Category Archives: Jews

From Shut Up to Get Out

Posted on by
Reply

There is a progression from intimidation and expulsion.

  • A heckler’s veto prevents you from speaking.
  • A chilling effect teaches you to remain silent.
  • Self-concealment teaches you to hide the identity that makes you a target.
  • Constructive exclusion makes the environment sufficiently hostile that you stay away or leave.
  • Forced expulsion completes the progression: someone else decides you must go.

American Jews have been moving through these stages over the last decade.

Don’t Speak

In 2015, Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to lecture on the ethical obligations of militaries to protect civilians. Protesters repeatedly interrupted him, delaying his lecture for about half an hour as police removed them.

It was a classic heckler’s veto: make enough noise and the speaker cannot speak.

Eventually, Halbertal did.

Over time, intimidation becomes more efficient. People learn the consequences of speaking and begin censoring themselves. The expectation of the heckler creates the chilling effect.

Then the intimidation moved beyond speech.

Hide Who You Are

In May 2021, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and antisemitic incidents surged concurrently in the United States.

Aaron Keyak had served as Jewish engagement director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and would become the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. His advice to frightened American Jews was extraordinary: “If you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david.”

The Jew walking down the street had given no speech and joined no protest. His Jewish identity itself made him a target.

The response from the highest levels of government was self-concealment: take off the kippah and hide the Star of David.

This was 2021, more than two years before the October 7 massacre.

Stay Out

After the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the progression took over the Democratic Party.

Dana Nessel is Michigan’s attorney general, the state’s chief law-enforcement officer and its highest-ranking Jewish state official. This June she decided to stay away from the Michigan Democratic Party convention. “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said. She feared being chased, harassed, yelled at and booed because, she explained, “it’s been happening to me.”

Consider where the progression had reached: Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer felt safer staying away from her own political party’s convention out of fear.

And Nessel is not alone.

Earlier in the summer, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht left the Democratic Party and became an independent. Wecht is Jewish, was elected as a Democrat and had once served in the leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “I can no longer abide this.”

Nessel stayed away. Wecht walked away. Revulsed by what they saw happening inside the Democratic Party.

Get Out

The next stage has already begun.

In 2024, anti-Israel artists protesting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts issued a list of demands. Among them: remove all “Zionist Board members and funders.” While the institution rejected the demand, its Jewish interim CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat, subsequently resigned, saying the climate surrounding Israel and Palestine in the Bay Area had become “untenable.”

The demand itself crossed the line into the final stage: Get them out.

If one needs proof, consider how the alt-left treated one of its own, NYC Mayor-endorsed politician Brad Lander. He was tossed from a far-left political rally in August 2026 because he was a “Zionist,” even though he is highly critical of Israel.

Democratic politician Brad Lander – supported by NYC Mayor, DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani – tossed from a rally because he is a “Zionist”

The heckler’s veto was already an assault on a basic American principle: everyone gets to enter the public square and speak. What has grown from it is far uglier and deeply un-American:

Don’t speak.
Don’t be seen.
Don’t come.
Get out.

This is intimidation being rewarded with territory. Each retreat gives the intimidators another piece of the public square: the microphone, the street, the political convention, the institution itself.

And this poison is now flourishing inside the Democratic Party.

A party that claims to champion minorities and protect people from intimidation now has a Jewish attorney general afraid to attend its own convention, a Jewish state supreme court justice who concluded that Jew-hatred had become sufficiently tolerated that he could no longer remain a Democrat, and an anti-Israel DSA-mayor-endorsed Jewish politician run out of the streets of New York.

That is disgraceful. It is frightening.

The American answer to intimidation is to protect the person being intimidated and confront the intimidator. Nobody should gain control of a microphone, a street, a political convention or an institution by making someone else afraid to enter it.

Leaders of the Democratic Party should understand what is happening inside its own tent. The heckler’s veto has metastasized into something deeply toxic and deeply un-American.

The hecklers no longer simply want to only decide what Jews may say. They want to expel Jews from the room.

Jews Never Left the Land Voluntarily And They Never Stopped Coming Back

Posted on by
Reply

The Jewish story in the Land of Israel is often told with an enormous hole in the middle.

The script runs something like: there were ancient Jewish kingdoms and then Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jews were forced into exile, and then, nearly 1,800 years later, Zionists began arriving in Palestine.

That shorthand turns one of history’s longest relationships between a people and a land into an unexplained disappearance and sudden reappearance.

The actual story is more remarkable.

After the Destruction of the Second Temple

The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE was catastrophic, but it did not empty the land of Jews. Six decades later, Jews launched the Bar Kokhba Revolt from Judea. After its defeat in 135, Roman repression devastated Jewish life in Judea and severely restricted Jews in Jerusalem.

Ancient coins minted during the Bar Kochba revolt

So Jewish life shifted north. The Galilee became its major center, particularly Tiberias and Sepphoris. Around 200 CE, Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah in the Land of Israel. Centuries later, Jewish scholars there produced the Jerusalem Talmud. Archaeology has uncovered synagogues across the country from this period.

The Jewish state was gone. The Jews were not.

Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron

The rulers changed repeatedly with new invaders: Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman. So did the size and location of the Jewish population.

Under early Muslim rule, Jews reestablished themselves in Jerusalem. The Crusader conquest brought another catastrophe, including killings and displacement.

Again, Jews returned.

In 1267, Nachmanides—Ramban—arrived in Jerusalem and helped rebuild its shattered Jewish community.

After the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the Ottoman conquest in 1517, Safed became an international center of Jewish civilization, producing Joseph Karo, whose Shulchan Aruch became a foundational code of Jewish law, and Isaac Luria, whose teachings transformed Jewish mysticism.

Old synagogue in Safed / Tzfat (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Ottoman tax records make the population visible. Safed/Tzfat contained 233 Jewish households in 1525–26; by 1567–68 there were 945. Jews were also recorded in Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, Peki’in and elsewhere.

The Four Holy Cities

Over time, four cities became especially identified with Jewish life in the land: Jerusalem. Hebron. Safed. Tiberias.

Their Jewish populations rose and fell through war, disease, earthquakes, economic hardship and persecution. The communities kept being rebuilt, and Jews kept arriving.

Hundreds accompanied Judah HeHasid to Jerusalem in 1700. Hasidic Jews came from Eastern Europe in 1777. Beginning in 1808, disciples of the Vilna Gaon arrived in successive waves.

The cemetery in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives has Jewish graves going back to the 15th century (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Follow the Population

By the nineteenth century, the continuity becomes difficult to miss. Moses Montefiore’s censuses recorded dramatic growth:

City18391875
Jerusalem2,91611,237
Safed1,3843,753
Tiberias8011,552
Hebron419939
Jaffa86660
Haifa138531

The communities covered by the census tripled from 6,173 Jews in 1839 to 18,672 in 1875.

Historical estimates differ because Ottoman-era demographic records were not modern censuses. But the trend is unmistakable. One reconstruction estimates roughly 6,700 Jews in the country in 1800, 42,900 in 1890 and 94,000 by 1914.

And Jews were not simply scattered individuals. By 1880, one reconstruction estimates Jews constituted approximately 57% of Jerusalem, 52% of Safed and 60% of Tiberias.

Modern Zionism Accelerated the Return

This is where conventional histories often begin. But it wasn’t the beginning; it was an acceleration.

Petah Tikva was founded in 1878, in part by Jews from the existing Jerusalem community. The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, helping establish and expand agricultural communities including Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov and Rosh Pina.

The Second Aliyah brought another wave. In 1909, Jews founded Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, something extraordinary was occurring: Hebrew returned as the everyday language of a society. A language preserved through centuries of prayer, scholarship and literature became the language of children, workers and shopkeepers.

What About the Land?

By the end of the British Mandate, Jews did not privately own most of Palestine. British statistics for April 1945 put Jewish landholdings at approximately 1.49 million dunams, or 5.67% of the total territory.

The remaining territory was not privately owned “Arab land.” It included state domain, desert, communal lands and other Ottoman and British legal classifications.

Jewish ownership was concentrated where Jewish society was developing. By the mid-1940s, historical land statistics put Jewish ownership at roughly 39% in the Jaffa/Tel Aviv subdistrict, 38% in Tiberias, 35% in Haifa, and 18% in Safed.

And much of this land had been purchased.

The British Survey of Palestine recorded a net 938,365 dunams purchased and registered by Jews between 1920 and the end of 1945 alone.

Presence, Memory, Return

The nearly 1,900 years between Rome and Israel can be understood through three words.

Presence. Jews continued living in the land, sometimes in substantial communities, despite conquest, persecution and repeated displacement.

Memory. Jews elsewhere continued facing Jerusalem in prayer, praying for return, remembering Jerusalem at weddings, ending Passover with the hope of being there the following year and financially supporting Jewish communities in the land.

Return. Ramban came in 1267 after the Crusades. Jews came from Spain after 1492. Many followed Judah HeHasid in 1700, the Hasidim in 1777, the disciples of the Vilna Gaon beginning in 1808, the First and Second Aliyahs, fleeing Russian pogroms and Nazism, and as survivors of the Holocaust.

The scale changed. The political objective changed. The ability to return changed.

1948 Was Not the Beginning

Beginning the story of Israel in 1948 – or even with Herzl in 1897 – fundamentally distorts Jewish history. Those were not years when Jews suddenly showed up. They were the times when Jews accelerated their return and became self-governing once again.

The Israeli flag waves in the foreground, with the white domes of the rebuilt Tiferet Israel and Hurva Synagogues in the center, and the grey Al Aqsa mosque dome to the right. In the distance, cranes build new residential towers in the western parts of the city. (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Related:

The Greatest Decolonization Story, Inverted (August 2026)

The Greatest Decolonization Story, Inverted

Posted on by
1

The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) has an ambitious mission. It calls for “anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy” in which students study imperialism and oppression, resistance movements and the struggles of peoples to reclaim their identity and agency.

By those standards, one extraordinary case study should sit near the center of the curriculum: The Jews.

Israel may be one of history’s greatest examples of successful decolonization.

Indigenous

Jewish civilization did not originate in Europe. It arose in the Land of Israel.

Israel, Judah, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion are not modern colonial names. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish history. Judaism developed there. The Hebrew Bible is centered there. Jewish holidays follow its seasons and agricultural cycles. Jerusalem became the religious and national center of the Jewish people.

1630 Map of the Israelite tribes in the holy land, together with images on the border from the life of the Jewish prophet Moses, and the Children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt

Even the people’s name—Israel—is ancient.

Colonized

Then came conquest. Jewish kingdoms were conquered by successive imperial powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many Jews into exile. Rome later destroyed the Second Temple, crushed Jewish revolts and accelerated the dispersion that would define Jewish existence for centuries.

The Jewish people lost sovereignty in its own homeland but never its connection.

Dispossessed—but Not Disconnected

Dispersion scattered the Jews without eliminating Jewish peoplehood. Jews in Poland did not simply become Poles. Jews in Morocco did not simply become Moroccans. Jews in Iraq did not simply become Iraqis.

Across continents, they retained a common religion, history, calendar and connection to the same ancestral land. They prayed toward Jerusalem. They ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew survived as the language of scripture, prayer and scholarship.

And Jews never disappeared from the land itself. Jewish communities remained through centuries of foreign rule.

Resistance

Jewish history is also a story of resistance. The Maccabees resisted Seleucid repression and restored Jewish sovereignty. Jews later rebelled against Rome.

Judah the Maccabee, Wood engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794 – 1872), published in 1860.

After military resistance became impossible, survival itself became resistance. A small, scattered minority endured expulsions, forced conversions, discriminatory laws and massacres without surrendering its identity.

Eventually came Zionism: the modern movement to restore Jewish national self-determination where Jewish national history began.

A stateless people sought to cease being stateless.

Decolonization

And then something extraordinary happened. The dispersed people returned in large numbers.

There was no Jewish Britain or France directing an overseas colony. Jews came from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere to the land at the center of their collective history.

They restored sovereignty.

And they accomplished perhaps their most astonishing act of cultural decolonization: they revived Hebrew.

Not Polish, Russian, German or Arabic. Their ancestral language became the everyday language of children, schools, newspapers, commerce and government.

They made Jerusalem their capital. They called their national movement Zionism, after Zion.

So apply LESMC’s vocabulary consistently: Indigenous. Conquered. Dispossessed. Resistance. Return. Cultural restoration. Self-determination.

The Jewish story fits remarkably well.

So What Happened?

Why does this seemingly perfect LESMC case study become almost its opposite when the curriculum reaches Israel?

Some of the people shaping the curriculum help explain the disconnect.

Samia Shoman, a Palestinian-American member of LESMC’s leadership, co-coordinates the Teach Palestine Project, which develops curricula for American schools. Her materials describe Israel as an “institutionalized system of oppression and apartheid.” After California rewrote its original ethnic-studies curriculum, Shoman blamed “Zionist and other rightwing lobbyists” for what she said was the destruction of its “anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory” approach.

Jody Sokolower, who is Jewish, co-coordinates Teach Palestine. Her student history says Britain promised Palestine to Zionists and describes Zionists as subsequently carrying out plans to push Palestinian Arabs and Britain out. The larger Teach Palestine curriculum explicitly seeks to put these perspectives into American classrooms.

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, a founding member of Liberated Ethnic Studies, has spent her career developing what LESMC itself describes as “critical curriculum” and helped build the Liberated alternative after the original California curriculum was substantially changed.

This isn’t a peripheral connection. LESMC lists Shoman, Cardona and Theresa Montaño among its leadership, while Teach Palestine produces lessons connecting the conflict to forced relocation, criminalization and a “culture of resistance.”

“Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary. As support for Palestine and criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies have grown in the US and internationally, Zionist organizations have stepped up their efforts to silence
discussion of Palestine/Israel in movement circles, on college campuses, and now in K–12 education.” – Teach Palestine’s Understanding Zionist Backlash

Now the inversion makes more sense.

A framework supposedly built to recognize indigeneity, dispossession, resistance and decolonization encounters a people whose history contains all four—but influential architects approach Jewish national restoration through an anti-Zionist and settler-colonial lens.

So:

The indigenous become settlers.
The dispossessed become colonizers.
Return becomes colonialism.
National liberation becomes oppression.

The Jews should be a textbook LESMC case study: an ancient people conquered and dispersed, preserving its identity and ancestral language for centuries, returning home, reviving that language and restoring sovereignty.

Instead, one of history’s most remarkable decolonization stories is recast as colonization.

The history didn’t change. The ideological lens did.

ACTION ITEM

Be involved in your local school board and investigate the materials used in the classroom.

Judea, Long, Long Before Muhammad

Posted on by
Reply

Long before the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born, long before Arab armies invaded Jerusalem, there was Judea.

It was called Judea in the Books of Maccabees. The Greek geographer Strabo called it Judea. Josephus called it Judea. The Roman historian Tacitus called it Judea. The Christian New Testament called it Judea. Rome governed a province called Judaea.

And when the Romans defeated the Jews there, they minted coins celebrating IVDAEA CAPTA — “Judea Captured.”

Roman coin from 71AD with Emperor Vespesian on one side and “Judea Capta” on the other

All of that happened centuries before Muhammad was born in Arabia and Arabs invaded the Jewish holy land.

Yet today WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, describes Israel’s use of “Judea and Samaria” as an effort to give its “bogus claims… a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.”

Bogus?

The Romans weren’t Zionists. Tacitus wasn’t working for the Israeli government. Roman coins celebrating the defeat of a Jewish rebellion certainly weren’t designed to manufacture Jewish history.

They called it Judea because Judea was its name.

And Judea, Judah and Jew share the same historical root. The Jewish people carry the connection to this land in their very name.

So why does the Palestinian Authority choose to call that heritage and homeland claim “bogus”?

Perhaps because acknowledging Judea creates an enormous problem for the narrative the PA and WAFA promote every day, calling Jews living in the land of Israel as “colonists.” But colonizers are outsiders who arrive in someone else’s homeland. It becomes considerably harder to sustain that description while acknowledging that the people being called colonizers take their name from the very land in which they supposedly have no indigenous history.

This is antisemitic historical erasure—and it should be condemned as such.

It should be condemned at the United Nations. It should be condemned by governments that have chosen in recent years to recognize a Palestinian state. Britain, Canada and others should demand something elementary in return: recognition of the history and heritage of the Jewish people.

Because recognition cannot sensibly run in only one direction.

If the Palestinian Authority asks the world to recognize the local Arabs attachment to this land while its own official news agency dismisses the Jewish people’s vastly documented attachment as “bogus,” the problem is larger than terminology.

It goes to coexistence.

Two peoples cannot make peace if one insists that acknowledging the other’s history is itself illegitimate. A Palestinian state cannot be built on the proposition that Jewish history deserves international negation.

ACTION ITEM

Contact governments of Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Mexico and others that they demand that the Palestinian Authority stop calling the long Jewish history in the holy land “bogus.”

When Did Jews Become a People?

Posted on by
Reply

“This day you have become a people to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 27:9)

It is a strange declaration in this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo.

Why now?

God had already called the Israelites “My people” while they were slaves in Egypt. They left Egypt together and crossed the sea together.

At Sinai, they received the Torah and entered a covenant with God. There, they were called “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)

Yet forty years later, as they prepare to enter Israel, Moses declares: “This day you have become a people.”

What changed?

Ki Tavo opens with the answer:

“When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you possess it and settle in it…” (Deuteronomy 26:1)

Only then begins the commandment of Bikkurim, bringing the first fruits. Standing on the Land with its produce in his hands, the farmer must recount Jewish history: the descent into Egypt, suffering, liberation and finally:

Palm trees in the Jordan Valley (photo: FirstOneThrough)

“He brought us to this place and gave us this land.” (Deuteronomy 26:9)

The Exodus was not simply about leaving Egypt. It was part of a journey toward somewhere.

Egypt gave us freedom. Sinai gave us the covenant. The Land gave us responsibility.

Israel was already a people in Egypt and a covenantal community at Sinai. But entering the Land changed the nature of that covenant.

Now Jews would have land, property, businesses, courts, borders, wealth and poverty. They would no longer simply receive God’s laws. They would be responsible for effectuating them through a society of their own.

That is why Bikkurim matters. Sovereignty does not permit the successful farmer to begin his story with himself. Holding what he grew on his own land, he must recite the history that put him there.

History creates the claim. Covenant creates the obligation. Sovereignty makes both real.

That gives “this day you have become a people” particular resonance after nearly two thousand years without Jewish sovereignty.

A people is not fully defined by what happened to it, what it believes or even the laws it accepts. It is also defined by what it takes responsibility for building.

Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound?

Posted on by
1

“There’s something happening here.”

Stephen Stills wrote those words sixty years ago for Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. He did not tell listeners exactly what was happening. He told them to notice.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound?”

For Jews today, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to hear it.

In Britain, years of anti-Israel demonstrations were followed by attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions, the murder of two Jews at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur and the stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in Golders Green.

Finally, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Britain to “open their eyes to Jewish pain, Jewish suffering and Jewish fear.”

He was even more explicit about a slogan common at anti-Israel demonstrations: “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”

“Everybody look what’s going down.”

Australia had its warnings too. Antisemitism surged after October 7. Jewish institutions were targeted. Then came Bondi Beach.

On December 14, 2025, gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Chanukah by the Sea. Fifteen victims were murdered. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an “act of evil antisemitism.”

The warnings had become bodies.

The question is no longer whether every protester is an antisemite or every criticism of Israel antisemitic.

The question is whether something is happening here.

Britain’s leaders now say so. Australia’s leaders now say so.

American Jews should not need another massacre before believing their own eyes and ears.

America has already had Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were murdered in synagogue; Poway, where a woman was murdered at Passover services; and Jersey City, where Jews were hunted inside a kosher market.

In 2025, two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Days later, Jews demonstrating in Boulder, Colorado, for Israeli hostages were attacked with Molotov cocktails. Hostages were taken in a synagogue in Texas. An armed man rammed his truck into a Jewish school in Michigan.

The ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in America in 2025—17 every day. Antisemitic assaults reached a record high.

Yet some institutions still debate the meaning of the sound.

In 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were asked before Congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ rules. Instead of an immediate yes came answers about context.

In New York, before becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani repeatedly refused to condemn “Globalize the intifada.”

Jews understand.

The Second Intifada meant suicide bombers on buses and in cafés and restaurants. It meant the deliberate murder of Jewish civilians. Now the slogan is shouted in America while American Jews are assaulted and Jewish institutions require armed guards.

Rally against antisemitism outside Central Synagogue after man punched a person inside during services. He had social media littered with posts about Israel and Judaism.

Stephen Stills’s sixty-year-old warning suddenly sounds less like history. “There’s something happening here.” Now.

The university presidents wanted context. The mayor of the American city with the largest Jewish population wanted to explain intifada.

Jews have context. Pittsburgh is context. Poway is context. Jersey City is context. Boulder is context. Washington is context. Britain is context. Australia is context.

Stop. Hey. What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

Related:

Antisemitism As Political Currency (August 2026)

When Antisemitism Was Killing Jews, Left-Wing Jews in Congress Backpedaled (January 2026)

Two Democratic Senators Gaslight Jewish Attorney During Confirmation Hearing (March 2025)

The Diaspora Intifada (September 2024)

Gross Antisemitism in the English-Speaking World

Posted on by
3

Western governments have developed a familiar vocabulary.

  • “Hate is rising.”
  • “Religious intolerance is increasing.”
  • “Antisemitism and Islamophobia must be confronted.”

Every minority deserves protection. But treating victims equally does not require pretending they are being targeted equally.

CountryAnti-JewishAnti-MuslimJewish / Muslim Ratio
UK (England & Wales)1,060 per 100,000120 per 100,0008.8×
Canada~274 per 100,000~13 per 100,000~21×
United States~250–300 per 100,000~5–6 per 100,000~45–50×
Australia*~2,185 per 100,000~38 per 100,000~57×

*Australia uses community incident reporting rather than a directly comparable national police hate-crime database.

Britain clearly has a religious-hatred problem. Muslims and Jews suffer substantial levels of hate crime, well above that of other English-speaking countries, while Jews are targeted at almost nine times the rate of Muslims. Canada and USA show fewer hate crimes per population, and a wider disparity between Jews and Muslims being attacked.

Then there is Australia.

For the decade before October 7, 2023, Australia averaged 342 reported anti-Jewish incidents annually. That exploded to 2,062 in 2023/24 and remained at 1,654 in 2024/25. In New South Wales, police-recorded hate incidents against Jews rose from 40 in 2020 to 841 in 2025.

Then statistics became bodies.

On December 14, 2025, gunmen attacked Chanukah by the Sea at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were murdered while celebrating the Jewish holiday.

Australia subsequently established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which is examining the circumstances surrounding the attack and whether authorities adequately recognized the threat to Jewish events.

Australia had been warned.

It had also begun responding. The government appointed Jewish communal leader Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Her national plan followed extensive consultation with Australian Jews, and the government adopted all 13 recommendations.

Yet Australia continues to struggle with whether antisemitism is a distinct threat or another part of generalized “hate.”

Its Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act puts antisemitism in the title – along with more generic terms of “hate” and “extremism.” There is nothing wrong with fighting all forms of hatred. The question is whether symmetry in government policy reflects the reality on the ground.

Australia’s available community data indicate roughly 38 anti-Muslim incidents per 100,000 Muslims and 2,185 anti-Jewish incidents per 100,000 Jews.

That is roughly 57-to-1.

Indeed, Australia’s Islamophobia envoy (in a federal post strictly devoted to “Islamophobia” and no other forms of hate) has urged the Royal Commission on Antisemitism to approach antisemitism through the broader causes of identity-based hatred and the common roots of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other prejudice.

“antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice share common causes, such as polarisation, online environments and declining trust in institutions. Tackling these underlying factors can strengthen outcomes for all communities.” – Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, June 2026

What? If they were all the same, why are Jews attacked at a 57-to-1 ratio?

Australia does not have a generic hate problem that happens to include Jews. It has an extraordinary antisemitism problem that generic language about hate must not be allowed to hide.

Related:

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media? (December 2025)

Global Jewry Is Losing Australia, Canada, France, Germany and UK (December 2024)

Israel By The Numbers

Posted on by
Reply

Israel is discussed with hyperbole and adjectives: massive settlements, enormous American aid, rampant settler violence, Jewish encroachment, disproportionate war.

It’s a fiction. A ruse.

Skip the adjectives. Look at the numbers.

750,000 → 5.9 Million;
850,000 → 0
— Two Refugee Populations

Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees when they fled the battlefield as they awaited fellow Muslim Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish State during the 1948-9 war. In the same era, roughly 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries with many more leaving non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran and Afghanistan.

Even though the Jewish refugee population was larger, we never speak of it today.

Today, UNRWA registers 5.9 million Palestinian Arab refugees, predominantly consisting of descendants of the original refugees, and those who married or were adopted by refugees. The comparable number of registered Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants is zero.

The Jews were absorbed as citizens of Israel and other countries. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were not perpetuated as refugees, they way Palestinian Arabs have been forced by those same “brotherly” Arab countries which went to war with Israel in 1948-9, in order to perpetuate the war they initiated and lost.

650 Times
— Arab League Territory to Israel

Israel covers roughly 22,000 square kilometers and the 22 members of the Arab League collectively cover roughly 13–14 million square kilometers.

The territory of the Arab League is approximately 650 times the size of Israel.

127 Times
— Muslims to Jews

There are roughly 2 billion Muslims in the world, twice the size of the entire populations of North, Central and South America.

There are roughly 15.8 million Jews.

That is approximately 127 Muslims for every Jew.

Muslims account for roughly one-quarter of humanity. Jews account for about 0.2%.

Yet people in the West refer to Muslims as a “minority.”

60 to 1
— Muslims to Jews Ascending the Temple Mount

Before COVID, roughly 1.8 million to 2 million Muslims visited the Temple Mount annually, compared with approximately 30,000 Jewish visits in 2019. That is roughly 60 Muslim visits for every Jewish visit.

The more recent figures of 2025 after the October 7 massacre launched by Gazans has roughly halved the visits by Muslims and doubled those by Jews, lowering the figure to about 15 times at Judaism’s holiest site.

57 to 1
— OIC States to the Jewish State

There are 57 countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation that perpetually lambasts Israel. There is one Jewish state.

The Jewish state exists alongside a Muslim world dozens of times larger in countries, population and territory.

25 to 1
— American Defense Spending Outside Israel

Israel receives about $3.8 billion annually under the U.S.-Israel security assistance agreement. For every dollar America spends annually on Israel’s defense, roughly $25 is spent on defense elsewhere—defending the United States, maintaining forces abroad, supporting allies and providing security assistance around the world.

Even more striking, there are over 220,000 military personnel stationed around the world, of which slightly over 100 are in Israel. The baseline ratio is over 1,500-to-1, rising to 2,200-to-1 when reserve personnel are included.

The anti-Israel discussion focuses solely on Israel while ignoring the enormous American monies and personnel in Japan, Qatar, Germany and elsewhere.

14 Times
— The Growth of Israel’s Arab Population

Approximately 156,000 Arabs lived in Israel in 1948 when the modern Jewish State was reestablished. Today, approximately 2.16 million Arabs live in Israel.

Israel’s Arab population has grown almost 14-fold since the establishment of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the number of Jews inside Israel hasn’t even grown 12-times in that same time.

And people accuse Israel of “ethnic-cleansing.”

12 Times
— Israeli Arabs Killed by Israeli Arabs
Versus West Bank Arabs Killed by West Bank Jews

Thus far in 2026, Arab Israelis are murdered by other Arab Israelis at roughly 12 times the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by West Bank Jewish civilians in Judea and Samaria.

Hundreds of Arab Israelis have been murdered amid the organized-crime epidemic inside Israel over the last few years. Yet the international narrative solely focuses on settler violence.

10 to 1
— Muslim Gates to the Jewish Entrance

Muslims have access to the Jewish Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem through ten gates. Jews and other non-Muslims enter through one: the Mughrabi Gate. There, Jews must pass through metal detectors and security clearance at only specified times of the day, even as Muslims ascend and descend at will through every other portal.

Muslim women descending from the Temple Mount through one of the many gates exclusively available for Muslims (photo: First One Through)

9
— Number of Times Hamas Charter Refers to Jews and Judaism

Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is replete with antisemitic rhetoric. The opening lines begin with “Our struggle against the Jews…” and continues throughout its genocidal jihadist call to wipe out the Jewish people and Jewish State.

While the anti-Israel crowd pretends that the conflict is merely over land which can easily be compromised and carved up, they ignore the deep antisemitic ideology embedded in the Palestinian Arab culture.

8 Times
— U.S.’s Ukraine War Spending Versus Gaza War Spending

The United States has spent roughly eight times more in connection with the Ukraine war with Russia than the Gaza war against Israel.

America has made roughly $195 billion available for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. American expenditures associated with Israel and the Gaza war are a fraction of that amount.

Yet it is spending associated with Israel that is routinely presented as uniquely extraordinary.

6 to 0
— UN Bodies for Palestinians Versus Israelis

The United Nations maintains six standing bodies, offices or mechanisms focused specifically on Palestinian Arabs and Israel’s treatment of said Arabs: UNRWA; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the Division for Palestinian Rights; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices; the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories; and the Human Rights Council’s permanent Agenda Item 7.

There is no comparable UN agency, committee or permanent agenda item devoted to protecting Israelis from the conflict, nor is there any group in the entire world (think the Kurds) so over-represented at the global organization.

5
— Gaza Wars Since Hamas Took Control

Israel withdrew every Jewish civilian and military asset from Gaza in 2005. Hamas subsequently took control of Gaza in 2007. Since then, it has launched five major rounds of war with Israel: in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-.

Five wars in sixteen years.

2.5 to 1
— Israel Versus the Rest of the World at the UN

In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 18 resolutions focused on Israel. It adopted seven country-specific resolutions concerning the rest of the world combined.

That is roughly 2.5 to 1. One country received more than twice as many resolutions as every other country combined.

1 to 1
— An Equivalency of 15 Kilometers Which Matters for One But Not the Other

At its narrowest along the pre-1967 lines, Israel is roughly 15 kilometers wide. It is a stretch that continues along its major population centers.

After Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem’s east, the remaining West Bank corridor is also roughly 15 kilometers wide at a single narrow point where virtually no West Bank Arabs live.

15 kilometers versus 15 kilometers. Over a million Jews in the narrow stretch versus a few thousand Arabs.

Israel’s narrow waist is never described as dangerously vulnerable, while the West Bank neck is cast as making a two-state solution “impossible.”

1
— The Jewish State Whose Capital the World Challenges

There is only one country in the world whose national anthem is all about its capital.

Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, expresses the Jewish people’s ancient longing for Zion and Jerusalem.

The Knesset is there. The president is there. The prime minister is there. The Supreme Court is there. The government ministries are there.

Yet most countries still refuse to locate their embassies in Jerusalem or fully accept Israel’s designation of Jerusalem as its capital.

The numbers are there. Before accepting the narrative which is infused with anti-Israel bias, look at them.

Antisemitism As Political Currency

Posted on by
2

It is very strange that Sen. Jon Ossoff would make fun of Donald Trump.

Trump has many more followers and, candidly, is much better at insulting people than just about anyone. So it begs the question as to Ossoff’s motivation.

At an Atlanta rally, Ossoff mocked Trump for supposedly not wanting to do the job of president, saying Trump wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” referring to Trump aide Natalie Harp. He later doubled down, describing Harp and other aides around Trump as a kind of “security blanket” to make him feel good about himself.

Ossoff had to know that would provoke Trump’s ire and generate targeted insults.

And it did.

Trump mocked Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman” look-alike, while White House officials piled on with insults of their own.

But those insults would go out to millions of Trump followers. Ossoff’s supporters and anti-Trump people would simultaneously pile on online. Suddenly, Ossoff becomes the topic of conversation, and people start talking about him running for president in 2028. Indeed, that is already part of the discussion surrounding the episode.

It is all manufactured to improve his visibility.

Ugly. Vapid. And that’s politics.

But what about Rep. Jamie Raskin claiming that Trump manufactured the antisemitism-in-schools narrative?

Raskin seized on a whistleblower complaint from former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem, who alleged that the Trump administration’s investigations of antisemitism at Harvard, Brown and Columbia were driven by predetermined political objectives and, in some instances, pursued without sufficient factual or legal grounds. The Justice Department disputes those allegations and stands behind its investigations.

Raskin went considerably further in describing what the report meant. He accused Trump officials of abusing Title VI investigations to attack universities while using “antisemitic discrimination as a pretext and a ‘ruse.’”

That is not a silly swipe at Trump. It is an anti-factual smear about Jews under attack.

Why would Raskin do that?

In politics, it is to generate views and, consequently, power. He might get picked up by Hasan Piker or others who trade in Jew hatred online. He chums for antisemites to get their support for his own personal brand while simultaneously scrubbing any scent of Jew from his person.

That is a whole different kettle of fish than silly insults about Trump.

And it says terrible things about the state of the Democratic Party, that Jewish progressive politicians are whitewashing antisemitism in an appeal to votes from antisemites.

The Depravity of Antisemitic Socialism Has Become a Movement

Posted on by
Reply

From his perch at The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wants to be “very clear” about Hamas. Instead, his formulation gets the moral order backwards.

“Hamas is a terrible organization,” he writes, “first and foremost for Palestinians.”

Hamas is not primarily a terrible organization. It is a terrorist organization whose foundational ideology targeted Israel and Jews.

Hamas said so itself. Its 1988 charter declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Article 7 invokes a religious tradition about Muslims fighting and killing Jews. Article 13 rejects negotiated settlements: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

October 7 was the depravity of those words turned into action. Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, attacked civilian communities, murdered families and kidnapped hundreds of people. Terrorism was not an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas rule. It was the method of an organization whose charter had openly described its enemy and objective.

Nor was Hamas imposed upon Palestinian Arabs. In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, voters handed Hamas 56% of the seats in parliament — 74 of 132 — and control of the legislature.

October 7 did not sever that political connection. In December 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Palestinians believed Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct, including 57% in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank. Even in October 2025, 53% still called the decision correct.

That context makes Friedman’s criticism of Western Hamas apologists particularly revealing. He calls the “free pass” Hamas receives from some pro-Palestinian progressives “shameful.”

The issue runs much deeper than shame.

There is a straight line from a charter describing the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, to terrorists carrying out a massacre in Israel, to people defending the decision to launch that attack. The depravity lies in the ideology, the terrorism committed in its name and the willingness to celebrate or excuse it afterward.

And that depravity has migrated into American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America and radical left-wing university professors describe Israel as a colonial project and Israelis as “colonialists,” a framework to erase the distinction between combatants and civilians and recast violence against Israeli Jews as “resistance.” This movement is no longer confined to demonstrations and campuses; DSA member Zohran Mamdani has ridden the democratic-socialist movement into the New York City mayoralty and is now helping other left-wing candidates like Mohamed El-Zayed in Michigan win office.

Friedman’s formulation reverses the danger. Hamas becomes “terrible” rather than terrorist. Palestinians become its primary victims rather than a population which supports Hamas. And those in the United States and elsewhere who give Hamas political cover are merely “shameful.”

That formulation grants absolution to terrorists and their knowing supporters.

The endorsement and celebration of mass violence against Jews — a tiny minority-minority — is becoming a motivating force in American politics. That should terrify Thomas Friedman. It should terrify every decent American.

Because when a movement can watch the mass murder of Jews and explain why their killers were engaged in “resistance,” the problem is no longer simply Hamas.

The depravity has become a movement.