on July 6 to cut ties with the ADL. In rejecting using any materials from the ADL, the NEA stated that “despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.” NEA delegate Stephen Siegel said “allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change.”

Only comrades of the socialist-jihadi alliance should be allowed to define antisemitism.

So when House Republicans call a hearing to investigate antisemitism on college campuses after mobs trap Jewish students in libraries and bar entry to Hillel buildings, outlets like Time spin it as a crackdown on speech. When Jewish students file Title VI complaints because professors and deans dismiss their fears and excuse calls for a new Holocaust as “political expression,” activists call it censorship.

Jewish students hide from mob at Cooper Union in New York City

The charge that “antisemitism is being weaponized” is not a defense of speech—it’s a shield for Jew hatred. It inverts the aggressor and victim and gaslights the world into thinking that Jews are too powerful, too organized, and too vocal in defending themselves.

It is not only in the Jewish Diaspora. The Islamic Republic of Iran – sworn to the destruction of the Jewish State which it calls a “cancer” – has literally weaponized its nuclear program. Not willing to be exterminated, Israel preemptively took out the infrastructure of the weapons of mass destruction. And the world came after Israel as if it were the aggressor.

Because there is a corrupt belief that Jews must accept their fate silently.

UN claims that Israel cannot defend itself from the political-terrorist group Hamas which rules Gaza and has 58% of the seats in parliament

The world has been trained that Jews have too much – whether power, money, land, rights – even pride. People believe that Jews should be stripped of those items and absorb the abuse. To demand basic human rights, dignity or protection is not considered defense but an assault on the attackers.

Are Jews hunting Palestinians on Western campuses or are Palestinian flag-wavers cornering Jewish students? Did Israel issue a fatwa against Arabs and Muslims, or was it Osama bin Laden who said that Jews will never be safe, Hamas that declared in its charter that it is an obligation for every Muslim to kill Jews, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who demanded a land ethnically cleansed of every Jew?

The world knows that antisemitism has been weaponized but not by Jewish students or congressional investigators. It has been weaponized by Hamas with bullets, knives, and fire. By “anti-Zionists” who shout genocidal slogans and assault Jews in the the streets of the Global North. By media figures who gaslight Jews to stay silent to protect the indefensible in the name of free expression.