Category Archives: Opinion

Venezuela in NYC, Twice

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Venezuela has arrived in New York City in two forms.

One arrives carrying the wreckage of a socialist system that hollowed out a country by redefining private property as moral corruption and state control as virtue. That experiment ended in scarcity, corruption, and mass flight. Its leaders now face judgment far from home, a coda to a long collapse.

The other arrival is quieter, bureaucratic, and far more consequential. It moves through City Hall.

Words That Become Policy

“Private property — especially homeownership — is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy.”

Those words were written by Cea Weaver, who now holds authority inside New York City government over housing regulation, landlord enforcement, and real estate policy.

This is a moral judgment about ownership itself. Homeownership is framed as harm. Property is recast as a moral hazard. The implication is straightforward: what has long been treated as legitimate must be dismantled.

Knowing full well her position about private real estate and home ownership, Weaver was elevated into a role designed to shape housing outcomes by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Real Estate as the Lever

Because housing is where ideology becomes operational.

Weaver’s portfolio centers on real estate because real estate concentrates independence, savings, and permanence. It is immobile, heavily regulated, and politically sensitive. Those traits make housing the easiest sector in which to normalize forced redistribution through regulation rather than spectacle.

Within Democratic Socialist thought, housing functions as the primary front for structural change. The stated objective is “decommodification” — removing housing from private markets through eminent domain and insulating it permanently from profit. Achieving that objective requires stripping ownership of legitimacy and transferring control to the state or state-backed collectives.

Jacobin Makes the Case Explicit

That program is reinforced repeatedly in Jacobin, the flagship publication of democratic socialism. Its housing coverage goes well beyond expanding public housing or strengthening tenant protections. It openly endorses removing homes from private ownership.

Jacobin has praised campaigns such as Berlin’s Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, which was approved by voters in 2021, calling for the expropriation of privately owned residential housing and its transfer to public control. It regularly argues that landlord property rights must yield to collective ownership if housing justice is to be achieved.

The logic is consistent: justice requires taking housing out of private hands.

Venezuela’s Sequence Is Familiar

Venezuela followed this same sequence.

Ownership was recast as exploitation.
Returns were constrained.
Controls expanded.
Maintenance collapsed.
Scarcity spread.

By the time property was openly seized, the groundwork had already been laid. Confiscation felt justified because ownership had already been condemned. Language prepared the public long before policy completed the transfer.

History records this pattern with grim consistency.

Ideological Alignment at City Hall

Zohran Mamdani placed Weaver precisely where her beliefs carry consequence.

“Impoverish the “white” middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” – Cea Weaver

Democratic Socialists today debate pace and scope more than premise. Housing is the testing ground because it touches wealth, stability, and autonomy simultaneously. Alter the rules of ownership there, and broader economic control becomes easier to assert.

Donald Trump Begins to Align with Democratic Socialists on housing

And it seems that President Donald Trump is getting on board.

Trump just announced that he will ban institutional investors from buying single family homes. The goal is to keep the housing market acting rationally based on normal individual demand, rather than bowing to the force of massive realtors controlling rent prices.

It is not stripping individuals of their homes the way Weaver desires, but a first step in meeting the mission part way.

Naming the Mechanism

When government redefines private assets as illegitimate and reallocates them through enforcement, penalties, and regulatory attrition, the economic effect remains consistent regardless of branding.

Control shifts away from owners.
Value erodes.
Decision-making migrates to the state.

“As landlords exit the market, using state action to acquire properties and leverage divestment to convert thousands of homes into publicly and democratically controlled land/housing.” – Cea Weaver

“The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal [of seizing Greenland], and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.” – Trump’s White House

Language about equity or justice does not change outcomes for families whose homes become conditional assets rather than protected property. Redistribution through regulation or seizure is theft.

People think of Donald Trump as a true Conservative; he is not. He spent years as a Democratic real estate developer in New York City. Owning, controlling and licensing property is in his bloodstream.

We are entering a dangerous moment when government leaders of the right and left are converging on the thesis that the state is the arbiter of private property, including your house.

The Question That Matters

A society either treats private property as legitimate or places it at the discretion of the state.

Once ownership depends on ideological approval, it no longer functions as a right. Capital withdraws. Investment slows. Stability erodes. Liberty disappears.

Venezuela already supplied the answer.

History rarely announces itself as collapse. It usually arrives disguised as compassion, long before the consequences become unavoidable.

Democratic Socialist Banana Republic

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There is a familiar script in the American imagination: the banana republic. A place where public money leaks into private pockets, where cronies get rich, and where the state exists less to serve citizens than to lubricate loyalty. We usually imagine this as something foreign—dictatorships, juntas, autocrats with offshore accounts.

But Minnesota has offered a more modern, democratic variant.

The Somali community fraud cases that emerged from COVID relief funds, child-nutrition programs, and early-learning initiatives were not small-time scams. Tens of millions—eventually billions— of dollars flowed through nonprofit fronts. Programs meant to feed hungry children and support families became vehicles for enrichment. People inside the community became millionaires. Luxury homes, cars, and cash replaced the language of charity.

It didn’t stop with pandemic money. The same networks appeared again in other state and federal programs. Kickbacks were alleged. In some cases, parents were implicated. Oversight mechanisms failed repeatedly. Red flags were raised and ignored.

Which leads to the uncomfortable question that hovers over every such scandal: how much of this was invisible, and how much was merely inconvenient?

Because money of that scale does not move without institutional permission—explicit or implicit. If government officials knew and looked away, if warnings were buried to keep a constituency satisfied, if enforcement was delayed because elections loomed, then the fraud begins to blur into something murkier. Not theft from the shadows, but theft tolerated in the light.

And once it is tolerated, the line between crime and policy becomes disturbingly thin.

This is not uniquely American.

In Israel, a parallel story has unfolded for decades in a more formalized way. When the state was founded, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community was granted exemptions from military service. They were few in number, devastated by the Holocaust, and the exemption was framed as a temporary measure to rebuild a shattered world of Torah learning.

That world rebuilt itself—spectacularly. Today the Haredi population approaches 15% of Israel’s citizens and an even larger share – approaching 60% – of its youth. Their exemption from military service has become one of the most volatile fault lines in Israeli society, especially over the last two years of war, when reserve soldiers have been called up again and again while entire neighborhoods remain exempt.

The state pays. Child allowances, stipends, subsidies. And despite mounting public anger, the government—under Benjamin Netanyahu—continues to send checks. The reason is not hidden. Haredi parties vote as disciplined blocs. Their support keeps coalitions alive. The transaction is transparent.

It is deeply unfair. It corrodes social trust. But it is not a crime, because it is legislated, budgeted, and justified in public.

This is the key distinction that matters less than we pretend.

Governments control trillions of dollars. Politicians direct those flows—sometimes explicitly, sometimes through euphemism—to keep voters happy. In plainer language, they buy loyalty. Niche communities that vote as a bloc have disproportionate leverage. When challenged, they retreat behind the language of discrimination, marginalization, or historical injustice. The whistleblower becomes the villain.

Movements that openly favor redistribution, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, are at least honest about the direction of travel. They believe the treasury should be used to shift wealth and power to favored or protected groups. They don’t pretend the redistribution is an element of corruption—it is the point of government.

Contrast this with the classic banana republic. There, a dictator steals for himself and his inner circle. The corruption is crude, centralized, and personal.

In a democracy, the corruption is softer and more dangerous. The state funnels money to preferred constituencies under moral banners: equity, justice, relief, rebuilding. The beneficiaries vote. The politicians win. Accountability dissolves.

No villas on the Riviera are required. No coup is needed.

What emerges instead is a democratic socialist banana republic: not ruled by a single strongman, but by a web of incentives where public funds are traded for political survival. Fraud becomes harder to prosecute, because it nests inside policy. Waste becomes invisible, because it wears the language of virtue.

And when someone finally asks whether this is really a crime, the most honest answer may be the most unsettling one of all:

No. It’s worse.

Reparations Is Not About the Past. It Is About Power.

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For years, reparations has been framed as moral accounting — a long-overdue reckoning with colonial crimes, slavery, and historical trauma. That framing no longer captures what is actually unfolding. The modern reparations movement has evolved into something far more consequential: a Global South demand on the Global North to rebalance power, wealth, and legitimacy, amplified by a coalition that blends post-colonial nationalism, socialism, and jihadist anti-Western ideology.

This is not accidental. It is strategic.

Across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and parts of Asia, governments are no longer asking quietly for acknowledgment or symbolic regret. They are issuing demands. Reparations, apologies, restitution, debt relief, technology transfer, and capital flows are increasingly bundled into a single argument: the prosperity of the Global North is illegitimate and must be paid back.

From Memory to Leverage

Consider Algeria, where colonial grievance is not episodic but foundational. French violence, nuclear testing, and cultural erasure are not invoked merely to heal wounds. They are reasserted whenever diplomacy stalls or domestic legitimacy frays.

Demonstration in Marseille, France against antisemitism, much coming from Muslim immigrants from former French colonies including Algeria

Or Namibia, which rejected Germany’s €1.1 billion offer precisely because it was labeled “development aid” rather than “reparations.” Aid preserves hierarchy. Reparations invert it. Reparations place the former colonizer in the position of debtor — morally, legally, and politically.

Across the Caribbean, reparations has become collective bargaining. Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti are not asking for apologies alone. Haiti’s claim that France repay the 1825 “independence ransom” reframes national birth itself as extortion requiring reversal.

In India, reparations rhetoric fits neatly into civilizational nationalism — extracting moral and economic concessions from Britain while rejecting Western liberal tutelage.

This is not nostalgia. It is leverage. And it is gaining momentum.

The Socialist–Jihadi Convergence

What gives this movement its new force is the coalition that amplifies it.

On one flank are socialist movements that treat capitalism itself as a colonial crime. On the other are Islamist and jihadist ideologies that frame Western dominance as a civilizational sin. Their vocabularies differ, but their conclusions align.

Both see the Global North as illegitimate, wealth accumulation as theft, liberal democracy as camouflage for domination, and historical grievance as a renewable political resource. Reparations becomes the bridge — translating resentment into claims and memory into entitlement. It offers redistribution without admitting failure, a bloodless substitute where revolution stalled.

That is why reparations rhetoric now travels alongside calls to dismantle Western institutions, forgive sovereign debt, nationalize industries, and replace a rules-based order with “multipolar justice.”

From States to Peoples

Once nations inherit grievance, groups of people inevitably follow.

In the United States, descendants of enslaved Africans argue that wealth extracted centuries ago still compounds today — in land, capital, education, and political power. The logic mirrors the international model: systematic harm, identifiable beneficiaries, ongoing effects, and a moral requirement for redistribution.

In the Middle East, Arab claims against Israel for homes and land lost in the 1948 war are framed not as consequences of war initiated, but as perpetual moral debts transferable across generations and insulated from counter-claims.

Here reparations is not merely compensation. It is recognition, reversal, and re-legitimation of identity.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

For individuals without a banner to rally around, reparations is the escape hatch, and there’s little selfish downside in crushing the Global North.

The Question No One Wants to Ask

If reparations reach back to slavery, empire, and war — how far back do they go?

Will Jews demand reparations from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states for Islamic conquest, dhimmi subjugation, and the twentieth-century expulsion of ancient Jewish communities from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco? If Arabs displaced in 1948 may claim restitution, Jews dispossessed from Arab lands must be able to claim the same (and why doesn’t the United Nations say as much?)

If slavery justifies restitution, does conquest?
If conquest counts, does ancient conquest count less than modern conquest?
And who decides?

These questions expose the framework’s central fault line: there is no principled stopping point.

Reparations as a Substitute for the Meritocracy Debate

Before reparations becomes the closing argument, it must be understood as something else as well: a way to bypass the hardest debate of all — meritocracy, accountability, and performance.

Reparations offers a sweeping explanatory shortcut. Systems that may be inefficient, corrupt, poorly governed, or badly executed are recast as inevitable products of historical oppression. Failure ceases to reflect choices or incentives. It becomes proof of theft.

Once inequality is framed entirely as inherited structural injustice, there are no consequences for present-day decisions. Policy failure is absolved. Cronyism becomes resistance. Capital flight becomes colonial residue. Authoritarianism becomes post-colonial trauma.

Meritocracy itself becomes suspect. Success is not earned; it is inherited privilege. Competence is irrelevant; power imbalance is decisive. Agency dissolves — and with it, responsibility.

Why This Is Gaining Power Now — and Who It Alienates

This framework has surged as the wealth gap widens and upward mobility weakens. When capital compounds faster than wages and education no longer guarantees security, reparations offers a clean explanation: inequality is not complex or contingent — it is an unpaid historical debt.

That logic now collides with social reality in the West, especially for young men. College has become exorbitantly expensive. Returns feel uncertain. Many feel pressure to earn now rather than invest years in institutions that increasingly tell them they are part of the problem. If reparations is the moral language of the moment, some will try to join it. Those who cannot — particularly young white men — are cast as beneficiaries of a corrupt system, criticized for underperforming despite “privilege,” and then asked to atone anyway.

The result is a triple bind: vilified for advantage, shamed for underperformance, and burdened with inherited guilt — despite having done nothing other than be born where and how they were. This convergence helps explain male dropout from universities, the turn toward trades and online hustle, and the simmering anger of those who feel targeted by a moral framework that offers neither dignity nor exit.

The End State

If reparations becomes the dominant moral currency of global politics, the result will not be justice. It will be permanent contestation — a world where every border is provisional, every inheritance suspect, every success morally contingent.

Reparations promises closure. In practice, it offers none.

It turns history into an endless claims process, civilization into a courtroom, and the future into a hostage of the past.

Ben Shapiro, the Biblical Joseph, and Lessons on Where to Aim

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The conservative group Turning Point USA held its four day AmericaFest conference this week with a lineup of political commentators – and Nicki Minaj (1:13:00). Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire sent the conference in a new direction, coming to speak early and attacking several of the speakers due to come on – including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly – for trafficking in antisemitism and platforming wild conspiracy theories and theorists.

The media lit up that there is a rupture inside the conservative movement. Vice President JD Vance said at the conference, seemingly in response to Shapiro’s line of attacks, that “we have far more important work to do than cancelling each other.”

While the majority of people at Turning Point agree with Shapiro about Israel according to polls, the question of how to engage with people with whom you strongly disagree or want to persuade is an important question about tactics.

Consider the biblical figure Joseph.

When he first dreamed, Joseph placed himself at the center of the story and delivered the message directly to those who would one day bow before him. His brothers did not merely hear a vision of the future; they heard a declaration of hierarchy. The dream named winners and losers, elevation and humiliation.

Truthful or not, it was combustible.

Joseph learned—at extraordinary cost—that telling people they will submit to you does not hasten destiny. It creates enemies who delay it. Fate may be fixed, but its route is not.

Years later, standing before Pharaoh, Joseph applies that hard lesson with precision.

Joseph tells Pharaoh that his dream came in two forms because God has decided to do it—and to do it soon (Genesis 41:25-32). This is a striking claim, because Joseph himself had two dreams many years earlier, and nothing happened quickly.

Joseph is not contradicting himself. He is revealing what he has learned.

As a boy, Joseph assumed repetition meant imminence. Life taught him otherwise. His dreams were doubled, yet delayed for decades. They passed through betrayal, silence, and obscurity before fulfillment.

So why does Joseph now speak with certainty?

Because he ultimately understood something he did not then: the meaning of repetition depends on where the dream is aimed and who holds agency.

Joseph’s youthful dreams were aimed directly at people—at his brothers, at his parents, at their submission to him. They provoked resistance. Those who felt targeted fought the message, and history slowed.

Pharaoh’s dreams are different—not because they are truer, but because Joseph presents them differently.

Joseph does not tell Pharaoh that HIS reign will collapse or that HIS legacy will be erased. He does not aim the dream at Pharaoh’s ego. He does not place Pharaoh at the center of decline and does not elevate himself as the savior.

Instead, Joseph shifts the focus outward—to the land, to the people, to the coming conditions. Egypt will suffer. The famine will devastate the country. The threat is environmental and collective, not personal.

By doing so, Joseph removes both himself and Pharaoh from the line of fire.

Joseph learned an important lesson: when a dream threatens reality rather than pride, it accelerates history.

His own dreams were delayed because they challenged people directly. Pharaoh’s dreams moved quickly because they challenge circumstances instead.

Joseph’s greatness is not merely interpretive; it is strategic. He transforms a divine warning into a solvable problem.

He gives Pharaoh a way forward—storage, planning, delegation, foresight. Pharaoh is no longer defending his status; he is protecting his people.

Joseph learned the difference between telling people what will happen to them and showing them what will happen around them.

The first creates enemies. The second creates leaders.

Truth, But Approach

Joseph did not abandon truth. He learned how to deliver it. Ben Shapiro also spoke about serious matters honestly, but perhaps poorly. He imagined himself as the true shepherd of the conservative movement and sought to de-platform others.

When you aim at people, they shield themselves. When you aim at conditions, people mobilize.

If you want history to move, do not take aim at the audience.
Give them the map—and let them walk into the future themselves.

The New York Times’ Year in Pictures and the Architecture of Moral Inversion

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Hamas does not rule Gaza against the will of its people. It rules because large numbers of Gazans want it to. Hamas articulates aims that many in Gaza accept: “armed struggle,” permanent war, and the eradication of Israel. This is not an imposed ideology. It is a shared one.

That reality is the reason the war has not ended.

Hamas refuses to disarm. It promises to fight again. It rejects coexistence as a moral crime. And Palestinian Arabs have not rejected Hamas. There has been no uprising, no mass refusal, no turning inward to say this has destroyed us and must stop. The tunnels remain. The rockets are rebuilt. The hostages were hidden in plain sight and with complicity.

The Arab world understands this. So does the Muslim world and international community, quietly if not publicly. No money will rebuild Gaza while Hamas governs. No state will guarantee security for a territory whose leadership is openly genocidal. Even those who chant Gaza’s cause from afar refuse to absorb the cost of dismantling its rulers. Words are cheap. Responsibility is not.

And so the world fractures.

One side insists Gaza deserves unlimited sympathy—stripped of agency, frozen as a permanent victim, absolved of all consequence. The other side sees a society that has embraced a war of annihilation and asks the world whether moral condemnation is not only justified, but necessary. This divide is not about compassion versus cruelty. It is about whether moral judgment still matters.

What cannot be sustained is the fiction that Gaza is merely trapped between Hamas and Israel. Gaza is trapped— by leaders and parents who have chosen martyrdom over future, ideology over life, and war over their own children’s survival.

That is where sympathy collapses.

Because the only people in Gaza whose moral claim is uncontested are the children—and they are being sacrificed by a society willing to place guns in schools, tunnels under bedrooms, and hostages among families. A society that teaches its children that nothing is nobler than dying for the cause of destroying the Jewish State.

Sympathy cannot be demanded for that choice. It can only be extended—narrowly, painfully—to those who never had one.

That is why the ritualized outrage of the West’s most powerful institutions now feels so hollow. Each year, The New York Times publishes its Year in Pictures, and the selection itself becomes an argument. In 2025, the year with the largest spike in antisemitism including several incidents of mass murder, there were no pictures of Jewish victims. Instead, page after page of Gaza: rubble, smoke, bloodied streets, dust-covered children. Destruction, repeated until it acquires the authority of inevitability. Israel appears only as force. Gaza appears only as suffering. Context is stripped away. Agency is erased. The camera becomes a verdict.

Two-page spread in New York Times’ 2025 year in pictures showing Gaza rubble. The only other 2-page spread was the election of Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel member of the DSA, as mayor of New York City

But the depravity lies not only in what is shown—it lies in what is omitted.

There are no photographs of Jewish life under siege: no police guards posted outside synagogues, no concrete barriers and metal fences erected around schools, no quiet images of fear normalized into daily routine. There are no frames of mourning for Jewish victims abroad, the couple shot in Washington, D.C., the arson at the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania over Passover. No recognition of the global consequences of a war whose ideology has traveled far beyond Gaza. Violence against Jews outside Israel didn’t even make a footnote.

New security fence erected outside synagogue in 2025 (photo: First One Through)

When Israeli hostages appear in the Times, they are reduced to a single visual trope: a large military helicopter, as if their captivity were a logistical problem rather than a crime. Even Jewish victims of Gazan atrocities are set against a large Israeli military. The human cost of hostage-taking is laundered into abstraction.

New York Times only picture of a Jewish victim is a tiny speck in a large Israeli military helicopter

What does receive sympathetic attention are arrests—multiple images of pro-Palestinian demonstrators detained by police, framed as moral courage meeting state power. Advocacy for Israel’s destruction is softened into dissent. The pages preen about resistance while refusing to name what that “resistance” seeks to accomplish.

This is not journalism. It is moral choreography.

The pictures ask only one question—who suffered more?—while carefully avoiding the only one that matters: who chose this war? To launch it? To continue it? They do not show Hamas leaders refusing disarmament. They do not show weapons beneath nurseries. They do not show the ideological choice to sacrifice children for permanence of war.

In this telling, Israel becomes the aggressor by existing, and Gaza becomes sympathetic by persisting in annihilation. The refusal to surrender is recast as resilience. The willingness to sacrifice children is aestheticized as tragedy rather than condemned as crime. Sympathy is manufactured by amputating responsibility. The global anti-Israel advocates are embalmed in the moral light; Jewish victims disappear off the pages.

When the world’s most influential newspaper presents destruction without causation, suffering without choice, and death without ideology, it does not advance peace. It sanctifies perpetual war. It promotes a global blood libel. And it teaches readers that moral clarity is cruelty, while moral confusion is virtue.

The far-left media hopes that history will remember its curated selection of photographs and the modern moment will gather sympathy for the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish horde. Hopefully they are proved very wrong, and this time capsule will forever mark The New York Times for its profound antisemitism and moral depravity.

Related:

Every Picture Tells A Story: There Are No Genocidal Leaders In Iran, Just Fancy Women (November 2024)

Every Picture And Headline Tells A Story: Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Students Are NOT Antisemitic (April 2024)

Every Picture Tells A Story: No Brutal Slaughter Of Israeli Civilians (October 2023)

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims (November 2020)

Every Picture Tells a Story: Anti-Semitism (February 2017)

The Revolutionary Theology Has Gone Operational

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The arrests came just before New Year’s Eve.

Federal authorities charged members of a group calling itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front with planning coordinated bomb attacks in Southern California. Investigators described discussions of explosives, targets, and timing. The plan was operational, deliberate, and aimed at creating fear and mass harm.

The group’s own words revealed how its members understood their actions. Posters and social media tied to the suspects declared “death to America,” hostility toward federal institutions, and solidarity with “Palestine” framed as “liberation.” The suspects did not describe their plans as criminal. They viewed them as morally required.

That distinction is critical. It explains why violence felt justified rather than transgressive. And why young people can cheer the assassinations of healthcare executives and the massacres by Hamas terrorists, rather than ponder the moral swamp that has taken over their minds.

A World Reduced to Moral Absolutes

At the core of this twisted ideology is a belief that America, Israel, and capitalism are systems of permanent oppression. They are described as forces that keep a foot on the throat of the common man—extracting labor, denying dignity, enforcing hierarchy through violence.

DSA member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI) reciting her version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the DSA conference in 2021

Within this framework, reform loses meaning. Coexistence is treated as betrayal. Opposition becomes a duty. Violence becomes resistance.

Once that moral threshold is crossed, escalation is no longer radical. It is faithful.

How Far-Left Activism Removed the Guardrails

This worldview is not confined to clandestine cells. Its language has circulated for years inside far-left activist spaces, including factions associated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

DSA-linked rallies, resolutions, and affiliated campus groups have repeatedly adopted language that frames politics as existential struggle rather than democratic contest. Israel is described as a settler-colonial project that must be dismantled. Zionism is labeled racism. Capitalism is defined as violence. America is cast as an imperial force whose institutions lack legitimacy.

The phrasing matters. Calls for “by any means necessary,” “intifada revolution,” and declarations that there can be “no peace on stolen land” are not metaphors. They are moral instructions. They announce that outcomes justify methods and that limits no longer apply.

The rhetoric has infiltrated American schools, both K-12 and universities. Young people are being taught that they have a moral duty to dismantle systems of oppression and that the oppressors are capitalism, the American government, and powerful Jews. Stealing from stores is no longer a crime but means of reparations. Shooting up a kosher store is a form of “restorative justice.”

And the DSA rhetoric and candidates have infiltrated the Democratic Party. It began in 2017 and has accelerated. Rashida Tlaib is the most noxious example, but incoming mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani may become the most visible, leading the largest American city, the center of American capitalism, and the city with the largest number of Jews outside of Israel.

Where will this lead? Will Jews and capitalists become daily targets?

Movements are shaped by the permissions they grant. When activists normalize the idea that destruction is justice, someone eventually decides to carry it out literally.

Why Israel and Jews Become the Inevitable Focus

Israel occupies a singular place in this ideological ecosystem. It represents sovereignty, national identity, military power, economic success, and Jewish self-determination. For movements defined by opposition to perceived power, Israel becomes the ultimate symbol.

Criticism shifts from policy to existence. Zionism is no longer debated; it is pathologized. Jewish presence becomes suspect. Exclusion is reframed as moral clarity.

And this is not just aired on TikTok but taught at leading American schools, often funded by Islamic regimes.

This pattern is familiar. When a people are defined as embodying the system itself, harm against them begins to feel righteous. Antisemitism thrives wherever absolutist ideologies divide humanity into victims and irredeemable oppressors.

Iran’s Revolutionary Language, Recycled

The structure of this worldview is not new.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution articulated it decades ago. America was cast as the Great Satan. Israel as the Little Satan. Zionism as a cancer that must be removed. These were not rhetorical excesses. They were moral justifications for perpetual violence.

Over time, the religious vocabulary faded, but the framework endured. Imperialism replaced heresy. Capitalism replaced idolatry. “Liberation” replaced salvation. The certainty remained intact in a secularized lexicon. It was internalized as faith for the common man.

What once animated clerical revolution now circulates through Western classrooms and social media feeds, stripped of theology but retaining its absolutism.

A Warning, Not a Theory

The Turtle Island arrests are not an anomaly. They, the election of DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the Luigi Magione fandom are an American signal flare that has been brewing for years for the Jewish community. They mark the moment when revolutionary language stops being symbolic and becomes operational against Americans on a mass scale.

Harvard students rally to Hamas in the aftermath of the brutal slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel

Societies do not collapse because extremists speak. They collapse when eliminationist ideas are normalized, when calls for destruction are treated as moral expression, and when institutions charged with defending pluralism hesitate to draw lines.

Once a culture accepts the premise that entire nations, peoples, or systems deserve to be erased, violence is no longer a question of if. It is a question of when.

Liberal Democracy, on Edge

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A liberal democracy begins with a belief in pluralism—that a society can remain open even when its people profoundly disagree.

It assumes citizens will hold incompatible views about religion, morality, identity, and history, and that the state’s role is not to arbitrate truth but to preserve space. Speech is therefore protected broadly, even when it is crude, offensive, or deeply wrong. A liberal democracy does not require enlightenment. It requires freedom.

That freedom extends even to haters. But it is not unlimited.

Pluralism does not mean surrender. A society can protect speech while still drawing firm lines against coercion. The distinction is simple and essential: ideas are free; intimidation is not.

This is why liberal democracy depends on strong law enforcement. Courts, police, and prosecutors are the infrastructure of freedom. Without enforcement, rights exist only for those willing to defend themselves physically.

The law must intervene before intimidation hardens into violence. Waiting for broken windows or spilled blood is not neutrality—it is negligence. Fear does its work quietly. People leave long before they are injured.

This is not theoretical.

Across the West today, Jews are being harassed in public spaces, on campuses, and in neighborhoods—not for what they say or do, but for who they are. They are told their presence is a provocation. That they should leave “for their own safety.” That public space belongs to others now.

Jewish man in Montreal Canada out shopping with his family told to leave area because his physical presence was a provocation to anti-Israel protestors in November 2024

This is a flashing warning sign.

When Jews are asked to disappear so that others may feel comfortable, liberal democracy is already failing. When the burden shifts from the intimidator to the target—when minorities are told to lower their profile, avoid certain areas, or conceal their identity—the law has retreated.

President Biden’s Jewish liaison, Aaron Keyak, tells Jewish Americans to hide their religion in May 2021

The logic is dangerous: if you weren’t here, there wouldn’t be trouble.

That logic ends pluralism.

A liberal democracy does not require Jews—or any minority—to justify their presence. It does not ask them to trade visibility for safety. It does not treat their normal lives as inflammatory acts.

When intimidation succeeds, speech becomes theoretical and freedom selective. The public square shrinks until only the loudest remain, and those vicious groups with whom the government aligns. Elections may continue, courts may still issue rulings, but the civic bargain is broken.

The test of a liberal democracy is therefore how it responds when minorities are told to leave, either directly by government officials or with their tacit approval. If the state allows harassment to drive people out—quietly, gradually, without intervention—it has abandoned its most basic duty.

Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City who is comfortable with the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” will be in charge of law enforcement in the city with the greatest number of Jews.

  • How will he respond when Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests Jews cancel holiday events because antisemites have the run of the school and the institution cannot (will not) assure their safety?
  • What will he do when Jewish students at New York University cannot enjoy the school’s facilities because of gross failures to protect students?
  • Who will send in the police when Columbia University Jewish students are forced to walk a tight direct line between classrooms with an escort, because the university cannot secure the campus for everyone?
  • Where will the courts and law enforcement be when Jewish students and faculty at CUNY Hunter College are forced to cancel or not attend classes because of widespread harassment and intimidation?

Students at Cooper Union in downtown NYC lock themselves in a library while anti-Israel protestors threaten them outside

A successful liberal democracy welcomes immigrants and may elect a Ugandan born mayor. Yet it fails to be a liberal democracy when Jews are forced to flee the streets because governmental officials give a free pass to harassment, intimidation and discrimination.

The West is on the cusp of learning whether it remains a liberal democracy. And whether it cares.

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media?

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There are moments when a headline tells you everything by what it refuses to say.

A mass shooting took place at a Hanukkah party in Sydney, Australia. A Jewish holiday. A Jewish gathering.

Yet when major global outlets reported the story, something curious happened.

The New York Times headline did not mention Jews. Only the sub-header caught the significance of the attack, but did not say Jews were targeted.

More disturbing, follow-up articles did not focus on the horrific spike in antisemitism in Australia these past two years. Instead, the Times posted an article about… Bondi Beach, and how beautiful and popular it is.

The BBC followed a similar path. So did The Guardian. So did others like CNN. The event was flattened into abstraction: a “shooting,” a “disturbance,” a “tragedy,” untethered from identity.

By contrast, The Telegraph named Jews. The Jerusalem Post did as well. The New York Post and CNBC, too. Al Jazeera did not. Actually, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera attempted to whitewash the entire incident that there was “no information.”

This divide is not accidental. It reflects something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Because at the same moment that major Western media hesitated to name Jewish victimhood, the global Jewish community had no such confusion. WhatsApp groups lit up within minutes. Videos circulated—not to sensationalize, but to bear witness. The injured were named, not as statistics but as people. Hebrew names were shared so strangers across continents could pray for them.

No one asked whether Jews had been targeted. They knew.

The only uncertainty discussed privately was not if the attack was antisemitic, but which strain of antisemitism it represented. Neo-Nazis? Radical Islamists? A lone actor steeped in online hate? Jews have learned, painfully, to recognize the pattern even before the authorities finish their press conference.

So why the hesitation in public framing?

Why is Jewish identity often erased precisely when Jews are attacked?

Part of the answer lies in a narrative trap the modern media has built for itself. Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are increasingly cast in a single role: power holders, enforcers, aggressors. In that framework, Jews are permitted to be actors—but not victims. Agents—but not targets. Perpetrators—but not innocents.

Victimhood, in today’s moral economy, is rationed. And Jews often find themselves disqualified from it in favor of victims of preference.

Naming Jews as victims complicates the preferred storyline. It disrupts the binary of oppressor and oppressed. It forces an uncomfortable reckoning: that a people portrayed relentlessly as powerful are still being hunted in synagogues, homes, and holiday celebrations—from Pittsburgh to Poway, from Paris to Copenhagen, from Jerusalem to Sydney.

And so the language softens. The identity disappears. The motive is delayed, blurred, or left unexplored. The story becomes about the setting, not the target. About the neighborhood, not the people. About ambience, not intent.

The question is not whether Jews are under attack. That is beyond dispute.

The question is whether the world’s most influential media institutions are willing to say so plainly—or whether Jews may only appear in headlines when they are accused, never when they are wounded.

Part of the answer to the disgraceful shrug to the barbaric October 7 massacre in Israel is the systemic brainwashing that has been going on, that Jews cannot be viewed as innocent victims. Even when they plainly are, half a world away.


The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.

The Little Drummer Boys of Terror

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President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”

The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.

Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.

Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.

In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.

“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)

It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.

We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.

On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem

They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.

While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.

The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.

Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.

The young listen. And they march.

At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.

But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.

Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.

The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?

These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025

At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.

The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.