Tag Archives: antisemitism

The United Nations and International Law are Antisemitic

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The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.

Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.

The issue extends beyond language.

Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims

The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.

The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“

International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.

Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.

The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.

The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.

Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.

A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.

International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?

The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?

Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?

Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.

The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.

In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.

Then there is the question of refugees.

The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.

Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.

The asymmetry is impossible to miss.

Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.

Jews have done all of those things.

They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.

Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.

How Maureen Galindo Became Someone Else’s Story

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Imagine a congressional candidate proposing detention camps for members of another minority group.

Imagine accusing that group of criminality, depravity, and collective guilt. Imagine that candidate finishing first in a major-party primary and having a realistic path to Congress.

What would journalists focus on? The candidate? Or everyone around her?

“turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

That question hovered over the New York Times coverage of Texas congressional candidate Maureen Galindo. Readers learned about Republican efforts to boost her candidacy. They learned that Democratic leaders denounced her. They learned of fears that she could become a liability for her party.

What they largely did not receive was a full accounting of Galindo herself.

accused her opponent of being “paid by Zionist terrorism and trafficking.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

The article informed readers that Galindo had made inflammatory remarks. It offered a glimpse of the controversy. Yet it spent remarkably little time exposing the breadth and character of the rhetoric that made her candidacy so extraordinary. Galindo’s own words appeared only in fragments. Her worldview remained mostly offstage.

The effect was subtle but significant. Readers were encouraged to view Galindo as a political problem rather than as a political phenomenon.

Jews run Hollywood and worship at the “synagogue of Satan.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

The frame became Republican meddling.

The story should have been why thousands of Democratic voters found her acceptable.

Republican spending may have increased Galindo’s visibility. Democratic leaders may have condemned her. Neither explains why a candidate whose rhetoric would once have ended a political career finished first in a Democratic primary.

“All politicians who have taken Israeli money should be tried for treason” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

That is the question the article never seriously explored.

The answer may lie in a reality that many journalists remain reluctant to confront that antisemitism is increasingly treated differently from other forms of prejudice.

When politicians target most minority groups, journalists lead with the offensive remarks themselves. Readers see the words and judge them accordingly.

When Jews or Zionists are the target, the instinct often shifts toward explanation. The discussion moves to grievances, movements, funding, coalitions, and historical forces. The prejudice becomes something to interpret rather than confront.

I don’t care “what any Zionist-owned politician thinks. They’re exposing themselves as Zionists which will backfire on them.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35

This pattern has become particularly visible in discussions surrounding Zionism. For years, much of the political and academic world insisted that anti-Zionism and antisemitism occupy entirely separate categories. One concerns a state. The other concerns a people.

Galindo’s rhetoric collapses that distinction.

Her remarks are not primarily arguments about settlements, borders, military policy, or diplomatic arrangements. They concern Zionists in the United States. They assign collective characteristics to an enormous population. They transform a political identity into a moral category. They depict entire groups as uniquely dangerous and deserving of extraordinary treatment.

That is why her candidacy matters.

Not because she is representative of all progressives. She clearly is not.

Not because every critic of Israel shares her views. They plainly do not.

She matters because she demonstrates how rhetoric that would be instantly recognized as bigotry in almost any other context can find an audience when directed at Zionists and Jews.

And that audience is no longer hypothetical.

Galindo finished first because real voters chose her. That fact should have been the center of the story.

Instead, the NY Times coverage drifted toward a more comfortable explanation: Republicans boosted her campaign because they wanted to embarrass Democrats.

Perhaps they did.

Political parties routinely try to elevate weak or extreme opponents. There is nothing novel about the tactic.

What is novel is the assumption that the tactic itself explains the outcome. It does not.

A campaign contribution can buy advertising. It cannot manufacture belief. A mailer can increase awareness. It cannot create enthusiasm where none exists. Electoral manipulation may shape margins, but it does not explain why a message resonates.

To understand Galindo’s success requires examining the movement that produced her supporters rather than the operatives who noticed them.

That inquiry would lead into uncomfortable territory. It would require asking why anti-Israel activism increasingly attracts rhetoric that once belonged on the fringes of political life. It would require examining how language once considered antisemitic is repackaged as moral virtue. It would require acknowledging that hatred can emerge from the left no less than from the right.

Instead, the Times watered down the belief system of Galindo’s voters. It argued that the bile had “significantly less attention in Texas’s 35th congressional district.” It claimed that “most were unaware of the controversy,” and “knew little about the specifics.” It quoted a progressive who heard about Galindo’s smears “but brushed them as a political attacks.”

In other words, the Times deliberately sought to portray the progressive voters for Galindo as NOT antisemitic nor anti-Israel, just unaware.

This is journalistic malfeasance. It would never happen for any other minority group, and certainly not one experiencing a wave of hate crimes.

Journalists are trained to recognize certain forms of extremism instantly and warn readers about their implications.

The danger is not only the prejudice they recognize. It is also the prejudice they explain until it begins to sound normal.

Maureen Galindo may or may not win her race. What matters is that a candidate who trafficked in rhetoric that would have dominated headlines if directed at almost any other minority group finished first in a Democratic primary.

Yet the discussion focused elsewhere: Republican strategy, Democratic embarrassment, campaign spending, electoral tactics.

Everything surrounding the candidate became the story.

The candidate – and her supporters – became someone else’s story.

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”

The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.

Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.

The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.”  It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy. 

This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.

Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.

The core vocabulary was already there:

  • apartheid
  • settler colonialism
  • genocide
  • racial supremacy
  • alien domination
  • decolonization

The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.

Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.

The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.

Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.

The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.

The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.

Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:

  • The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
  • Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
  • Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.

And Israel had to be recast as uniquely illegitimate despite being the most liberal, democratic and pluralistic society for a thousand miles in any direction.

The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.

The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity.  Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.

Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.

NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.

The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.

Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.

The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”

And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.

The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The imbalance was not accidental.

The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.

The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.

But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.

Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.

Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.

For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.

October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.

The Genocidal Chant of “Globalize the Intifada”

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There is a difference between being hated and being hunted. Most people understand that instinctively.

A slur is hatred made verbal. The N-word for Blacks, like “k*ke,” for Jews, carries generations of contempt. It degrades and dehumanizes. When someone says it, there is no confusion about what is being communicated. The message is brutally simple: you are despised.

Ugly as that is, it is at least honest.

But history teaches that some language goes beyond contempt. Some language carries the memory of violence and the method of violence.

For Black Americans, the image of a noose is not abstract. It is inseparable from lynching, terror, and public spectacle. A crowd marching with nooses would never be defended as harmless symbolism or political expression. Black Americans would hear it exactly as history taught them to hear it: as a threat.

That is where Jews place the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

The First Intifada was marked by riots, Molotov cocktails, stabbings, and attacks directed at Israeli Jews. The Second Intifada escalated into systematic suicide bombings: buses blown apart, cafés destroyed, restaurants turned into funeral scenes. Jewish civilians were the battlefield.

Arabs bombing Israeli buses during Second Intifada

Then came what Israelis grimly called the “car intifada” of 2014–2016: vehicles driven into crowds at bus stops and train stations. After that, the “stabbing intifada”: knives pulled in streets, supermarkets, and neighborhoods, ordinary objects turned into weapons for killing Jews.

Palestinian cartoon directing Arabs to run over Israelis in 2015

These were not abstractions. These were methods.

That matters because when someone chants “globalize the intifada,” Jews do not hear a vague political slogan. They hear the globalization of those methods.

Globalize the bus bombing. Globalize the car ramming. Globalize the stabbing. Globalize the killing of Jews.

That is why the phrase lands differently than a slur. A slur says: I hate you. “Globalize the intifada” says: the violence used against your people in Israel should be used against your people everywhere.

And this is no longer merely a Jewish interpretation. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said this week that those chanting “globalise the intifada” should face prosecution, explicitly describing it as rhetoric calling for terrorism against Jews. That recognition matters because it affirms what Jews have been saying for years: history gives words their meaning, and violent history gives them their menace.  

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews – and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extreme racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.” – Sir Kier Starmer

Society already understands this principle elsewhere. A noose is not “just rope.” A burning cross is not “just wood.” History made them symbols of violence.

History made “intifada” one too.

And asking Jews to pretend otherwise is no different than asking Black Americans to pretend a noose is just a piece of rope.

Children’s Book Authors Etch Antisemitism

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The new play Giant has revived the scandal of Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s author whose antisemitism became inseparable from his legacy. Dahl’s hatred had its roots in an obsession with Israel, especially after the 1982 Lebanon War, which hardened into something older and darker: Jews as a collective object of blame. Political fury dissolved the line between a state and a people.

Matt Chun shows where that road now leads.

Chun is an Australian children’s book illustrator, part of a profession entrusted with shaping how children understand innocence, cruelty, and empathy. But when Jews were murdered at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration in Bondi, his response in an article title “Never mourn a fascist,” exposed something far beyond political critique: raw antisemitism. The victims were neither Israelis nor soldiers. They were Australian Jews gathered in communal celebration, among them a ten-year-old girl. Chun denied their innocence and treated their deaths as politically qualified, as though Jewish identity itself diminished the claim to grief.

People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honour the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, December 16, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone)

That marks the evolution. Dahl saw war and blamed Jews. Chun sees Jews and explains away their murder.

That is why the cancellation of Chun’s forthcoming children’s book Bila by University of Queensland Press was fitting. Children’s books are an act of trust. Parents place them in their children’s hands believing that the people behind them understand something fundamental about innocence and human worth. A creator who cannot recognize the innocence of a murdered Jewish child at a Hanukkah celebration has forfeited any claim to shape the moral imagination of children.

Dahl’s antisemitism traveled through Israel before landing on Jews. Chun begins with Jews.

Chun wrote that “lands have been pillaged, poisoned, desecrated, and set ablaze by colonisers,” as he celebrates the slaughter of people at a holiday party. Alas, he is only the latest author instilling venom in the ink of books being marketed to children.

NY Times Issues Warning About “Resurgence” of “Far-Right” Jews

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The latest The New York Times piece on a JDL-linked murder plot tells a very specific story—and then stretches it into something much larger than it is.

Start with the facts. One individual in a fringe offshoot movement, often described as a ghost of the old Jewish Defense League, allegedly plotted a murder that never happened because law enforcement stopped it. That is the entire event. Not a movement. Not a wave. Not a trend. A single actor orbiting a marginal group.

And the target was not randomly selected. This was not an attack on “Muslims” or a civilian population. The alleged target was a highly visible anti-Israel agitator who celebrates violence against Jews and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. That context matters. It does not justify anything but explains a motive. Erasing that distinction flattens reality into propaganda.

Yet from this narrow incident, the long article pulls a wide arc—Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, decades-old ideology, insinuations about modern Israel. The reader is led to see not one unstable actor, but a resurfacing Jewish extremism problem.

“apparent resurgence of far-right Zionism” – The New York Times

That framing collapses under the weight of what is actually happening.

2025 saw the highest number of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in over thirty years. Not plots—killings, specifically because they are Jews. Across cities and continents. In New York, Jews remain the primary target of hate crimes by a wide margin. Assaults are not hypothetical. They are routine. Visible Jews are attacked on the street, not in theory but in daylight.

So the inversion becomes obvious.

A stopped act by one fringe Jewish extremist becomes a sweeping narrative. A global surge in antisemitic violence becomes less than background noise.

“a disturbing message to New York City: the ideology of the Jewish Defense League has resurfaced.” – The New York Times

This is not balance. It is misdirection.

Every society has extremists at its edges. Jewish communities are no exception. They should be confronted early and without hesitation. But scale matters. Sequence matters. When coverage elevates a single fringe actor into a defining story while minimizing the sustained targeting of Jews, it sends a clear signal about whose fear counts and whose does not.

“voted for President Trump,” – The New York Times non-sequitur about member of the JDL, seemingly painting all Jews who voted for Trump as a potential extremists

And it feeds something deeper: the growing belief among Jews that institutions—from media to politics—are more comfortable scrutinizing Jewish reaction than confronting antisemitic aggression.

The real story is not that somewhere on the margins there are Jews capable of violence. Every people has that margin.

The real story is that Jews, in New York and across the diaspora, are once again living with a level of threat that is measurable, visible, and rising—and that too many prefer to mock the real security fear of Jews and cast Jews as the crux of the problem.

Holocaust – and Hamas – Remembrance Day

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Six Million Jews were slaughtered in Europe by Nazi Germany and its enablers in the 1930s and 1940s. One-third of European Jewry was wiped from the earth for the sick reason that people detested them and wanted them gone “by any means necessary.” The scale and the barbarity of the genocide was revolting and a permanent stain on humankind.

The Nazi Party did not rise alone. It was carried by a culture that softened language and normalized hatred. The machinery of murder arrived last. The permission came first.

We have watched that permission be rebuilt.

People often comment that the Palestinian Arab massacre of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023 was the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It is true, in terms of scale, a statistical fact. But the underlying reason is not discussed enough: a systemic hatred became embedded in a society that elected a government to carry out a genocide.

October 7 was not a rogue event by a gang. It was a popular movement by a sitting ruling authority that had years of preparation to carry out a genocide of local Jews.

Hamas’ 1988 foundational charter is the single most antisemitic political document ever written. The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) voted Hamas to 56% of parliament with full knowledge of the group’s position and mission. When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the area became a terrorist enclave, building an infrastructure and culture dedicated to the annihilation of Jews.

And when it acted out its plans in full on October 7, the people celebrated.

A “Holocaust Remembrance Day” that confines memory to ceremonies and candles misses the point. Remembrance without recognition of the present is ritual without responsibility. The lesson was never only about what was done. It was about how quickly societies create the conditions that allow it to be done again.

So what does responsibility look like now?

It begins with clarity. A group that openly declares and executes the mass killing of Jews is genocidal. That word should not be negotiated away, let alone flipped onto the victims.

It continues with institutions. Universities, media and cultural organizations must stop laundering advocacy for such groups through euphemism. Speech has consequences; platforms are choices.

It requires enforcement. Governments must treat material support, incitement, and coordination for designated terrorist organizations as what they are: threats to public safety, not protected abstractions.

It demands civic courage. Communities, leaders, and peers must refuse the social comfort of silence when celebration of violence surfaces in their midst.

And it insists on moral consistency. If the targeting of civilians is intolerable anywhere, it is intolerable everywhere—without qualifiers, without footnotes.

Democratic Socialist of America believe that violence against Jewish civilians is appropriate

It is important to remember the past: the millions of Jewish victims and the culture that touched Europe from Vienna to Vilna. It is also important to remember the environment that allowed it to happen, and actively confront the antisemitic infrastructure that enables the genocide of Jews.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) openly traffics in antisemitism – and gets reelected

Campus Jewish Life Needs a Mainstream Voice

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On elite campuses, something more consequential than protest is unfolding. Jewish life is being redefined by extremists.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and “Jews for Liberation” present themselves as the authentic moral voice of Jewish students. They speak in the language of justice, liberation, and equality that resonates with their peers. But strip away the branding and the position is blunt: the Jewish state is illegitimate and cast as a project of racial supremacy, apartheid, even genocide.

That is not critique. That is an argument for erasure.

The danger is not only that these claims are false. It is that they are being laundered into the mainstream through the fig leaf of Jewish identity. When anti-Israel activism is voiced by non-Jews, it is political. When it is voiced by Jews, it is marketed as moral truth. Then the fringe becomes credible and slogans become scholarship. Eliminationist ideas acquire the authority of internal dissent.

That shift matters.

Once Israel is no longer seen as a flawed state – much like others – but as an illegitimate one, every boundary collapses. If the state itself is the crime, dismantling it becomes justice, and whatever follows can be rationalized as liberation.

This is how language is turned into a weapon.

Mainstream Jewish campus institutions have not met this moment with equal clarity. Groups like Hillel are focused, rightly, on building Jewish life: community, ritual, continuity. They create space. They avoid litmus tests. They keep doors open. But when the central attack is not on Jewish practice but on Jewish legitimacy, generality reads as hesitation.

When others define Zionism as racism, it is not enough to respond with programming and belonging. The argument has moved to first principles. It demands an answer at that level.

And so a vacuum has opened.

Into that vacuum have stepped the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. The result is a distorted picture of Jewish opinion, one in which the extremes are visible and the center is absent.

That center needs a voice of its own.

Not a mirror image of the anti-Zionist fringe. Not a reaction that turns legitimate security concerns into collective hostility toward all Arabs. But a clear, unapologetic articulation of what most Jews actually believe, and what a sustainable future requires.

That position is not complicated.

The Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel must remain secure and capable of defending itself against those who seek its destruction. Terrorism and the glorification of violence are disqualifying, not contextual. No serious political future can be built on a culture that celebrates October 7 or teaches that murder is resistance.

The “two-state solution” is treated as moral doctrine, as if repeating it resolves the conflict. It does not. Self-determination is not a slogan tied to a single map. It can take different forms across different political arrangements. Millions of Palestinian Arabs have held Jordanian citizenship. Others live under varying structures of autonomy. The real question is not whether self-determination exists in theory, but whether any proposed structure can produce stability rather than violence.

A future Palestinian state, if it is ever to emerge, must come after a profound transformation: demilitarization, institutional reform, and an educational shift away from incitement and toward coexistence. Statehood is not an entitlement. It is a responsibility.

This is baseline reality, yet it is rarely stated plainly on campus.

A new kind of Jewish student group is needed, one that is explicit where others are cautious and disciplined where others are reckless. A group that centers Israel not as an abstraction but as a living, embattled state. One that can say, without hedging, that Jewish self-determination is legitimate, that its delegitimization is dangerous, and that moral seriousness requires both strength and restraint.

Such a group would do three things differently.

  • It would reject the language trap. Words like apartheid and genocide would be treated not as serious analysis but as distortions that inflame rather than illuminate.
  • It would refuse the false binary. Supporting Israel does not require abandoning moral judgment. Rejecting terror does not require rejecting an entire people.
  • It would re-anchor the conversation in reality. Israel exists. Threats are real. Peace requires conditions, not just intentions.

The goal is not to win an argument in a seminar room. It is to prevent a generation from being taught that the existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a moral error to be undone.

Campus Jewish life needs a mainstream voice that is willing to speak clearly – and be heard.

Pope Leo Leaves Room For Antisemitism

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There are moments when language has to carry more than meaning. It has to carry memory. It has to carry consequence. When the subject is the death of Jesus and the role of Jewish leadership in that story, every word is loaded with two thousand years of fallout.

That is the backdrop to a recent homily reported by Vatican News, where the Pope recounts how members of the Sanhedrin planned to put Jesus to death and frames the decision as a political calculation rooted in fear.

On its face, this is familiar terrain. The Gospel of John tells that story. The Pope emphasizes fear, power, and the instinct of leadership to preserve order when threatened. He broadens the lesson, warning about “hidden schemes of powerful authorities” and concluding that not much has changed when we look at the world today. It is a universal moral frame, the kind clergy have used for centuries to draw a line from ancient texts to modern behavior.

But this is not a normal moment, and that is not neutral language.

We are living through a surge in antisemitism that is not subtle, not isolated, and not theoretical. Jews are being targeted in cities, on campuses, and online. The State of Israel is being recast in mainstream discourse as uniquely illegitimate, even genocidal. The old accusations have not disappeared. They have been updated, rebranded, and redeployed. In that environment, the space between what is said and what is heard narrows dangerously.

The Catholic Church knows this better than anyone. For centuries, Christian teaching around the Passion narrative fed the idea that Jews, as a people, bore responsibility for the death of Jesus. That charge—deicide—did not stay in theology. It moved into law, into mobs, into expulsions and massacres. It became part of the architecture of antisemitism in Europe.

The Church confronted that history in Nostra Aetate, a landmark statement of the Second Vatican Council. The declaration made clear that Jews as a whole, then or now, cannot be blamed for the death of Christ. That was not a minor clarification. It was a doctrinal line drawn after catastrophe, an effort to shut down a pattern of interpretation that had proven lethal.

Successive Popes understood what that required in practice. Pope John Paul II did not rely on implication. He spoke directly, repeatedly, calling Jews “our elder brothers” and making visible gestures that reinforced the message. Pope Benedict XVI went further in precision, arguing explicitly that references to “the Jews” in the Gospel of John describe a specific leadership group, not a people across time. They closed interpretive doors because history showed what happens when those doors are left ajar.

That is why the current language matters. “Religious leaders saw Him as a threat.” “Hidden schemes of powerful authorities.” “Not much has changed.” None of these phrases, standing alone, violates Church teaching. None explicitly assigns blame to Jews today or draws a line to the modern State of Israel. But they operate in a space that has been misused for centuries, and they leave enough room for that misuse to return.

In a different era, that looseness might pass without consequence. Today, it does not. The categories are too easily mapped by those already inclined to do so. “Religious leaders” becomes “rabbis and synagogues.” “Powerful authorities” becomes a stand-in for Jewish power, whether the government of Israel or leaders in the Jewish diaspora. “Not much has changed” becomes an argument for continuity from the first century to the present. And in a climate where Israel is already being portrayed as a moral outlier among nations, the slide from scripture to contemporary politics is not a leap. It is a small step.

This is not about intent. The Pope is speaking in a long Christian tradition of drawing moral lessons from the Passion. The emphasis on fear and political calculation is, in fact, a move away from older, more dangerous framings. But intent does not control reception, especially when the subject has such a charged history.

The standard here cannot be whether the words are technically defensible. It has to be whether they are tight enough to prevent foreseeable distortion.

Because the distortion is not hypothetical. It is already happening in the broader culture. Jews are being pushed out of public spaces, treated by default as representatives of a state and a government they may or may not support, whether they live there or not. Israel is singled out in ways that strip context and complexity, recast as uniquely evil in a world that has no shortage of brutality. In that environment, any rhetoric that can be bent toward those narratives will be bent.

The Church has done the hard work of confronting its past. It has the doctrine. It has the precedent. What it needs, in moments like this, is the discipline to match.

Savannah Guthrie Times 250

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Savannah Guthrie tried to describe the indescribable.

Her 84 year old mother was taken from her home, with signs of violence left behind, a masked man on camera. And then nothing. A void where a mother used to be. She spoke about sleepless nights, about imagining fear she cannot reach, about a word she kept returning to: unbearable.

That word should end the conversation. It should strip away everything else.

Because everyone understands what it means when someone you love is taken.

Now Multiply That by 250

What Guthrie is living through is devastating.

In Israel, it happened at scale.

Over 250 people were abducted violently—children, parents, grandparents—dragged from homes, shoved into vehicles, disappeared into tunnels by jihadi terrorists. The same questions Guthrie now asks became a national condition: Are they alive? Are they suffering? What are they thinking?

The same agony. Multiplied. Multiplied. Multiplied.

Where the World Breaks

Here is the dividing line.

When Guthrie speaks, there is no debate. No one justifies it. No one says her mother deserved it. No one rallies in defense of the abductor.

The reaction is immediate and human: bring her home.

But when Israeli families faced the same horror, the reaction in too many places—especially on college campuses—was not sympathy.

It was celebration.

Not confusion. Not distance. Celebration of the very act Guthrie calls unbearable.

The Only Question That Matters

Her interview removes every excuse. No politics, no slogans—just a daughter describing what it feels like to have a mother taken.

If you can feel that—and then justify or cheer when it happens to someone else—you are not misinformed. You are choosing evil.

And that is the part that is unbearable to civilized people.