What Chants Are Antisemitic?

Posted on December 17, 2025 by First.One.Through

In Britain, a jury recently decided that the so‑called Khaybar chant is not antisemitic. The chant invokes Khaybar, a seventh‑century battle in which Jewish communities were slaughtered by the armies of Muhammad. The actual chant in Arabic, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”. Its meaning is not subtle. It is a threat dressed up as history: remember what happened to the Jews then—remember what can happen again.

If that chant is deemed legally innocuous, what else must now be tolerated?

Would crowds chanting, “Jews, remember the ovens—the Nazis are coming,” be waved through as historical commentary about the Holocaust? What about “We love October 7—it will happen again, in your neighborhood,” explicitly celebrating the mass murder of Jews in Israel and promising its repetition elsewhere? These are not metaphors. They are incitement through remembrance, violence recalled as promise.

The problem is not that the law is incapable of recognizing hate. It plainly can. Careers are ended for misgendering. A single racial slur can bring swift institutional punishment. Speech codes are enforced with zeal—except, it seems, when the targets are Jews.

When courts insist on laundering openly antisemitic chants into something more refined and dignified—while other forms of bigotry are policed to the syllable—Jews are stripped of basic protections. Uniquely so. They are told to absorb the abuse, to endure the menace, to treat threats as culture and calls to murder as mere politics.

Law enforcement, under this logic, will intervene only—perhaps—after Jewish blood is spilled. Until then, Jews are instructed to tolerate the intolerable.

The divergence between the United States and the United Kingdom is often overstated. America claims the shield of the First Amendment; Britain claims the precision of hate‑speech law. In practice, both systems now converge on the same result: maximal latitude for antisemitic intimidation, coupled with maximal scrutiny of everyone else.

In the U.S., threats are dismissed as protected speech until they metastasize into action. In the U.K., chants that openly celebrate or foreshadow Jewish slaughter are judicially sanitized as cultural or historical expression. Different doctrines, identical outcomes.

*San Francisco Hillel torched and vandalized in December 2025*

This is not neutrality. It is a re‑creation of an old status under a modern name: Jews may live here, but only on sufferance; they may speak, but only quietly; they may appeal to the law, but not expect its protection.

If Western societies imagine that this posture will buy peace—by indulging jihadist rhetoric while disciplining polite speech—they are deluding themselves. A legal order that cannot name antisemitism, that cannot distinguish remembrance from menace, has already corroded from within.

History’s lesson is not subtle. The moment a society teaches Jews to absorb threats, it has decided that Jewish safety is optional. And when the law makes that decision, it is only a matter of time before others learn the same lesson.

Chabad Caught In a Thicket

Posted on December 15, 2025 by First.One.Through

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.

The Meteors And The Jews

Posted on November 12, 2025 by First.One.Through

Meteors streak through the night sky, lighting up for a brief second before vanishing into nothing. They burn because the Earth protects itself. Our planet’s atmosphere—thin but powerful—defends it from destruction. The meteors disintegrate, and the world goes on unharmed.

The Moon has no such shield. Every rock, every speck of space dust that comes its way slams straight into its surface. That’s why it’s pockmarked with craters—permanent scars of endless bombardment. Without protection, the Moon endures the full force of the universe’s hostility.

So it is with the Jewish people.

Across centuries, Jews have existed as the exposed body in a world of friction and fire. Without a “cultural atmosphere” to cushion them, they’ve absorbed the hits directly—pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, boycotts, and genocides. The Jewish story is a catalogue of collisions that the rest of humanity barely felt.

Christians and Muslims, by contrast, have lived for centuries within the thick atmosphere of dominance. Their societies, their empires, their majority status wrapped them in protection and privilege. When hatred sparks, their vast numbers and institutions disperse the heat before it burns. They are Earth-like—shielded by mass and power.

The Jew, wherever he resides as a minority, has always been lunar—alone in orbit, lacking an atmospheric buffer. Every ideological meteor, every political upheaval, every cultural storm leaves its mark. From England in 1290 to Spain in 1492, from Kishinev in 1903 to Pittsburgh in 2018, the craters accumulate.

If Christianity and Islam represent the Earth—secure, dominant, cushioned by atmosphere—Judaism remains the Moon, enduring open space without defense, absorbing the hits and still shining back upon the world.

In that celestial backdrop, we are now in a major meteor shower. We look up at them pounding the Moon and lighting the Earthly skies. We see the Moon amassing more scars and pray the projectiles will be small enough to incinerate before hitting Earth.

Jews had learned to survive without a shielding atmosphere for two thousand years. And then, in 1948, it got one, in the very place where the Jewish forefathers lived. Now, when the meteor showers of Jew-hatred arrive, those in Israel feel the impacts when the projectiles are large, while their diaspora brothers on the Moon get pummeled by lighter fare.

The Earth and Moon Jews have been barraged these last two years. They are scarred but eternal, waiting for the wave of debris to pass by as quickly as possible.

*Jewish New Yorker Barry Borgen in hospital after being assaulted by mob of anti-Israel protestors in midtown New York City*

Palestineism Is Antisemitism Writ Large

Posted on July 30, 2024 by First.One.Through

The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States has gone full jihadi, targeting JEWISH institutions, including synagogues. The instigators are not only anti-Israel but anti-Jews.

Squirrel Hill Synagogue, PA location of worst mass murder of Jews in the US, defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti, July 2024

Jewish houses of worship are not Israeli. They have nothing to do with the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, but were targeted by pro-Palestinian antisemites.

Synagogue in Los Angeles, CA spray painted with “Free Palestine” and “F*ck Israel” in May 2020

The Palestineism movement specifically calls for finding and confronting Zionist organizations, which it has determined is every Jewish organization unless it specifically repudiates Zionism. They have created a “Mapping Project” to enable people to locate and harrass Jewish Americans, Jewish organizations, Jewish schools and synagogues.

The United States Holocaust Museum has written extensively about the Nazis use of intimidation as a tool to weaponize fear and “rationalize war, persecution, and genocide.” The “Free Palestine” graffiti on houses of worship – especially in the shadow of the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023 by Palestinian Arabs – is a deliberate targeting of Jews, a marker for exclusion and persecution.

The Department of Justice needs to act against these hate crimes. The department knows that “Hate crimes have a devastating effect beyond the harm inflicted on any one victim. They reverberate through families, communities, and the entire nation, as others fear that they too could be threatened, attacked, or forced from their homes, because of what they look like, who they are, where they worship, whom they love, or whether they have a disability.”

Section 241 of the civil rights code makes it a felony to intimidate people to hinder the free exercise to a basic privilege like worship.

Yet in Pennsylvania, home to the largest mass murder of Jews in the United States and scene of recent graffiti on a synagogue, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov. Josh Shapiro did not flag that the perpetrators of the antisemitic intimidation should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They only spoke of the symbolism of the vandalism and graffiti.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) made it an offense to use intimidation to prevent a person from going to a synagogue. A Tennessee woman was just sentenced to three years and five months for intimidating people from using an abortion clinic. Such action should be enforced quickly and broadly for vandalizing a synagogue, with long sentences when the language calls to eradicate the Jewish State.

Words of condemnation are appreciated but American Jewry needs and demands that politicians and law enforcement enforce laws to protect Jews from the onslaught of toxic antisemitic Palestineism that is sweeping the nation.

Protecting Synagogues Like Abortion Clinics (July 2024)

“Context” For Attacking People In The West Regarding Situation In The Middle East (May 2024)

Hamas, CAIR, DSA, Within Our Lifetime, SJP Are All Gunning For Jews (May 2024)

The Normalization Deformity: No To Zionism and Peace; Yes To Massacres and Terrorism In a Global Intifada (January 2024)

CAIR On October 7 Sadistic Massacre (December 2023)

We Normalized Jew-Hatred For Years (December 2023)

WESPAC, The Charitable Terrorist Supporters In Your Backyard (October 2023)

Know Your Enemies. This Is 1948 Redux (October 2023)

Antisemitism Is A Tool For Ethnic Cleansing (October 2023)

Palestinians View Jews Like The French Viewed Nazis (August 2023)

Kanye’s And Palestinian Arabs’ Antisemitism (November 2022)

You Cannot Be Progressive And Pro-Palestinian (October 2022)

Apartheid In Palestinian Authority, Not Israel (May 2022)

Palestineism is Toxic Racism (August 2019)

The Disproportionality of Hate Speech

Posted on June 17, 2024 by First.One.Through

The size and “power” of Jews is grossly inflated.

While Judaism is described as one of the three great monotheistic religions in the western world, it is a fraction of the size of Christianity and Islam. While Christianity and Islam are universalistic religions which forced or coerced conversions over centuries, Judaism is a particular religion with no such tenet. Consequently, Christians and Muslims number roughly 2.4 billion and 1.9 billion, respectively, spread around the world, while Jews number only about 15 million, found principally in Israel and the United States.

The scale differential is enormous. Consider that if only 10% of Muslims are radical antisemites willing to kill Jews, the 190 million Islamists would be 12 times the entire Jewish population.

There are about 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world, and only a single Jewish-majority country. Even in countries without a Muslim majority, the number of Muslims are growing quickly and dwarf Jews.

The result is that Muslims can voice antisemitic things without fear of reprisals. In Muslim-majority countries, the Quran and Islamic teachings are beyond reproach under blasphemy laws but not non-Islamic faiths. Jews and Judaism can be mocked without any repercussions.

*Deborah Samuel was killed and burned by mob after she was accused of blasphemy at Shehu Shagari school in Sokoto, Nigeria*

That is becoming more true in Western non-Muslim majority countries as well. People are terrified about drawing a picture of the Islamic prophet Muhammed out of fear of being killed, but will comfortably mock the small minority Jewish population and Judaism aloud publicly.

The sheer size of the Christian and Muslim population and number of Muslim-majority countries, coupled with fear of crossing radical extremists produces a disproportionate volume of hate speech. Whether at the U.N., social media or on college campuses, Islamic privilege insulates the large religions in a way that does not exist for Jews and Judaism.

Some resolutions have been put forward at global bodies which try to afford religious protections.

In 1992, the United Nations adopted the “Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.” It was followed in 2011 with UN Human Rights Council 16/18 “Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.” More recently in July 2023, the UNHRC passed a resolution introduced by Pakistan to prohibit “desecration of sacred books and religious symbols” after a Quran burning in Sweden. It’s a smattering of protections for people (in 1992), curtailing speech (in 2011) and protection of articles (in 2023).

Many of the sponsors of the resolutions have been Islamic countries. Their desire to protect the sanctity of Islamic holy texts and prophets globally is part of the reason there have been almost no incidents of radical Islamists burning Jewish holy books. Islamists also don’t insult Jewish prophets such as Moses, as Islamists also view them as prophets.

Instead, Islamists come for Jews and the Jewish State. They mock the Holocaust as a fair target of Jewish history, not of Judaism. They state that Jews have no history in the land of Israel, which, while undermining the basic text of the Bible, is viewed as only insulting Jews as people and not the religion itself.

This divide is another element in the disproportionality of hate speech: an intrinsic part of modern antisemitism is to divorce Jews from Judaism. It allows Judaism to be placed among the three great monotheistic religions, even while there are a paltry number of Jews compared to Christians and Muslims. The gap between the understanding of religion and people inflates the fictitious “power” of the handful of Jews, a source of significant hate speech.

On April 11, 2016, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said “One of the key warning signs of genocide is the spread of hate speech in public discourse and the media…. And every day, the seeds of future massacres and genocides are being planted… It is essential that Governments, the judiciary and civil society stand firm against hate speech and those who incite division and violence.”

The U.N., social media platforms and antisemitic politicians are themselves enabling and spreading antisemitic hate speech. Everyone can feel the temperature rising for Jews but few are willing to condemn the vile slander.

Jews are a small minority-minority facing a disproportionate number of hate crimes in the United States every year. They also face a disproportionate amount of hate speech, protected by free speech laws in the West, and indifference in the East and global South.

We Normalized Jew-Hatred For Years (December 2023)

Jews Are A Minority-Minority (November 2023)

The United Nations Ignores Radical Muslim Violent Extremism and Terrorism (February 2023)

Islamic Privilege (March 2022)

The Re-Introduction of the ‘Powerful’ Jew Smear (March 2021)

NY Times Considers Notion That Terrorism Against Israel is a Matter of Free Speech (January 2021)

Organized and Disorganized Antisemitism (January 2020)

Uncomfortable vs. Dangerous Free Speech (October 2017)

The Only Religious Extremists for the United Nations are “Jewish Extremists” (March 2016)

We Normalized Jew-Hatred For Years

Posted on December 3, 2023 by First.One.Through

Jew-hatred was the leading form of hatred in the United States, even before the horrible spike post-October 7. Yet it was actively minimized by politicians and the mainstream media in favor of Victims of Preference, the majority-minority groups of Blacks, Hispanics and members of the LGBT+ community.

When Jew-hatred was tied to Israel, powers in government, media and universities deliberately did their utmost to claim that anti-Zionism wasn’t antisemitism, even as they promoted anti-Semitic laws and narratives.

There are a few primary antisemitic laws and narratives which have become so normalized, many fail to acknowledge their profound Jew-hatred:

Denying Jews their history and heritage
Banning Jews from living somewhere
Banning Jews from praying at their holiest site

Denying Jews Their History and Heritage

Jews have a unique religion. At its core, Jews are a small tribe tied to a specific piece of land, the holy land of Israel. While other religions were idealized as universalistic and therefore pushed to convert masses wherever they went, Jews had no such mantra. Whether they live in Israel or the diaspora (everywhere other than Israel) they pray facing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and try to visit Jerusalem at least three times each year, and did not scour the globe in search of new recruits.

Yet university professors say that Israel is a product of “European settler colonialism,” denying Jews their history and heritage, and these professors get tenure and continue to espouse their Jew-hatred to the next generation.

Banning Jews From Living Somewhere

Would anyone consider it legal to pass a law that Black people cannot live somewhere? Has Amnesty International blessed Iran’s policy of banning gay people and hanging them in public, and suggested the law be spread to more countries?

Yet the United Nations General Assembly passed resolutions in the 1970s and the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334 in 2016 making it illegal for Jews to live in the “West Bank” and eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City of Jerusalem where Judaism’s holiest sites are located. According to international law, an Israeli Arab from Jaffa can relocate to the Old City of Jerusalem but a neighboring Israeli Jew in Jaffa would be called an illegal settler if he did a similar move.

It reeks of Jew-hatred, blessed by the United Nations.

Banning Jews From Praying At Their Holiest Site

Jews, and only Jews, are denied their right to pray at their holiest location. The world brands people who demand such basic human right as “extremists,” rather than the jihadists who insist on such law, threatening Jews with violence.

Israel has continued the antisemitic ban to calm the Muslim world. Palestinian Arabs are not satisfied and want Jews to stop even walking around the Temple Mount during regular visiting hours as they consider such visits “provocative.” The United Nations supports that Jew-hatred, and claims that the Jewish Temple Mount is a purely Islamic holy site.

*United Nations map showing the Jewish Temple Mount as only holy to Muslims*

All of these things have to do with Jews, not Israelis nor the Israeli government. These are laws that insult any Jew as it relates to their permissible activities in their homeland regardless of whether Israel is run by a right-wing or left-wing government, or even if Israel was a country.

There are also laws in other countries which are infused with Jew-hatred like banning the ritual slaughter of animals for kosher meat, bans on Jewish circumcision or wearing a kippah in public to make it difficult for Jews to live in those countries. Some ban Jews from being able to become the leader of the country. Those countries wrap their animus with misdirection about protecting animal and minor rights, or protecting the civil nature or culture of their societies for passing such edicts.

It is a transparent fig leaf when they extend their hatred for Jews far from their shores.

On a small strip of land far away from their own, countries still press laws infused with Jew-hatred, either because they want to appeal to 1.8 billion Muslims and over 50 Muslim-majority countries, or they simply hate Jews. Either way, these laws helped set the stage for the October 7 massacre, as they normalized Jew-hatred in the Jewish homeland.

The vile REACTIONS to the October 7 massacre did not happen in a vacuum. The UN, media and universities have normalized Jew-hatred for years, and it is well past time to strike the antisemitic laws at the UN and remove the classes and professors at universities.