Tag Archives: antisemitism

The Met Announces the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence

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A satire.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has canceled its planned 2027 exhibition honoring John Galliano, after people objected to the museum bestowing one of its highest honors on a designer convicted of an antisemitic hate crime.

The Met has promised a replacement. And to go bigger.

Instead of John Galliano, the Costume Institute will honor Kanye West. It is an inspired substitution. Kanye is enormously influential in fashion, globally famous and has expressed considerably more recent thoughts about Hitler and Jews. He brings the Met’s original concept fully into the 21st century.

But fashion is only one artistic medium. The Met will establish the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence, celebrating achievement across the arts, literature, media and public life.

Roger Waters will anchor the music galleries and show clips of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Musical.” Inflatable pigs adorned with Jewish stars will be available for purchase in the gift shop.

The children’s wing will celebrate Roald Dahl. Parents can walk their children through an oversized exhibit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, followed by an interactive display of Dahl’s thoughts about Jews.

The Met’s new Film Department will honor Mel Gibson, ensuring his legacy.

The American Wing will have a permanent exhibit for Henry Ford. Many of the automobiles will remain in Detroit, but the Met will showcase Ford’s other publishing achievement, The International Jew, allowing visitors to explore how an industrial genius helped mass-produce something besides automobiles.

Contemporary media deserves its own galleries.

  • Candace Owens can become Director of Jewish Studies.
  • Tucker Carlson can chair the Department of Contextualization.
  • Nick Fuentes can lead Emerging Voices, introducing younger audiences to one of civilization’s oldest traditions.

Institutional leadership should reflect the museum’s expanded mission.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has been asked to join the Board’s Committee on Jewish Community Relations.

The Met should also dramatically expand accessibility.

All United Nations personnel receive complimentary membership. Security Council members receive Patron status. UN Human Rights Council members enter through a dedicated express lane.

And the Met needs an international partner for 2027. Fortunately, Iran has experience.

In 2006, Tehran hosted its Holocaust-denial conference. Two decades later, the Islamic Republic can bring the concept to New York as a special Met partnership: ERASURE: Reimagining Holocaust Memory Presented in partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence.

Vogue will commemorate each new addition to the Met lineup with a full spread in every international edition. Antisemitism, after all, should never be allowed to suffer from poor distribution.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani cheered the latest Met and Vogue moves and is considering making attendance to the museum mandatory for all public school students.

John Galliano was still disappointed about being canceled but was thrilled to see how the Met stepped up with counter-measures. He has moved on. He is pushing Britain and France to move past their memories of World War II, and reimagine their police uniforms to echo the outfits donned by the military of Nazi Germany.

Related:

Eyal Gilad Naftali Klinghoffer. The new Blood Libel. (June 2014)

From Shut Up to Get Out

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There is a progression from intimidation and expulsion.

  • A heckler’s veto prevents you from speaking.
  • A chilling effect teaches you to remain silent.
  • Self-concealment teaches you to hide the identity that makes you a target.
  • Constructive exclusion makes the environment sufficiently hostile that you stay away or leave.
  • Forced expulsion completes the progression: someone else decides you must go.

American Jews have been moving through these stages over the last decade.

Don’t Speak

In 2015, Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to lecture on the ethical obligations of militaries to protect civilians. Protesters repeatedly interrupted him, delaying his lecture for about half an hour as police removed them.

It was a classic heckler’s veto: make enough noise and the speaker cannot speak.

Eventually, Halbertal did.

Over time, intimidation becomes more efficient. People learn the consequences of speaking and begin censoring themselves. The expectation of the heckler creates the chilling effect.

Then the intimidation moved beyond speech.

Hide Who You Are

In May 2021, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and antisemitic incidents surged concurrently in the United States.

Aaron Keyak had served as Jewish engagement director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and would become the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. His advice to frightened American Jews was extraordinary: “If you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david.”

The Jew walking down the street had given no speech and joined no protest. His Jewish identity itself made him a target.

The response from the highest levels of government was self-concealment: take off the kippah and hide the Star of David.

This was 2021, more than two years before the October 7 massacre.

Stay Out

After the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the progression took over the Democratic Party.

Dana Nessel is Michigan’s attorney general, the state’s chief law-enforcement officer and its highest-ranking Jewish state official. This June she decided to stay away from the Michigan Democratic Party convention. “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said. She feared being chased, harassed, yelled at and booed because, she explained, “it’s been happening to me.”

Consider where the progression had reached: Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer felt safer staying away from her own political party’s convention out of fear.

And Nessel is not alone.

Earlier in the summer, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht left the Democratic Party and became an independent. Wecht is Jewish, was elected as a Democrat and had once served in the leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “I can no longer abide this.”

Nessel stayed away. Wecht walked away. Revulsed by what they saw happening inside the Democratic Party.

Get Out

The next stage has already begun.

In 2024, anti-Israel artists protesting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts issued a list of demands. Among them: remove all “Zionist Board members and funders.” While the institution rejected the demand, its Jewish interim CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat, subsequently resigned, saying the climate surrounding Israel and Palestine in the Bay Area had become “untenable.”

The demand itself crossed the line into the final stage: Get them out.

If one needs proof, consider how the alt-left treated one of its own, NYC Mayor-endorsed politician Brad Lander. He was tossed from a far-left political rally in August 2026 because he was a “Zionist,” even though he is highly critical of Israel.

Democratic politician Brad Lander – supported by NYC Mayor, DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani – tossed from a rally because he is a “Zionist”

The heckler’s veto was already an assault on a basic American principle: everyone gets to enter the public square and speak. What has grown from it is far uglier and deeply un-American:

Don’t speak.
Don’t be seen.
Don’t come.
Get out.

This is intimidation being rewarded with territory. Each retreat gives the intimidators another piece of the public square: the microphone, the street, the political convention, the institution itself.

And this poison is now flourishing inside the Democratic Party.

A party that claims to champion minorities and protect people from intimidation now has a Jewish attorney general afraid to attend its own convention, a Jewish state supreme court justice who concluded that Jew-hatred had become sufficiently tolerated that he could no longer remain a Democrat, and an anti-Israel DSA-mayor-endorsed Jewish politician run out of the streets of New York.

That is disgraceful. It is frightening.

The American answer to intimidation is to protect the person being intimidated and confront the intimidator. Nobody should gain control of a microphone, a street, a political convention or an institution by making someone else afraid to enter it.

Leaders of the Democratic Party should understand what is happening inside its own tent. The heckler’s veto has metastasized into something deeply toxic and deeply un-American.

The hecklers no longer simply want to only decide what Jews may say. They want to expel Jews from the room.

Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound?

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“There’s something happening here.”

Stephen Stills wrote those words sixty years ago for Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. He did not tell listeners exactly what was happening. He told them to notice.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound?”

For Jews today, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to hear it.

In Britain, years of anti-Israel demonstrations were followed by attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions, the murder of two Jews at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur and the stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in Golders Green.

Finally, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Britain to “open their eyes to Jewish pain, Jewish suffering and Jewish fear.”

He was even more explicit about a slogan common at anti-Israel demonstrations: “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”

“Everybody look what’s going down.”

Australia had its warnings too. Antisemitism surged after October 7. Jewish institutions were targeted. Then came Bondi Beach.

On December 14, 2025, gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Chanukah by the Sea. Fifteen victims were murdered. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an “act of evil antisemitism.”

The warnings had become bodies.

The question is no longer whether every protester is an antisemite or every criticism of Israel antisemitic.

The question is whether something is happening here.

Britain’s leaders now say so. Australia’s leaders now say so.

American Jews should not need another massacre before believing their own eyes and ears.

America has already had Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were murdered in synagogue; Poway, where a woman was murdered at Passover services; and Jersey City, where Jews were hunted inside a kosher market.

In 2025, two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Days later, Jews demonstrating in Boulder, Colorado, for Israeli hostages were attacked with Molotov cocktails. Hostages were taken in a synagogue in Texas. An armed man rammed his truck into a Jewish school in Michigan.

The ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in America in 2025—17 every day. Antisemitic assaults reached a record high.

Yet some institutions still debate the meaning of the sound.

In 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were asked before Congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ rules. Instead of an immediate yes came answers about context.

In New York, before becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani repeatedly refused to condemn “Globalize the intifada.”

Jews understand.

The Second Intifada meant suicide bombers on buses and in cafés and restaurants. It meant the deliberate murder of Jewish civilians. Now the slogan is shouted in America while American Jews are assaulted and Jewish institutions require armed guards.

Rally against antisemitism outside Central Synagogue after man punched a person inside during services. He had social media littered with posts about Israel and Judaism.

Stephen Stills’s sixty-year-old warning suddenly sounds less like history. “There’s something happening here.” Now.

The university presidents wanted context. The mayor of the American city with the largest Jewish population wanted to explain intifada.

Jews have context. Pittsburgh is context. Poway is context. Jersey City is context. Boulder is context. Washington is context. Britain is context. Australia is context.

Stop. Hey. What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

Related:

Antisemitism As Political Currency (August 2026)

When Antisemitism Was Killing Jews, Left-Wing Jews in Congress Backpedaled (January 2026)

Two Democratic Senators Gaslight Jewish Attorney During Confirmation Hearing (March 2025)

The Diaspora Intifada (September 2024)

Gross Antisemitism in the English-Speaking World

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Western governments have developed a familiar vocabulary.

  • “Hate is rising.”
  • “Religious intolerance is increasing.”
  • “Antisemitism and Islamophobia must be confronted.”

Every minority deserves protection. But treating victims equally does not require pretending they are being targeted equally.

CountryAnti-JewishAnti-MuslimJewish / Muslim Ratio
UK (England & Wales)1,060 per 100,000120 per 100,0008.8×
Canada~274 per 100,000~13 per 100,000~21×
United States~250–300 per 100,000~5–6 per 100,000~45–50×
Australia*~2,185 per 100,000~38 per 100,000~57×

*Australia uses community incident reporting rather than a directly comparable national police hate-crime database.

Britain clearly has a religious-hatred problem. Muslims and Jews suffer substantial levels of hate crime, well above that of other English-speaking countries, while Jews are targeted at almost nine times the rate of Muslims. Canada and USA show fewer hate crimes per population, and a wider disparity between Jews and Muslims being attacked.

Then there is Australia.

For the decade before October 7, 2023, Australia averaged 342 reported anti-Jewish incidents annually. That exploded to 2,062 in 2023/24 and remained at 1,654 in 2024/25. In New South Wales, police-recorded hate incidents against Jews rose from 40 in 2020 to 841 in 2025.

Then statistics became bodies.

On December 14, 2025, gunmen attacked Chanukah by the Sea at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were murdered while celebrating the Jewish holiday.

Australia subsequently established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which is examining the circumstances surrounding the attack and whether authorities adequately recognized the threat to Jewish events.

Australia had been warned.

It had also begun responding. The government appointed Jewish communal leader Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Her national plan followed extensive consultation with Australian Jews, and the government adopted all 13 recommendations.

Yet Australia continues to struggle with whether antisemitism is a distinct threat or another part of generalized “hate.”

Its Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act puts antisemitism in the title – along with more generic terms of “hate” and “extremism.” There is nothing wrong with fighting all forms of hatred. The question is whether symmetry in government policy reflects the reality on the ground.

Australia’s available community data indicate roughly 38 anti-Muslim incidents per 100,000 Muslims and 2,185 anti-Jewish incidents per 100,000 Jews.

That is roughly 57-to-1.

Indeed, Australia’s Islamophobia envoy (in a federal post strictly devoted to “Islamophobia” and no other forms of hate) has urged the Royal Commission on Antisemitism to approach antisemitism through the broader causes of identity-based hatred and the common roots of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other prejudice.

“antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice share common causes, such as polarisation, online environments and declining trust in institutions. Tackling these underlying factors can strengthen outcomes for all communities.” – Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, June 2026

What? If they were all the same, why are Jews attacked at a 57-to-1 ratio?

Australia does not have a generic hate problem that happens to include Jews. It has an extraordinary antisemitism problem that generic language about hate must not be allowed to hide.

Related:

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media? (December 2025)

Global Jewry Is Losing Australia, Canada, France, Germany and UK (December 2024)

The Depravity of Antisemitic Socialism Has Become a Movement

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From his perch at The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wants to be “very clear” about Hamas. Instead, his formulation gets the moral order backwards.

“Hamas is a terrible organization,” he writes, “first and foremost for Palestinians.”

Hamas is not primarily a terrible organization. It is a terrorist organization whose foundational ideology targeted Israel and Jews.

Hamas said so itself. Its 1988 charter declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Article 7 invokes a religious tradition about Muslims fighting and killing Jews. Article 13 rejects negotiated settlements: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

October 7 was the depravity of those words turned into action. Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, attacked civilian communities, murdered families and kidnapped hundreds of people. Terrorism was not an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas rule. It was the method of an organization whose charter had openly described its enemy and objective.

Nor was Hamas imposed upon Palestinian Arabs. In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, voters handed Hamas 56% of the seats in parliament — 74 of 132 — and control of the legislature.

October 7 did not sever that political connection. In December 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Palestinians believed Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct, including 57% in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank. Even in October 2025, 53% still called the decision correct.

That context makes Friedman’s criticism of Western Hamas apologists particularly revealing. He calls the “free pass” Hamas receives from some pro-Palestinian progressives “shameful.”

The issue runs much deeper than shame.

There is a straight line from a charter describing the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, to terrorists carrying out a massacre in Israel, to people defending the decision to launch that attack. The depravity lies in the ideology, the terrorism committed in its name and the willingness to celebrate or excuse it afterward.

And that depravity has migrated into American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America and radical left-wing university professors describe Israel as a colonial project and Israelis as “colonialists,” a framework to erase the distinction between combatants and civilians and recast violence against Israeli Jews as “resistance.” This movement is no longer confined to demonstrations and campuses; DSA member Zohran Mamdani has ridden the democratic-socialist movement into the New York City mayoralty and is now helping other left-wing candidates like Mohamed El-Zayed in Michigan win office.

Friedman’s formulation reverses the danger. Hamas becomes “terrible” rather than terrorist. Palestinians become its primary victims rather than a population which supports Hamas. And those in the United States and elsewhere who give Hamas political cover are merely “shameful.”

That formulation grants absolution to terrorists and their knowing supporters.

The endorsement and celebration of mass violence against Jews — a tiny minority-minority — is becoming a motivating force in American politics. That should terrify Thomas Friedman. It should terrify every decent American.

Because when a movement can watch the mass murder of Jews and explain why their killers were engaged in “resistance,” the problem is no longer simply Hamas.

The depravity has become a movement.

Israel’s Response to the Ceuta Invasion

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For nearly three years, Spain positioned itself as one of Israel’s sharpest critics in Europe.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez repeatedly condemned Israel’s conduct in Gaza, recognized a Palestinian state, pressed for European measures against Israel, and framed the conflict primarily through the language of humanitarian obligation. Israeli officials responded that Spain had become increasingly detached from the security realities Israel faces and was rewarding Hamas diplomatically after October 7.

Then Spain found itself confronting a border crisis of its own.

An estimated 49,000 migrants surged into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta in a single day, overwhelming local authorities and forcing Spain to deploy troops to restore order. Overnight, the country’s political conversation shifted from humanitarian ideals to border control, sovereignty, and national security.

Israel noticed immediately.

Israeli officials pointed to Ceuta as evidence of something they had argued for years: it is easy to lecture another democracy about borders until your own border collapses.

Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon took aim at Spain for why it maintains a colony in Africa

There was an unmistakable sense of schadenfreude in parts of the Israeli reaction. The same government that had spent months criticizing Israel for emphasizing security suddenly found itself insisting that no sovereign nation can simply allow tens of thousands of people to cross its frontier without control.

Every democracy must balance compassion with sovereignty. Every democracy must decide whether humanitarian obligations can coexist with meaningful border enforcement. Israel has argued for years that they must. Spain is now discovering how difficult that balance becomes when events unfold on its own frontier.

There is another irony.

Spain’s immediate security now depends heavily on Morocco’s cooperation. Rabat’s willingness to police its side of the border has become essential to Spain’s stability. Yet Morocco chose a dramatically different path from Spain in its relationship with Israel. It joined the Abraham Accords, expanded security, intelligence, and economic cooperation with Israel, and demonstrated that pragmatic regional partnerships can coexist with support for Palestinian aspirations.

Spain and Morocco have moved in opposite diplomatic directions with Israel. Yet today Spain needs Morocco more than ever.

Israel’s ambassador to Spain declined to say whether its government supports Morroco taking over the Spanish enclaves in Africa.

Israel, however, should resist celebrating too loudly.

If Ceuta marks the beginning of sustained migration pressure into Europe, the political consequences are unlikely to stop with Spain. Across the continent, immigration has already fueled the growth of nationalist parties and intensified debates over identity, sovereignty, and integration. Another large migration wave could accelerate those trends even further.

History offers a warning for Jews.

Periods of political instability and polarization have rarely benefited Jewish communities. When societies become more fractured, antisemitism often finds new expression—from parts of the far right, from extremist Islamist movements, and from other ideological currents. Europe has already experienced a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents since October 7, 2023. Additional social upheaval could place Jewish communities under even greater pressure.

Israel can fairly point out the irony of Spain’s predicament. It can argue that Ceuta demonstrates the complexity of governing borders that are easier to criticize than to defend.

If Europe enters another prolonged period of political instability, no one should assume European Jews will remain untouched by the consequences. Those victims will not be amused by Israel nor protected by smug Israeli diplomats saying I told you so.

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.