The fighters of antisemitism are rushing to the front with silly catchphrases. Perhaps even toxic.
Take the line: “What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
It is meant to elevate the issue. To make antisemitism feel urgent to those who might otherwise ignore it. But it carries an uncomfortable implication: that what happens to Jews matters most because it might eventually happen to someone else.
Why?
Why is the attack on Jews not sufficient on its own? Why must Jewish suffering be reframed as a warning signal for others before it earns attention?
It is already evil when Jews are targeted and that should be enough. Jews are not canaries in a coal mine for the protection of others. They are millions of innocent people living with threats, violence, and fear. That reality does not need to be universalized to be taken seriously.
Then there is the fallback line: “I condemn antisemitism, but…”
The sentence always breaks in the same place. Everything before the “but” is obligation. Everything after it is the real message.
No one says, “I condemn racism, but…” without immediately undermining themselves. Only with antisemitism does the moral clarity feel negotiable, conditional, open to context. The phrase signals that antisemitism is wrong in theory, but explainable – even understandable.
Or consider the most common defense of Israel: “Israel has a right to exist.”
It sounds firm, but it collapses under even a moment’s scrutiny.
No country has a “right to exist.” Not Singapore. Not Spain. Not South Sudan. Countries exist because history, peoplehood, and political will bring them into being and sustain them.
The real point is that the phrase is uttered because people want to destroy it. Not Montenegro or Guyana. The sole Jewish State.
This isn’t a hundred year old debate about political Zionism and the reestablishment of a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland but a discussion about the genocide of millions of Jews. Why is such phrase ever used? The defenders of Israel should condemn the premise that forced the urge to utter the words.
The more careful phrase “Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism” often lands the same way.
It is true, of course. But it is almost always deployed at the exact moment when the line is being approached, if not crossed. It functions less as clarification and more as insulation, a way to reassure the speaker that whatever comes next cannot be antisemitic, because it has already been declared not to be.
It pre-clears the argument.
All of these phrases share something in common. They take a situation that demands moral clarity and replace it with moral positioning. They allow people to sound serious and defensive while adopting the framework of the accuser.
Attacking Jews is evil. Threatening Jews is evil. Justifying targeted harm against Jews—whether through politics, ideology, or euphemism—is evil.
It is time for anti-antisemites to stop using catchphrases that feel emotionally empowering but are soaked in the lexicon of antisemitism.
What happened at Cornell University is not complicated.
A student threatened to bomb, stab and rape Jews and was eventually convicted. A professor described the mass slaughter of Jews and the burning of families as “exhilarating.” Jewish students faced open hostility in spaces that were supposed to protect them.
That is the story.
But you would not know any of it from reading The New York Times.
There, the story is something else entirely.
It is about leverage and negotiations. About a university navigating pressure from Washington, in which “[t]he principal incentive for Cornell to settle was to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in research money.”
Antisemitism is not the subject. It is merely the backdrop.
Once Jew-hatred is relegated to the background, everything else falls neatly into place. Cornell is no longer responding to hatred; it is managing a dispute. The federal government is no longer addressing civil rights concerns; it is applying political pressure. The moral stakes dissolve into process and incentives.
This is not omission by accident. It is construction by design.
Because centering what actually happened – explicit threats against Jews, open celebration of their murder – would force a conclusion that cannot be comfortably absorbed into the paper’s worldview: that serious, virulent antisemitism has taken root inside institutions it instinctively protects.
So the frame shifts.
Facts that clarify are excluded, while context that softens is elevated, and the reader is guided, carefully, away from the obvious.
It is a familiar pattern.
When antisemitism comes from ideological adversaries – white supremacists, Christian nationalists, “your father’s antisemitism” – mainstream media names it plainly and condemns without hesitation. It is the headline, the thesis, the moral center.
But when it emerges from favored spaces – elite campuses, activist movements, intellectual circles – the noxious hatred disappears. It is reframed as protest, as speech, as tension, as politics. Anything but what it is.
Because if every instance of antisemitism were treated with the same clarity, the same urgency, the same willingness to name what is happening, then the victims of preference would face unwanted scrutiny.
So it is managed instead.
Turn a story about Jews being threatened into a story about money. The antisemitic horde combines the two naturally anyway.
The New York Times is no longer just erasing antisemitic actions by majority-minorities and woke institutions, it is participating in the targeting of Jews for future attacks.
There is a temptation in moments of fear and anger to reach for the bluntest possible instrument: collective blame.
We are seeing it again now, in calls from some politicians and commentators to treat Muslim Americans not as individuals, but “as a class.” It is offensive. It is wrong. And it is profoundly un-American.
We have been here before.
American history offers a warning that should never be forgotten: General Ulysses S. Grant’s order expelling Jews “as a class” from parts of the South during the Civil War. It was born of frustration, prejudice, and expedience. It is remembered today as a stain.
That is what collective guilt produces. Not security. Not clarity. Just injustice.
And it obscures the truth.
Because the truth is more important: not all Muslims are jihadists. The overwhelming majority are not. But there exists, within every society, a subset animated by radical, supremacist ideology. In this case, that subset is jihadists and they are a very real problem.
We have seen synagogues attacked, Jewish schools targeted, and civilians murdered around the world – from New York to Paris, from Sydney to Jerusalem. These acts are not isolated. They are the violent edge of a broader ideological ecosystem that glorifies terror, sanctifies hatred, and seeks legitimacy in the West.
That ecosystem is not confined to foreign battlefields. It has nodes here.
Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Within Our Lifetime do not operate as neutral advocacy groups. Their rhetoric, tactics, and alliances echo the narratives of jihadist movements – erasing terrorism, justifying atrocities, and turning mass violence against Jews into something to be rationalized and celebrated.
This is where scrutiny belongs.
Not on millions of Muslim Americans living ordinary lives who are part of the American fabric. But on the networks, organizations, and ideologies that radicalize, that excuse violence, and that deliberately blur the moral line between protest and terror.
Failing to make that distinction is not only unjust but dangerous.
When everything is labeled the problem, nothing is. When all Muslims are treated as suspects, actual jihadists disappear into the noise. They benefit from that confusion. They rely on it.
And worse, it hands them a propaganda victory: proof, in their telling, that the West is inherently hostile, that coexistence is impossible, that radicalism is justified.
That is why calls to expel Muslims from the United States are not just racist; they are strategically self-defeating. They punish the innocent, betray American principles, and distract from the real threat.
A serious society does not fight ideologies with hysteria. It fights them with precision.
It identifies the threat clearly: jihadist ideology, its enablers, and the institutions that normalize or legitimize it. It protects the innocent. And it refuses, no matter how charged the moment, to abandon the principles that distinguish a free society from the movements that seek to destroy it.
What disappears in all three cases is the simplest word: invasion.
We prefer a softer story that cultures blended, languages spread, religions were adopted. But that story falls apart on contact with reality. Spain did not grow into the Americas. France did not organically merge with Africa. Arab armies did not quietly diffuse ideas across continents. They came from the outside, took control by force, and reshaped the societies they conquered—imposing language, religion, and identity.
That is not exchange. It is replacement.
Over time, something happens to memory. The longer the outcome lasts, the more natural it feels. A forced language becomes simply the language. An imposed religion becomes tradition. Conquest becomes history and eventually, heritage.
But modern outrage does not follow history evenly. It clusters around the United States as if European expansion began and ended there. The rest of the Americas, reshaped just as profoundly – perhaps more – by Spanish and Portuguese conquest, rarely draw the same sustained scrutiny.
Part of this is power. The United States is the dominant global actor today, and criticism follows visibility. Part of it is recency. But another part—rarely stated outright—lies in how colonialism is now framed.
In today’s discourse, colonialism is implicitly coded as a “white” phenomenon. The category is no longer just historical but visual.
Where power is perceived as Western and white, the language of colonialism sharpens. Where societies are seen as non-Western or part of the Global South, even when shaped by earlier conquests, the language softens into history or identity. Entire regions transformed by Spanish and Portuguese expansion or Islamic invasions are broadly framed as “indigenous,” while the United States becomes the central exhibit.
That same lens is applied even more aggressively to Israel.
Israel is often cast as a project of Western, even “white,” power. But that framing collapses under even modest scrutiny. The largest share of Israel’s population descends from Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, whose skin is as dark as their neighbors.
More fundamentally, the Jewish return to the land of Israel is a decolonization movement. It is not an external power projecting control into a foreign land. It is dispersed communities reconnecting to a shared origin and reviving their language and restoring their cultural framework in the place it began.
And yet it is falsely framed as colonial.
While the clearer cases fade into history, the exception is forced to fit the rule.
That contrast reveals something deeper. Colonialism is no longer a historical description. It has become a moral label which is applied unevenly, shaped by contemporary perceptions of identity, power, and alignment.
Histories that fit a “white West imposing on others” framework are foregrounded and moralized. Histories that do not fit as neatly are softened, reframed, or absorbed into the past.
European and Islamic invasions took over the Americas and Africa, but universities and progressive media only showcase the interlopers with whiter skin. The blind rage infects reason to such a degree, that even anti-colonial movements such as the Jewish State, cannot be addressed by fact and reason.
The colonial-imperial lens at work today is shaped by an anti-White racist Global South. Its mission is portable colonialism – to extract wealth and power from White societies and redistribute them to non-White communities.
Broadway has always returned, in one form or another, to Jewish life. For decades, those stories were carried by memory, infused with struggle, displacement, and loss, yet grounded in continuity, humor, and the stubborn persistence of a people that refused to disappear. What has changed is not the subject matter, but the center of gravity. The stage has shifted from portraying how Jews lived to confronting how Jews are targeted.
The Past: Life in the Foreground
Fiddler on the Roof (2018 in Yiddish) remains the defining example of how Jewish life was once presented. The audience is drawn into a village that feels intimate and alive, filled with arguments between generations, negotiations between tradition and change, and the quiet dignity of ordinary people trying to hold their world together as it begins to shift beneath them.
The violence arrives but it does not dominate the story. It lingers at the edges, a reminder of fragility rather than the force that defines the narrative. What stays with the audience is the humanity that precedes it: the sense that Jewish life contains richness and meaning even as it is repeatedly uprooted, and that something essential survives the disruption.
The Present: History Without Distance
Vienna, and the Illusion of Safety
Leopoldstadt (2022-3) opens in a world that feels secure, even enviable in contrast to the humbler scenes from the Pale of Settlement in Fiddler – assimilated Jews in Vienna who have embraced culture, intellect, and national identity with the confidence of people who believe they belong. The early scenes are filled with warmth and the easy assumptions of permanence.
As the story unfolds, those assumptions dissolve with unsettling speed. Families thin, names disappear, and what began as a portrait of belonging becomes a study in erasure. The audience is left confronting how completely a thriving world can vanish and how little warning the people inside it seemed to have.
America’s Own Reflection
Parade (2022-3) brings that realization into the American setting through the story of Leo Frank. His life in early twentieth-century Atlanta ends in a spectacle shaped by rumor, media amplification, and a public willing to accept accusation as truth.
The discomfort of the story lies in its familiarity. The mechanisms feel recognizable, the escalation disturbingly plausible. The setting removes any remaining sense that antisemitism belongs elsewhere or to another time, placing it squarely within the American experience.
A Present That Refuses to Stay Quiet
Prayer for the French Republic (2024) unfolds in unmistakably contemporary terms, following a French Jewish family as they debate whether their future still lies in the country they call home. The conversation revolves around schools, neighborhoods, and the quiet calculations that shape daily life.
What emerges is not a single defining incident, but an accumulation, a steady normalization of hostility that makes departure feel less like a rupture and more like an eventual step. The question is no longer abstract. It is logistical, immediate, and deeply personal.
Hatred with a Familiar Face
Giant (2026) centered on Roald Dahl, shifts the focus from overt violence to something quieter and, in many ways, more unsettling. Here, antisemitism resides within a figure celebrated for imagination and storytelling, revealing how prejudice can coexist with cultural admiration.
The discomfort lies in how easily such views can be absorbed into environments that otherwise pride themselves on sophistication. Hatred does not require a uniform or a slogan when it is permitted to live comfortably within admired voices. It persists not despite acceptance, but often because of it.
A Pattern Taking Shape
Seen together, these productions trace a continuum across time and place – Vienna, Atlanta, Paris, and the cultural circles of modern Britain – linked by a recurring dynamic. Each begins with a sense of stability, moves through unease, and arrives at rupture. The details differ, but the trajectory remains strikingly consistent.
This repetition carries its own message. It suggests that the issue is not confined to a specific moment or geography, but reflects a pattern capable of reappearing in new forms, shaped by local conditions yet driven by familiar forces.
The Audience and the Mirror
The audiences filling these theaters are often educated, affluent, and deeply engaged with cultural life. They watch these stories unfold, absorb their lessons, and respond with admiration for the craft and the performances.
Yet there is a tension that lingers beyond the applause. The same cultural spaces that elevate these narratives often struggle to confront their contemporary parallels with equal clarity. The distance between stage and reality narrows, but the response to each is not always aligned.
The result is a kind of dissonance: an ability to recognize antisemitism when framed as art, while hesitating to address it with the same urgency when it appears in present-day discourse.
Why This Moment Feels Different
This shift on Broadway reflects a broader change in perception. The conditions once associated with distant history no longer feel entirely removed. The sense of safety that allowed earlier generations to treat persecution as context has given way to a more immediate awareness, one that resists easy separation between past and present.
Recent events have reinforced that awareness. The resurgence of openly hostile rhetoric, the normalization of extreme positions in public discourse, and the willingness in some circles to rationalize or reframe acts of violence have all contributed to a climate in which these stories resonate with a new intensity.
Art does not create that reality, but it reveals how widely it is being felt.
The contrast with earlier eras becomes difficult to ignore. Where once the stage offered a portrait of Jewish life shaped by external pressures, it now presents environments in which those pressures define the experience itself. The richness of daily life is increasingly overshadowed by a sense of vulnerability that cannot be pushed to the margins.
This evolution reads less like a natural progression and more like a recalibration, one that places the question of security at the center. The stories no longer unfold at a comfortable distance. They press closer, asking the audience to consider what they mean beyond the confines of the theater.
Broadway continues to tell Jewish stories, but the tone has shifted in a way that carries unmistakable weight. The warmth that once framed these stories has given way to something sharper, more immediate, and more raw.
The audience is no longer only staring ahead at actors; the Jews attending Broadway turn to the right and left to consider their own lives as living theater.
The United Nations has released yet another report on violence against women. It reads like a catalogue of human depravity – Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza – each documented, each calibrated to shock the conscience.
And it does but not for the reason the authors intend.
Because one of the most documented episodes of mass sexual violence in recent history is missing. Not debated. Not contextualized.
Absent.
On October 7, an estimated 6,000 Gazans invaded Israel and carried out atrocities that included the systematic rape and mutilation of women. This is not a matter of competing narratives. It has been documented by eyewitnesses, first responders, forensic teams, and subsequent investigations.
And yet, in a sweeping global report about violence against women, these victims disappear.
The report finds space for a child raped every half hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the explosion of abuse in Haiti, for war deaths in Ukraine, and for casualty figures in Gaza. Horrific and worthy of attention.
But the omission is not accidental. It is instructive.
Because what the United Nations is quietly establishing is a hierarchy of victims. Some suffering is elevated. Some is ignored. And some – when it disrupts a preferred political narrative – is erased altogether.
Jewish women fall into that last category.
That is not human rights reporting. It is narrative management.
And that distortion does not stay confined to UN documents. It bleeds outward. When the international system refuses to clearly name and center atrocities committed against Jews, it creates a form of moral cover. The record itself becomes a kind of absolution.
So when figures in the West – like the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji – publicly express approval for the October 7 massacre, the reaction is muted, rationalized, or ignored. The most grotesque elements of that day, including the sexual violence, have already been softened, blurred, or omitted by institutions that claim to stand for universal rights.
If the crime is not fully acknowledged, then the celebration of it can be more easily excused.
That is the downstream consequence of selective memory and outrage.
The United Nations is not failing to see. It is choosing not to look and remind the world about violent antisemitism. And in doing so, it transforms a report about protecting women into something far more revealing: a document that tells us which victims matter and which ones are inconvenient.
In that calculus, the rape and murder of Jewish women is not denied. It is deemed unworthy of inclusion. Perhaps even harmful, lest it paint its forever wards, the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in an unfavorable light.
A man attempted to massacre Jews at a synagogue and preschool in Michigan.
He drove a truck into the building, fired a rifle, and carried explosives and gasoline. Inside were more than a hundred children and staff. Only the quick response of security guards prevented what could have been a mass slaughter of Jewish children.
That should have been the story.
Instead, in its coverage of the attack, The New York Times quickly shifted the emotional center somewhere else. The paper highlighted concern that Muslims or members of the local Arab community had “anxiety,” worried they might face might face “blowback” after the attack.
Pause for a moment and consider the moral inversion.
A man tries to murder Jewish children in a synagogue, and the newspaper of record worries about the social consequences for people who share the attacker’s background, and “communities everywhere.. confronting rising hate.”
Would this framing appear in any other circumstance?
If a white nationalist attempted to burn down a Black church, would the central concern in the article be whether white Americans might face uncomfortable scrutiny?
If a neo-Nazi attacked a mosque, would journalists pivot immediately to the anxiety of Christians worried about backlash?
Of course not.
The victims would be the story. The ideology behind the violence would be examined directly and without hesitation.
But when Jews are attacked – especially by jihadists – the narrative too often drifts away from them.
The Reality the Coverage Avoids
There is another uncomfortable fact that often disappears in these discussions.
In the United States, Jewish institutions have repeatedly been targets of ideological violence.
Synagogues, kosher markets, Jewish schools, and community centers have been attacked by extremists motivated by antisemitism and/or jihadist ideology.
The list is tragically familiar:
the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh
the Poway synagogue shooting
the Jersey City kosher market attack
the Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis
Across Europe the pattern is even clearer: the Toulouse Jewish school massacre, the Hyper Cacher supermarket attack in Paris, and numerous synagogue shootings and plots across the continent have been by jihadists.
Yet the reverse pattern is almost nonexistent.
There is no recurring history in the United States of Jews entering mosques to massacre Muslims, no wave of Jewish attackers targeting Muslim schools or grocery stores.
The asymmetry matters.
Jewish institutions build security fences, hire armed guards, and train for active shooters not because of paranoia, but because experience has taught them they are frequent targets.
The Michigan synagogue had security for exactly this reason.
Without it, the story might have been hundreds of funerals.
A Pattern of Moral Softening
The New York Times’ framing of the Michigan attack fits a broader pattern that has become increasingly visible in recent years.
When jihadist-inspired violence occurs, the language often softens. Motives become vague. Ideology dissolves into references to “grievances,” “tensions,” or the emotional distress of communities associated with the attacker.
Select context is provided for the perpetrator that make him appear a victim, such as mourning the loss of family members in the Middle East, without sharing that those family members were members of jihadi terrorist groups.
This is no longer news but distortion.
Journalism is supposed to clarify reality, not obscure it. When coverage instinctively protects the social sensitivities of the attacker’s community while barely dwelling on the intended victims, it creates a moral fog.
No serious observer believes entire communities are responsible for the crimes of individuals. That principle should remain unquestioned.
But shifting sympathy away from the Jewish victims of an attack to the jihadi attacker is a failure to report the truth clearly for the purpose of a twisted narrative. One that continues to put the most attacked minority-minority in the crosshairs while falsely painting their most frequent attackers as the ones needing sympathy.
When armies lose wars, the battlefield does not always disappear. It often moves to softer targets.
That is what happened after the Six-Day War, when Israel delivered a devastating defeat to the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, territories changed hands, military reputations collapsed, and the promise that Israel would soon be destroyed evaporated.
The defeat reverberated far beyond the battlefield. It humiliated governments across the Arab world and shattered the image of inevitable victory that had surrounded the campaign against Israel.
But the war did not end. It simply changed form.
In the years that followed, militant organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Black September Organization exported the conflict around the world.
The targets were no longer Israeli armies; they were civilians.
Airplanes became battlegrounds. Diplomats became targets. Jewish institutions across the diaspora suddenly found themselves on the front lines of a war being fought thousands of miles away.
The Munich massacre shocked the world when Israeli athletes were murdered at the Olympic Games by Palestinian Arab terrorists. It demonstrated that the battlefield could be moved to the most international stage imaginable.
Another defining moment came with the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian terrorists seized an Air France flight and diverted it to Uganda. There, Jewish and Israeli passengers were separated from the others and held hostage in an old airport terminal. The episode ended with a daring Israeli rescue, but the hijacking revealed something chilling: Jews anywhere could be turned into targets for a war militants could not win against Israel itself.
Synagogues and Jewish community centers were attacked in cities far removed from the Middle East battlefield. Rome. Athens. Istanbul. Hezbollah and Iran were often behind the atrocities.
These were not military targets. They were chosen precisely because they were vulnerable.
The message was unmistakable: if Israel could not be defeated in the Middle East, Jews everywhere would become targets.
Today there are worrying signs that the same pattern may be returning.
Iran and its regional network of militias face mounting military pressure from Israel and the United States. When regimes and movements cannot confront stronger armies directly, history shows they often search for targets they can reach more easily.
Recent intelligence chatter has suggested that Iran may have issued signals intended to activate sleeper operatives abroad. Western security services have increased monitoring of potential networks across North America, Europe, and Australia. Whether these warnings prove accurate or not, the concern reflects a familiar strategic logic: when the battlefield is lost in one region, pressure is applied elsewhere.
As the United States becomes the central military opponent of Iran, American Jews may face the threat most acutely.
Extremist movements have repeatedly treated Jewish communities abroad as symbolic stand ins for Israel and its allies. When Israel gains the upper hand militarily, Jews in distant cities have often become the targets that terrorists believe they can reach.
This time the danger may be compounded by a new environment.
Terror no longer requires direct command structures. Groups such as Islamic State pioneered a model of “inspiration terrorism,” where individuals absorb propaganda online and act independently without formal membership or training, such as happened this week in New York City.
At the same time, a troubling ideological convergence has taken shape in parts of Western society. Radical Islamist movements and segments of the revolutionary left increasingly share a political vocabulary built around anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and the demonization of Israel. In that narrative, Israel becomes the embodiment of oppression. Jews are portrayed as agents of imperial power rather than a people with a three thousand year connection to their homeland.
When those ideas spread through social media, activist networks, and even parts of the educational system, hostility toward Israel can easily spill over into hostility toward Jews themselves.
The result is combustible.
A generation is growing up hearing that violence against Israel is “resistance,” that Jews represent colonial domination, and that the conflict is part of a global struggle against oppression.
History shows where that logic can lead.
If history is echoing once again, the streets of Western cities may soon remind us of a grim truth: the losers of wars do not always accept defeat.
We are witnessing the next phase of the War on Zionists.
A bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion followed a pattern Americans have seen before: young men radicalized online, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and attempting violence in the name of jihad.
But if you read the The New York Times, you might never notice the pattern at all.
Two men were charged after attempting the ISIS-inspired bombing near Gracie Mansion. Prosecutors say the suspects pledged allegiance to ISIS and threw improvised explosive devices toward a protest crowd and police. The bombs failed to detonate, but the casualties could have been catastrophic. The bombing suspects were 18-year-old Emir Balat, a high school student, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19.
The plot followed a model ISIS has promoted for years: radicalize individuals already living in Western societies and encourage them to strike where they live. No training camps. No command structure. Just ideology delivered through propaganda, social media and Muslim countries money in American schools.
America has already seen the results.
In 2015, a radicalized couple carried out the San Bernardino attack. Syed Rizwan Farook was 28 and Tashfeen Malik was 29.
In 2016, Omar Mateen, 29, murdered forty nine people in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando while declaring loyalty to ISIS.
In 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, also 29, drove a rented truck onto the Hudson River bike path in Manhattan in the 2017 New York City truck attack, killing eight people and leaving a note pledging allegiance to ISIS.
This pattern is not accidental. ISIS propaganda deliberately targets young Muslims in their late teens and twenties, the age when identity and grievance can be shaped by ideology. The strategy is not to import terrorists into the West. It is to cultivate them here.
Yet when the New York Times recently referenced the Hudson River attack, it described it simply as “a terrorist driving a truck killed eight people.”
The ideology behind the attack vanished from the story.
When the ideology behind violence disappears, the violence itself begins to look random. But it is not random. It is ideological.
The same pattern of New York Times’ language appears elsewhere.
After the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, the New York Times described social media posts celebrating the attack as being “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” One of the examples involved Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had liked posts praising the attack shortly after it occurred. At the time, Duwaji was 26 years old.
October 7 was a terrorist assault in which more than a thousand Israelis were murdered and civilians were kidnapped. Describing celebration of that massacre as support for a “cause” transforms the event itself, and radical jihadi terrorism disappears.
ISIS and Hamas operate in different places and pursue different strategies, but they draw from the same radical Islamist narrative that frames Jews as enemies and violence as religious duty.
Online, that narrative increasingly reaches the same audience: young people in Western societies, including young Muslims searching for identity and purpose.
First, there is an ideology problem. Radical Islamist movements openly encourage violence against Western societies and portray Jews as enemies in a religious struggle.
Second, there is a sanitization problem. When that ideology is softened, blurred, or renamed as a “cause,” the public cannot see the pattern.
San Bernardino. Orlando. The Hudson River bike path. Bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion. Young people celebrating Muslim massacres of Jews.
A sick 60% of Americans aged 18-24 polled said the October 7 massacre was “justified,” 50% support Hamas, and 51% said Israel should end and be handed to Hamas
Different attacks with the same ideological current reaching the same young audience, and pointing toward the same enemies.
The violence makes headlines yet the ideology poisoning western youth is being whitewashed. That is jihadi-washing, and it endangers us all.
Words matter. Especially when a newspaper chooses them carefully.
In a recent article, The New York Times wrote that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Ms. Duwaji had “liked Instagram posts supportive of the Palestinian cause immediately after the attacks,” referring to October 7.
Read that sentence again.
October 7 was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists murdered about 1,200 people, raped women, burned families alive, and kidnapped 251 civilians.
Yet approval of posts celebrating that moment is described by the Times as support for a cause.
A cause sounds political. Principled. Even noble.
But immediately after October 7 the images circulating online were not debates about borders or statehood. They were videos of murdered Israelis, kidnapped civilians, and triumphant Hamas fighters.
Calling appreciation of those posts “support for the Palestinian cause” launders the meaning of the act. The language turns approval of atrocities into activism. And it did the spin repeatedly.
Then the article pivots.
The Times raises concerns about a Jewish congressman from New York because his wife had “liked or reposted” posts from right wing accounts that some people considered hateful or insensitive.
So approval of posts DIRECTLY ABOUT a terrorist massacre is softened, while a Jewish public official becomes controversial through a chain of ASSOCIATIONS.
One situation involves praise for the moment Jews were slaughtered. The other involves subjective offense. Yet the newspaper treats them as comparable.
And this pattern did not begin here.
For years the Times has regularly described Israel’s elected government as “the most right wing in its history,” a political judgment embedded in news reporting. At the same time, the paper often avoids stating a simple fact: Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
So the judgmental language is applied freely to Israel and the factual label is avoided for Hamas.
Frighteningly, the framing has sunk even lower. The New York Times has moved from absolving terrorists to sanctifying the antisemitic genocidal terror itself as a “cause.”
It is a moral inversion that reflects a deeper rot in how the story is being told.
And it arrives at a moment when hostility toward Jews is rising once again across the world, seemingly with the endorsement of The New York Times.
