Tag Archives: antisemitism

Free Speech Is Not on Trial. Antisemitism Is.

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Every time antisemitism is called out on the left, the same dodge appears on cue:
“It’s just free speech.”

That response is not a defense. It is a red herring.

No one is arguing that anti-Israel speech is illegal. Under American law, almost nothing is. You can shout racist slogans. You can be misogynistic. You can mock religions. You can hold a Draw Muhammad contest outside a mosque. You can call for the destruction of a country. You can deny a people’s history.

All of that is protected speech. That has never been the question.

The question is what that speech is.

And much of what now passes as “anti-Israel discourse” is not political critique at all. It is hate speech, clearly, historically, and deliberately so.

Calling for the destruction of the Jewish State is not foreign policy analysis.
Denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not academic debate.
Declaring that Jews alone have no right to national self-determination is not progressive politics.
Passing a law that Jews cannot live somewhere and cannot pray at their holiest location is not a free exchange of ideas.

It is the application of a single moral standard to one people — and only one people — that says: you do not belong anywhere.

It is naked antisemitism.

Organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime and Palestine Youth Movement are not tolerating this rhetoric. They are chanting it, platforming it, amplifying it, and treating it as virtuous. They deny Jewish peoplehood, erase Jewish indigeneity, excuse violence against Jewish civilians, and then insist this is nothing more than robust debate.

It is not.

It is hate speech — even if the Constitution protects the right to utter it.

And then there is Zohran Mamdani, who embodies the selective blindness at the heart of this moment. No serious person believes he would tolerate a mass of protesters outside mosques depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, screaming at Muslims as they enter prayer. That would be — correctly — labeled Islamophobia, regardless of whether it was technically legal.

Yet Mamdani casually removed buffer zones around entrances to synagogues, insuring his excited comrades can yell epithets at Jews.

When Jewish institutions are targeted, when synagogues are surrounded, when Jewish national identity is declared illegitimate, the alt-left response suddenly becomes procedural: free speech.

Free speech does not launder bigotry. The First Amendment protects the right to speak; it does not cleanse the moral content of what is said. When people accuse Mamdani and the DSA of promoting Jew-hatred, they are not confused about constitutional law. They are describing the reality of ingrained Jew hatred.

“Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, July 2019

Invoking free speech is an evasion. A way to avoid responsibility while continuing to normalize ideas that would be instantly condemned if aimed at any other minority.

The tragedy – and fear – is that liberals understand this perfectly well in every other context. They simply refuse to apply it to Jews. Or at least, when uttered by a community of preference, Muslims.

Free speech is not on trial, do not be confused by the misdirection. Antisemitism is, and it is winning.

The Golem of New York City

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In the legends of Prague, the Golem came into being when civic order failed Jews in predictable ways. Blood libels circulated, crowds gathered, and authorities hesitated at the decisive moment. Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (c.1512-1609), recognized the pattern. He shaped a human form from the mud of the Vltava River—from the city itself—and animated it with sacred words. The choice of material mattered. The defender of Jews was made from the ground beneath their feet. Even if the city’s leaders would not protect Jews, the city itself would.

The Golem patrolled the Jewish quarter, broke the rhythm of violence, and restored deterrence. When the danger passed, it was deactivated and laid to rest in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the Altneuschul. The legend recorded a hard truth: when the state falters, protection is improvised; when the state recovers, emergency power sleeps.

Altneuschul in Prague (photo: First One Through)

That memory traveled.

The melody of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish State of Israel, traces back through the musical world of that same Prague river Vltava, famously shaped by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Exile and return share a river. The Golem embodies survival within exile; Zionism embodies the resolve to end exile. One guards a community where it stands, the other builds sovereignty so guarding becomes policy.

Yet the Golem never disappears. It waits for the moment when trust in authority thins again.

New York, Upper East Side

New York City holds one of the world’s largest and most visible Jewish populations. Jewish life here is open and proud. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions operate in public view, anchored by the assumption that their protection is a foundational duty of government.

That assumption has been tested.

On the Upper East Side in November 2025, an anti-Israel crowd swarmed a synagogue hosting a pro–Land of Israel event. The scene echoed an old shape: shouting at the doors of a Jewish house of worship, intimidation in a public park, the expectation that Jews would need to justify gathering openly as Jews. Instead of drawing a clear perimeter around the synagogue and condemning the mob, Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, scolded the shul for holding a Zionist event, shifting the burden of restraint onto the Jewish institution.

For Jews who carry history close, the signal was unmistakable. Cities fail their minorities first through language, then through hesitation, and only later through force. When the synagogue itself surrounded by an angry crowd is framed as the problem, safety has become conditional.

Conditional safety never endures.

How the Modern Golem Forms

The Golem of New York does not rise from clay. It forms from memory.

Private guards appear where confidence once lived. Volunteer patrols lengthen into the evening. Parents coordinate entrances and exits. Institutions harden quietly, without ceremony.

These are the incremental steps of adaptation. Communities organize when clarity blurs. Parallel systems take shape when weak reassurance yields to experience.

Other minority groups get municipal funding and public declarations of support while Jews are only lumped into a general “other” category, as in White Plains, the capital of Westchester County just north of New York City. Jews learn that they must fend for themselves, because their basic protection offends many. Frighteningly, even for local politicians.

On the Upper East Side, a growing and proudly Zionist congregation bears a name heavy with inheritance: Altneu Synagogue. Old–New. It is a spin-off of the Park East Synagogue where the anti-Israel mob harassed and intimidated Jews. The echo of Prague’s Altneuschul may also prove prescient. Old dangers return wearing contemporary language. Rivers change. Cities change. But the logic persists.

Natan Sharansky, a famous Russian “refusenik” who was jailed for years before being allowed to leave to Israel, knows the dangers of antisemitic regimes. He came to Washington, D.C. in November 2023 to address 300,000 people about the need to fight back: “We, together, will fight against those who try to give legitimacy to Hamas. We will fight for Israel. We will fight for every Jew. We will fight against antisemitism. We will fight for the values and against corruption of those values which are at the center of our Jewish identity and American identity.”

Sharansky is coming to New York in January, soon after Mamdani takes office. He should come to the Altneu Synagogue and help shape and awaken a modern Golem as Jewish security appears vulnerable, and the current leaders of Jewish institutions appear unable to rise to the moment. New, unconventional defenders need to assume roles.

For the moment, things may be OK. Mamdani appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a role she has had for several years. She is Jewish and no-nonsense leader, widely supported by the city’s Jewish community. If she can do her job without anti-Zionist and antisemitic politicians limiting her mandate, Jews will be fine. Otherwise, a new golem will rise in the New World, hundreds of years after the Golem of Prague went to sleep in the attic of the Altneuschul.

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

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

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

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

Consider the biblical figure Joseph.

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

Truthful or not, it was combustible.

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

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

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

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

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

So why does Joseph now speak with certainty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first creates enemies. The second creates leaders.

Truth, But Approach

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

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

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

You Can’t Launder Murder

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In October 2002, in a case before the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia did something characteristically disarming. In the middle of a commercial case—a dispute about representations, intent, and liability—he reached for an example so blunt that no one in the courtroom could miss the point.

“let’s assume that there is a Federal statute that makes discrimination because of, or failure to hire someone, or let’s say, let’s say killing someone solely because of his race a crime, a separate crime. And someone, let’s assume he kills someone who is Jewish, and he said, well, I didn’t kill him solely because he was Jewish; I killed him because I disagree with the policies of Israel. Does that get him out of the statute?” – Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia on October 8, 2002

The question was not theatrical. It was instructional.

Scalia was making a narrow, lawyerly point about intent laundering—the habit of rebranding a harmful act with a more palatable explanation after the fact. In commercial law, courts reject that move every day. You cannot sell a defective product and escape responsibility by calling the defect innovation. You cannot mislead customers and then claim a higher purpose. Labels don’t change outcomes; explanations don’t erase harm.

He chose that example because everyone understood it immediately. Not because it was exotic, but because it was familiar. People do, in fact, come for Jews with reasons. They always have. The reasons change; the target does not. That is why the hypothetical worked even in a commercial case. It required no ideological scaffolding, no speech doctrine, no moral hedging. The room got it.

Scalia wasn’t talking about protest or expression. He was reminding the Court that post-hoc justification does not transform reality. A Jew selected as a Jew remains a Jew, regardless of the banner the attacker waves. You cannot launder murder through geopolitics any more than you can launder fraud through branding.

What makes the moment unsettling two decades later is not that Scalia saw this clearly in 2002. It’s that today, society now pretends not to.

Today, the very maneuver Scalia identified is routinely indulged. Violence against Jews is reframed as politics. Targeting Jews is explained as resistance. The word “Israel” is treated as a solvent capable of dissolving antisemitism on contact. The act is dissected until the victim disappears into the explanation.

Scalia understood that this maneuver was not new. In the Middle Ages, it was radical preachers who performed the laundering. On Easter, from pulpits across Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christ, poisoning wells, murdering Christian babies. The charge was always moral, never personal. The violence that followed—pogroms, expulsions, massacres—was framed not as hatred, but as righteous response. The excuse sanctified the act. The victim was still Jewish.

“The crimes you are committing in Palestine by desecrating the sanctity of the holy sites – foremost among them the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque – you should expect reactions, not only from the Muslims, but rather from the entire world.” – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash on December 15, 2025 about the massacre of Jews in Sydney, Australia

The vocabulary has changed. The mechanism has not.

Today the laundering is done in different robes—through left-wing media narratives, academic language, teacher-union resolutions, and activist slogans. The Jewish state is branded unholy, colonial, imperial. Zionism is recast as original sin. Once that premise is accepted, Jews everywhere become legitimate stand-ins—symbols of something larger, targets by proxy. “Globalize the intifada” is not poetry. It is a call that travels, and it always knows where to land.

The laundering does not stop on the left. Figures like Candace Owens have vilified Jews across time itself—casting them as architects of the slave trade two centuries ago, as hidden hands behind modern social decay, as a people uniquely responsible for nearly every ill that can be stitched into a narrative. The effect is not historical inquiry; it is moral conditioning. When Jews are blamed for everything, they become appropriate targets for anything. The excuse differs. The permission is the same.

Candace Owens antisemitism reel by Canary Mission

This is why Scalia’s example mattered—and why he chose it so plainly. He knew that people come for Jews with reasons. He knew those reasons are never the point. And he assumed, reasonably at the time, that everyone else could still see the difference between explanation and absolution.

Decades later, that clarity is treated as controversial. Motives are said to cleanse acts. Ideology is said to transform targets. Murder is said to become discourse if the language is fashionable enough.

You can change the sermon.
You can update the slogans.
You can trade Easter blood libels for postcolonial theory.

But you cannot launder murder.

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

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

That reality is the reason the war has not ended.

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

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

And so the world fractures.

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

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

That is where sympathy collapses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not journalism. It is moral choreography.

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

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

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

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

Time to Say Goodbye, With Love and Sorrow

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I was sitting in the audience at an Andrea Bocelli concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the lights dimmed, the hall hushed in anticipation for the encore “Con Te Partiro,” (Time to Say Goodbye), his most iconic song. He teased the audience with “New York, New York” and headed for the exit once more. The crowd cheered and he came back to sing the song they craved.

Andrea Bocelli at Madison Square Garden (photo: First One Through)

Beside me sat a close Jewish friend who grew up in Australia. We had come for the music, for the beauty of a voice that carries memory as much as sound. Yet, as the first familiar notes rose, I saw her mind was in another world.

She was thinking of her parents and brother’s family back in Melbourne.

Only days earlier, they had been at a Chabad Chanukah party—children, candles, singing, the ordinary holiness of Jewish joy. Then the news broke of the shooting in Sydney. Phones buzzed. Conversations stopped. Parents gathered children closer. And out. What had begun as celebration turned into a flight of urgency. They left with the unmistakable instinct that something precious had become fragile. Perhaps lost.

As Bocelli sang of leaving—of standing alone and dreaming of the horizon—the words landed differently. “It’s time to say goodbye,” he sings, not with bitterness, but with ache. He sings of departing lands once fully lived in, of moving forward while carrying love along. The song understands that some goodbyes are spoken precisely because the bonds mattered.

Time to say goodbye
Countries I have never
Seen and experienced with you

Australia has been such a land for Jews. Around 115,000 strong, the community was built in large part by Holocaust survivors and their children, who arrived determined to create lives of dignity and contribution. They succeeded. Jewish schools flourished. Synagogues filled. Jewish families felt Australian in the fullest sense—rooted, confident, woven into the national fabric. It was a beloved home.

That is why this moment feels so melancholy.

When antisemitism intrudes into Jewish life—when Chanukah gatherings require calculation, when news of violence travels faster than reassurance—something internal shifts. Families begin to think not only about safety today, but about continuity tomorrow. They listen closely for the voice of government, for the firmness of protection, for the sense that Jewish life is fully defended. When that reassurance feels thin – no, absent – dark history whispers.

Yes, I know there is no light in a room when there is no sun
If you’re not there with me, with me

For two years my friend had been speaking to her parents and brother about leaving Australia as antisemitic incidents surged and the government seemed unwilling to do anything. Now, the threats had crossed to violence. Murder. On a mass scale.

At the concert, Bocelli sang on. “With you I will leave,” he promises. The line felt written for this generation of Jews. Leaving does not mean erasing. It means carrying Australia forward: the beaches, the friendships, the generosity, the years of building a good life. Love will not dissolve at the airport gate.

For children, aliyah after moments like these is not politics. It is the air they breathe. It is the desire to grow where Jewishness fills the public calendar, where holidays are shared rather than guarded, where identity settles into the background instead of standing on alert. Israel becomes the horizon the song gestures toward—not as fantasy, but as alignment.

But they know some parents – many Holocaust survivors – will not be able to make the journey. They will stay behind in a land they thought of as home while their children and grandchildren head to their homeland.

When you’re far away I dream of the horizon and words fail
And I, yes, I know that you are with me, with me

As the music swelled, my friend wiped away tears. They were for her brother’s children, who should have stayed longer at a Chanukah party. They were for her parents’ generation, who believed Australia was the final chapter. They were also for something enduring: the knowledge that the Jewish story includes movement, discernment, and the courage to know when it is time.

I will leave with you
On ships at sea
Which, I know
No, no, they don’t exist anymore

The concert ended. The applause lingered. We walked out quietly, in a world darkly distinct from the thousands of other concert-goers heading to their homes.

Somewhere between Melbourne and Jerusalem, between a beloved home and a homeland, the song kept playing, softly affirming the discussions of long goodbyes that were taking place in Jewish homes throughout Australia.

The Revolutionary Theology Has Gone Operational

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The arrests came just before New Year’s Eve.

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

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

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

A World Reduced to Moral Absolutes

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

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

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

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

How Far-Left Activism Removed the Guardrails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Israel and Jews Become the Inevitable Focus

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

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

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

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

Iran’s Revolutionary Language, Recycled

The structure of this worldview is not new.

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

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

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

A Warning, Not a Theory

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

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

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

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

Liberal Democracy, on Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not theoretical.

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

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

This is a flashing warning sign.

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

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

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

That logic ends pluralism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chabad Caught In a Thicket

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There are Jews who keep their heads down. And then there is Chabad.

From Bondi Beach to Mumbai, from Barcelona to American college campuses, Chabad does the opposite of what fear would counsel. It does not retreat inward. It goes outward—publicly, cheerfully, stubbornly—lighting candles, setting tables, opening doors.

And for that, it bleeds.

In Australia, Chabad helped organize a large public Chanukah gathering near Bondi Beach—sun, music, children, light. A Jewish holiday celebrated exactly as it was meant to be: openly, without apology. Antisemites came – because, as they say of bank robbers robbing banks – that’s where the Jews are. Violence came to eradicate the joy.

In India, Chabad paid an even heavier price. During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House. This was not collateral damage in a geopolitical struggle between India and Pakistan. It was targeted slaughter. The rabbi and his wife were tortured and murdered because they were Jews—and because they were visible Jews, serving other Jews. The attackers bypassed many targets to reach them. They knew exactly who they were looking for.

This pattern repeats itself with chilling consistency. Chabad emissaries—shluchim—are not anonymous. They live openly as Jews in places where Jews are few, where governments barely register their presence, let alone prioritize their safety. Some countries have only dozens of Jews. Some have none at all, except for Chabad.

And still Chabad goes.

On Friday nights in Barcelona, Jewish life gathers around Chabad tables. Tourists, locals, students—many unaffiliated, many unsure—find Judaism not as a political identity or an abstract cause, but as food, song, wine, warmth. As Shabbat.

On university campuses across North America, Chabad events now regularly outshine Hillel. This is not accidental. Where Hillel has often drifted toward “wokeness,” flattening Judaism into a vague social-justice aesthetic, Chabad offers something older and sturdier: tradition without embarrassment. Commandments without footnotes. Jewish joy without ideological permission slips.

That, too, draws attention. And danger.

Chabad rabbis and their families know they wear a mark, and not metaphorically. They live without anonymity. They publish their addresses. They welcome strangers. They light menorahs in public squares at a moment in history when public Jewishness has been recast as a provocation.

Chabad lighting “the largest menorah” on the sixth night of Chanukah in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza in 2017 (photo: First One Through)

Chanukah, of all holidays, insists on this. It is not meant to be hidden. The lights are placed in windows, at doorways, facing the street. Pirsumei nisa—publicizing the miracle—is the law. Chabad takes it seriously, even when the risk feels immediate.

In a world where Jew-hatred has resurged with startling comfort, Chabad has become something else as well: exposed in the spotlight.

There is an old biblical image for this.

When Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac, the knife is raised but the sacrifice is halted. Instead, a ram appears, caught in a thicket by its horns. The ram is offered in Isaac’s place.

Chabad, today, feels like that ram.

Silhouette of two Chabad men at a Chankah lighting ceremony on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, shortly after the massacre of Jews in Bondi Beach, Australia in December 2025. Just a few hundred feet away sits Gracie Mansion, soon-to-be home of New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who refuses to repudiate the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a call to kill diaspora Jews. (photo: First One Through)

Not because Chabad seeks martyrdom—it emphatically does not. It absorbs the blows meant for Jewish visibility itself. It becomes the target because it brings together Jews to celebrate Judaism with gladness – the ultimate point of inflammation for antisemites.

The world often says it wants Jews to be “normal.” Chabad refuses that bargain. It insists on being Jewish instead—fully, visibly, joyfully—even when the cost is high.

Chabad is not actually caught in a thicket; it takes its position openly. But antisemites hear a calling that is not divine but grotesque when they see joyful Jews, and are willing to sacrifice themselves and their sons – like the murderers of Bondi Beach – to feed the poisoned passion.

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why the hesitation in public framing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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