Category Archives: Jews

A Name That Never Changes

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In Parshat Toldot, as the last of the forefathers is birthed and named, we are reminded that Isaac stands out for a quiet but powerful distinction. He is the only one of the forefathers whose name was never changed.

Abram became Abraham.
Jacob became Israel.

But Isaac remains Isaac — Yitzchak — from the moment God speaks his name before he is even conceived. His existence, his identity, and his destiny are declared in advance. Not earned, not negotiated, not revised.

God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son in her old age (Genesis 17:19), and when he laughs at the impossibility of it, that laughter becomes his name. His very being is rooted in divine certainty: what looks impossible to humans is already written by God. Isaac’s name is fixed because the promise is fixed.

And so it is with the Land of Israel.

Israel is the only nation on earth whose name predates its people’s return, their sovereignty, their wars, their exiles, and their rebirth. The name was carved into Tanach, inscribed into prayer, whispered by exiles across continents, and sustained through millennia when Jews had no army, no state, no power — only a promise. [see more below]

The Romans tried to erase it, renaming Judea as Palestina to sever Jewish memory from Jewish land. Empires rose and fell, borders shifted, conquerors rewrote maps. But the name Israel endured, unchanged — the national parallel to Isaac himself. A people and a land whose identity was not invented but inherited, not imposed but foretold.

Just as Isaac’s name was spoken before his birth, the name “Eretz Yisrael” was spoken long before the modern state emerged. A name older than Rome, older than Islam, older than every foreign flag that temporarily claimed the soil. A name that outlived exile and humiliation, the Crusades and expulsions, pogroms and partitions.

You can conquer a territory.
You can redraw borders.
You can rename provinces.

But you cannot undo a promise.

The modern State of Israel is often framed as a political accident — a product of diplomacy, war, and the ashes of Europe. But its name tells a different truth. Like Isaac, its identity was scripted long before any diplomat voted or any soldier fought. It is not a modern label but an ancient declaration returning to life.

And Isaac’s life – the longest of all of the forefathers at 180 years – was only spent in Eretz Yisrael. While Abraham and Jacob both spent years outside, God told Isaac (Genesis 26:2) to not leave the land, even during famine. His presence, like his name, is fixed forever.

The world can debate policies, borders, governments. But the essence — the name — does not change. Isaac never needed a new one. And neither does Israel.

Young boy praying at the Kotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel (photo: First One Through)

Eretz Yisrael, The Land of Israel

Biblical Origins
The phrase Eretz Yisrael (ארץ ישראל) already appears in Tanakh:
• Shmuel I 13:19 – “No blacksmith could be found in Eretz Yisrael.”
• Melachim II 5:4 – Naaman’s Israelite maid and the cessation of Aramean raids reference Eretz Yisrael.
• Yechezkel 40:2; 47:18 – Ezekiel is shown visions “in the Land of Israel.”
• Divrei HaYamim I 22:2; II 2:16; 34:7 – Solomon’s labor and Josiah’s reforms occur “throughout Eretz Yisrael.”

These uses establish the term over 2,500 years ago, well before the Roman exile.

Early Rabbinic Usage — Mishnah
The term becomes a formal halakhic category in the Mishnah:
• Kelim 1:6 – “Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands,” the base level of the Ten Sanctities.

This is 2nd century CE — already treating Eretz Yisrael as a fixed legal reality.

Dead Sea Scroll known as 4QMMT (estimated written in 150BCE) is a halachic letter that refers to “Eretz Yisrael”

Talmudic Centrality
The Talmud Bavli expands the spiritual meaning:
• Ketubot 110b – “Whoever dwells in Eretz Yisrael is as one who has a God; outside it, as one who has none.”
• Ketubot 111a – “Whoever lives in Eretz Yisrael dwells without sin.”

These sugyot codify the land’s religious centrality, not just its geography.

Halakhic Midrash — Sifrei
The Sifrei on Devarim states:
• “Dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the commandments.”

An early, sweeping valuation of the Land as a spiritual axis.

Rishonim — Medieval Commentators
• Ramban teaches that mitzvot are fully binding only in Eretz Yisrael, and observed in exile merely to preserve them.
• Rambam (Beit HaBechirah 7:12) reiterates the Mishnah: “All of Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands.”

By the Middle Ages, the term is fully entrenched across halakhic, theological, and philosophical writing.

Bottom Line

“Eretz Yisrael” is not a modern, Zionist, or political invention. It is a halakhic and theological constant across 2,000+ years.

The Veil on Antisemitism is Gone

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For years, defense lawyers tried to blur the lines in terrorism cases. When police uncovered jihadist plots, attorneys floated the well-worn argument of entrapment — that officers merely nudged vulnerable young men into thinking about violence. If not entrapped, then “mentally ill.” “Impressionable.” “Confused.” A haze of excuses meant to rehabilitate the indefensible.

But look at the landscape now.

The people calling for violence against Jews aren’t hiding behind whispers in back rooms or being lured by undercover officers. They’re shouting it from megaphones under the banner of “free speech.” They’re organizing through groups like CAIR, Within Our Lifetime, and the Palestine Youth Movement. They openly describe Jews as “enemies” who must be “confronted by any means necessary.” They praise “resistance” in every form, stripping the word of euphemism and revealing precisely what they endorse.

Unlike past defendants, they haven’t yet been charged with providing weapons, scheming attacks, or casing synagogues. Not yet. But they are building the moral scaffolding for others to do so — a permission structure wrapped in slogans about “justice,” “liberation,” and “decolonization.” It is ideological, deliberate, and public.

This is not entrapment.
This is not mental instability.
This is not marginal, confused fury.

This is ideology. Hardened, intentional, and proud of itself.

For decades, antisemitism coming from “majority minorities” — segments of the Black community and the Muslim community — was treated differently. Explained away. Softened. Excused as an understandable reaction to oppression, poverty, policing, or trauma. Jews were asked to tolerate it, contextualize it, empathize with it. The burden of understanding was always placed on the victim. So much so, that when Jews were killed by Black people in Jersey City, Jews asked the Black community for forgiveness.

But the past few years have blown apart the pretense.

Anti-Israel activists outside a Jewish day school in Westchester calling for “liberation by any means necessary” in 2024

The hatred is no longer whispered. It is validated in academic departments, amplified on social media, and wrapped in moral language to disguise its ugliness. The same voices that once insisted they were merely “pro-human rights” now chant openly for the erasure of the Jewish people and state. They’ve dropped the mask because they believe the cultural winds are at their backs.

The veil is gone.

What remains is the raw reality: A movement that celebrates violence, justifies terror, and cloaks explicit antisemitism in the robes of social justice — and an America increasingly unwilling, or unable, to call it what it is.

Because the scaffolding of antisemitism for the alt-left is that Jews are a threat. They are powerful. They steal what is not theirs. And Jews then have the temerity to complain of “antisemitism” as if they aren’t privileged, their veil of protection to rip the victim card from the truly marginalized communities of color. For the alt-right, the rightful owners of this land are White Christians, and Jews are undermining them too.

This is FOLO, Fear Of Losing Out. The trepidation that what should rightly be yours is being snatched away by nefarious forces. The Jews. Perhaps alone, perhaps with other allies, whether they be minority groups, PACs or a foreign country.

It’s old antisemitism, magnified by social media and chat groups to instigate and mobilize the masses against the most persecuted people of the past centuries. The media veil can no longer conceal the barbarians at the gates of synagogues.

Roughly 200 protestors outside of New York City’s Park East Synagogue shouting “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!” on November 19, 2025

The New York Times Seeks To Inflame Antisemitism By Minority Groups

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There are endless scams in New York City. People forge deeds, steal equity, and prey on desperation every week. Almost none of those crimes get elevated to a national morality tale.

So why did The New York Times choose a particular case and present it as it did?

A headline about home theft.
A photograph of a visibly Orthodox Jew in a courtroom to lead the story.
A description of victims “from minority communities.”

The message was unmistakable: A Jew stole from vulnerable minorities.

The Times could have reported the crime without turning it into a racial and religious showdown, yet it chose not to.

If his religion played no role in the scheme, then it had no business in the article. Yet the Times made sure every reader saw the kippah and beard, and read of his Orthodox clan coming to rally for the criminal: a greedy Jew stealing from the vulnerable.

The New York Times made a point of discussing the perpetrator being from the “Orthodox Jewish community“, even though the case had nothing to do with religion.

This did not land in a vacuum. Jews are being attacked in New York at rates that should horrify any decent newsroom. Anti-Jewish tropes about Jews stealing land, homes, and resources are exploding across campuses and city streets. It is standard stump propaganda by Democratic Socialist politicians.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) at a Democratic Socialist conference said of Jews: “they do it from Gaza to Detroit, and it’s a way to control people, to oppress people. And it’s those structures that we continue to fight against. I know you all understand the structure we’ve been living under right now is designed by those who exploit the rest of us, for their own profit.“

If the victims were Orthodox Jews and the offender was a member of another minority group – a majority-minority group like Blacks or Latinos – does anyone believe the Times would blast the offender’s ethnicity and splash a religiously identifiable photo across the top of the page?

Absolutely not. They would call that incitement.

This is a pattern. Mainstream media outlets have spent the last decade profiling Jews as:

They would never speak this way about any other minority group. But when the subject is Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, suddenly it’s acceptable to present them as predators and everyone else as their prey.

That is not journalism. It is character assassination dressed up as social justice.

And it does this in the backdrop of the election of a Ugandan immigrant, Zohran Mamdani who has trafficked in antisemitism, to be the new mayor of New York City. A man supported by the Black and Latino communities and opposed by the Orthodox Jewish one. A man who focused on the affordability crisis of living in New York City, with scaffolding provided by the Times about how corrupt Jews make it impossible for poor immigrants to live in the city.

The New York Times made a point of discussing the perpetrator being from the Orthodox Jewish community, even though the case had nothing to do with religion.

Propaganda does best when there are elements of truth. It does best when the fire has already been lit and the mob is seeking red meat to fuel the passion. The Times is feeding the beast and clearing an auto de fe for Jews to be marched through the streets.

Virality and Values

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There was a time when respect was earned by learning. People who studied hard, accumulated degrees, mastered facts and logic were admired. They didn’t need followers; they had knowledge. They didn’t need virality; they had depth.

That world is gone.

Fame today is not built in libraries or laboratories but in the palm of a hand. A ring light replaces a classroom. A viral clip replaces a thesis. And the more lurid, outrageous, emotional, and dishonest the content is, the faster the fame spreads. The algorithms demand provocation, not proof. They reward outrage, not understanding.

And people are responding exactly as the system intends: they’re dropping degrees, skipping college, deciding that years of expensive education aren’t worth it in a world where clout is free and clicks are currency. AI will write the papers anyway. Tuition is a fortune. Morality is optional. Why struggle through years of learning when you can fabricate a persona, press “upload,” and watch the world react?

For the first time in history, the older generation will have far more education than the young. Degrees are becoming relics. Expertise is becoming an antique. And winning hearts and minds through argument — the old democratic ideal — is becoming a luxury.

Politics is drifting toward the young, the uninformed, the inflamed, the furious, the ones who know how to play the game of attention better than the game of truth.

Hasan Piker doesn’t win debates; he wins followers. Comedian David Smith isn’t famous for jokes; he’s famous for attacking fellow Jews, because tearing down your own people brings clicks in a sick digital economy.



And here is the crisis for the Jewish people: We are the People of the Book trying to survive in a world where books don’t matter. We are a civilization built on reason, argument, text, questioning — and we cannot comprehend why we’re losing the PR battle against influencers who deal only in emotion, rage, and spectacle.

We fight with facts. They fight with feelings.

The socialist-jihadi crowd celebrates Hasan Piker showing up at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party

We build logic. They build engagement.

We look for truth. They look for traction.

And so a terrifying question hangs in the air: Must Jews abandon their values to survive? Must we trade nuance for noise?
Must we jump into the sewer of social-media fabrication because that is the only battlefield the world seems to care about? Must we out-viral our enemies just to protect ourselves from the lies, the hatred, and the persecution that spread faster than any truth we offer?

Or is there a third way — a way to fight fiercely without becoming the thing we oppose? A way to compete in the digital arena without destroying the intellectual soul that has kept us alive for 3,000 years?

This is the defining challenge of the modern Jewish experience. Not whether we can win a debate — we always could.
But whether debate still matters.

And if it doesn’t, then the Jewish people must decide how to defend themselves in a world where vanities, not virtues, are the currency of influence.

The People of the Book didn’t choose this kind of world. But we must learn how to survive it — without losing who we are.

The Meteors And The Jews

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Meteors streak through the night sky, lighting up for a brief second before vanishing into nothing. They burn because the Earth protects itself. Our planet’s atmosphere—thin but powerful—defends it from destruction. The meteors disintegrate, and the world goes on unharmed.

The Moon has no such shield. Every rock, every speck of space dust that comes its way slams straight into its surface. That’s why it’s pockmarked with craters—permanent scars of endless bombardment. Without protection, the Moon endures the full force of the universe’s hostility.

So it is with the Jewish people.

Across centuries, Jews have existed as the exposed body in a world of friction and fire. Without a “cultural atmosphere” to cushion them, they’ve absorbed the hits directly—pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, boycotts, and genocides. The Jewish story is a catalogue of collisions that the rest of humanity barely felt.

Christians and Muslims, by contrast, have lived for centuries within the thick atmosphere of dominance. Their societies, their empires, their majority status wrapped them in protection and privilege. When hatred sparks, their vast numbers and institutions disperse the heat before it burns. They are Earth-like—shielded by mass and power.

The Jew, wherever he resides as a minority, has always been lunar—alone in orbit, lacking an atmospheric buffer. Every ideological meteor, every political upheaval, every cultural storm leaves its mark. From England in 1290 to Spain in 1492, from Kishinev in 1903 to Pittsburgh in 2018, the craters accumulate.

If Christianity and Islam represent the Earth—secure, dominant, cushioned by atmosphere—Judaism remains the Moon, enduring open space without defense, absorbing the hits and still shining back upon the world.

In that celestial backdrop, we are now in a major meteor shower. We look up at them pounding the Moon and lighting the Earthly skies. We see the Moon amassing more scars and pray the projectiles will be small enough to incinerate before hitting Earth.

Jews had learned to survive without a shielding atmosphere for two thousand years. And then, in 1948, it got one, in the very place where the Jewish forefathers lived. Now, when the meteor showers of Jew-hatred arrive, those in Israel feel the impacts when the projectiles are large, while their diaspora brothers on the Moon get pummeled by lighter fare.

The Earth and Moon Jews have been barraged these last two years. They are scarred but eternal, waiting for the wave of debris to pass by as quickly as possible.

Jewish New Yorker Barry Borgen in hospital after being assaulted by mob of anti-Israel protestors in midtown New York City

How Jews Should Manage The Bad Apples

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Every political movement faces the same question: what do you do with the bad people in your camp?

Ezra Klein, writing in The New York Times, argues that Democrats should welcome everyone under their banner — no matter how extreme — because inclusion wins elections. He calls it the big tent: forget purity, just make sure they call themselves Democrats. It’s politics over principle, and power over conscience.

Republicans, by contrast, still try to draw a line. When groups like the Heritage Foundation flirt with extremists such as Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes — men who traffic in grievance and racism — many conservatives recoil. To them, the party label still carries moral weight. You can lose elections, but you shouldn’t lose your soul.

And then there’s Hamas — the third model. When Hamas decides someone in its own ranks isn’t loyal enough, it doesn’t debate inclusion or expulsion. It breaks their legs in the street. It executes them in public. For Hamas, politics is not persuasion or debate; it is terror enforced by fear. That’s how it keeps power — absolute, unchallenged, and bloodstained.

The Temptation of the Big Tent

Ezra Klein’s “big tent” philosophy played out in real time with Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City. The Democratic Party opened its doors to a wholly different ideology and welcomed it inside to secure a victory. But at what cost?

The party platform now stretches so far that it’s unrecognizable — and to many, repulsive. In its desperation to confront unified Republican power in Washington, the Democrats chose to absorb the fringe rather than confront it. The price of inclusion was coherence.

For illustration, imagine a Jewish newspaper facing a business dilemma:

A group like Jews for Jesus wants to buy an ad. The editor must decide:
Do we take the money? Do we run it in the name of inclusion and open debate? Or do we reject it as off-brand, offensive, and disloyal to our readership?

Most would choose the last. They’d rather forgo the check than cheapen their identity.

But the Democrats have made a different calculation. The party tasted the fringe, saw no backlash, and convinced itself there’s no downside. It’s as though that Jewish paper ran the Jews for Jesus ad — and the subscribers applauded.
So what’s next?
An ad from the KKK?
Pork recipes for Passover?
How far can inclusion stretch before it becomes desecration?

Power, Principle, and the Price of Brand

Republicans have power so can afford to maintain their brand by shedding radicals. Hamas maintains power by shedding blood. Democrats, desperate to gain power, are willing to shed consistency.

Three models emerge to rule:

  • The Democrat: inclusion for victory
  • The Republican: exclusion for integrity
  • The Islamist: execution for control

Each reveals a truth about how institutions face the corrupting pull of power.

Politics, like publishing, isn’t just about what you include — it’s defined by what you refuse to print. A brand without boundaries isn’t brave. It’s broken.

Of course the masses would like consistency and inclusion and integrity and peace on the streets. But they have come to realize that politics is power, and they want power. When Congress was a bell curve with little difference between Democrat and Republican, there was general ambivalence about elections and the impact on people’s daily lives regarding who was in power. Not so in today’s barbell society with extremists dominating politics.

The Jewish Community

What does the Jewish community do with groups like Neturei Karta that join the worst of the anti-Israel protests and fly to Iran for Holocaust denial conferences? With Jews who voted for a mayor who supports “globalize the Intifada”?

Neturei Karta protesting a march against antisemitism in New York City, January 2020 (photo: First One Through)

Neturei Karta is a small fringe group that mostly keeps themselves isolated, so in practice, there needn’t be an active response. But there were an estimated one-third of Jews in New York City that voted for Zohran Mamdani, including public officials and celebrities. There was a big turnout in younger Jews voting for Mamdani, estimated at two-thirds of those under 44 years old.

How does the Jewish community react when a majority of young Jews are viewed as putting the broader community at risk? Which model does it follow, or is the question more complicated as one’s Jewishness cannot be shed like political affiliation, and being a Jew is not about attaining power.

And is the conclusion in the observation? Politics is about power and people take actions depending on the environment to obtain or maintain power. However, Judaism shuns power, and seeks to live a religious life of one’s choosing without external influence.

Jews have never been a monolithic group, and include capitalists and socialists, conservatives and progressives. Some have power and influence, many are poor, and others seek to shed any power and influence and hand it to majority-minority groups.

Mandy Patinkin endorsing Zohran Mamdani for mayor, president and emperor

Jews, while always small in number, have always had a very large and wide tent because they don’t get to decide who to include and exclude for their numbers. They only decide who should be included in their associations – in their shuls, schools, umbrella groups.

In May 2021, young anti-Israel Jews were calling Israeli engagement with Palestinian Arabs “apartheid” and “genocide’ (well before Hamas’s 2023 War on Israel), and some were thereby fired from teaching positions at Jewish schools. At Upper East Side Yeshivat Ramaz, alumni pressured the Principal Emeritus Haskel Lookstein to not speak at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Jews shut down other Jews for their comments and associations.

I do not believe that there is a single answer for what Jews should do with kinsmen who are regarded as beyond the pale. Historically, in a bell curve political dynamic with moderate antisemitism, the radical could be ignored as noise. However, in today’s barbell political reality, with heightened antisemitism, active measures need to be considered regarding the bad apples.

What will those actions be? Who has the power to enforce them? That is the critical question before the diaspora community today. The first step is to comprehend that the paradigm has shifted, and we can no longer ignore nor absolve the problematic actions of fellow Jews.

Jews More Than Understand

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Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) — in Gaza and the West Bank — often cry out that they cannot go wherever they wish in Israel. They protest that they cannot move to the towns where their grandparents once lived. They label Israel as racist for preventing them from settling there, even though their Muslim Arab cousins live peacefully in those very same towns.

Arab women sitting in the shade in Akko, Israel (photo: First One Through)

They point to United Nations resolutions declaring they have a “right of return.” They frame their displacement as an “ongoing Nakba,” a catastrophe that Israel continues to impose.

I hear their complaint. I hear their anger. I more than understand — I live it.

Because Jews have lived that same nightmare — and worse. The very same United Nations that claims SAPs have a “right of return” decreed that Jews should be banned from living in half of their homeland. It told us we could not live in our own capital, Jerusalem. It told us we could not pray on our own holy mountain. It called it a “status quo” and the world nodded in approval.

And the Stateless Arabs from Palestine have the gall to try to deny Jews that very same right — to live freely in their homeland — while complaining that Jews are denying them theirs. They scream of injustice while vilifying “Yahoods.” The hypocrisy is obscene.

The Palestinian Arabs know it, and rather than confront it through accommodation and compromise, they wage war like Highlander, shouting “there can be only one.” They elected Hamas. They supported the October 7 barbarism. They continue to support Hamas, all in the hope of taking over the entire land from a small country.

Israeli Arabs make up 21% of the Israeli population, while Jews make up 0% of Gaza’s population and about 18% of the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL). The world ignores the Israeli Arabs with full citizenship rights, and obsesses and smears the Jews in the “West Bank” as illegal “settlers.” It seeks to ethnically cleanse that region of Jews while simultaneously claiming Israel has no true sovereignty to determine who to allow into its country to push the Israeli Arab population to 50%. It’s absurd.

Muslim Arabs have global support backed by 2 billion Muslims in their complaint against Israel. The small number of Israeli Jews receive global contempt for seeking the same right to live and travel freely in their homeland.

Israeli Arab women in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

The Extremes Modify The Abhorrent

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There’s always someone worse.

The vile antisemitism of Within Our Lifetime‘s Nerdeen Kiswani and MPower Change‘s Linda Sarsour isn’t accidental or peripheral — it’s the smoke that hides the fire. Their venom serves political purposes: to push Zohran Mamdani further and to make him look like a moderate.

Kiswani, the founder of Within Our Lifetime, just declared that there is “no scourge of antisemitism” in New York, that antisemitism is merely a “political tool.” She dismisses Jewish fear as propaganda, mocking the very notion that attacks on Jews are real or meaningful.  It’s malice dressed up as activism.

Sarsour, her ideological twin, has spent years deflecting and justifying Jew-hatred while demanding that “Zionists” be excluded from feminist and progressive spaces. Both women were already disgusting before Mamdani’s rise; their brand of hatred was a known quantity.  But now, with a self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist” mayor-elect, their vitriol has a new function.

By shouting louder, by pushing uglier rhetoric, by saying they will hold Mamdani “accountable,” Kiswani and Sarsour pull the Overton window so far into open antisemitism that Mamdani’s own positions — once fringe — could appear reasonable. When he calls for “justice for Palestine” but refuses to condemn chants for the destruction of Israel, he suddenly sounds measured. When he pays lip service to opposing antisemitism while platforming its deniers, he looks balanced.

That’s the trick. The extremists normalize the radical.

Expect them to ratchet it up — louder, uglier, more unapologetic. Every grotesque statement they make gives Mamdani cover to pretend he’s in the middle, that he’s the “responsible” voice between hatred and hysteria. In reality, it’s a choreography: they spew; he sanitizes.

This is how antisemitism gains respectability — not only through mobs on the street which are clearly terrifying sights – but through mayors in city hall who appear “moderate” only because the activists behind them are obscene.

New York should not fall for the illusion. The vile bigotry of Sarsour and Kiswani doesn’t make Mamdani reasonable — it exposes how far the city’s moral compass has tilted. When hatred becomes the baseline, even those who echo it softly begin to sound centrist.

There’s always someone worse. That’s how the worst ideas survive.

During a July 31, 2021 WOL rally in Brooklyn, after fireworks were lit, Kiswani told [01:02:43] the crowd: “I hope that a pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!”

The Rape Deniers Celebrating Zohran Mamdani

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The cameras panned across the crowd at Zohran Mamdani’s victory celebration — the newly elected mayor of New York City, surrounded by socialist activists, digital influencers, and the self-congratulating left. It was meant to be a night of triumph for the “movement.” But what stood out for those watching was not unity, or even politics. It was who was cheering.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, laughing and hugging, were Jamaal Bowman, Hasan Piker, and Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan — three men whose names have become synonymous with the moral collapse that followed the Hamas atrocities of October 7.

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the Mamdani victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman. (start at 52:00)

Bowman, the disgraced former congressman, made his name shouting on New York’s streets that Israeli women were not raped on October 7 — that the accounts of mass sexual violence by Hamas terrorists were fabricated. He wasn’t a lone crank in an internet comment section; he was a member of Congress using his platform to publicly deny the humanity of Jewish victims in the streets of his district.

Hasan Piker, meanwhile, mocked the entire subject on his Twitch stream, telling his millions of followers that he didn’t care if the women on October 7 were raped. That flippant cruelty — that casual dismissal of atrocity — has become a feature, not a bug, of a corrupted culture that cloaks moral degeneracy in “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. His anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric had become so toxic, that Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Latin-Black gay Congressman, wrote a letter on October 29, 2024 to the CEO of Twitch to have Piker removed.

And then there was Mehdi Hasan, who publicly argued that early reports of “mass rape” on October 7 were overstated and politicized, arguing that the allegations had been “weaponized by supporters of Israel.” At Mamdani’s party, he stood smiling with Bowman and hugging Piker as the pain of Jews was being amplified and normalized.

And celebrated.

The spectacle was a black mirror of a broken city — a city that once prided itself on tolerance and moral clarity now relishing Jewish trauma.

New Yorkers didn’t just elect a socialist. They elected a symbol of moral inversion — a man whose supporters include those who laughed at, ignored, or explained away the rape and murder of innocents.

When the applause dies down and the speeches fade, one question will remain for the city that crowned Mamdani: What kind of people celebrate with rape deniers and those that revel in the pain of the most persecuted minority-minority?

The Other Part of the Balfour Declaration Detested by Antisemites

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Much of the attention on the Balfour Declaration—issued on November 2, 1917—focuses on the United Kingdom’s pledge to “facilitate” “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Israel-haters rage at this clause, claiming that Jews had no historical connection to their ancestral homeland and that Britain had no right to “hand over” immigration rights from local Arabs to Jews.

Balfour Declaration

On the anniversary of the Declaration in 1943, Heinrich Himmler of Nazi Germany sent a telegram to the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem that Nazis and Arabs had the same enemies – Jewish invaders. In 2016, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas demanded an apology and reparations from Britain for issuing the Balfour Declaration, having repeatedly failed to destroy the Jewish State.

Telegram from Heinrich Himmler to Amin al-Husseini on November 2, 1943

But there’s another part of that same document that antisemites also detest. The closing line reads:

“…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

That final clause—protecting Jews’ rights around the world—is precisely what modern antisemitic movements are trying to undermine. Groups like Within Our Lifetime, CAIR, and the Democratic Socialists of America openly campaign to dismantle what they deride as “Jewish power” in America.

They smear Jews as self-serving “capitalists,” accuse them of exploiting “Black and Brown bodies” for profit (as Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said), and seek to push Jews to the margins of public life—all because Jews affirm that the land of Israel is their homeland.

A century after the Balfour Declaration, its promise remains under attack—not only in the Jewish homeland but wherever Jews dare to live proud and free.