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Retaliation?

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A single word can change the story of a war.

In its live coverage of the conflict with Iran, the New York Times warned that Europe was preparing for “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.” In the same reporting, the paper noted that Iranian drones struck Azerbaijan and that a missile headed toward Turkish airspace was intercepted by NATO defenses.

The New York Times coverage of Iran attacking countries still as “retaliatory”

Neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan had attacked Iran, yet the strikes were still described as “retaliatory.”

This is more than sloppy wording. It subtly changes how readers understand who initiated violence and who expanded the war.

In ordinary language, retaliation means striking back at the party that attacked you. If A attacks B and B strikes A, that is retaliation. But if A attacks B and B launches missiles at C, that is something else. That is expansion of the war.

Other reporting on the same events makes this clear. Reuters described NATO defenses intercepting an Iranian missile headed toward Turkey, while Azerbaijan raised its military alert after drones linked to Iran struck near an airport in Nakhchivan. Those incidents marked the conflict spilling into countries that were not previously part of the fighting.
Yet the New York Times still placed these events under the heading of “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.”

That word does important narrative work. If readers repeatedly see the sequence framed this way, the implied storyline becomes simple:
Israel strikes.
Iran retaliates.

But the actual chain of events across the Middle East is far more complicated.

Iran has spent decades building a network of proxy forces across the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen have all launched rockets, drones, and missiles at Israel and at U.S. forces. Israeli strikes on Iranian commanders, weapons depots, or missile factories often follow those attacks.

Yet the language describing the two sides differs. Israeli operations are commonly described as “strikes,” “attacks,” or “escalations.” Iranian missile launches are frequently described as retaliation, even when the missiles land in countries that were not the attacker.

Precision matters. A missile aimed at Turkey, a NATO member, cannot be retaliation against Turkey if Turkey did not attack Iran. A drone strike in Azerbaijan cannot be retaliation against Azerbaijan for the same reason.
Those are new fronts.

Iran may claim it is responding to earlier Israeli or American strikes. But when its missiles and drones land in countries that were not fighting it, that is not retaliation.
It is the widening of a war.

And when journalism blurs that distinction, the reader is left with the impression that the war began somewhere else.

From Defanging to Beheading Islamic Extremism

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The primary goal of a defensive war is to end the fighting for good. The goal is not to conquer land or take spoils but to stop the bloodshed. This objective can be realized with not just defeating the foe but having them relinquish their weapons for good.

Sometimes this happens with the enemy losing much of its army while occasionally it is with the elimination of the leadership. This is mostly true with secular nations who concede the battlefield when any chance to victory has been squashed.

Yet religious wars seem to seep into the future. It is difficult for the faithful to abandon the battle if such effort forces a challenge to faith.

We see that today with radical Islam. Hamas, the popular leaders of Gaza, waged their version of a holy war to annihilate the Jews in what they consider a “waqf”, Islamic land. Even when the fighters were vanquished and the leaders killed, the remaining zealots continue to hold onto weapons and refuse to allow calm to take root. The jihadists’ deeply radical and religious orientation obliterate the chance for coexistence with non-believers.

So the defensive war carries on much longer than required in a secular war. The destruction is more widespread because the jihadists refuse to relent.

The same front is now in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its leadership is not as popular locally as Hamas is in Gaza. Months ago, the United States and Israel were able to take out the country’s nuclear weapons program in a 12 day war. The Iranian people did not rally to its leaders and press for war as they did in Gaza and the “West Bank”/ east of the 1949 Armistice lines “E49AL” against Israel, but took to the streets to challenge their own leadership.

But the jihadi leaders took aim at their people. Iranian soldiers mowed their own citizens down by the tens of thousands. The radical clerics would not abandon their plans for intercontinental ballistic missiles nor weapons of mass destruction, to be used to threaten and wage war against the “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” of the United States and Israel, respectively.

So the U.S. and Israel have reluctantly returned to Iran. The defanging of the regime escalated to beheading the rulers. On the first day of this next iteration of battle, Khamenei was killed as were other leaders.

Unlike the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), the Iranian people are more secular. They want to live a quality life and are not obsessed with killing Jews hundreds of miles away. One therefore hopes that this war will end quickly.

The past two years has pushed back radical Islam significantly in the Middle East, which may pave a path for peace. It is incumbent on the world to encourage a form of humble faith which channels devotion towards personal humility rather than asserting supremacy, as the course towards coexistence.

Islamic supremacy is being both defanged and beheaded in the Middle East. There will likely be victories in the secular states, while the West will need to develop a different gameplan for the religious zealots, like those in Gaza.

Absence And Endurance

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“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way…”


In Book of Deuteronomy the Torah recalls the ambush first described in Exodus. A newly freed slave nation, weary and disoriented, is attacked from behind. The text lingers on a painful detail: Amalek struck the weak who lagged at the rear. Then comes the deeper indictment. Amalek did not fear God.


The assault carried a message about reality itself. Amalek targeted the stragglers and declared that the Jewish God could not protect his flock. The nation attacked Jewish flesh in order to wound their faith.


The Torah directs our attention to the rear of the camp because doubt begins there. The people who fall behind often feel exposed and unseen. In that space it becomes tempting to read hardship as proof of abandonment.


Across centuries the pattern returns. The Inquisition tried to sever Jews from memory and covenant. Pogroms turned humiliation into public ritual. The Holocaust mechanized death while desecrating Torah scrolls. Modern jihadi massacres are staged as proclamations that Jewish destiny can be mocked without consequence. Each generation repeats the same challenge. Where is your God now?


Zachor commands two acts that stand together. Remember what Amalek did. Blot out the memory of Amalek.


Jewish memory preserves the record of cruelty with precision. What must be erased is Amalek’s thesis that hiddenness equals absence and that suffering proves divine withdrawal. The mitzvah confronts the instinct to conclude that what cannot be seen has vanished.


That theme deepens in the story of Book of Esther, read days after Zachor. God’s name never appears in the Megillah. A genocidal decree is signed by Haman, identified as an Agagite and heir to Amalek’s legacy. The Jews of Persia stand vulnerable in exile.
Yet events turn solely with the human characters. A sleepless king. A courageous queen. The story bends without spectacle.


The absence of explicit mention of God becomes the teaching. Presence can operate beneath the surface. Providence can move without announcement.


Amalek’s worldview rests on a simple claim. If God cannot be seen, He is gone.
Zachor and Esther answer together. The covenant does not dissolve in silence. Hiddenness forms part of the design. The rear of the camp remains within divine promise and protection.


To blot out Amalek is to erase the interpretation that vulnerability equals rejection. It is to refuse despair when protection cannot be measured. It is to affirm that concealed presence still sustains.

For Jews, the invisible is core to faith, while active erasure of those who mock such faith strengthens belief. Absence as endurance componded.

Ending Evil Is Not Revenge

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Pharaoh stood unmoved as the Nile turned to blood.
Life-giving water became useless overnight, and the system held.
That moment captured the moral reality of the Exodus.

The plagues were not revenge. They were not emotional retaliation for suffering already endured. And they were not even, in the narrow sense, punishment for evil deeds. They were something far more deliberate: the dismantling of a system that could not be allowed to continue.

That distinction matters—then and now.

Revenge, Punishment, and Dismantlement

Revenge is backward-looking. It seeks emotional satisfaction for injury.
Punishment is judicial. It assigns guilt and imposes consequences.
Dismantlement is future-oriented. It exists to make continued evil impossible.

The plagues fit only the third category.

They were announced in advance. They escalated slowly. It wasn’t rage. It didn’t aim at humiliation. The Torah goes out of its way to show a paced methodology.

Even “punishment” does not fully explain what happens. Punishment targets perpetrators. The plagues targeted foundations: economy, theology, nature, and political myth. The Nile, the body, the sky—everything Egypt relied on to project permanence was stripped away piece by piece.

Why? Because slavery was not a policy failure within Egypt.
It was Egypt.

You cannot reform a system built on domination. You cannot shame it. You cannot negotiate it out of existence. You have to break the assumptions that make it feel eternal.

That is what the plagues did. They delivered a message: “You are not absolute—and the time for evil has ended.”

The Same Moral Error Reappears Today

That same confusion appears again in the way Israel’s war in Gaza is discussed.

Since October 7, critics have insisted that Israel is acting out of revenge, wounded pride, or collective punishment. That reading repeats the same error people make about the plagues: it projects human emotion onto a campaign that is structural in nature.

If Israel were seeking revenge, Gaza would already be erased.
If this were punishment, the war would end with confessions and symbolic justice.

Neither is happening.

Israel is trying to end a war by dismantling the system that made it inevitable.

Hamas is not a fringe militia. It is the elected majority of the Palestinian parliament and ruling authority in Gaza. It is immensely popular. Over years, it constructed a comprehensive war society: tunnels beneath homes, schools, and mosques; civilian infrastructure fused with military command; education and media organized around eradication; international aid converted into weapons. Violence was not a breakdown. It was the operating principle.

As in Egypt, brutality was not an abuse within the system.
It was the system.

You cannot coexist with that indefinitely. You cannot contain it forever. You cannot pause it and hope it reforms while leaving its foundations intact.

Why Ending the System Is Not Cruelty

Calls for ceasefire without dismantlement may sound compassionate but mirror Pharaoh’s promises: temporary relief with permanent structures preserved. The Torah teaches us to distrust that move. Pauses without transformation merely reset the cycle.

Israel’s campaign is not about humiliation. It is about limits. No governing authority may embed genocide into its ideology. No regime gains immunity by hiding behind civilians. No society organized around death gets an unlimited future.

Ending such a system is not revenge.
It is moral necessity.

The Darkest Dawn, and the End of “The Right of Return”

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There is an old saying that “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” It captures the turning point where exhaustion and despair crest just before clarity breaks through. It sounds sour but is actually optimistic in seeing that the darkness will soon yield to daylight.

The phrase fits perfectly for the century-long conflict surrounding the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs)—because the world has lingered in the darkness for generations, terrified to say out loud what every policymaker knows: there is no “right of return” to Israel. There never was. And acknowledging that truth is the dawn the region desperately needs.

Old City of Jerusalem (photo: FirstOneThrough)

For decades, diplomats, presidents, secretaries-general, and foreign ministers have spoken in hushed tones, pretending that the millions of Arab descendants of the 1948 refugees might somehow “return” to houses where grandparents lived in a sovereign Jewish state. No one believed it. But fear of political backlash from the Muslim world kept the fiction alive. UN resolutions were drafted with linguistic acrobatics; peace conferences avoided the topic like a contagion; European chancelleries adopted the convenient illusion that avoiding the subject was the same as solving it.

The result was darkness—deep, suffocating darkness. A generation raised on false hope. UNRWA built an education system anchored in grievance. Politicians in Ramallah and Gaza used the fantasy as a perpetual cudgel against compromise. The Arab League made it non-negotiable, ensuring negotiations never truly began.

Every time the world inched toward clarity, it recoiled. And the darkness thickened.

But dawn comes precisely when the night feels endless. Today, after the horrors of October 7, after the open celebration of massacres on Western streets, after the exposure of UNRWA’s radicalization pipelines, and the decimation of Gaza, the world is finally approaching that moment. Governments are beginning to say the once-unsayable: a two-state solution is incompatible with a mass influx of millions of SAPs into Israel. You cannot demand a Jewish state and simultaneously demand its demographic erasure. You cannot promote coexistence while promoting a “return” to towns long integrated into modern Israel.

The math, the politics, the security, the basic logic—none of it ever supported the claim. The world simply refused to admit it.

Now the truth is no longer optional. The dawn is forming whether the diplomats like it or not.

Sunrise at the Kotel (photo: FirstOneThrough)

For the first time, Western leaders are linking a future Palestinian state to the clear, final abandonment of the so-called right of return. Israel has always said this. Quietly, so have every serious negotiator from Washington, Brussels, and Cairo. Even Arab states normalizing relations with Israel recognize that “return” is code for endless war, not peace.

When the world finally articulates the truth clearly—that Palestinian refugees and their descendants will build their future in a Palestinian state, not in Israel—that is the moment when peace becomes possible. It is the moment the darkness begins to lift, replaced by a realistic horizon instead of a hallucinatory demand.

The tragedy is that it took so long in time and lives: waves of terrorism, regional wars, Western riots, and the revelation of UN complicity to get here. But the proverb holds: it is always darkest before the dawn. And now, the sunlight is unavoidable.

The world must finally say it out loud:
There is no right of return into Israel. The dawn of a real two-state solution begins with accepting that truth.

Sunrise at the Citadel of David (photo: FirstOneThrough)

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

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.

For the Sins of 5785

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Against the Jewish People

  • For the sin of hating each other more than our enemies.
  • For the sin of forgetting Jerusalem while remembering Paris.
  • For the sin of treating exile as destiny instead of tragedy.
  • For the sin of chanting “Never Again” but adding a question mark.
  • For the sin of excusing antisemitism when it comes from our political side.
  • For the sin of making Holocaust comparisons cheap.
  • For the sin of watching thousands of Jewish Instagram and YouTube posts but never subscribing.
  • For the sin of praying for unity and voting for division.
  • For the sin of mistaking Jewish Twitter for Jewish life.
  • For the sin of writing more about falafel than faith.

Against the State of Israel

  • For the sin of normalizing insane charges like “genocide.”
  • For the sin of inviting murderers to parades of diplomacy.
  • For the sin of forgetting about hostages.
  • For the sin of bowing to the UN as if it were Sinai.
  • For the sin of letting the Temple Mount be ruled by fear.
  • For the sin of not buying Israeli products.
  • For the sin of treating Israel as a vestigial organ.
  • For the sin of confusing moral clarity with extremism.
  • For the sin of excusing “Free Palestine” as anything other than a call for dead Jews.
  • For the sin of treating Jewish sovereignty as negotiable.

Against the Nations

  • For the sin of mourning terrorists more than their victims.
  • For the sin of pretending the war from the Global South is only about the land of Israel when they make clear they are coming for America and Europe..
  • For the sin of classrooms that celebrate “resistance” with blood.
  • For the sin of treating the ICC as holy writ.
  • For the sin of UN resolutions drafted by dictators.
  • For the sin of excusing antisemitism as “anti-Zionism.”
  • For the sin of universities that protect bullies and shame Jews.
  • For the sin of liberal values that vanish when Jews need them.
  • For the sin of making free speech absolute — except for Jews.
  • For the sin of confusing neutrality with cowardice.

Against America

  • For the sin of laughing at assassination because of party labels.
  • For the sin of mobs deciding what is taught and what is erased.
  • For the sin of canceling decent teachers while tenuring radicals.
  • For the sin of treating violence as speech and speech as violence.
  • For the sin of replacing education with indoctrination.
  • For the sin of praising diversity while excluding Jews.
  • For the sin of thinking collapse only happens elsewhere.
  • For the sin of dividing every citizen into tribes.
  • For the sin of confusing patriotism with partisanship.
  • For the sin of handing microphones to those who despise us.

Against Ourselves Personally

  • For the sin of thinking binge-watching counts as Torah study.
  • For the sin of pretending podcasts make us learned.
  • For the sin of putting my dog on my lap at the Shabbat table.
  • For the sin of descending into a pursuit of immediate gratification.
  • For the sin of not prioritizing time with friends and family.
  • For the sin of still not calling our in-laws “Ma” and “Pa.”
  • For the sin of calling it a fast while sneaking coffee.
  • For the sin of turning Kiddush into a buffet strategy.
  • For the sin of watching dog videos in bed rather than talking to our spouses.
  • For the sin of leaving my sprinkler on over Shabbat.

And the Truly Absurd

  • For the sin of blowing the shofar as if it were a car alarm.
  • For the sin of fasting — but only until lunch.
  • For the sin of turning “Ashamnu” into a group karaoke session.
  • For the sin of posting “G’mar Chatimah Tovah” memes.
  • For the sin of making break-fast more important than the fast.
  • For the sin of asking if lox counts as repentance.
  • For the sin of using “teshuvah” as an excuse for procrastination.
  • For the sin of making this list too long — again.

For all these things, please pardon us

Performative Moral Kashrut

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When I was a kid, before every supermarket aisle was filled with OU symbols, you had to read the ingredients yourself. That’s how you figured out whether something was kosher. No stamp, no shortcut. You made your own call with the information at hand.

It wasn’t perfect but that training carried over to how I learned to read the news. You didn’t wait for someone in authority to tell you what was moral. You read, you weighed, you judged.

After the October 7 Gazans’ slaughter in Israel, non-Orthodox denominations—the same ones least interested in kosher certification—raced to the presses with appeals for peace on both sides and declarations of shared mourning. The Orthodox world stayed largely quiet.

Then in August 2025, Open Orthodox rabbis decided they, too, needed to weigh in, well after Hamas and its allies had been trounced. Their letter condemned Hamas’s atrocities, but it quickly shifted its focus. Israel, they argued, bore moral responsibility for not providing enough food to Gazans and for Jewish violence in the West Bank.

The reaction was swift. The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing a more traditional Orthodox camp, branded the letter a distortion. They accused the signatories of ignoring critical facts, downplaying Hamas’s genocidal intent, and amplifying Jewish sins while minimizing Islamist terror. In other words, the Open Orthodox letter was stamped “Not Kosher.”

But step back for a moment and ask the obvious: who exactly are these letters for? Are the rabbis addressing their own congregants and communities, who look to them for guidance in halacha, prayer, and Jewish life? Are they trying to lecture the Israeli cabinet, which is fighting an existential war 6,000 miles away? Are they speaking to the American press and social media audience, where the concern is whether they will be judged as sufficiently “balanced” or critical? Or do they believe they are the modern equivalent of biblical prophets keeping Jewish kings in check?

The truth is that no single voice speaks for the Jews. And if you want serious political analysis, rabbis are not the address. They are trained to decide what happens when your meat knife slices into a piece of cheese—not how to conduct a multi-front war. When the OU stamps a product, it’s because real diligence has been done: site visits, lab tests, ingredient tracing. When rabbis stamp foreign policy with a moral hechsher, it’s about as kosher as Zabar’s selling ham on Chanukah.

Meanwhile, rabbis are getting urgent war-related questions. Not about ceasefires or humanitarian corridors—but about how to bury a soldier whose body isn’t recovered, or what obligations a spouse has when the other is on the front line, or how to mourn when half a community is shattered. Those questions are answered the traditional way: discreetly, privately, and halachically. That is moral clarity.

Open letters, by contrast, are performative. Nobody asked these rabbis to issue a ruling on how the IDF fights its battles. If anyone had, the question and answer would have been private, rooted in Torah and respect. To publish sweeping pronouncements in American media isn’t moral clarity—it’s moral vanity. It attempts to signal superiority over the very people fighting and dying, while feeding the antisemitic bonfire already raging online.

That may be the point. To profess innocence now that certain lines have been crossed, to posture publicly so that no one can accuse you of silence. But make no mistake: this is not Torah. It is branding.

Moral clarity means living the values you preach and answering the hard questions your people actually ask. It does not mean stamping your moral logo on a war you neither fight nor fully understand.

The Disturbing Difference Between Weaponizing Racism and Weaponizing Antisemitism

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When liberals talk about “weaponizing racism,” the meaning is clear. Think of the infamous cases where white people call the police on Black people for doing something perfectly innocuous — selling water, birdwatching, sitting in a Starbucks. The very act of dialing 911 becomes a way to make Black people feel more vulnerable, more over-policed, more endangered. Racism is real in this framing, and its “weaponization” is a way of worsening the problem, inflicting still more harm on those already marginalized.

But when it comes to antisemitism, the logic gets flipped on its head. When Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) or campus activists talk about “weaponizing antisemitism,” they don’t mean that Jews are made more vulnerable. They mean the accusation of antisemitism is being used to silence critics of Israel or chill free speech. In this version, the harm is not what antisemitism does to Jews — but what claims of antisemitism do to non-Jews.

December 4, 2023 debate about “weaponizing antisemitism” on the House floor

That’s a disturbing asymmetry. With racism, the victim is always centered: racism exists, and its weaponization compounds the pain. With antisemitism, the victim disappears entirely: antisemitism itself is treated as unreal, and Jews are recast as the aggressors who manipulate charges of antisemitism for their own gain.

That’s not just dismissive. It’s antisemitism squared: denying the reality of antisemitism, while simultaneously vilifying Jews as powerful, conniving actors who exploit victimhood to harm others. It erases Jewish vulnerability, erases Jewish history, and turns the victims into villains.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal slams Israel as racist state June 2023, accuses Republicans of weaponizing antisemitism in May 2024

The result is a discourse where every minority group is believed about its pain — except Jews. For everyone else, weaponization highlights their marginalization. For Jews, weaponization supposedly proves their power. That isn’t a progressive double standard. It’s an old antisemitic one, dressed up in new language.