In July 2023 alone, 67,769 Gazans were allowed to exit Gaza through Israeli crossings according to the United Nations. In the entire year of 2023, only 50,098 Jews were allowed onto the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state according to Beyadenu a Jewish rights advocacy group.
One month versus one year. A border crossing versus a holy site in a nation’s capital. The comparison is damning.
The Jewish state allowed more Gazans to cross its border in one month before the Gaza leadership launched a war, than it allowed Jews to step foot on their holiest site over an entire year.
That is not security policy. That is civilizational self-sabotage.
Every country controls its borders. That is normal. What is not normal is a nation blocking its own people from their central religious site in their own capital city.
Jews face time windows, group limits, police escorts, and de-facto prayer bans to walk on ground their ancestors sanctified 3,000 years ago. The result is obvious: Jewish presence is suppressed by design.
Fifty thousand Jews in a year is not demand. It is managed scarcity.
Thousands of Jews congregate in the Kotel plaza on Passover, unable to ascend onto the Jewish Temple Mount
The Western Wall Plaza is sold as Jewish religious freedom. It isn’t. It is a containment zone — a consolation prize engineered to keep Jews away from the mountain that actually matters.
This is why the Gaza comparison cuts so deep.
Israeli policy makers allowed in more Gazans into Israel, during a blockade, knowing that the area is led by an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group sworn to destroy the Jewish State, than for Jews just seeking a basic human right of prayer.
A sovereign nation that polices Jewish prayer more aggressively than cross-border traffic has lost the plot. A capital that cages its own sacred history is not free.
Until Jews can walk onto the Temple Mount without escorts, quotas, and humiliation, the Kotel Plaza remains exactly what it is: an open-air prison with good lighting and a propaganda budget.
History has a grim rhythm. The most destructive ideas rarely hatch overnight but stew in society. They are excused as rhetoric, theater, or “just politics.” Then—roughly five and a half years later—they explode.
This is not numerology. It is pattern recognition.
In 1933, Germans burned Jewish books in public squares. It initiated the cultural permission for the destruction of Jews. Five and a half years later, that permission hardened into the machinery of the Final Solution.
Als Höhepunkt einer von Joseph Goebbels initiierten ‘Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist’ werden auf dem Opernplatz in Berlin von Studenten und SA-Einheiten Bücher von Autoren verbrannt, die den Nationalsozialisten mißliebig waren.
In 2018, Gaza launched the so-called “Great March of Return.” It acted as a trial run to invade Israel and slaughter Jews. Five and a half years later, October 7 arrived—mass murder, rape, kidnapping—exactly as promised and practiced.
Ideas announce themselves early. The damage arrives later.
Today, in America, a new idea is being spoken aloud with disturbing ease: personal property is conditional.
Property Is the Load-Bearing Wall
Private property is not a side feature of capitalism; it is the load-bearing wall. Remove it and the structure collapses—investment freezes, contracts become jokes, and capital flees to wherever the rules still mean something.
Yet in recent years, voices across the ideological spectrum have started to say the quiet part out loud.
On the progressive left, figures like Zohran Mamdani and his partners in crime like Cea Weaver have openly argued that housing and land can be seized or overridden by the state in the name of moral urgency. Ownership becomes a social inconvenience. “Use” replaces title. Force replaces consent.
On the populist right, Donald Trump has flirted with the same heresy from a different direction—embracing sweeping government power over land, contracts, and assets when it suits political goals. The rhetoric differs. The result converges.
When the left and right agree that property rights are optional, the center cannot hold.
From Rhetoric to Ruin
Every historical catastrophe begins with intellectual laundering.
Book burning was framed as cleansing culture. The Gaza marches were framed as civil resistance. Property seizure is framed as compassion or patriotism.
Once a society accepts that ownership is contingent on political favor, every asset becomes provisional. Homes, farms, factories, patents—nothing is safe from the next emergency, the next slogan, the next election.
Capital responds rationally. It leaves. Innovation slows. Black markets thrive. Strongmen fill the vacuum. What follows is not equality but scarcity enforced by power. And there will be a scapegoat, and Jews have proven the most convenient.
July 2031 Is Not Far Away
Count forward five and a half years.
Ideas being normalized today will be policy tomorrow. Policies will become enforcement. Enforcement will become precedent. By the summer of 2031, the damage will no longer be theoretical.
This is how capitalism dies—not with tanks in the streets, but with applause for confiscation. This is how world order fractures—not through invasion, but through the voluntary abandonment of the rules that made prosperity possible.
This is how the Global North will collapse-not through open country borders, but the eradication of personal property lines.
The lesson of history is brutally clear: destruction is foretold in dangerous gestures towards property that eventually comes for the persons who own them.
The blood libel begins with how the Book of Exodus is misremembered. Exodus is a story of Jewish liberation, yet antisemites preserve it as a story of punishment. That inversion is not confusion but tradition. Every generation dresses the libel in new language, while the structure never changes.
The plagues were directed at dismantling Egyptian authority with precision. The opening strike hit the Nile—Egypt’s god, economy, and source of life—and exposed a crime already committed there. Egypt had drowned Israelite infants in that river to erase a future it feared. The first plague named that bloodshed and stripped Egypt of moral order.
What followed was escalation with restraint. Egypt lost land, productivity, and cosmic claims. Darkness collapsed Pharaoh’s divine authority. What remained was the empire’s final refuge: the belief that continuity would return, that tomorrow would repair what today exposed.
The final plague took it. The death of the firstborn judged a state that had already made children expendable. It revoked Egypt’s claim on the future. Regimes that destroy children forfeit moral legitimacy. Measure followed measure.
The Israelites did not celebrate death. They marked their doors, stayed inside, and departed at dawn. Their defining act was escape from bloodlust, not indulgence in it. Freedom—not punishment—was the center of the story.
Antisemitism begins by erasing that fact.
Across centuries, Jews were remembered not as a people who fled violence but as a people who embodied it. Divine judgment on a tyrannical state was detached from context and reassigned as a permanent Jewish trait. Victims became perpetrators. Liberation became threat. From this inversion, the blood libel followed naturally, and not surprisingly, during Jewish celebrations of Passover when they left Egypt.
The charge did more than justify violence; it recoded Jews as a permanent danger. If society believes Jews possess bloodlust, then Jews must be watched, monitored, restricted, and scrutinized. They become an unwanted risk. Suspicion overwhelms citizenship. Surveillance replaces equality. In this logic, it is only a matter of time before Jews are assumed to act—and preemptive punishment becomes rationalized as self-defense.
This is how the libel works. It marks Jews forever as dangerous rather than as people who long for freedom. It recasts victims as villains and turns survival itself into evidence of guilt. The blood libel means that Jews are never trusted as equals, and never accepted as free.
That inheritance governs today’s rhetoric. Calling Jews “baby killers” is not a factual claim; it is the inherited reflex of a culture that never accepted Jewish freedom. The accusation is identity-based, not evidence-based. It exists to keep Jews outside the circle of legitimate humanity and to deny the moral standing of Jewish self-defense before it is even asserted.
Turkey fans the blood libel in Hamas’s latest war to destroy Israel
This mindset survives because it is passed down, laundered through new vocabulary, and presented as moral concern. But it is the same lie. It refuses to see Jews as a people who escaped societies that murdered their children and insists instead on seeing Jews as the source of murder itself.
The story that antisemitism started when Pharoah forgot Joseph and became worried about the growing number and power of Jews was the fear of a monarch. Antisemitism was instilled in the masses when the Exodus story was flipped that Jews had a bloodlust and didn’t deserve equality. Every society that accepted the libel eventually convinced itself that Jewish freedom was intolerable—and acted accordingly.
António Guterres wants the world to believe that peace can be engineered with a spreadsheet — that inequality is the disease, redistribution the cure, and justice a matter of financial rearrangement. In his January 15 address, he warned that concentrated wealth corrupts institutions and that most low-development countries are in conflict. The implication is unmistakable: balance the books and peace will follow.
“The top 1 per cent holds 43 per cent of global financial assets. And last year alone, the richest 500 individuals added $2.2 trillion to their fortunes.
Increasingly, we see a world where the ultra-wealthiest and the companies they control are calling the shots like never before — wielding outsized influence over economies, information, and even the rules that govern us all.
When a handful of individuals can bend global narratives, sway elections, or dictate the terms of public debate, we are not just facing inequality — we are facing the corruption of institutions and our shared values.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres
But choosing the wrong enemy guarantees the wrong war.
Because evil is not an accounting problem.
The UN’s failure begins in its diagnosis. It treats terrorism as a social pathology when it is, in fact, an ideological one.
Terrorism is not born in empty wallets. It is born in minds captured by belief.
Two decades of research have demolished the claim that poverty causes terror. Terrorists are rarely the poorest of the poor. They are often educated, middle-class, and technically trained — the engineers of jihad, the lawyers of holy war. The suicide bomber is seldom starving. He is convinced.
If poverty produced terrorism, the poorest societies would be its factories. They are not. Many desperately poor states remain largely untouched by global jihad, while terror movements arise from politically radicalized societies with functioning middle classes and ideological incubators.
What correlates with terrorism is not poverty, but ideas combined with power: religious absolutism, revolutionary nationalism, grievance cultures, and failed identity — not failed GDP.
This is not an academic distinction. It is the fault line between clarity and catastrophe.
If money could defeat jihad, Gaza would be the proof. It is not — it is the refutation.
Gaza has received billions in international aid. What emerged was not prosperity, but the most elaborate terrorist war machine ever embedded in a civilian population: tunnels beneath hospitals, command bunkers under schools, rockets from playgrounds, children trained for martyrdom.
This was not a failure of funding. It was the success of ideology. And the UN instigates that very ideology claiming that Israel should have no sovereign control of who enters its country, and specifically that almost every Arab living in Gaza will move into Israel with UN support.
“We are totally committed in the cause of peace in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and far beyond.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres
Hamas did not build tunnels because Gazans were poor. Hamas built tunnels because its charter demands Israel’s destruction, because martyrdom is sacred, because jihad is identity. Money did not create this worldview — it merely financed its execution.
You can flood a society with aid, but if its governing ideology is annihilationist, all you finance is a more capable war machine.
Once the UN misdiagnoses ideology as economics, the next failure becomes inevitable.
For decades, it has constructed and sustained a grievance system around the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that functions symbiotically with jihadist aims. Through its agencies and resolutions, it has promised millions of SAPs who have never lived in Israel that they will one day “return” en masse into Israel — effectively proposing Israel’s demographic erasure through mass population transfer via international decree.
No state can survive if an external body claims authority over who may enter it and redefine its citizenship from the outside. Yet the UN has made this assault on sovereignty a central plank of its Palestine policy — while calling it “humanitarian.”
Through UNRWA’s unique multigenerational refugee status, displacement becomes inherited identity rather than a temporary humanitarian condition. Grievance becomes doctrine. Statelessness becomes culture. A territorial dispute becomes a perpetual weapon.
And then the UN asks for more money to sustain it.
Why does the UN persist in this inversion?
Because it refuses to judge belief systems.
It will not confront jihad as an ideology. It will not describe Islamic terrorism as such. It will not wade into cultural or civilizational dynamics because it sees itself as a neutral global body.
But neutrality toward ideology does not produce peace. It produces permission.
And because the UN will not fight belief systems, it substitutes economics.
It reframes terror as inequality. It reframes jihad as deprivation. It reframes mass murder as misallocated capital.
In doing so, it becomes part of a broader machinery seeking to shift wealth and power from the Global North to the Global South — not merely for development, but as moral rebalancing, regardless of whether this addresses the real drivers of violence.
Redistribution becomes its ritual response whenever violence erupts.
Which means: more authority, more money, more relevance for the UN.
This is not accidental. It is institutional self-preservation dressed as virtue.
So the world is invited to believe the problem is billionaires rather than beheaders. That terror is born from inequality rather than indoctrination. That peace will come from redistribution rather than defeating enemies.
Evil is not a pocketbook problem. It is an ideology.
And no amount of redistribution will make a death cult lay down its weapons.
Capitalism disciplines hatred only where it can still touch it. Where contracts exist, behavior can be checked. Where they don’t, mobs rule.
Kanye West (Ye) didn’t begin by attacking Jews. He began by denigrating Black people—calling slavery a “choice,” sneering at collective memory, mocking historical suffering. The reaction was outrage softened by indulgence. He was criticized, contextualized, excused. His Black identity functioned as camouflage. The lesson was clear: you could insult your own people and still be protected.
So Ye escalated. Antisemitism offered a bigger payoff—more visibility, more fear, more leverage. It worked until money intervened.
When Adidas cut him loose, the spell broke. Capitalism finally touched him and apologies followed—not from moral awakening, but because the incentive structure flipped.
This is often cited as proof that “the system works.” It doesn’t—at least not anymore.
Ye performing
Capitalism disciplines behavior only where value is concentrated. Ye had a centralized choke point: Adidas. Today’s antisemitism largely does not. It thrives where contracts don’t exist, boards don’t answer, and outrage itself is the reward.
That vacuum has produced a new Ye-like template: antizionist Jews who denigrate Jews. They celebrate October 7. They call Israelis “Nazis.” They launder moral inversion through identity—and are absolved because of it. Jewishness becomes armor, converting bigotry into “bravery,” hatred into “critique,” massacre into “context.” The uglier the claim, the louder the ovation.
Poorly named “Jewish Voice for Peace” partners with terrorist-supporting group Samidoun
The center of gravity is social media—especially TikTok—where attention replaces contracts, outrage outperforms restraint, and individuals have nothing material to lose. There is no Adidas-scale counterparty. Condemnation becomes fuel. Challenge confirms righteousness.
This is where the political story locks in and takes flight.
For years, the far left has discredited institutions under the banner of “corporate Democrats.” At the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2025 convention, a delegate said it plainly: the movement should organize people “that the corporate Democrats and Republicans have abandoned for dead.” In this frame, institutions aren’t imperfect—they’re illegitimate. Friction isn’t restraint—it’s oppression.
On the ground, the rhetoric sharpens. New York councilmember Alexa Avilés urged activists to “root out ‘corporate Democrats’ backed by AIPAC,” recasting pro-Israel Democrats as bought and disposable. Structural critique becomes moral license. Identity becomes proof. Mobs become “the people.”
DSA’s Alexa Aviles
Far-left media and politicians amplify the message—outlets like The Young Turks and figures such as Jamaal Bowman. They know that institutions impose friction > Friction slows mobs > Mobs hate friction. So the institutions must be delegitimized—and the most extreme voices elevated.
The Young Turks coin a term and come for “Corporate Democrats”
This is sold as empowerment. In reality, it is power to the algorithm. Algorithms reward the loudest, angriest, least accountable claims. In that environment, antisemitism doesn’t just survive; it thrives. Jews are too small a minority to outvote a mob optimized for rage.
The reality is that capitalism was never the moral engine here, but it was sometimes a brake. Contracts could snap shut and money could impose limits. When those limits vanish—when speech floats free of consequence and identity shields cruelty—nothing restrains the mob.
Ye was stopped because capitalism still touched him when he crossed from trashing Blacks to bashing Jews.
The antizionist Jewish influencers celebrating October 7 are not stopped because nothing touches them. In People Capitalism, attention is the asset, outrage is the yield, and antisemitism is rewarded, and boosted on a litter—especially when Jews attack Jews.
Every such system needs a moral absolver.
That role is played by Bernie Sanders—the mob’s messiah. He doesn’t organize the mob; he legitimizes it by claiming it isn’t radical, reframing rage as righteousness by declaring institutions corrupt, restraint oppressive, and “corporate Democrats” illegitimate. His function isn’t governance. It’s permission to come for mainstream Democrats and other Jews.
Sen. Bernie Sanders swears in DSA’s Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City
This is the final logic of People Capitalism:
markets once imposed limits; crowds impose none.
institutions once punished bigotry; mobs reward it.
Modern conflict is collapsing into a single, repeatable failure mode: when armed power replaces legitimacy, civilian life becomes expendable—and the international system normalizes the outcome rather than correcting it.
From Syria to Yemen, from the Gaza Strip to Somalia and Sudan, different wars follow the same script. Flags and slogans change; outcomes do not. Cities empty, economies collapse, millions flee, and societies become permanent humanitarian wards while armed elites persist.
The mechanics of collapse
Across all five regions, the structure repeats with grim consistency. Power flows from weapons rather than consent, with ideology serving as authority instead of constraining it. Civilians become leverage—through hunger, displacement, and terror—while the outside world manages suffering rather than ending the conditions that cause it.
These dynamics differ in context and scale. They converge in result.
Different conflicts, identical results
Syria survives by sacrificing its cities and people. Yemen turns famine into strategy in a proxy war. Gaza shows armed rule embedded among civilians, shifting the cost of war onto the population. Somalia normalizes permanent instability under jihadist entrenchment. Sudan mirrors the same logic through rival armed elites hollowing out cities and driving mass displacement.
The human outcome is uniform.
A shared demographic reality
Each of these societies is overwhelmingly Muslim-majority— above 90 percent. This matters for clarity. These disasters do not arise from religious diversity or minority rule. They unfold in largely homogeneous societies where armed authority crowds out the chance for peaceful legitimate governance. Shared faith does not restrain violence. Only accountable institutions do—and they are absent across all five.
Two warnings for 2026
First: recognition divorced from reality. The push to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state reflects a dangerous inversion. Recognition is meant to affirm effective governance, restraint of armed actors, and protection of civilians. Gaza demonstrates the opposite. Armed rule persists, civilians absorb the cost, and failure deepens. Recognition under these conditions elevates symbolism over survival and legitimizes collapse.
Second: repression without war. In Iran, an ideological regime in power since 1979 faces economic decline and eroding legitimacy. The response has been internal violence—security forces firing on civilians, mass arrests, repression replacing consent. Iran shows the same pattern without a battlefield: when legitimacy collapses, violence becomes governance.
The United Nations: institutionalizing failure
The United Nations was founded to prevent this exact depravity. Eighty years on, it increasingly fosters it.
The UN grants equal procedural authority—votes, committee chairs, agenda control—to entities regardless of whether they govern responsibly or sacrifice their populations. Collapse carries no institutional penalty. In January 2026, the UN Security Council, the highest body at the UN, handed the gavel to Somalia, a state unable to protect its citizens or control its territory. Committee chairs shape agendas, manage debate, and mute scrutiny. The signal was unmistakable: mass failure has no consequence.
Somalia assumes head of UN Security Council in January 2026
This structure protects actors who weaponize civilians, including groups like Hamas, while rewarding states that export instability. Humanitarian agencies attempt to save lives on the ground, but UN governance shields the forces that endanger them. Through regional rotation, states implicated in mass civilian harm routinely gain seats, votes, and leadership roles across UN committees—including those charged with protecting human rights—without meeting any threshold of civilian protection.
Entities that systematically sacrifice civilians should lose voting rights and committee authority until they demonstrate basic standards of governance and restraint. Without consequences, international law becomes theater and failure becomes permanent.
The verdict
Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Somalia, Sudan—and the trajectory now visible in Iran—show what follows when sovereignty outweighs civilian life and armed power is indulged as politics. By preserving authority for collapsing entities, the United Nations has become part of the problem it was created to solve.
Civilian survival and protection must be the minimum requirement for legitimacy. If the UN cannot reform to enforce that standard INTERNALLY, then eighty years after its founding, it stands as a faint shadow of its founding principles at best, and an enabler of mass atrocities at worst.
Every UN humanitarian agency coordinates with the authority that governs where it operates—except in Jerusalem. That exception is not a footnote. It is the story. And it exposes a mandate failure driven by politics, not humanitarian necessity.
UNRWA holds that humanitarian work requires coordination with governing authorities. In practice, it does so almost everywhere: with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority—and even with Hamas in Gaza, despite Hamas’s terrorist designation by the United States, the EU, the UK, and others.
In Jerusalem alone, UNRWA refuses to coordinate with Israel, the authority exercising full municipal, policing, and regulatory control over the city.
Call it “coordination for access” if you like. It is still coordination. And municipal coordination is not a sovereignty concession (if one believes that Israel does not have sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem despite annexing it in 1980); it is a humanitarian necessity.
How the Facilities Came to Exist
UNRWA’s Jerusalem facilities were established between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan seized and annexed the eastern half of the city in a move not recognized by the UN or the international community. UNRWA nonetheless coordinated with the Hashemite authorities to build schools, clinics, and service centers—because humanitarian work requires coordination with whoever governs in fact.
That history matters. UNRWA’s Jerusalem footprint exists specifically because it once coordinated with an unrecognized occupier.
UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
The Reversal
In 1967, Jordan entered the war, violated the armistice, and lost control of Jerusalem. Israel assumed governance and unified the city. Palestinian Arab residents became permanent residents with access to Israeli courts, healthcare, municipal services, and the right to apply for citizenship.
At that point, UNRWA reversed its logic. Where it coordinated with Jordan despite non-recognition, it now refuses to coordinate with Israel—by labeling eastern Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territory,” theoretically negating its obligation to work with Israel.
That label sits uneasily with the UN’s own history. The 1947 Partition Plan never intended Jerusalem—east or west—to belong to an Arab state. The city was designated a corpus separatum, an internationally administered entity. Jerusalem was never meant to be Arab sovereign territory.
The contours of “Corpus Separatum” (in pink) in the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan stretched over Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem, marking the region as an international Holy Basin to be administered by the UN
An Outlier by Design
UNRWA’s mandate emphasizes cooperation with local authorities to ensure access, security, and civilian protection. That cooperation exists everywhere except Jerusalem. UNRWA coordinates with armed groups and unrecognized authorities elsewhere, yet refuses coordination with the governing authority in the city where coordination is most essential.
Refusing to coordinate with the authority responsible for public safety is not neutrality. It is an affirmative political act—one that inverts humanitarian logic by privileging narrative over civilian protection. UN immunity exists to facilitate coordination, not to replace it.
Continuity of Care—and the Standoff
Israel has enacted laws to shutter UNRWA offices in Jerusalem. UNRWA refuses to comply, invoking immunity and operating facilities largely outside municipal oversight. The confrontation exists because UNRWA chose inconsistency in the one city where consistency matters most.
“The UNRWA Jerusalem Health Centre, which serves hundreds of Palestine refugee patients every day is, for most of them, their only possibility of having access to primary healthcare…. These [Israeli] measures are a violation of the inviolability of United Nations premises and an obstacle to the implementation of the clear mandate of the General Assembly for UNRWA’s continued operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres January 15, 2026
The closure of UNRWA offices in Jerusalem would not create a humanitarian vacuum. Education, healthcare, and social services are already provided through municipal systems, national institutions, other UN bodies, and a dense NGO network operating in the city. What would end is not care delivery, but UNRWA’sparallel governance model.
Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem rely daily on municipal emergency services, hospitals, and courts. UNRWA’s non-coordination removes the safety mechanisms coordination is meant to provide—for civilians, staff, students, and patients alike.
The Reckoning
UNRWA coordinated with Jordan when Jordan’s rule was unrecognized. It coordinates with Hamas despite terrorist designations. Yet it refuses to coordinate with Israel while Israel governs the city, extends legal status to its Arab residents, and has a network of service providers which can easily replace UNRWA in Jerusalem.
That is not humanitarian principle. It is selective politics.
Consistency is the minimum requirement of a mandate. A mandate that works everywhere but Jerusalem is not a mandate—it is a message, and it is that UNRWA is not a humanitarian organization.
UNRWA remains a rusty tool of the 1947 Partition Plan which insists that holy sites in Jerusalem never fall under Jewish rule.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul delivered her State of the State address on January 13, 2026. In her prepared remarks, she condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia in the same breath, as if they were parallel crises in New York. They are not.
“In 2026, we’ll take new steps to protect our houses of worship against the rising tide of Antisemitism and Islamophobia.” – NY Gov. Kathy Hochul
In 2025, antisemitic attacks in New York City were over ten times more frequent than attacks against Muslims. That is not a nuance. It is the entire story. When one form of hatred overwhelms all others by orders of magnitude, collapsing them into a single moral gesture is not fairness—it is evasion.
Worse, “Islamophobia” is now routinely invoked as a political shield, not a measured diagnosis. It is wheeled out whenever radical Islamic antisemitism becomes too obvious to ignore, functioning as a way to halt scrutiny. Name the attackers. Name the ideology. Name the chants. The response is immediate: Islamophobia.
Today’s antisemitism is not abstract, historical, or evenly distributed across society. It is being driven openly and energetically by Islamist movements and their Western enablers, celebrated in the streets and sanitized as “anti-Zionism.”
Leadership requires prioritization. Data requires honesty. And moral clarity requires the courage to say that when Jews are being attacked ten times more than anyone else, they do not need their suffering balanced away.
False symmetry is not inclusion. It is worse than cowardice. It is vulgar absolution.
The most consequential move in the New York Times coverage was quiet. It described Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s response to pro-Hamas chants as an effort to avoid inflaming “tensions on either side of the Israel–Gaza war.” The language sounded responsible. It also erased the central reality.
The New York Times is attempting to allay fears of Jewish New Yorkers but softening image of extremist mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 17, 2026
There were no equivalent sides involved. One group openly chanted support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and calls for genocide. The other side was a Jewish community standing outside its own synagogue, defending it from terrorist sympathizers.
That location matters. This did not unfold at City Hall or on a random street corner. It took place in front of a synagogue. For Jews, synagogues are communal sanctuaries, not neutral backdrops for geopolitical theater. Geography conveys intent. Bringing terror slogans to a Jewish house of worship transforms speech into targeting.
The New York Times chose to smooth this away. By framing the episode as “tension on either side,” it recast explicit support for Hamas as a legitimate pole of community expression. The chant was softened. The targeting dissolved into abstraction. Readers were reassured that calm was being preserved with statements such as “Mr. Mamdani’s team repeatedly debated the wording and fairness of the language,” as if a group chanting for the genocide of Jews required “fairness.”
This is how extremism gets normalized. When terror advocacy demands careful calibration rather than moral clarity, the boundary quietly shifts. Such framing would collapse instantly if crowds praised ISIS outside a mosque or neo-Nazis gathered at a Black church.
Protesters understand what editors seem determined to whitewash: location is the message. No amount of “Palestine-washing” can absolve the antisemitism in the Times coverage.
Reassurance purchased at the cost of truth carries consequences. It teaches extremists that intimidation can be reframed as passion and that targeted terror speech will be treated as just another civic grievance. That does not cool tensions. It redraws the line of what is acceptable.
Pharaoh stood unmoved as the Nile turned to blood. Life-giving water became useless overnight, and the system held. That moment captured the moral reality of the Exodus.
The plagues were not revenge. They were not emotional retaliation for suffering already endured. And they were not even, in the narrow sense, punishment for evil deeds. They were something far more deliberate: the dismantling of a system that could not be allowed to continue.
That distinction matters—then and now.
Revenge, Punishment, and Dismantlement
Revenge is backward-looking. It seeks emotional satisfaction for injury. Punishment is judicial. It assigns guilt and imposes consequences. Dismantlement is future-oriented. It exists to make continued evil impossible.
The plagues fit only the third category.
They were announced in advance. They escalated slowly. It wasn’t rage. It didn’t aim at humiliation. The Torah goes out of its way to show a paced methodology.
Even “punishment” does not fully explain what happens. Punishment targets perpetrators. The plagues targeted foundations: economy, theology, nature, and political myth. The Nile, the body, the sky—everything Egypt relied on to project permanence was stripped away piece by piece.
Why? Because slavery was not a policy failure within Egypt. It was Egypt.
You cannot reform a system built on domination. You cannot shame it. You cannot negotiate it out of existence. You have to break the assumptions that make it feel eternal.
That is what the plagues did. They delivered a message: “You are not absolute—and the time for evil has ended.”
The Same Moral Error Reappears Today
That same confusion appears again in the way Israel’s war in Gaza is discussed.
Since October 7, critics have insisted that Israel is acting out of revenge, wounded pride, or collective punishment. That reading repeats the same error people make about the plagues: it projects human emotion onto a campaign that is structural in nature.
If Israel were seeking revenge, Gaza would already be erased. If this were punishment, the war would end with confessions and symbolic justice.
Neither is happening.
Israel is trying to end a war by dismantling the system that made it inevitable.
Hamas is not a fringe militia. It is the elected majority of the Palestinian parliament and ruling authority in Gaza. It is immensely popular. Over years, it constructed a comprehensive war society: tunnels beneath homes, schools, and mosques; civilian infrastructure fused with military command; education and media organized around eradication; international aid converted into weapons. Violence was not a breakdown. It was the operating principle.
As in Egypt, brutality was not an abuse within the system. It was the system.
You cannot coexist with that indefinitely. You cannot contain it forever. You cannot pause it and hope it reforms while leaving its foundations intact.
Why Ending the System Is Not Cruelty
Calls for ceasefire without dismantlement may sound compassionate but mirror Pharaoh’s promises: temporary relief with permanent structures preserved. The Torah teaches us to distrust that move. Pauses without transformation merely reset the cycle.
Israel’s campaign is not about humiliation. It is about limits. No governing authority may embed genocide into its ideology. No regime gains immunity by hiding behind civilians. No society organized around death gets an unlimited future.
Ending such a system is not revenge. It is moral necessity.
First One Through 