Category Archives: Jews

A Capital Crime for Jews—and a Paper and World That Look Away

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One fact should dominate any serious discussion of land and power in the West Bank: under Palestinian Authority law, a Palestinian who sells land to a Jew can face the death penalty.

That is not rumor or polemic. It is statute.

In areas governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza, selling land to Israeli Jews is prosecuted as treason. The charge is brought under Jordanian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 — particularly Articles 113–118 and Article 114 on aiding the enemy — still in force in the West Bank, along with the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code of 1979. A 2014 decree by Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that such land sales constitute “collaboration with the enemy.” Courts have issued death sentences under these provisions.

The defining element is the identity of the buyer. A private real-estate transaction becomes a capital crime because the purchaser is Jewish and therefore legally framed as part of the “enemy.” Most countries reserve treason for espionage, armed rebellion, or wartime assistance to a hostile state. The Palestinian framework instead applies classic treason law to a civilian property sale — explicitly treating Jews, as a national collective, as the enemy for purposes of capital punishment.

Yet when the New York Times recently acknowledged this, it did so quietly, almost apologetically, inside an article whose primary concern was Israeli policy. The focus was not the law itself, but the risk that Israeli transparency might expose Palestinian Arabs to danger because the law exists.

That framing reverses cause and effect.

Israel was portrayed as aggressive and ideological, while the Palestinian Authority’s capital punishment for a racially defined transaction was treated as background context. Israeli officials were labeled “right-wing” and scrutinized by name. The PA, which enforces a law rooted in religious antisemitism, was spared comparable description. Its ideology went largely uninterrogated.

The article even suggested that sealed land records once served as a form of protection for Palestinians. That sentence alone concedes the nature of the regime. A governing authority from which citizens must be shielded because it may kill them for selling property to Jews is not a peace partner. It is a theocratic system enforcing ethnic taboos with lethal force.

If a Jewish state executed Jews for selling land to Arabs, that law would dominate media coverage. Instead, when Jews are the forbidden buyers, the death penalty becomes an inconvenience and the exposure of it becomes the problem.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that the current trajectory on the ground, including this decision [to unseal the names of the owners of land making private real estate transactions easier], is eroding the prospect for the two-State solution. He reiterates that all Israeli settlements [the physical presence of Jews east of the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and the Kingdom of Transjordan, which specifically stated were not to be considered borders] in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and their associated regime and infrastructure, have no legal validity and are in flagrant violation of international law, including relevant United Nations resolutions.”

This is how extremist antisemitism is normalized: by treating it as an immutable local condition, while directing moral outrage at those who reveal it. When selling land to a Jew carries a death sentence, that fact is not incidental. It is the moral center of the conflict.

The Only Place Jewish Murder In a Synagogue Isn’t Antisemitism

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When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Europe, the United Nations speaks plainly. The attacks are labeled antisemitic. The violence is called terrorism. Solidarity with the Jewish community is explicit, and justice is demanded.

UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in Germany “demonstration of antisemitism” in 2019
UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in United Kingdom in 2025 “antisemitism” and “stresses the urgent need to confront hatred and intolerance in all their forms.”

When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Jerusalem, that clarity vanishes.

The same act—killing Jews at prayer—suddenly requires “context.” Terrorism is softened into “violence.” Antisemitism dissolves into “tensions.” Victims are anonymized, motives left unexplored, ideology carefully avoided. Language that flows easily in Europe locks up entirely in Israel’s capital.

UN Secretary-General never calls killing of Jews in Jerusalem rooted in “antisemitism.”

This is not rhetorical drift. It is doctrine.

The UN has formally adopted the Palestinian demand that Jews should not live in Jerusalem. Through measures such as UN Security Council Resolution 2334, it asserts that Jews may not alter the city’s “demographic composition.” That position freezes Jerusalem at a moment immediately following the Jordanian army’s ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the eastern half of the city between 1948 and 1967. Jewish expulsion is accepted as a legitimate baseline. Jewish return is treated as a violation of international law.

This is not neutrality. It is the institutionalization of an antisemitic premise: that Jews, uniquely among peoples, have no right to live in their holiest city.

UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in United States “antisemitism” THREE TIMES.

Once that premise is accepted, Jewish life in Jerusalem becomes conditional. Jewish neighborhoods are labeled illegal. Jewish prayer is framed as provocation. Jewish presence itself is cast as destabilizing. Violence against Jews no longer reads as antisemitism but as political reaction to an allegedly illegitimate reality.

Under those conditions, motive cannot be named. Calling synagogue murders in Jerusalem “antisemitic terrorism” would require acknowledging that Jews are being targeted for who they are, in a city where the UN has already ruled they should not be. It would expose the connection between UN doctrine and the moral evasions that follow.

So the motive is omitted.

Aftermath of Jews slaughtered in synagogue

The UN does not merely tolerate the idea of Jews being removed from Jerusalem; it has encoded it. The language is bureaucratic—demographics, international law, peace—but the result is stark: a city where Jewish existence is treated as unlawful, and Jewish murder as a political complication.

The contrast with the rest of the world makes the pattern undeniable. The UN knows exactly how to speak about antisemitism. That moral vocabulary disappears only in Judaism’s holiest city, in the Jewish State’s capital, because the United Nations has endorsed the antisemitic wishes of radical jihadists.

The Western Intersection and Direction of Antisemitism

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Years ago in Australia, I rented a car and learned what every American driver eventually does overseas: instinct is not universal.

About 45 minutes into my first drive, I took a left turn too wide and drifted into the wrong lane. No crash. No damage. Just a slow, awkward mistake at a four-way stop.

An older driver exploded at me. Shouting. Cursing. A full theatrical performance of outrage.

I apologized immediately. I explained I was American and adjusting to the other side of the road. That only intensified things. Now the insults expanded — not just me, but my country and people like me. He wasn’t correcting a traffic error. He was indicting a type.

I didn’t engage. I blew him a kiss and wished him a good day. His fury was his burden, not my identity.

Then I drove away and forgot him.

I could afford to. He had no power. No platform. No mechanism to convert temper into consequence. He was just a man yelling at an intersection.

But imagine if he did.

Imagine if he persuaded Australian officials that Americans are inherently unsafe drivers. Rental cars should require warning stickers: CAUTION — AMERICAN DRIVER and charge them higher insurance premiums. Restricted roads. Special licensing. Even banning them from the road. Imagine it caught on and other countries adopted the same “precautions.”

Now the incident isn’t about a bad turn. It’s an inditement of an entire people, with irritation morphing to governance.

Apply this to western antisemitism.

The Mechanism

Western antisemitism rarely begins as doctrine. It begins as emotion: resentment, humiliation, envy. A story forms around the feeling. Jews are clannish, privileged, manipulative, alien.

From there, the sequence is almost mechanical:

Anecdote becomes stereotype.
Stereotype becomes narrative.
Narrative becomes moral permission.
Permission becomes policy.

By the time formal discrimination appears, the ethical resistance has already been dissolved. People do not feel they are doing wrong. They feel they are being sensible.

The danger is not the man screaming at the intersection; every society has loud fools.

The danger is when the fool’s story becomes civic common sense.

Why Pride Isn’t Enough

One response to the current wave of western antisemitism is to ignore the screamers and turn inward: strengthen Jewish identity, deepen learning, fortify community. There is wisdom there. Cultural confidence is stabilizing.

But pride is psychological armor. It is not structural protection.

You can build a stronger community life. That does not prevent surrounding institutions from teaching your neighbors to see you as a problem to be managed. Parallel vitality does not neutralize hostile narratives embedded in the systems that shape public belief.

Resilience helps you endure hostility. It does not stop hostility from becoming rule.

Where the Real Battle Is: Public Schools

Street hate is episodic. Institutional formation is durable.

Public schools are the key civic storytelling monopolies. For more than a decade, nearly every American child passes through them, and is taught and tested by them. That is where moral categories are formed, historical legitimacy is assigned, and group identities are framed as native or suspect.

If students absorb a picture of Jews as recent interlopers, racial outsiders, uniquely powerful, or structurally oppressive by nature, then the Melbourne intersection has already found its legislature.

Western antisemitism does not need crude slurs. It adapts. It speaks the language of equity, power, decolonization, and social justice — while recycling ancient claims of Jewish illegitimacy and hidden control.

A new syllabus needs to be established.

Students should be taught that Judaism is the ancient Israelite civilization of the Hebrew Bible; that Jewish peoplehood originates in the land of Israel long before Christianity and Islam; that both later faiths arise in dialogue with — and departure from — that earlier tradition. That millions of Hispanics today are descendants of conversos – Jews who were forced to convert by the Inquisition hundreds of years ago, and that the majority of Jews in Israel today are descended from Muslim-majority countries that forced them to flee.

Today, the opposite is taught at the most antisemitic public schools – like those in California and Massachusetts – where Jews are cast as “oppressors,” “racists” and only care about themselves.

The public schools are setting the environment, and while I respect Bret Stephens, Jewish pride is ill equipped to address the current curriculum.

Yes, Jews should spend more time focused on their Judaism, but that will not insulate them from a hostile society. Jews and all decent Americans should take back K-12 education from the socialist-jihadi alliance that has assumed control of many school boards and unions.

An immediate effort should be to advance more charter schools and enable funding of non-public schools. Breaking the monopoly of school unions is a must to save the future.

Another remedy would be to pass a law that any school union that does not take immediate action to report, investigate and discipline (as appropriate) incidents of racism and antisemitism, will lose its right to collect dues out of paychecks and to negotiate contracts with the relevant municipality.

Public schools should also be prohibited from using materials provided by another government, such as Qatar which has been funding K-12 textbooks and trips to Qatar. This initiative is being advance under the “Transparency in Reporting of Adversarial Contributions to Education Act,” the TRACE Act.

ISGAP March 2025 report

Antisemitism is being taught and instilled into children in many public schools around the country, via antisemitic and anti-Israel school boards, unions and foreign countries. It requires an all-out war to root it out.

As opposed to the COVID-19 pandemic which mostly impacted older people, the western antisemitism pandemic has consumed the youth, courtesy of a deeply broken and plagued public school system.

We cannot pretend it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing to be done. Not just for ourselves, but to save the West from the furious fools in the intersections who have gained real power.

Two Story Arcs and Parshat Yitro

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The final season of Game of Thrones disappointed many viewers.

For years the show carried two storylines: an existential threat to humanity and a political struggle for the throne. When the ending came, the cosmic danger faded first and the camera returned to palace intrigue. Technically both plots resolved but emotionally, it felt like the story had mistaken the setup for the destination.

That structural tension comes to mind every year at Parshat Yitro.

The most dramatic moment in Jewish history — Sinai, revelation to the entire people, the Ten Commandments — arrives astonishingly early in the Torah. If receiving the law is the climax, why does it appear so soon in the Bible?

Because it isn’t the ending; it’s the beginning.

Sinai gives the people a constitution. It shapes their character, their obligations, their relationship with God and each other. But from the very first promise to Abraham, the Torah’s narrative is moving somewhere concrete — toward a land.

Walk the text and it reads like a map: journeys, wells, borders, inheritances. The story is geographic as much as spiritual. It is about building a nation in a place.

Torah and land were always meant to live together.

Torah without a homeland leaves Jewish life suspended in theory. A homeland without Torah loses its moral compass. Sinai forms the people; the land is where that formation is meant to be lived.

Over a thousand years of exile forced a different emphasis. When Jews lost soil, they carried scrolls. When borders disappeared, mitzvot became portable homeland and identity. That devotion was critical for survival.

Now history has shifted again.

For the first time since antiquity, a plurality of Jews lives in the Land of Israel, and soon it will likely be a majority. The part of the Torah that once felt distant and theoretical — sovereignty, agriculture, public responsibility, national life — is no longer abstract. It is daily reality.

Which reframes Parshat Yitro.

Sinai is not the finale of the Jewish story. It is the preparation. The training. The moment a people receives the tools it will need to build something lasting in its own land.

The Torah itself tells us this by where it ends: at the edge of the land, looking forward.

After centuries of mastering how to live as guests in other people’s history, Jews are being invited back to the main storyline: living in the land, with the Torah in hand.

The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela was an eight year travelog from circa 1165 to 1173, chronicling the pilgrimage of a Jew from Spain to the Jewish holy land.

The United Nations Elevates A Jihadi Antisemite as a Paragon of Peace

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On the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day—after solemn vows of “Never Again”—the Secretary-General of the United Nations chose to praise a cleric who has spent years demonizing Jews and denying their right to exist in their holiest city under the framework of an “International Day of Human Fraternity.“

António Guterres elevated “His Eminence the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb” as a global partner for peace, despite a record steeped in antisemitic incitement. Under el-Tayeb’s authority, Jews are framed as conspirators, Jewish prayer is cast as desecration, and Jewish presence in Jerusalem is portrayed as a civilizational crime. At events tied to his influence, chants calling for the killing of Jews and the eradication of Jewish sovereignty are tolerated and normalized.

Comments by al-Tayeb in November 2011

This is the peace the UN now celebrates.

“both Judaism and the Hebrew language have nothing to do with Jerusalem and Palestine.” – official statement of Al-Azhar

The ideology behind it is familiar. It rests on an Islamic superiority complex that treats Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate, Jewish history as fraudulent, and Jewish worship as contamination. In this worldview, Islam may rule Jerusalem absolutely; Jews may exist only conditionally and quietly—preferably elsewhere. Jewish presence in their ancestral capital becomes an offense demanding correction.

“”Do not think that we will ever give up on Jerusalem. We cannot abandon our rights there as a Muslim people. Allah will not enable you to erect a single stone on this land as long as Jihad persists.”” – official statement of Al-Azhar

El-Tayeb has given voice to this logic. Crowds gathered under his prestige repeat it. The demand is explicit: Jerusalem must be purged of Jewish claims, Jewish history, and Jewish life.

“In their attempt to judaize Jerusalem, the Zionists, in reliance on brutal Western imperialist powers, are risking the future of the Jews themselves by overstepping the limits of the Muslim Nation whose population is about a quarter of humanity, and who are able, one day soon, to restore their usurped rights by force.”

When the UN Secretary-General praises this man as a moral authority, he aligns with that demand. The language used by the UN confirms it. The profound antisemitism is ignored. Calls to violence dissolve into “grievance.” Incitement becomes “cultural difference.” Jewish presence is reframed as provocation.

This is how the United Nations defines peace: Jewish invalidation, submission, removal.

Guterres speaks of “a world based on equal rights for all and compassion” while elevating a cleric who denies Jews equality in the one place central to their faith and history. That contradiction is structural and vicious.

A jihadi antisemite is rebranded as a peacemaker, with ethnic cleansing repackaged as protection of holy sites.

And so, holocaust remembrance evaporates overnight.

History will read this moment clearly. When antisemitism returned cloaked in religious authority and liberation rhetoric, the United Nations offered applause, legitimacy, and a podium.

Who Gets Context: Ilhan Omar, Josh Shapiro, and the Media’s Double Standard

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When Rep. Ilhan Omar was squirted with a liquid by an assailant, the story was not the act itself. The story was the atmosphere. Readers were immediately given Minnesota ICE protests, Trump’s rhetoric, the temperature of MAGA politics, and speculative motive pathways pointing firmly rightward. Political attribution preceded investigative certainty. Context did the work and assigned blame.

Yet when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was attacked by arson in April, context vanished.

There was no mention of the documented surge in antisemitic incidents. No reference to months of anti-Israel rhetoric saturating elite politics. No discussion of the “No Genocide Josh” campaign. No acknowledgment that the attack occurred during Passover—a fact ordinarily noted when violence intersects with religious or communal significance, but here omitted entirely. No exploration of whether sustained accusations of genocide, ethnic-cleansing chants, or the casual demonization of Jews in power might have contributed to a permissive climate. Investigative caution preceded any discussion of political backdrop.

This was not restraint. It was a choice.

The same media institutions that insist “words have consequences” suddenly treat words as irrelevant when the victim is Jewish and the potential inciters sit on the progressive side of the aisle. Context, once treated as morally essential, becomes editorially radioactive.

The pattern is no longer subtle. When violence – staining a shirt – touches a left-wing Muslim lawmaker, identity and ideology are framed as explanatory forces. When violence – arson and attempted murder of an entire family – touches a Jewish, pro-Israel official, identity is scrubbed clean and politics are declared off-limits. One story expands outward into meaning. The other … nothing.

The issue is not what motivated the attacker. The issue is why certain motivations are never even permitted to be discussed.

To contextualize the attack on Shapiro would require acknowledging uncomfortable truths: that anti-Israel rhetoric frequently curdles into antisemitism; that political incitement is not confined to one end of the spectrum; that portraying Jews as uniquely malevolent actors has consequences beyond protest slogans and campus chants. Easier, then, to say nothing.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle had no issue clearly identifying the “Pro-Palestinian arsonist” and the support for targeting the Jewish governor, something liberal media scrubbed clean. The Steel City Food Not Bombs group is associated with the Socialist Rifle Association which seeks “to combat the toxic, right-wing, and exclusionary firearm culture in place today.”

But silence is not passive. It is editorial.

For Ilhan Omar, context was everything.
For Josh Shapiro, context was invisible.

If context is essential when violence can be plausibly traced to the right, it must be highlighted when violence engulfs Jews as well. Anything else is antisemitic choreography.

Guterres Informs That Holocaust Remembrance Is About the UN, Not Jews

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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, António Guterres reached for the safest symbol available: Nuremberg. He spoke of universal lessons, multilateralism, and the dangers of unchecked hatred. It sounded solemn, but it was evasive. By invoking Nuremberg instead of Eichmann, the UN spun a story in which institutions matter more than victims, and legality matters more than justice.

That choice is not accidental. It is institutional self-protection.

Why the UN Prefers Nuremberg

The International Military Tribunal flatters multilateral ideals. It universalizes guilt, diffuses responsibility, and allows the UN to present itself as the heir to postwar justice. It avoids a harder truth: the world did not finish the job. Genocide went unnamed. Jewish extermination was evidence, not the charge. Many perpetrators melted back into ordinary life.

The Nuremberg trials were necessary but insufficient. And on Holocaust Remembrance Day, sufficiency is the point.

“I have always understood the clear link between the horrors of the Holocaust and the spirit of multilateralism, justice and rights that founded our organization. Just over 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. These trials represented the beginning of a new era in international criminal law; an era 78 which individuals, including the most powerful, are held accountable. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim that spirit.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Eichmann Is the Missing Sentence—And the Turning Hinge

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem did what Nuremberg did not. It named genocide as genocide. It put survivor testimony at the center. It replaced bureaucratic fog with individual culpability. Eichmann was not tried as a generic war criminal; he was judged as an architect of the annihilation of Jews.

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, many years after the Nuremberg trials

As Hannah Arendt observed, the case exposed how extermination was operationalized by ordinary men. And it exposed a global failure: Eichmann lived freely for years after the war. Many like him were never tried at all.

That is why Eichmann is not an “example” to be mentioned in passing. He is the pivot of postwar justice—the moment when the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged as what it was.

Universalism That Erases the Crime

Guterres’s language collapses the Holocaust into a general warning about hatred. of course hatred matters. But flattening the crime turns extermination into general prejudice and genocide into an abstraction. The Holocaust was not simply bigotry run amok; it was a state-organized project to destroy a people everywhere it could reach them.

“let us together pledge to stand against antisemitism and all forms of hatred — and against bigotry, racism and discrimination anywhere and everywhere.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Universalism should follow truth—not replace it. When remembrance avoids naming genocide plainly, “Never Again” becomes a slogan that comforts institutions rather than indicts them.

The Uncomfortable Lesson the UN Avoids

The defining act of Holocaust justice did not come from the UN system. It came from a Jewish state acting unilaterally. Without Israel, Eichmann would have died untried, his crimes dissolved into postwar amnesia. That is not a political claim; it is a historical conclusion.

The UN prefers Nuremberg because Eichmann exposes its limits. Nuremberg affirms process; Eichmann exposes failure. One reviews general war crimes while the other points the finger squarely at demonic antisemitism. One is safe to cite as the other forces accountability.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is not a seminar on international law. It is a reckoning with a singular crime and a singular abandonment. The Jewish state does not exist to teach the world lessons, but we see plainly that the world failed to protect Jews—and then failed to prosecute their murderers. And it fails to recognize the clear difference to this day – on the very day designated to remember.

The Line That Cannot Be Dodged

Remembrance without judgment is theater. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the honest citation is not Nuremberg’s promise but Eichmann’s dock. One symbolizes aspiration. The other delivered judgment.

If the UN wants this day to mean more than ritual, it must say the truth it avoids: the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged because Jews had a state willing to act when the world would not. That is not a complication of remembrance. It is its core.

No Human Is Illegal—Until It’s a Jew

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The modern left claims to speak in absolutes. Borders are immoral. Enforcement is cruelty. Language itself must be purified so that no human is illegal. That creed is recited with missionary confidence—until the subject becomes Jews in the Middle East. Then the absolutes vanish. The language hardens. Expulsion becomes justice.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “no human being is illegal,” she isn’t hedging. When Ilhan Omar insists “undocumented does not mean illegal,” the point is categorical. When Julián Castro calls the word illegal dehumanizing, the doctrine is clear: presence confers legitimacy.

“This bill prohibits any executive agency from using the term alien to refer to an individual who is not a U.S. citizen or national, or illegal alien to refer to such an individual who is unlawfully present in the United States or lacks lawful immigration status. This prohibition does not apply when quoting certain texts.” – H.R.457 — 117th Congress (2021-2022) submitted by Joaquin Castro (D-TX) with 13 Democratic co-sponsors

And then Jews cross the only line that matters.

Beyond the 1949 armistice lines—lines drawn to stop a war, never to define a state—the same mouths reverse themselves. Jews become “illegal settlers.” Homes become “violations.” Removal becomes moral necessity. The word that supposedly dehumanizes migrants is suddenly deployed eagerly against Jews. The same politicians who recoil at deportation rhetoric now demand the dismantling of Jewish communities that have existed for decades.

The contrast is not accidental. Rashida Tlaib brands Jewish towns “illegal” and calls for their removal. Bernie Sanders repeats the charge as if the label itself settles every moral question. Even Omar—who rejects illegality as a concept at home—embraces it fully when applied to Jews. Same actors. Same vocabulary. Opposite rules.

This is where anti-Zionism sheds its disguise. A politics that claims to defend Black and Brown people from delegitimization turns around and singles out Jews—alone—for collective criminalization. When a political doctrine singles out Jews—alone—for criminalization and expulsion, it stops being anti-Zionism and becomes antisemitism, full stop. If a principle applies to everyone except Jews, it isn’t principle. It’s prejudice.

The United Nations provides the laundering. Resolutions passed by automatic anti-Israel majorities are treated as moral verdicts rather than political artifacts. When the Barack Obama administration chose not to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, it handed activists a legal-sounding alibi. The appeal is obvious: demand expulsions while pretending your hands are clean. Outsource conscience. Invoke “international law.” Move on.

“any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition [added Jews] of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council” – UN General Assembly

The hypocrisy spills into the street. Protestors harass synagogues and Jewish institutions, targeting Jews for contemplating life in Israel. That behavior would be condemned instantly if aimed at any other minority. Instead, it’s excused as activism—supposed to make people uncomfortable, as Cori Bush once put it. When the discomfort belongs to Jews, the moral bar drops through the floor.

Strip away the slogans and the pattern is unmistakable: hierarchy. Some groups are granted innocence without agency. Jews exercising sovereignty are denied legitimacy regardless of history, law, or fact. The left that insists words can wound has no trouble criminalizing Jewish existence.

If no human is illegal, Jews aren’t illegal.
If deportation is immoral, ethnic cleansing is immoral.
If harassment is violence, it applies outside synagogues too.

Yet the antisemitic anti-Israel crowd miss the entire point and attempt to reframe the story. Palestine Chronicle wrote that “Israel has come home to roost in Minnesota. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have become the Palestinians of Minnesota,” misdirecting people that Arabs are targeted by Israel, when in fact it is Jews being targeted for being “illegal” by the UN and the Muslim world.

The rules change only for Jews. That isn’t progressivism. It’s selective morality—rigged, tribal, and exposed.

When Antisemitism Was Killing Jews, Left-Wing Jews in Congress Backpedaled

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Antisemitism came bursting onto the American scene these last years. Jews were murdered. Synagogues were attacked. Jewish students were stalked, doxxed, and targeted by name. Schools and workplaces became hostile terrain.

And at that moment—when antisemitism crossed unmistakably from speech into violence—Jewish New York Congressman Jerry Nadler responded with the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act.

ARPA was framed as action. In reality, it was an exercise in evasion. While Jews were being assaulted and killed, Nadler urged Congress to study, track, and administratively manage antisemitism—while carefully avoiding the standards already designed to confront it.

The United States already had a playbook, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, adopted precisely because it reflects how antisemitism functions in the modern world. IHRA recognizes what recent victims already knew: antisemitism today often arrives wrapped in ideological language—through demonization of Israel, denial of Jewish self-determination, and collective punishment of Jews for the actions of the Jewish state.

That clarity made IHRA inconvenient to some. It required institutions to draw lines. ARPA was drafted to move in the opposite direction.

“this bill [H.Res 1449 to use IHRA definition of antisemitism] threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.” – Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY)

Instead of reinforcing enforcement under existing civil-rights law and a recognized definition, ARPA handed discretion to federal agencies. Antisemitism would be assessed holistically. Guidance would follow. Coordination would improve. Standards would remain flexible.

But flexibility is a luxury for bystanders, not for targets.

“the IHRA definition is plainly unconstitutionally vague.” – Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

Mainstream Jewish organizations understood the consequence immediately. Ambiguity does not restrain institutions that already fail to act. Universities that tolerated harassment would gain new procedural defenses. Administrators could claim compliance while Jewish students were chased from quads and classrooms. The more antisemitism intensified, the slower the response would become.

That is why opposition to ARPA came from the center of Jewish communal life, groups like Jewish Federations and the AJC. Their message was blunt and grounded in reality: Jews were being attacked under existing law. The failure was enforcement, not definition. Weakening standards while violence increased was not caution—it was retreat.

Support for ARPA came largely from groups more concerned with preserving far-left wing ideological space around anti-Israel activism than with confronting antisemitism as it actually manifested. In their calculus, the risk of over-enforcement mattered more than the fact that Jews were being targeted, assaulted, and killed. The alt-left preferred to cast their lot with CAIR in falsely labeling the IHRA definition as a gag order.

Congress eventually pivoted—toward strengthening Title VI enforcement and reaffirming IHRA—quietly conceding the obvious. When antisemitism turns violent, clarity protects lives. Process protects institutions.

“I share the concerns of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Bend the Arc, B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and the ACLU that the IHRA definition of antisemitism will be used to stifle dissent and chill free speech, especially Palestinian human rights advocacy. The resolution also does not recognize that the fight against antisemitism is connected to our fight against Islamophobia, racism, white nationalism, and all other forms of hate.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

ARPA will stand as a reminder of a grim truth: at a moment when antisemitism demanded resolve, left-wing Jews chose ambiguity and cozying to antisemites, rather than defense.

The Kotel Plaza Is an Open-Air Prison

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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.