Monthly Archives: December 2025

The Revolutionary Theology Has Gone Operational

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The arrests came just before New Year’s Eve.

Federal authorities charged members of a group calling itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front with planning coordinated bomb attacks in Southern California. Investigators described discussions of explosives, targets, and timing. The plan was operational, deliberate, and aimed at creating fear and mass harm.

The group’s own words revealed how its members understood their actions. Posters and social media tied to the suspects declared “death to America,” hostility toward federal institutions, and solidarity with “Palestine” framed as “liberation.” The suspects did not describe their plans as criminal. They viewed them as morally required.

That distinction is critical. It explains why violence felt justified rather than transgressive. And why young people can cheer the assassinations of healthcare executives and the massacres by Hamas terrorists, rather than ponder the moral swamp that has taken over their minds.

A World Reduced to Moral Absolutes

At the core of this twisted ideology is a belief that America, Israel, and capitalism are systems of permanent oppression. They are described as forces that keep a foot on the throat of the common man—extracting labor, denying dignity, enforcing hierarchy through violence.

DSA member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI) reciting her version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the DSA conference in 2021

Within this framework, reform loses meaning. Coexistence is treated as betrayal. Opposition becomes a duty. Violence becomes resistance.

Once that moral threshold is crossed, escalation is no longer radical. It is faithful.

How Far-Left Activism Removed the Guardrails

This worldview is not confined to clandestine cells. Its language has circulated for years inside far-left activist spaces, including factions associated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

DSA-linked rallies, resolutions, and affiliated campus groups have repeatedly adopted language that frames politics as existential struggle rather than democratic contest. Israel is described as a settler-colonial project that must be dismantled. Zionism is labeled racism. Capitalism is defined as violence. America is cast as an imperial force whose institutions lack legitimacy.

The phrasing matters. Calls for “by any means necessary,” “intifada revolution,” and declarations that there can be “no peace on stolen land” are not metaphors. They are moral instructions. They announce that outcomes justify methods and that limits no longer apply.

The rhetoric has infiltrated American schools, both K-12 and universities. Young people are being taught that they have a moral duty to dismantle systems of oppression and that the oppressors are capitalism, the American government, and powerful Jews. Stealing from stores is no longer a crime but means of reparations. Shooting up a kosher store is a form of “restorative justice.”

And the DSA rhetoric and candidates have infiltrated the Democratic Party. It began in 2017 and has accelerated. Rashida Tlaib is the most noxious example, but incoming mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani may become the most visible, leading the largest American city, the center of American capitalism, and the city with the largest number of Jews outside of Israel.

Where will this lead? Will Jews and capitalists become daily targets?

Movements are shaped by the permissions they grant. When activists normalize the idea that destruction is justice, someone eventually decides to carry it out literally.

Why Israel and Jews Become the Inevitable Focus

Israel occupies a singular place in this ideological ecosystem. It represents sovereignty, national identity, military power, economic success, and Jewish self-determination. For movements defined by opposition to perceived power, Israel becomes the ultimate symbol.

Criticism shifts from policy to existence. Zionism is no longer debated; it is pathologized. Jewish presence becomes suspect. Exclusion is reframed as moral clarity.

And this is not just aired on TikTok but taught at leading American schools, often funded by Islamic regimes.

This pattern is familiar. When a people are defined as embodying the system itself, harm against them begins to feel righteous. Antisemitism thrives wherever absolutist ideologies divide humanity into victims and irredeemable oppressors.

Iran’s Revolutionary Language, Recycled

The structure of this worldview is not new.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution articulated it decades ago. America was cast as the Great Satan. Israel as the Little Satan. Zionism as a cancer that must be removed. These were not rhetorical excesses. They were moral justifications for perpetual violence.

Over time, the religious vocabulary faded, but the framework endured. Imperialism replaced heresy. Capitalism replaced idolatry. “Liberation” replaced salvation. The certainty remained intact in a secularized lexicon. It was internalized as faith for the common man.

What once animated clerical revolution now circulates through Western classrooms and social media feeds, stripped of theology but retaining its absolutism.

A Warning, Not a Theory

The Turtle Island arrests are not an anomaly. They, the election of DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the Luigi Magione fandom are an American signal flare that has been brewing for years for the Jewish community. They mark the moment when revolutionary language stops being symbolic and becomes operational against Americans on a mass scale.

Harvard students rally to Hamas in the aftermath of the brutal slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel

Societies do not collapse because extremists speak. They collapse when eliminationist ideas are normalized, when calls for destruction are treated as moral expression, and when institutions charged with defending pluralism hesitate to draw lines.

Once a culture accepts the premise that entire nations, peoples, or systems deserve to be erased, violence is no longer a question of if. It is a question of when.

What Chants Are Antisemitic?

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In Britain, a jury recently decided that the so‑called Khaybar chant is not antisemitic. The chant invokes Khaybar, a seventh‑century battle in which Jewish communities were slaughtered by the armies of Muhammad. The actual chant in Arabic, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”. Its meaning is not subtle. It is a threat dressed up as history: remember what happened to the Jews then—remember what can happen again.

If that chant is deemed legally innocuous, what else must now be tolerated?

Would crowds chanting, “Jews, remember the ovens—the Nazis are coming,” be waved through as historical commentary about the Holocaust? What about “We love October 7—it will happen again, in your neighborhood,” explicitly celebrating the mass murder of Jews in Israel and promising its repetition elsewhere? These are not metaphors. They are incitement through remembrance, violence recalled as promise.

The problem is not that the law is incapable of recognizing hate. It plainly can. Careers are ended for misgendering. A single racial slur can bring swift institutional punishment. Speech codes are enforced with zeal—except, it seems, when the targets are Jews.

When courts insist on laundering openly antisemitic chants into something more refined and dignified—while other forms of bigotry are policed to the syllable—Jews are stripped of basic protections. Uniquely so. They are told to absorb the abuse, to endure the menace, to treat threats as culture and calls to murder as mere politics.

Law enforcement, under this logic, will intervene only—perhaps—after Jewish blood is spilled. Until then, Jews are instructed to tolerate the intolerable.

The divergence between the United States and the United Kingdom is often overstated. America claims the shield of the First Amendment; Britain claims the precision of hate‑speech law. In practice, both systems now converge on the same result: maximal latitude for antisemitic intimidation, coupled with maximal scrutiny of everyone else.

In the U.S., threats are dismissed as protected speech until they metastasize into action. In the U.K., chants that openly celebrate or foreshadow Jewish slaughter are judicially sanitized as cultural or historical expression. Different doctrines, identical outcomes.

San Francisco Hillel torched and vandalized in December 2025

This is not neutrality. It is a re‑creation of an old status under a modern name: Jews may live here, but only on sufferance; they may speak, but only quietly; they may appeal to the law, but not expect its protection.

If Western societies imagine that this posture will buy peace—by indulging jihadist rhetoric while disciplining polite speech—they are deluding themselves. A legal order that cannot name antisemitism, that cannot distinguish remembrance from menace, has already corroded from within.

History’s lesson is not subtle. The moment a society teaches Jews to absorb threats, it has decided that Jewish safety is optional. And when the law makes that decision, it is only a matter of time before others learn the same lesson.

Liberal Democracy, on Edge

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A liberal democracy begins with a belief in pluralism—that a society can remain open even when its people profoundly disagree.

It assumes citizens will hold incompatible views about religion, morality, identity, and history, and that the state’s role is not to arbitrate truth but to preserve space. Speech is therefore protected broadly, even when it is crude, offensive, or deeply wrong. A liberal democracy does not require enlightenment. It requires freedom.

That freedom extends even to haters. But it is not unlimited.

Pluralism does not mean surrender. A society can protect speech while still drawing firm lines against coercion. The distinction is simple and essential: ideas are free; intimidation is not.

This is why liberal democracy depends on strong law enforcement. Courts, police, and prosecutors are the infrastructure of freedom. Without enforcement, rights exist only for those willing to defend themselves physically.

The law must intervene before intimidation hardens into violence. Waiting for broken windows or spilled blood is not neutrality—it is negligence. Fear does its work quietly. People leave long before they are injured.

This is not theoretical.

Across the West today, Jews are being harassed in public spaces, on campuses, and in neighborhoods—not for what they say or do, but for who they are. They are told their presence is a provocation. That they should leave “for their own safety.” That public space belongs to others now.

Jewish man in Montreal Canada out shopping with his family told to leave area because his physical presence was a provocation to anti-Israel protestors in November 2024

This is a flashing warning sign.

When Jews are asked to disappear so that others may feel comfortable, liberal democracy is already failing. When the burden shifts from the intimidator to the target—when minorities are told to lower their profile, avoid certain areas, or conceal their identity—the law has retreated.

President Biden’s Jewish liaison, Aaron Keyak, tells Jewish Americans to hide their religion in May 2021

The logic is dangerous: if you weren’t here, there wouldn’t be trouble.

That logic ends pluralism.

A liberal democracy does not require Jews—or any minority—to justify their presence. It does not ask them to trade visibility for safety. It does not treat their normal lives as inflammatory acts.

When intimidation succeeds, speech becomes theoretical and freedom selective. The public square shrinks until only the loudest remain, and those vicious groups with whom the government aligns. Elections may continue, courts may still issue rulings, but the civic bargain is broken.

The test of a liberal democracy is therefore how it responds when minorities are told to leave, either directly by government officials or with their tacit approval. If the state allows harassment to drive people out—quietly, gradually, without intervention—it has abandoned its most basic duty.

Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City who is comfortable with the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” will be in charge of law enforcement in the city with the greatest number of Jews.

  • How will he respond when Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests Jews cancel holiday events because antisemites have the run of the school and the institution cannot (will not) assure their safety?
  • What will he do when Jewish students at New York University cannot enjoy the school’s facilities because of gross failures to protect students?
  • Who will send in the police when Columbia University Jewish students are forced to walk a tight direct line between classrooms with an escort, because the university cannot secure the campus for everyone?
  • Where will the courts and law enforcement be when Jewish students and faculty at CUNY Hunter College are forced to cancel or not attend classes because of widespread harassment and intimidation?

Students at Cooper Union in downtown NYC lock themselves in a library while anti-Israel protestors threaten them outside

A successful liberal democracy welcomes immigrants and may elect a Ugandan born mayor. Yet it fails to be a liberal democracy when Jews are forced to flee the streets because governmental officials give a free pass to harassment, intimidation and discrimination.

The West is on the cusp of learning whether it remains a liberal democracy. And whether it cares.

Chabad Caught In a Thicket

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There are Jews who keep their heads down. And then there is Chabad.

From Bondi Beach to Mumbai, from Barcelona to American college campuses, Chabad does the opposite of what fear would counsel. It does not retreat inward. It goes outward—publicly, cheerfully, stubbornly—lighting candles, setting tables, opening doors.

And for that, it bleeds.

In Australia, Chabad helped organize a large public Chanukah gathering near Bondi Beach—sun, music, children, light. A Jewish holiday celebrated exactly as it was meant to be: openly, without apology. Antisemites came – because, as they say of bank robbers robbing banks – that’s where the Jews are. Violence came to eradicate the joy.

In India, Chabad paid an even heavier price. During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House. This was not collateral damage in a geopolitical struggle between India and Pakistan. It was targeted slaughter. The rabbi and his wife were tortured and murdered because they were Jews—and because they were visible Jews, serving other Jews. The attackers bypassed many targets to reach them. They knew exactly who they were looking for.

This pattern repeats itself with chilling consistency. Chabad emissaries—shluchim—are not anonymous. They live openly as Jews in places where Jews are few, where governments barely register their presence, let alone prioritize their safety. Some countries have only dozens of Jews. Some have none at all, except for Chabad.

And still Chabad goes.

On Friday nights in Barcelona, Jewish life gathers around Chabad tables. Tourists, locals, students—many unaffiliated, many unsure—find Judaism not as a political identity or an abstract cause, but as food, song, wine, warmth. As Shabbat.

On university campuses across North America, Chabad events now regularly outshine Hillel. This is not accidental. Where Hillel has often drifted toward “wokeness,” flattening Judaism into a vague social-justice aesthetic, Chabad offers something older and sturdier: tradition without embarrassment. Commandments without footnotes. Jewish joy without ideological permission slips.

That, too, draws attention. And danger.

Chabad rabbis and their families know they wear a mark, and not metaphorically. They live without anonymity. They publish their addresses. They welcome strangers. They light menorahs in public squares at a moment in history when public Jewishness has been recast as a provocation.

Chabad lighting “the largest menorah” on the sixth night of Chanukah in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza in 2017 (photo: First One Through)

Chanukah, of all holidays, insists on this. It is not meant to be hidden. The lights are placed in windows, at doorways, facing the street. Pirsumei nisa—publicizing the miracle—is the law. Chabad takes it seriously, even when the risk feels immediate.

In a world where Jew-hatred has resurged with startling comfort, Chabad has become something else as well: exposed in the spotlight.

There is an old biblical image for this.

When Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac, the knife is raised but the sacrifice is halted. Instead, a ram appears, caught in a thicket by its horns. The ram is offered in Isaac’s place.

Chabad, today, feels like that ram.

Silhouette of two Chabad men at a Chankah lighting ceremony on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, shortly after the massacre of Jews in Bondi Beach, Australia in December 2025. Just a few hundred feet away sits Gracie Mansion, soon-to-be home of New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who refuses to repudiate the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a call to kill diaspora Jews. (photo: First One Through)

Not because Chabad seeks martyrdom—it emphatically does not. It absorbs the blows meant for Jewish visibility itself. It becomes the target because it brings together Jews to celebrate Judaism with gladness – the ultimate point of inflammation for antisemites.

The world often says it wants Jews to be “normal.” Chabad refuses that bargain. It insists on being Jewish instead—fully, visibly, joyfully—even when the cost is high.

Chabad is not actually caught in a thicket; it takes its position openly. But antisemites hear a calling that is not divine but grotesque when they see joyful Jews, and are willing to sacrifice themselves and their sons – like the murderers of Bondi Beach – to feed the poisoned passion.

Stop With the Hanukkah Miracle and Declare the Hanukkah MESSAGE

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The Book of the Maccabees lays out that the war against the Jews did not start with violence but with policy. The Syrian-Greeks initiated the battle by denying Jews their right to religious practice. Jewish life was made illegal through decrees and prohibitions, through the quiet insistence that Jews no longer have standing in their own holiest spaces.

The Temple Mount was seized. Jewish worship was banned. Foreign rites were imposed in its place. The text is precise and unsparing:

“And forbid burnt offerings, and sacrifice, and drink offerings, in the temple; and that they should profane the sabbaths and festival days…. They set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and built idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.”
—1 Maccabees 1:45, 1 Maccabees 1:54

When the Maccabees returned to Jerusalem, the devastation they witnessed was total. The enemies of the Jews intended humiliation. A holy place was turned into a ruin so complete that nature itself began to reclaim it.

“They saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts shrubs had grown up as in a forest.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:38

Judas and his brothers refuse to accept erasure as permanent and took action:

“Then Judas and his brothers said: ‘Behold, our enemies are crushed. Let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate it…. They tore down the altar and stored the stones in a suitable place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:36, 44–46
“They purified the sanctuary and made another altar of sacrifice… and offered burnt offerings according to the law….They celebrated the dedication of the altar for eight days, and offered burnt offerings with gladness.“
— 1 Maccabees 4:48–56

And then memory was mandated.

“Judas and his brethren with the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:59

Why legislate remembrance? Why must it be done with joy?

Because danger does not end with victory nor complacency. The danger is forgetting how erasure begins—how denial of access precedes denial of life. Enemies rarely announce extermination at the start. They begin by declaring Jews illegitimate, unworthy of presence, unfit to practice their own traditions.

Guard blocks entry of a Jewish man onto the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate, because he is a Jew, in November 2025. (Photo: First One Through)

The Maccabees understood something timeless: when Jews accept exclusion as normal, the battle has already been lost. When they are told to make do with less than basic human rights demand, they can never really have a full heart.

Hanukkah is the refusal to let others define Jewish legitimacy. It is the insistence that Jewish rights—to worship, to gather, to exist openly—are not privileges granted by empires or overseers, but as the opening lines of America’s Declaration of Independence state, “endowed by their Creator.”

So it was in their days. So it is in ours.

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media?

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There are moments when a headline tells you everything by what it refuses to say.

A mass shooting took place at a Hanukkah party in Sydney, Australia. A Jewish holiday. A Jewish gathering.

Yet when major global outlets reported the story, something curious happened.

The New York Times headline did not mention Jews. Only the sub-header caught the significance of the attack, but did not say Jews were targeted.

More disturbing, follow-up articles did not focus on the horrific spike in antisemitism in Australia these past two years. Instead, the Times posted an article about… Bondi Beach, and how beautiful and popular it is.

The BBC followed a similar path. So did The Guardian. So did others like CNN. The event was flattened into abstraction: a “shooting,” a “disturbance,” a “tragedy,” untethered from identity.

By contrast, The Telegraph named Jews. The Jerusalem Post did as well. The New York Post and CNBC, too. Al Jazeera did not. Actually, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera attempted to whitewash the entire incident that there was “no information.”

This divide is not accidental. It reflects something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Because at the same moment that major Western media hesitated to name Jewish victimhood, the global Jewish community had no such confusion. WhatsApp groups lit up within minutes. Videos circulated—not to sensationalize, but to bear witness. The injured were named, not as statistics but as people. Hebrew names were shared so strangers across continents could pray for them.

No one asked whether Jews had been targeted. They knew.

The only uncertainty discussed privately was not if the attack was antisemitic, but which strain of antisemitism it represented. Neo-Nazis? Radical Islamists? A lone actor steeped in online hate? Jews have learned, painfully, to recognize the pattern even before the authorities finish their press conference.

So why the hesitation in public framing?

Why is Jewish identity often erased precisely when Jews are attacked?

Part of the answer lies in a narrative trap the modern media has built for itself. Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are increasingly cast in a single role: power holders, enforcers, aggressors. In that framework, Jews are permitted to be actors—but not victims. Agents—but not targets. Perpetrators—but not innocents.

Victimhood, in today’s moral economy, is rationed. And Jews often find themselves disqualified from it in favor of victims of preference.

Naming Jews as victims complicates the preferred storyline. It disrupts the binary of oppressor and oppressed. It forces an uncomfortable reckoning: that a people portrayed relentlessly as powerful are still being hunted in synagogues, homes, and holiday celebrations—from Pittsburgh to Poway, from Paris to Copenhagen, from Jerusalem to Sydney.

And so the language softens. The identity disappears. The motive is delayed, blurred, or left unexplored. The story becomes about the setting, not the target. About the neighborhood, not the people. About ambience, not intent.

The question is not whether Jews are under attack. That is beyond dispute.

The question is whether the world’s most influential media institutions are willing to say so plainly—or whether Jews may only appear in headlines when they are accused, never when they are wounded.

Part of the answer to the disgraceful shrug to the barbaric October 7 massacre in Israel is the systemic brainwashing that has been going on, that Jews cannot be viewed as innocent victims. Even when they plainly are, half a world away.


The Gates of the Temple Mount

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Jerusalem is a city of gates. Stone thresholds worn smooth by centuries of feet. Arches that promise passage, and others that deny it.

Nowhere is this more literal—and more symbolic—than at the gates to the Temple Mount.

There are many gates along its walls. Some are sealed, some are ceremonial, and some are active. But in practice, Muslims ascend and descend freely through multiple entrances, while non-Muslims are funneled through a single ramp, tightly controlled, time-limited, and revocable at will.

Group of Muslim women come down from the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchants’ Gate (photo: First One Through)

This is not accidental. It is policy.

Muslims enter through gates embedded naturally in the Old City’s fabric—the Cotton Merchants’ Gate among them. There, the walls are alive. Candy shops spill color onto the stones. Children’s clothing hangs in soft defiance of gravity. The scent of sweets mixes with dust and history. Life flows in and out, up and down, as it has for generations.

Jews, by contrast, are stopped.

They are turned away from nearly every gate. Not questioned. Not debated. Simply blocked.

Despite the Temple Mount being the holiest site in Judaism, Jews are told—by police, by signs, by precedent—that they may not enter as worshippers.

A solitary Jew is blocked from ascending the steps to the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest location in Judaism, because he is a Jew. (photo: First One Through)

They are redirected instead to a single entrance ramp, detached from the Old City’s living arteries. The ramp rises from the edge of the Western Wall plaza, a vast open expanse that functions less like a neighborhood and more like a giant stone parking lot. From there, Jews may ascend only during narrow windows, under escort, forbidden to pray, forbidden to whisper, forbidden even to move their lips in devotion.

Jews are limited to prayer at the Western Wall, a supporting wall to the Temple Mount. The ramp to the Mughrabi Gate (top right) is the only gate of the ten operating gates where Jews can pass onto the Temple Mount, in limited numbers, at limited times. (photo: First One Through)

Jews are told to make do.

Make do with praying to a retaining wall of the Temple Mount.
Make do with history filtered through permission.
Make do with holiness at a distance.

This arrangement is often called the “status quo,” as if it were ancient, neutral, or inevitable. It is none of those things. It is modern. It is enforced. And it rests on a single premise: Islamic supremacy over the site requires Jewish silence at Judaism’s holiest place.

Muslims may ascend and descend at will. Jews may only look up.

The irony is almost unbearable. Judaism sanctified this mountain long before Islam existed. The Temples stood here before the Qur’an was written, before the Dome of the Rock was imagined, before the word “status quo” could be used to freeze injustice in place.

And yet today, Jewish presence itself is treated as a provocation.

Not violence. Not disruption. Presence.

The gates tell the story more honestly than any diplomatic statement ever could. Gates that welcome. Gates that redirect. Gates that close.

It’s a caste system familiar to Black Americans. “For Whites Only” is now “For Muslims Only” for 90% of the gates to the Temple Mount. “Negro Entrance” read “Non-Muslim Entrance” is plastered atop a ramp in the far corner of the Temple Mount. While racial Jim Crow laws ended in the U.S. decades ago, Jews remain subject to open religious discrimination at their holiest location. At the insistence of the United Nations.

In Jerusalem, everyone speaks of coexistence. But coexistence cannot survive when one faith ascends freely and another is barred from its own summit.

Joseph, Yusuf and the Stories We Tell

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The story of Joseph is the longest sustained personal narrative in the Bible. It is a life told end-to-end—youth and jealousy, betrayal and exile, moral clarity under pressure, reversal of fortune, and reconciliation. Jews have lived inside this story for millennia and drawn from it lessons about love misdirected, loyalty earned, leadership forged, and fate revealed only in retrospect.

It begins, uncomfortably, at home.

Jacob’s overemphasis on Joseph—his public favoritism, symbolized by the coat of many colors—fractured the family. It was not Joseph’s dreams alone that enraged his brothers, but the hierarchy their father imposed. Love, unevenly expressed, curdled into resentment. That resentment escalated to violence. The brothers nearly killed Joseph, then sold him into slavery, persuading themselves that exile was mercy.

And yet, the terror of the pit became the opening move in a larger design. Joseph’s descent—into slavery, into prison, into obscurity—ultimately saved thousands from starvation, including the very brothers who betrayed him. The Torah insists on an uncomfortable truth: human cruelty can coexist with divine purpose, without being excused by it.

Over time, the transformation that matters most occurs not in Joseph, but in Judah. The brother who once proposed selling Joseph later rises to moral leadership. Faced with the potential loss of Benjamin, Judah offers himself instead. Ultimatelty, kingship does not emerge from brilliance or dreams, but from responsibility and loyalty. Judah learns what Jacob failed to teach early: leadership is love with a wide visual field.

But this is not the only Joseph story in the world.

Yusuf and Zulaykha: A Different Emphasis

In Islamic tradition, Joseph is Yusuf, and his story unfolds with different texture and purpose. The Qur’an (Surah Yusuf) adds layers absent from the biblical text. Where the Bible does not even name Potiphar’s wife, Islamic tradition gives her a name—Zulaykha—and an entire inner life.

Her attraction to Yusuf begins as physical longing, but in later tradition becomes a spiritual ascent. Love itself is refined—from desire for beauty to yearning for the divine. This is not biography alone; it is allegory.

Persian culture preserved these layers visually, through extraordinary manuscript art that does not merely illustrate scripture but interprets it.

One remarkable manuscript—now on display at the Grolier Club from the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary (until December 27, 2025)—shows Joseph cast into a well. The details are arresting. Joseph has lost not only his coat of many colors, but his hat and shoes as well—status stripped away piece by piece. The brothers even drop rocks down on him.

Story of Yusuf and Zulaykha from Mashhad, Iran in 1853 by the Jewish scribe Eliyahu ben Nisan ben Eliyahu Gorgi. Digitized entire manuscript can be viewed here

One figure stands apart in the drawing. At the bottom of the scene, a brother sits almost contemplatively. His hands alone are painted with henna, marking higher status. He smokes a long çubuk (copoq)—a dry-tobacco pipe, not the classic Persian water-based hookah—an unsettling detail as Joseph languishes in a dry well below. The image quietly foreshadows hierarchy, survival, and reversal. Even in betrayal, the future is being seeded. This must be Judah, on the side of the well with his five brothers from mother Leah, who is destined to help Joseph out of the pit and rise to fame himself.

One brother seems to connect at the same level of Joseph – at a low point in this story but will rise to fame later in life: Judah

Other images in the Yusuf cycle go further still in the manuscript. Women cut themselves upon seeing Joseph’s beauty (image 70 from Surah Yusuf 12:31). Zulaykha is said to lose her sight from longing for him (image 128). Beauty becomes dangerous, overwhelming, transformative. The Islamic tradition does not deny desire; it seeks to discipline and redirect it.

Zulaykha losing her sight at the end of the story is one of the versions transmitted through the ages

Two Traditions, One Origin

For Jews, Joseph’s story is about dreams and reversals, exile and return, family rupture and national survival. For Muslims, Yusuf’s story adds a meditation on beauty, temptation, and love’s ascent toward God. The Islamic telling emerged nearly two thousand years after the Jewish forefather lived. It is not wrong; it is different.

What matters for us today is that these differences did not need to fight. The stories coexist without trampling on the other.

The same characters—Jacob, Joseph, the brothers—carried distinct lessons without cancelling one another. No one is frozen forever as a villain. Jacob loved poorly but learned. The brothers failed catastrophically but changed. Judah rose. Sacred storytelling, at its best, refuses to eternalize blame.

That restraint is precisely what feels absent today.

Stories, Power, and the Present

The Holy Land, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, is no longer widely treated as a shared inheritance, but as a zero-sum possession. Hamas openly declares that Jews will be wiped out. Clerics in parts of the Islamic world speak in timelines of Jewish disappearance due to their being “enemies of world peace.” This is not interpretation; it is incitement. It rejects the Joseph model, in which history bends—slowly and painfully—toward survival, accountability, and reconciliation rather than annihilation.

And yet, Islamic civilization itself offers another precedent. Islam historically made room for Jewish continuity—absorbing biblical figures, preserving Jewish prophets, and allowing traditions to dovetail rather than collide. Yusuf did not replace Joseph; he walked alongside him. Zulaykha did not negate Potiphar’s wife; she deepened the moral inquiry. Reverence did not require negation.

That capacity still exists.

If Joseph teaches anything durable, it is that sovereignty, survival, and holiness are not insults to one another. Jews returning to and governing their homeland need not be read as a theological defeat for Islam. They can be understood, instead, as another chapter in a long, shared story—one that does not deny difference, but refuses extermination as destiny.

The question is whether we choose that inheritance again.

The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.

The Little Drummer Boys of Terror

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President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”

The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.

Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.

Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.

In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.

“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)

It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.

We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.

On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem

They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.

While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.

The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.

Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.

The young listen. And they march.

At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.

But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.

Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.

The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?

These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025

At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.

The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.