Tag Archives: antisemitism

New York Times Shows How To Mainstream Antisemitism

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Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, wrote a piece called “How Israel Lost America,” which made it sound like a country actively did something to turn Americans on it. She wrote:

“Conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them.”

Pause there.

The claim that Israel manipulates America into war is not new. It echoes dual loyalty accusations against Jews who support Israel. It echoes the suspicion of hidden influence. It echoes the charge that Jews entangle great powers in foreign conflicts.

To say such conspiracies will flourish is observation.
To say they contain “a grain of truth” is validation.

That sentence does not merely predict antisemitic rhetoric. It lends it credibility.

The column builds toward that moment.

Goldberg wrote:

“Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.”

Israel behaves appallingly – seemingly against America’s values and/or interests – and then pulls out the antisemitism card to try to silence critics, and that combination arms the Jew haters.

The causal arrow points away from the antisemite and toward the Jewish state. Hatred becomes consequence. Antisemitism becomes reaction. And it becomes so, because Israel itself decided to flag it, not the Jew hater.

To give credence to her theory, Goldberg quotes Jeremy Ben-Ami of the left-wing group J Street, warning of “blowback” when antisemitism is invoked in political disputes:

“You’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

Again, antisemitism is framed as backlash. The focus shifts from the existence of anti-Jewish hostility to whether Jews and Israel are provoking it.

Layer these claims together and the pattern emerges:

Israel behaves badly.
Antisemitism claims are overused.
Blowback follows.
Conspiracies flourish.
There is “a grain of truth.”

The article never touches upon the truth of Gazans slaughtering Jews. The column doesn’t write about the antisemitic genocidal Hamas Charter. Goldberg doesn’t discuss the anti-Israel mobs in America celebrating the slaughter of elderly Jews, raping of Jewish women, and the burning of Jewish families alive. Other than to validate their feelings.

But the most consequential move in the column is quieter.

Israelis are discussed in ways readers instinctively map onto Jews. Israeli Arabs are transformed into “Israel’s Palestinian citizenry”, separating them rhetorically from the category of “Israelis.” Roughly a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, yet that demographic fact disappears from the frame. Israeli Arabs are no longer part of the “Israel” that is “losing America” because they are really part of the counterparty in the war. That means that only Israeli Jews are the problem. The contrast is especially stark as the world cannot conceive of a “Palestinian Jew.”

The result is a subtle transformation. The conflict shifts from a dispute between a sovereign state (Israel) and a national movement (Stateless Arabs from Palestine, SAPs, seeking a new state) into something older and more volatile: Jews versus non-Jews in the Middle East.

Once that transformation occurs, every Israeli policy becomes Jewish policy. Every American alignment becomes Jewish influence. The state and the people fuse.

Now return to the “grain of truth.”

If Israel has already been rhetorically collapsed into Jews, then the suggestion that conspiracies about Israeli manipulation contain truth does not land on a neutral government. It lands on a people historically accused of secret power.

This is how respectable language normalizes ancient suspicions. The words are measured. The tone is analytic. The effect is corrosive.

Criticizing Netanyahu is legitimate. Opposing war is legitimate. Debating American foreign policy is legitimate. People do it all of the time about leaders and policy for all countries all over the world.

Yet people don’t turn the vile behavior of Iran into criticism of all Muslims. People don’t say Catholics run the drug cartels of Colombia, where a greater percentage of the country is Catholic than Israel is Jewish. People do not make people of faith the subject, unless it’s Jews.

Framing antisemitism as a foreseeable reaction to Israel’s – which we are informed should be read as “Jews'” – conduct while granting partial legitimacy to manipulation conspiracies crosses a line. And it leads to a public that no longer wants to combat antisemitism, as it has become conditioned to rationalize the ancient hatred.

The Long Shadow of 1492

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In a sharp escalation of transatlantic tensions, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States will “cut off all trade with Spain”, publicly castigating the Spanish government for refusing to allow U.S. military bases on its soil to be used in operations linked to strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran and for what he termed Spain’s failure to contribute sufficiently to NATO defense spending. Trump declared that he “doesn’t want anything to do with Spain,” framing the dispute as a response to Madrid’s resistance to what he described as confronting evil in the Middle East and paying its fair share for collective defense. 

What follows is not about this immediate crisis. It’s about deeper historical currents that help explain some of the underlying dynamics in Spanish public life that stretch back to the fifteenth century and still matter today.

In Western Europe outside Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, the two countries with the smallest Jewish presence relative to population are Spain and Portugal (about 0.02% of each countries’ overall populations).

That is not a statistical curiosity. It is a civilizational fact.

Five centuries ago, the Iberian Peninsula expelled its Jews. What had been one of the great centers of Jewish life vanished over a five and a half year short window. The Alhambra Decree in 1492 ordered practicing Jews out of Spain. Portugal followed with forced conversions and the Inquisition. Open Jewish life disappeared. What had been woven into the intellectual, commercial, and spiritual fabric of the peninsula was purged.

And it stayed removed.

Unlike other parts of Western Europe where Jewish communities, even after catastrophe, remained visible and rebuilt, Iberia entered the modern era with almost no Jews at all. Medieval synagogues became churches, then museums. Sephardic music became heritage. Jewish quarters became tourist sites. The living community remained tiny.

Fast forward to the present.

In Spain, large protests erupt over the Israeli-Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) conflict. Municipal councils pass symbolic measures aligned with boycotts. Parliament debates recognition of Palestine. Streets fill with Palestinian flags while graffiti targets Israel.

Anti-Israel graffiti on Barcelona street in March 2026 (photo: First One Through)

In Portugal, while public demonstrations are generally smaller, political and diplomatic critiques of Israeli policy align with broader European debates.

And yet.

There are no comparable national protest cultures around Sudan. No sustained marches over Somalia. No municipal votes over Afghanistan. Iran’s repression and mass slaughter of its citizens cannot find a sympathetic voice in Iberian plazas, and the Rohingya tragedy never became a regular mobilizing cause.

The difference is not just geopolitical proximity or media cycles. It is structural.

Germany, by contrast, carries the Holocaust in living memory. Its leaders speak of Israel’s security as part of state responsibility. Jewish life is visible, rebuilt, acknowledged. The past is recent enough to shape policy language. The moral vocabulary is immediate.

Spain does not carry that twentieth-century reckoning. Its rupture with Jewish life occurred in 1492, so there is no generational memory of deportation trains. The story of Jews is medieval, not modern.

When a society has lived five hundred years without Jews, when Jewish presence is primarily historical exhibit rather than daily reality, does Israel become easier to turn into abstraction? Does outrage attach more easily to a distant Jewish state when there is little lived Jewish experience at home?

Or is it even worse than detachment?

A peninsula that removed its Jews in the fifteenth century now hosts some of the smallest Jewish communities in Western Europe, public squares with the most intensely anti-Israel protests, and a government unwilling to mobilize in the slightest manner to defang the leading state sponsor of terror, especially against Jews.

Five centuries is not only long enough for history to fade; it is long enough for it to harden into culture.

The Third Type of Israeli For Diaspora Jewry

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Since October 7, diaspora Jews have met three types of Israelis: traumatized, empowered and lonely.

The traumatized arrive as witnesses.
The empowered arrive as proof of resilience.
The third variety is one of performance – asked to explain a country while still trying to understand their own experience.

In Jewish communities, the first narrative is familiar. Israelis describe rupture.

October 7.
The hostages.
Reserve duty.
Funerals.
The knowledge that Iran sits behind the horizon.

This is testimony. The Israeli leaves seen as wounded.

A second narrative follows.

Israel adapted.
The army responded.
The economy continues.
Restaurants are full.
Startups are built.

This story stabilizes the room. The Israeli leaves seen as resilient.

Between these narratives lives daily life.

Relief and dread coexist.
Normal life returns without feeling normal.
Laughter sits beside background tension.

Public conversation prefers clarity. Experience offers contradiction.

So Israelis adapt to the room.

They speak trauma when trauma is needed.
They speak strength when reassurance is needed.
They translate Israel in real time.

The performance is neither optimism nor trauma.
But it is performance, a derivative removed from feelings.

Psychology defines loneliness as the gap between experience and recognition, not the number of relationships. This is emotional loneliness – social connection without feeling fully known.

A related idea is self-discrepancy, the distance between lived reality and presented identity. When that distance persists, people function well while feeling internally unseen.

Connection forms around the role while the person remains partially hidden.

Diaspora encounters intensify this.

Israelis become representatives of war, resilience, survival. Conversation pulls toward clarity. Ambiguity has little space.

So ambiguity moves inward.

This produces what researchers describe as invisible loneliness: being embedded in strong relationships yet recognized mainly through narrative.

Outwardly, this looks normal.

Travel resumes.
Humor returns.
Good news is shared.
Life is described as continuing.

Much of this is regulation.

Many Israelis instinctively manage diaspora anxiety: softening uncertainty, emphasizing stability, offering reassurance before they fully feel it.

People compress their own ambiguity to protect others. Emotional labor strengthens connection while quietly increasing distance.

The loneliness that follows is subtle.

These Israelis are seen as strong and seen as wounded, but rarely seen as both at once. Explanation is recognized faster than contradiction.

Fluency becomes the demanded role.

But that fluency creates distance.

The most adaptive Israelis can tell every story correctly. They sense what the room needs and provide it. They move between testimony and reassurance without hesitation.

This is competence. And compression.

At home, without an audience, the unperformed experience lives: pride and exhaustion, relief and uncertainty, normal life alongside persistent tension.

Psychology frames this as the cost of sustained self-discrepancy: the larger the gap between experienced reality and presented reality, the greater the risk of loneliness inside connection.

Diaspora Jews are not doing something wrong and Israelis are not being inauthentic. This is what prolonged uncertainty does when communities need clarity.

Narratives travel easily. Complexity moves slowly.

The role of the Israeli has become easier to understand than the experience of being Israeli. Can diaspora Jewry enable them to feel truly connected simply by listening, or does the off-ramp from loneliness require sharing the barrage of antisemitism in their own daily lives.

Berlin 1936: When Racism and Antisemitism Shared the Track

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The story of the 1936 Summer Olympics is usually told as a duel between tyranny and talent.

  • Adolf Hitler builds a showcase for Aryan supremacy.
  • Jesse Owens wins four gold medals.
  • The German hateful ideology collapses.

But Berlin was more complicated. The Games revealed two prejudices at once: Nazi racial doctrine and American racism and antisemitism. While very different in scale and intensity, both were present on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two Jewish-American sprinters – Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller – were expected to run the 4×100 relay. Yet hours before the race, they were removed from the lineup and replaced by Owens and Ralph Metcalfe.

Glickman (left) and Stoller train aboard the ship Manhattan on their way to Berlin. July 1936.
—USHMM #21725/Courtesy of Marty Glickman

The official explanation was tactical: field the fastest possible team. The United States won gold in world-record time.

Yet the context was unavoidable. Glickman and Stoller were the only two Jewish runners on the U.S. track squad. Nazi Germany had already stripped Jewish athletes of meaningful participation. Their removal ensured that no Jewish athlete would stand on the Berlin track podium.

Glickman later said:

“I’ve always believed that we were taken off the relay team because we were Jews.”

Stoller observed:

“The only two Jews on the team were replaced.”

No archival proof confirms American coordination with Nazi officials. But antisemitism did not need a written agreement to operate. In the 1930s, American universities maintained Jewish quotas. Elite institutions limited Jewish membership. Prejudice was structural, even if unofficial.

Berlin exposed it.

Owens and Segregated America

Owens’ victories shattered Nazi racial mythology in the stadium but did not dissolve racial barriers in America.

The popular tale claims Hitler snubbed Owens. Owens himself redirected the accusation:

“Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president [Franklin D. Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

Owens continued:

“I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.”

And when he returned home:

“After those stories about Hitler snubbing me, I had to live under segregation.”

In Berlin, Owens stayed in the same hotel as white teammates. In parts of the United States, he entered through separate doors.

Two Systems, One Lesson

Nazi Germany codified antisemitism and racism into law and would soon escalate that hatred into genocide. While the United States did not operate extermination camps, it did operate segregated schools, restricted neighborhoods, Jewish quotas, and closed clubs.

The differences in scale and brutality were enormous. The presence of prejudice in both societies was real.

One of those hatreds remains embedded in American history, while the other has been buried.

The common narrative that Owens and Team America gave a big middle finger to Hitler’s Germany in the 1936 Olympics by showcasing Black talent is incomplete. In many ways, the real lasting insult and pain was to Jews, not Nazis.

First Comes the Word “Enemy”

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In November 1943, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to Haj Amin al-Husseini on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

He wrote of a “shared recognition of the enemy” and “the joint fight against it.”

“The enemy” meant world Jewry.

That phrasing did real work. It turned a people into a threat. Once Jews were cast as a civilizational danger – “Jewish invaders” – their removal became a duty. Vocabulary cleared the ground and policy followed. Then came the machinery.

This is how collective persecution begins: define a group as the problem.

Eighty years later, the same grammar keeps resurfacing.

In Doha, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, used the phrase “common enemy” to describe Israel. The target was the world’s only Jewish state. The effect was to cast Jewish sovereignty itself as something humanity must oppose.

That language strips legitimacy and treats existence as offense. It moves from argument to exclusion with the implied goal of eradication.

The pattern appears in American activism as well. Speaking at a conference hosted by American Muslims for Palestine, Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations urged audiences to “oppose the polite Zionists too,” grouping mainstream Jewish institutions — synagogues, federations, Hillel chapters, civil-rights groups — into the camp of adversaries, “they are your enemies.”

The construction never changes.

Nazi Himmler: Jews are the common enemy.
CAIR Billoo: Zionists are the enemy.
UN Albanese: Israel is the common enemy.

Different decades. Different accents. Identical structure.

Demonization targets identity. Once identity becomes the indictment, anything feels justified and the line between debate and dehumanization disappears.

After World War II, the human-rights system was built to prevent precisely this logic — the idea that an entire people could be pushed outside the moral community. Yet the vocabulary has returned, polished and respectable, spoken from podiums that claim the language of justice.

When the Nazis called Jews “the enemy,” the world should have drawn the line right there. No conferences. No nuance. No excuses. Anyone who speaks that way disqualifies themselves.

That same rule applies now.

Human-rights officials who talk like antisemitic propagandists should lose their mandates. Activists who label Jews the enemy lose the claim to civil-rights leadership positions. Institutions that tolerate this language lose credibility.

The mob put a yellow Jewish Star on Jews 80 years ago and told everyone that they are the enemy. The mob is labelling Jews as Zionists today and doing the same. We shouldn’t pause to take action, if “never again” means anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not rhetorical drift. It is doctrine.

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

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

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

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

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

So the motive is omitted.

Aftermath of Jews slaughtered in synagogue

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

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

The Western Intersection and Direction of Antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

Then I drove away and forgot him.

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

But imagine if he did.

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

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

Apply this to western antisemitism.

The Mechanism

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

From there, the sequence is almost mechanical:

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

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

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

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

Why Pride Isn’t Enough

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

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

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

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

Where the Real Battle Is: Public Schools

Street hate is episodic. Institutional formation is durable.

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

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

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

A new syllabus needs to be established.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISGAP March 2025 report

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments by al-Tayeb in November 2011

This is the peace the UN now celebrates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, holocaust remembrance evaporates overnight.

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

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

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

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

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

This was not restraint. It was a choice.

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

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

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

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

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

But silence is not passive. It is editorial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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