Intent and Action: Jacob, Cain, and the Burning Question of Worthy Offerings

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From the earliest chapters of the Hebrew Bible, we encounter a recurring theme: human beings trying to reach God through offerings. Noah offers thanks after the flood (Genesis 8:20–21). Abraham builds altars wherever he senses God’s presence (Genesis 12:7–8, 13:18). And in the first tragic sibling story, Cain and Abel each bring a gift to God—hoping to be seen, heard, loved (Genesis 4:3–5).

The Torah gives us the parameters of worthiness: a true offering rises.

Abel’s gift from the firstlings of his flock is accepted—traditionally understood as being consumed in heavenly fire (Genesis 4:4). It ascends upward like smoke from a perfectly tended sacrifice. Cain’s offering—of lesser quality—remains inert. No ascent. No connection. It is not merely ignored; it is a theological dead end, carrying the terror that one’s prayers may not only go unanswered, but may reflect back one’s own internal inadequacy.

That anxiety, that existential dread, echoes generations later across the Parshas of  Toldot and VaYeytze.

Isaac’s Consuming Blessing

Jacob, urged by his mother, disguises himself as Esau in an elaborate plan to secure Isaac’s blessing (Genesis 27:6–29). Isaac eats the carefully prepared meal and, in a moment echoing the sacrificial imagery of Cain and Abel, pours out a blessing so full that when Esau arrives moments later, Isaac declares he has nothing left (Genesis 27:33–36). It was an all-consuming offering. Nothing remains.

Esau’s reaction mirrors Cain’s ancient rage. Spurned, overshadowed, convinced the divine pipeline has bypassed him, Esau vows murder (Genesis 27:41). The pattern repeats: the rejected one turns violent against the brother whose offering has “risen.”

Jacob’s Panic: A Blessing Built on Lies?

And so Jacob flees at his mother’s urging – that same person who had directed him deceive his father. Jacob runs both from Esau’s wrath and from the unbearable question gnawing at his soul (Genesis 27:42–45).

Was his mother’s plan a failure?
Did he truly deserve his father’s blessing?
Was it legitimate if it was obtained through deception?
Was he the new Abel—accepted and uplifted—or Cain, offering something that looked fine on the outside but was internally rotten?

Jacob had already exploited Esau’s hunger to purchase the birthright (Genesis 25:29–34), then deceived his own blind father to secure the blessing (Genesis 27:15–23). He must have wondered whether the blessings he secured, built on trickery, would end like an unburnt sacrifice—never rising, never accepted, destined to collapse under their own falsehood. Perhaps this moment was not a perfect echo of the sacrifices to God by Cain, but marked by the intentions and actions between people, with the uncertainties and fragility such interactions forever carry.

Was Isaac’s blessing a dead letter?

The Ladder: When Heaven Answers the Question

Then comes the dream at Bethel.

A ladder planted on earth, its top reaching into the heavens, with angels ascending and descending (Genesis 28:12). A strange image on its face. Many divine characters at a single time and place, moving in remarkable choreography.

The angels rising—those are the offerings, the intentions, the gifts Jacob has made, confused and imperfect though they may be. They ascend like the smoke of Abel’s sacrifice. And the very same angels descend—carrying blessing back down. Not new angels. The same ones. The same act, the same intention, returning in kind.

This is the divine reply Jacob so desperately needed:
Your offering was accepted. Your intent was seen. Your blessing stands.

Marc Chagall’s Jacob’s Ladder (1973)

Jacob Wakes with Calm

Jacob awakens transformed: relieved, inspired, grounded (Genesis 28:16–17). He WAS afraid. No longer. He understands the dream not as a prophecy of future events but as confirmation that his past actions—flawed in execution but upright in intention—had been received as a worthy offering.

So Jacob does what his ancestors always did in moments of divine clarity: he offers something back to God, establishing that site as sacred and vowing a vow of service and eternal charity (Genesis 28:18–22).

The Lesson: Intent Rises

The Torah’s message from Cain to Jacob is not that action is irrelevant. Far from it. But action without intention is inert—like Cain’s cold, unrisen offering. Intention, even wrapped in human imperfection, can ascend and draw God’s response.

Jacob’s ladder teaches that what rises from the heart returns as blessing. The smoke goes up; the angels come down. The offering is accepted; the blessing is confirmed.

Intent and action. Purity and performance.
That is the spiritual physics the Torah reveals—first in a field with two brothers, and then on a lonely night with a frightened man who finally learns he is worthy.

The Prophetic Bird Of The Holy Land

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Israel’s national bird is not the mighty eagle or the muscular vulture which many countries select. It is not a predator circling above the desert in effortless dominance. Instead, Israelis chose a small, cinnamon-colored creature with a zebra crown — the hoopoe.

The hoopoe going for a walk in Israel (photo: FirstOneThrough)

The hoopoe is striking without being fearsome, regal without being tyrannical. Its crest rises like a tiny crown, not in arrogance but in alertness. Its quiet confidence is perhaps the most Israeli trait of all.

Ancient Jewish texts and Middle Eastern folklore saw in the hoopoe a messenger of wisdom. King Solomon, in one Midrash, learns from the bird’s insight. In Islamic tradition, it is the hoopoe who spots the Kingdom of Sheba and brings word of distant realms. Small in stature, large in perception — the bird was never the warrior; it was the one who saw.

And in that, too, there is something deeply familiar. Israel has always survived less by size than by awareness, less by brawn than by vigilance. The hoopoe does not conquer terrain; it adapts to it. It finds food in the hardest soil. It endures heat and drought. It survives because it is resourceful, not ruthless.

It is also fiercely protective through a strange biological ingenuity. When predators threaten its nest, the hoopoe emits a foul-smelling secretion that drives them away. It is a defense born of determination: My family will not be harmed.

That combination — gentle but unyielding, peaceful but protective — resonated in the public vote that crowned it Israel’s national bird in 2008. Israelis did not choose a symbol of domination. They chose one of resilience, devotion, and wisdom. They chose a creature that guards life rather than takes it.

Israel didn’t know in 2008, when it voted for the hoopoe, that Hamas would launch war after war with openly genocidal intent. It didn’t know that October skies would fill with rockets, or that invasions, massacres, and kidnappings would carve themselves into the national psyche. But the country understood something deeper — that, like the hoopoe, it would have to adapt to danger, live alert, and protect its family with whatever tools it had.

A small bird in a vast desert landscape.
A small country in a vast expanse of Arab and Muslim nations.

The hoopoe survives not by dominating its predators, but by outsmarting them, outlasting them, and never abandoning its young. Israel, too, has learned to persist in a world that often misreads its vigilance as aggression and its survival instincts as provocation.

The national bird turned out to be prophetic.

Israel may be small, but like the hoopoe, it adapts, endures, and protects its own — even when surrounded, even when threatened, even when the world insists it should fold its wings and pretend it is safe.

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 Polite Jihadist

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Zahra Billoo of CAIR once warned American Muslims to beware of “polite Zionists.” People who show up at interfaith events, bake challah with their neighbors, and fight for civil rights—but who, she insists, cannot be trusted because they believe Jews have a right to live and pray in their ancestral homeland. That was her definition of danger: Jews who smile, volunteer, and advocate for coexistence, but who also believe Israel has a right to exist. They are your “enemies.”

It was an extraordinary moment of inversion. The Jewish community—disproportionately involved in interfaith coalitions, civil-rights causes, racial-justice marches, refugee aid, and social-service work—was cast as a threat not for what it does, but for what it believes: that Jews, like any people, have the right to be sovereign in their own homeland. Billoo called that racism. And too many institutions nodded politely.

So it is fair to ask: Do Jews have to be wary of “polite jihadists”?

Smiling Zohran Mamdani

We are told by Muslim groups to fear polite Zionists, yet tiptoe around the reality of polite jihadists—individuals who wrap hard supremacist doctrines in soft rhetoric and a smile. People who reject violence in press releases but openly support ideologies that cast non-Muslims as infidels; who promote frameworks in which Jews and Christians may live only as tolerated second-class subjects (dhimmis) under Islamic rule; who embrace the idea that Islam should dominate the world, politically and spiritually; who speak of “justice,” but envision a future in which non-Muslims are either subordinate or erased.

These are not fringe concepts. They are hardwired into the foundational texts and invoked by extremists to justify their worldview. And while many American Muslims reject them entirely, groups like CAIR have repeatedly platformed leaders who traffic in these supremacist ideas—even while presenting themselves as civil-rights organizations.

If believing that Jews should be allowed to pray at their holiest site is “racist,” what is believing that Jews must never pray there at all?
If supporting Jewish sovereignty is “extremism,” what is supporting an ideology that grants Jews survival only as second-class subjects?

America has a long-standing standard for hate groups: organizations that demonize entire populations, promote supremacist ideologies, or justify violence or domination over others. The KKK fell into that category because it portrayed African Americans, Jews, and Catholics as existential threats who must be controlled, excluded, or eliminated.

What, then, do we do with organizations whose leaders insist that Jews who support Israel are untrustworthy; who describe the world in terms of Muslim purity versus Zionist contamination; who excuse jihadist violence as “resistance”; who call Jewish self-determination a racist ideology; who propagate doctrines in which non-Muslims must accept inferiority or die?

Is that not the definition of a hate ideology?

The United States is finally on the cusp of declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. It is long overdue, an action which many Muslim-majority countries have taken.

But what about CAIR?

CAIR is invited into coalitions, corporate trainings, universities, government initiatives, and interfaith events—despite leadership that routinely defames Jews and normalizes Islamist supremacy. If the KKK wrapped itself in the language of “civil rights,” it would still be disqualified. Supremacy does not become acceptable because it quotes scripture or wears a suit.

The polite jihadist is far more dangerous than the polite Zionist—because one seeks coexistence, while the other seeks dominance.

America needs to stop pretending it cannot tell the difference.

Western Zealots for ISIS and Palestine

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A decade ago, hundreds of Westerners streamed out of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Minneapolis, and Columbus to join the Islamic State. They weren’t merely curious spectators of a dark movement; they were converts to a brutal faith of fire. They thrilled at ISIS videos of men burned alive in cages, heads severed on sand, and ancient cities razed under the banner of the Caliphate. Entire families—women and children included—picked up and moved to Syria and Iraq to participate in the dream of a world purged of infidels. Many never returned.

Islamic radicals of ISIS slaughtering people

Today they don’t need to leave home.

The same ideological impulse that carried them to Raqqa now drives attacks on local Jews down the street—in schools, synagogues, coffee shops, and commuter trains. Radical jihadism has simply switched labels: from “ISIS” to “Palestine,” from “Caliphate” to “Resistance,” from overt barbarism to the socially-acceptable pose of “solidarity.” The mission is unchanged. Only the hashtags are new.

And while Western governments once scrambled to stop teenagers from boarding flights to Turkey, today they barely raise an eyebrow as mobs chant for Jewish death on college campuses and in city plazas. Police departments treat the threat as “protected speech” until someone lights the match or pulls the trigger. Surveillance of Jews hems closer, but nothing stops the expanding radical ranks of those who have found a new, easier battlefield: Western cities themselves.

The goal remains constant—burn down the old society and replace it with the black-green flag of radical Islam. In the Middle East, ISIS tried to seize territory. In the West, its ideological descendants aim to seize the streets, the discourse, and the public square.

The West fought—haltingly—to slow ISIS’s spread in Iraq and Syria. But it is utterly unprepared to confront the same doctrine as it metastasizes in Africa, online, and now in its own neighborhoods. European governments write reports; American politicians hold hearings; academics write tortured essays parsing the “legitimate grievances” of those calling for slaughter.

Only one country behaves as if the threat is real. Israel fights it directly, understanding the battle as existential rather than theoretical. Israelis have seen what happens when radical jihadists gather strength: they massacre civilians, rape women, burn communities, and boast about it online.

But the West still imagines that it can appease the ideology, contain it, or reinterpret it as a civil-rights movement. In certain cities, it is preparing to forfeit its Jews first—sacrificing them to buy temporary calm—while missing the larger reality that the same forces aiming at Jews today aim at the entire Western democratic structure tomorrow.

Societies do not collapse in a single moment. They erode from below, from the foundations. And those foundations—rule of law, minority protection, civic trust, freedom of worship, the very idea of objective truth—are already cracking as the zealots find new targets and new excuses.

The West destroyed the physical caliphate. It never touched the ideological one, the one which drew warriors from its own streets.

Now the jihad is local.

UNRWA Now is For ALL Arabs

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The United Nations has now openly confirmed what critics long understood: UNRWA isn’t an agency for a specific class of 1948 refugees—it exists for ALL Palestinian Arabs.

In a recent statement, the UN described UNRWA as essential for “millions of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees,” collapsing even the agency’s own elastic definition. The distinction has vanished. The entire population is the constituency.

UN admits that UNRWA is “irreplaceable lifeline” for every single Palestinian Arab.

This is a fundamental admission.
UNRWA was created in 1949 as temporary relief for Arabs – and only Arabs – displaced in a particular conflict. Twisted at its start, it has evolved into a hereditary, permanent system—unlike any refugee regime in the world—preserving grievance rather than enabling the “two state solution” the same UN purports to advance. Now the UN goes further, implying UNRWA’s mandate covers every Palestinian Arab regardless of any manufactured refugee criteria.

That is not humanitarian work. It is political infrastructure.

By broadening its mission to one entire group, the UN reveals UNRWA’s true function: a nation-building institution for Palestinians, not a neutral welfare agency. The “refugee” label is just a cudgel to wage war against the Jewish State.

The UN’s own wording now confirms that UNRWA is not designed to end a refugee situation; it is designed to expand it—to serve all Palestinian Arabs whether they fit the already-distorted definition or not.

A system once justified as emergency relief is a highly partisan political project.
And the UN has finally said so out loud.

The One State Hypocrisy

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Zohran Mamdani and his chorus of activists claim that the answer to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simple: one state in which everyone has “full and equal rights.” They pound the table with righteous fury, insisting that borders, ethnic divisions, and national identities melt away in a utopian civic democracy.

Fine. Let’s take them at their word.

If you truly believe in a one-state solution, then you must believe that Jews, like Arabs, have the right to live anywhere in that state. Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, Jerusalem’s Old City, Ramallah, Nablus, everywhere. That’s how equal rights work.
So why do the same people who chant “one state” turn around and scream “illegal settlers!” when Jews live or pray in places those protestors dislike?

They protested outside Park East Synagogue but deny Jews the right to live in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish homeland for 3,000 years. Either everyone gets equal rights everywhere, or you don’t believe in a one-state solution at all.

You can’t have it both ways.

The Temple Mount Test Case

If you want a perfect example of the hypocrisy, look up — literally — to the Temple Mount.

If you support one state where every citizen has equal rights, then you support Jews having the same rights as Muslims to: Visit their holiest site. Pray at their holiest site. Build a synagogue at their holiest site.
That is what equality means.

But the United Nations — which these same activists quote like scripture — demands the “status quo,” a euphemism for banning Jewish prayer on Judaism’s holiest ground. It is the only place on earth where Jews are legally prohibited from praying. The UN defends this discriminatory regime with fervor.

So which is it?
Is it a one-state democracy of full equality, or an international system that criminalizes Jewish religious rights because the Jordanian Waqf insists on it?

You cannot simultaneously denounce Jewish prayer as a provocation and claim to champion “equal rights for all.”

One State Means Equal Rights — For Jews Too

If Zohran Mamdani and his movement were intellectually honest, they would have to say:

  • Jews may live anywhere in the land
  • Jews may pray anywhere in the land
  • Jews may build synagogues anywhere in the land
  • Jews may return to their ancient homes — Hebron, Shiloh, the Old City of Jerusalem

Not one activist chanting for “full equality” will utter those words. Because their version of “one state” is equality for some and erasure for Jews.

Call it what it is.

You can’t claim a one-state solution while denying Jews the very rights you demand for others.

You can’t have it both ways.

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.

Guterres Sickening “Inspiration”

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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres crossed a moral line when he called Palestinian Arabs an “inspiration” and a model of “resilience” this week. Inspiring how? By the crowds who celebrated the October 7 massacre? By polls showing majorities still glorifying the murders of Israeli civilians? By a culture whose media, schools, and leaders reject coexistence and sanctify violence?

Statement by UNSG Guterres about Palestinian Arabs on November 18, 2025

Guterres didn’t qualify his praise. He erased the difference between the paltry few who seek peace and the dominant culture that cheers attacks on Jews. He took a society steeped in martyrdom worship and Jew-hatred — a culture that teaches children to dream of a land without Jews — and wrapped it in moral language.

That isn’t nuance. It’s whitewashing.

And the moral preening about UNRWA, the “irreplaceable lifeline for millions of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees“, which by his own admission is not just about an agency for descendants of displaced people from 75 years ago, but for ALL ARABS? That agency which was intimately engaged in fighting a war against Israel? He insists that the international “stand firmly” with the agency which fosters the violence and perpetual state of war?

Guterres has dignified the ideology that drives repeated attacks on Israeli families. He has signaled to the world that Jewish suffering is incidental, and Palestinian rejectionism is to be emulated.

If the Secretary-General looks at a society that celebrates slaughter and sees “a testament to the human spirit”, what won’t he excuse next?

It’s time for moral clarity. If Hamas supporters chant, “There is only one solution! Intifada Revolution!’— then outside the UN, people should gather in front of the campus with the truth:

“There is only one response — eradication of Hamas!”

Peace will never come from praising a culture of violence. Only from defeating it.

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