We tend to think of “ground zero” as a place, a site of destruction. Where you can point to and say: it happened here.
The new ground zeros are not simply where attacks occur. They are where the vulgar idea stops sounding outrageous.
They form in environments where the rules quietly change, where violence against Jews is never explicitly endorsed, but is no longer cleanly condemned. It is where it is explained. Contextualized. Where the language shifts just enough that the victim is converted into the villain.
You can see it in parts of political culture that elect figures like Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani without seriously confronting the ideological space around them.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Jews conspirators who operate “behind the curtain” to “make money off of racism” at the Democratic Socialist of America convention
Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the man who came to murder hundreds of children at a Jewish day school in Michigan, lived in Rashida Tlaib’s Michigan district, home to thousand of people who believe Tlaib’s rhetoric, who support – or least excuse – her vile antisemitism.
The same motion can be seen in New York City where Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and came to the city that elected a jihadist mayor to rain violence on perceived enemies.
When enough people participate in erasing the moral line, the boundary that once made violence unthinkable begins to weaken. And when that boundary weakens, the outliers don’t need instructions.
They need atmosphere.
The new ground zero is not the place where it happens. It is where it no longer feels impossible.
There is a temptation in moments of fear and anger to reach for the bluntest possible instrument: collective blame.
We are seeing it again now, in calls from some politicians and commentators to treat Muslim Americans not as individuals, but “as a class.” It is offensive. It is wrong. And it is profoundly un-American.
We have been here before.
American history offers a warning that should never be forgotten: General Ulysses S. Grant’s order expelling Jews “as a class” from parts of the South during the Civil War. It was born of frustration, prejudice, and expedience. It is remembered today as a stain.
That is what collective guilt produces. Not security. Not clarity. Just injustice.
And it obscures the truth.
Because the truth is more important: not all Muslims are jihadists. The overwhelming majority are not. But there exists, within every society, a subset animated by radical, supremacist ideology. In this case, that subset is jihadists and they are a very real problem.
We have seen synagogues attacked, Jewish schools targeted, and civilians murdered around the world – from New York to Paris, from Sydney to Jerusalem. These acts are not isolated. They are the violent edge of a broader ideological ecosystem that glorifies terror, sanctifies hatred, and seeks legitimacy in the West.
That ecosystem is not confined to foreign battlefields. It has nodes here.
Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Within Our Lifetime do not operate as neutral advocacy groups. Their rhetoric, tactics, and alliances echo the narratives of jihadist movements – erasing terrorism, justifying atrocities, and turning mass violence against Jews into something to be rationalized and celebrated.
This is where scrutiny belongs.
Not on millions of Muslim Americans living ordinary lives who are part of the American fabric. But on the networks, organizations, and ideologies that radicalize, that excuse violence, and that deliberately blur the moral line between protest and terror.
Failing to make that distinction is not only unjust but dangerous.
When everything is labeled the problem, nothing is. When all Muslims are treated as suspects, actual jihadists disappear into the noise. They benefit from that confusion. They rely on it.
And worse, it hands them a propaganda victory: proof, in their telling, that the West is inherently hostile, that coexistence is impossible, that radicalism is justified.
That is why calls to expel Muslims from the United States are not just racist; they are strategically self-defeating. They punish the innocent, betray American principles, and distract from the real threat.
A serious society does not fight ideologies with hysteria. It fights them with precision.
It identifies the threat clearly: jihadist ideology, its enablers, and the institutions that normalize or legitimize it. It protects the innocent. And it refuses, no matter how charged the moment, to abandon the principles that distinguish a free society from the movements that seek to destroy it.
A man attempted to massacre Jews at a synagogue and preschool in Michigan.
He drove a truck into the building, fired a rifle, and carried explosives and gasoline. Inside were more than a hundred children and staff. Only the quick response of security guards prevented what could have been a mass slaughter of Jewish children.
That should have been the story.
Instead, in its coverage of the attack, The New York Times quickly shifted the emotional center somewhere else. The paper highlighted concern that Muslims or members of the local Arab community had “anxiety,” worried they might face might face “blowback” after the attack.
Pause for a moment and consider the moral inversion.
A man tries to murder Jewish children in a synagogue, and the newspaper of record worries about the social consequences for people who share the attacker’s background, and “communities everywhere.. confronting rising hate.”
Would this framing appear in any other circumstance?
If a white nationalist attempted to burn down a Black church, would the central concern in the article be whether white Americans might face uncomfortable scrutiny?
If a neo-Nazi attacked a mosque, would journalists pivot immediately to the anxiety of Christians worried about backlash?
Of course not.
The victims would be the story. The ideology behind the violence would be examined directly and without hesitation.
But when Jews are attacked – especially by jihadists – the narrative too often drifts away from them.
The Reality the Coverage Avoids
There is another uncomfortable fact that often disappears in these discussions.
In the United States, Jewish institutions have repeatedly been targets of ideological violence.
Synagogues, kosher markets, Jewish schools, and community centers have been attacked by extremists motivated by antisemitism and/or jihadist ideology.
The list is tragically familiar:
the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh
the Poway synagogue shooting
the Jersey City kosher market attack
the Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis
Across Europe the pattern is even clearer: the Toulouse Jewish school massacre, the Hyper Cacher supermarket attack in Paris, and numerous synagogue shootings and plots across the continent have been by jihadists.
Yet the reverse pattern is almost nonexistent.
There is no recurring history in the United States of Jews entering mosques to massacre Muslims, no wave of Jewish attackers targeting Muslim schools or grocery stores.
The asymmetry matters.
Jewish institutions build security fences, hire armed guards, and train for active shooters not because of paranoia, but because experience has taught them they are frequent targets.
The Michigan synagogue had security for exactly this reason.
Without it, the story might have been hundreds of funerals.
A Pattern of Moral Softening
The New York Times’ framing of the Michigan attack fits a broader pattern that has become increasingly visible in recent years.
When jihadist-inspired violence occurs, the language often softens. Motives become vague. Ideology dissolves into references to “grievances,” “tensions,” or the emotional distress of communities associated with the attacker.
Select context is provided for the perpetrator that make him appear a victim, such as mourning the loss of family members in the Middle East, without sharing that those family members were members of jihadi terrorist groups.
This is no longer news but distortion.
Journalism is supposed to clarify reality, not obscure it. When coverage instinctively protects the social sensitivities of the attacker’s community while barely dwelling on the intended victims, it creates a moral fog.
No serious observer believes entire communities are responsible for the crimes of individuals. That principle should remain unquestioned.
But shifting sympathy away from the Jewish victims of an attack to the jihadi attacker is a failure to report the truth clearly for the purpose of a twisted narrative. One that continues to put the most attacked minority-minority in the crosshairs while falsely painting their most frequent attackers as the ones needing sympathy.
Before Christmas arrives in Europe, the barricades do.
Markets are designed around security corridors. Choirs rehearse behind concrete blocks. Armed patrols take their positions weeks in advance. In some cities, officials quietly shrink routes, replace gatherings with broadcasts, or advise citizens to celebrate privately. These decisions are made before a single hymn is sung, before a single candle is lit.
The season now begins with anticipation—not of joy, but of danger.
Europe carries this fear because Christmas has already been marked in blood. In Berlin in 2016, families shopping for ornaments were crushed beneath a truck driven by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Strasbourg in 2018, a gunman stalked a Christmas market, shouting Islamic slogans as he killed. An attack was foiled the following year in Vienna, Austria. Just days ago, five Muslim men were arrested for planning a Christmas attack in Germany. Another attack in Poland was foiled.
13 people killed in Berlin Christmas attack in 2016
These attacks were not misdirected rage or incidental violence. Christmas itself was the target. Its visibility, its symbolism, its unapologetic presence in public space made it irresistible to jihadist ideology.
Time has passed, but the lesson lingers. Terror no longer needs to strike every year to be effective. Memory enforces compliance. The terrifying ghosts return on schedule, and cities respond accordingly.
The ideology behind this fear is explicit. Radical Islamism divides the world into rulers and the ruled, believers and infidels. Christians and Jews are permitted only when diminished, tolerated only when silent. Public faith is defiance. Celebration is rebellion. Holidays are moments when submission is tested.
People mourn five people killed by jihadist in Strasbourg, France in 2018
That worldview does not stop at Europe’s borders.
In Nigeria, Christmas approaches without illusions. In the northeast, churches shorten services or cancel them outright. Caroling routes remain undrawn. Families calculate risk before prayer. Islamist insurgents have repeatedly attacked Christian villages and churches on Christmas and Easter, murdering worshippers and burning sanctuaries. The timing is intentional. The theology is clear. Christmas is treated as an offense that must be punished. Here, fear is not inherited memory. It is lived experience.
Jews have been bearing this burden for decades, their calendar similarly weaponized against them. Jewish holidays are chosen for attack because they gather families, because they proclaim continuity, because they announce survival in the open.
On Simchat Torah in Israel in 2023, 1,200 Jews celebrating the renewal of the Torah were slaughtered in their homes and at festivals. The date was chosen carefully. In Sydney, Australia, Jews gathering during Chanukah were met with terror and violence. A holiday of light confronted an ideology that demands darkness, enforced not metaphorically but operationally.
Across continents and faiths, the pattern holds. Jihadist terror does not only murder people. It seeks to reorder time. It teaches Christians and Jews that their holidays are liabilities, that joy invites punishment, that visibility must be negotiated. It aims to train infidels to bend the knee before violence is even required.
This is why the danger is most acute before Christmas, before Chanukah, before any non-Islamic holy day arrives. When celebrations are diminished in advance, when silence is praised as responsibility, when absence is framed as wisdom, terror has already achieved governance. Fear begins to regulate behavior.
A society that learns to cancel joy preemptively will eventually learn to cancel belief, then speech, then presence itself. When communities retreat before threats are issued, coercion has become ambient. Submission has become routine.
For the past decade, Islamic radicals have been chanting in Arabic in the West, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” which means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”. That Army of Mohammed is the ghost of jihadi Christmas coming to slaughter infidels near you.
Zahra Billoo of CAIR once warned American Muslims to beware of “polite Zionists.” People who show up at interfaith events, bake challah with their neighbors, and fight for civil rights—but who, she insists, cannot be trusted because they believe Jews have a right to live and pray in their ancestral homeland. That was her definition of danger: Jews who smile, volunteer, and advocate for coexistence, but who also believe Israel has a right to exist. They are your “enemies.”
It was an extraordinary moment of inversion. The Jewish community—disproportionately involved in interfaith coalitions, civil-rights causes, racial-justice marches, refugee aid, and social-service work—was cast as a threat not for what it does, but for what it believes: that Jews, like any people, have the right to be sovereign in their own homeland. Billoo called that racism. And too many institutions nodded politely.
So it is fair to ask: Do Jews have to be wary of “polite jihadists”?
Smiling Zohran Mamdani
We are told by Muslim groups to fear polite Zionists, yet tiptoe around the reality of polite jihadists—individuals who wrap hard supremacist doctrines in soft rhetoric and a smile. People who reject violence in press releases but openly support ideologies that cast non-Muslims as infidels; who promote frameworks in which Jews and Christians may live only as tolerated second-class subjects (dhimmis) under Islamic rule; who embrace the idea that Islam should dominate the world, politically and spiritually; who speak of “justice,” but envision a future in which non-Muslims are either subordinate or erased.
These are not fringe concepts. They are hardwired into the foundational texts and invoked by extremists to justify their worldview. And while many American Muslims reject them entirely, groups like CAIR have repeatedly platformed leaders who traffic in these supremacist ideas—even while presenting themselves as civil-rights organizations.
If believing that Jews should be allowed to pray at their holiest site is “racist,” what is believing that Jews must never pray there at all? If supporting Jewish sovereignty is “extremism,” what is supporting an ideology that grants Jews survival only as second-class subjects?
America has a long-standing standard for hate groups: organizations that demonize entire populations, promote supremacist ideologies, or justify violence or domination over others. The KKK fell into that category because it portrayed African Americans, Jews, and Catholics as existential threats who must be controlled, excluded, or eliminated.
What, then, do we do with organizations whose leaders insist that Jews who support Israel are untrustworthy; who describe the world in terms of Muslim purity versus Zionist contamination; who excuse jihadist violence as “resistance”; who call Jewish self-determination a racist ideology; who propagate doctrines in which non-Muslims must accept inferiority or die?
Is that not the definition of a hate ideology?
The United States is finally on the cusp of declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. It is long overdue, an action which many Muslim-majority countries have taken.
CAIR is invited into coalitions, corporate trainings, universities, government initiatives, and interfaith events—despite leadership that routinely defames Jews and normalizes Islamist supremacy. If the KKK wrapped itself in the language of “civil rights,” it would still be disqualified. Supremacy does not become acceptable because it quotes scripture or wears a suit.
The polite jihadist is far more dangerous than the polite Zionist—because one seeks coexistence, while the other seeks dominance.
America needs to stop pretending it cannot tell the difference.
Yet no one seems to give a lick about 40,000 women and children who are rotting in camps in Syria, because of their familial ties to ISIS.
Children gather at the al-Hol camp, which houses families of ISIS members, in Syria’s Hasakeh province in May 2021. (photo: Baderkhan Ahmad / AP file)
Over 40,000 people live in the al-Hol and Roj detention centers in northeast Syria, of which 62% are children. Almost all of the others are women in what is described as “one big prison.” They hail from 60 different countries (mostly Iraq and Syria) but their governments have been slow to repatriate them because of their ties to ISIS, and of how they might be perceived upon returning home.
While ISIS was defeated in Iraq on December 9, 2017, the group continues its attacks, with over 150 in the first half of 2024. As such, the women and children of ISIS fighters continue to find themselves in limbo FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS.
Al Hol Detention camp in northeastern Syria houses roughly 40,000 women and children for several years
The crux of the problem is that many of the women and children share the ideology of their ISIS relatives, as conveyed in the CNN report below. It has made the situation complicated for countries like France to repatriate these women and children for fear that they will foment terrorism back home.
In May 2022, France repatriated 51 women and children. In October 2022 the country brought back another 55 and in April 2023, another 35. It has been an extremely slow process. Upon arrival in France, minors were handed over to child care services while the adults were handed over to the relevant judicial authorities, as joining ISIS is considered a criminal act.
Some countries, like the United Kingdom and Denmark, have revoked the citizenship of people who went to fight with ISIS. Those countries have left people to rot in the detention camps for years.
Beyond the ISIS war, western countries have expelled hundreds of non-citizens for expressing extremist ideology, and stripped citizenship of women and children affiliated with terrorists. All in the name of ensuring the protection and security of their country.
While the UK, France, Denmark and other western countries took such actions, they voted for a UN resolution for Israel to “repatriate” and to “exert efforts toward the implementation of paragraph 11 of General Assembly resolution 194 (III)” which calls for moving millions of Arab descendants of the 1948/9 Arab-Israeli war INTO ISRAEL, even though those Arabs have never lived in nor have citizenship in Israel.
And the western countries did so in the middle of Hamas’s genocidal war to eradicate the Jewish State.
Western countries prioritize national security over the rights of women and children tied to radical jihadists, but simultaneously call for Israel to admit millions of radical jihadists while it is at war against those same people. It is worse than hypocrisy; it is an attempt to sacrifice Jews to the angry jihadi gods to save themselves.
Many political experts have offered that there is no way to defeat Hamas’ ideology though military means. Israel’s war effort will only be successful in defeating the military capabilities of the political-terrorist group, much like allied forces defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, and US and other allies defeated al-Qaeda and ISIS in the 21st century. The ultimate driver of Hamas, to destroy the Jewish State, will continue to fuel another generation of Palestinian radicals.
What goes unmentioned is that this “ideology” is rooted in religious fanaticism, much like al Qaeda and ISIS, among others. This potentially makes the ideology eternal, so any notion of defeating the ideology would be nonsensical.
Consider that there are only 900 Christian Arabs in Gaza out of a population of roughly 2.2 million, a paltry 0.04% of the region, with the rest being Muslim. The strip is deeply religious under a strictly Islamic religious regime enforcing sharia law. Hamas is attempting to use its Gaza foothold as the launching pad for a caliphate with the help of other Islamic regimes including Iran and Qatar, to consume Israel next door.
Last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came clean about his fanatical Islamic and antisemitic and anti-US beliefs in front of the Turkish parliament as he declared “we implement sharia law: victory or martyrdom!” and “America is the plague and the plague is America.”
The Israel-Arab war is a religious war for Palestinian Arabs and the Islamic Republic of Iran, not a territorial war. It is therefore not surprising that Jews in the diaspora are being attacked by antisemites who berate Jews as murderers, racists and robbers who are “colonizers,” not indigenous to the land of Israel. It is an unhinged rant of fanatics who celebrate the slaughter of unbelievers unmoored in reality, not a reasoned opinion capable of being addressed.
For decades, Palestinians put on a dance that they had two personas: one peaceful and secular, the other militant and Islamist. In August 2024, they shed the former and fully embraced the latter.
Palestinian Arabs had two principal parties in their government: the more secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas. The Palestinian Authority has been ruled by President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who the west presents as a moderate voice of reason, despite being a Holocaust denier and being deeply unpopular amongst local Palestinians. Abbas has ruled E49, the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines, commonly called the “West Bank” by Palestinians and “Judea and Samaria” by Israelis.
Hamas is the more popular political party amongst local Palestinian Arabs and has ruled Gaza since 2007. It is a designated terrorist organization according to the United States, European Union, Israel and many other countries. It nominally divided the organization between its political wing and its military wing, much like Nazi Germany had different divisions of the SS, Gestapo, Waffen, Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and Wehrmacht.
On July 31, 2024, Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, while he was in Iran. In response to the vacated position, on August 6, Hamas announced that Yahya Sinwar who is the group’s military leader, will also assume the role of diplomatic leader. The move consolidated the diplomatic and terrorist faces of the organization.
Just over a week later on August 15, President Abbas spoke to the government of Turkey in a large address. In his remarks, he made clear that the Palestinian Authority is not a secular party but a religious one, intent on “implement[ing] Islamic sharia law: victory or martyrdom.”
PA President Mahmoud Abbas addressing government of Turkey on August 15, 2024
He called for Islamic prayers to mourn for the slain leader of Hamas with reciting prayers from the Quran to wide applause.
And then called the United States a “plague,” something nefarious and detrimental to humankind which must be destroyed.
Palestinian leadership has shed the polite diplomatic facade and embraced the genocidal jihadi mantra of the foundational Hamas Charter, in line with the desires of the Palestinian Arab public and radical jihadists around the world. It remains to be seen if this will expand the war against the Jewish State or initiates a global recognition that an antisemitic genocidal regime next to the only Jewish State is untenable in the extreme.
Socialists have bound their cause with radical Islamists in an effort to broadly redistribute wealth and power from “White” and “Western” governments and people to the “global South.” The two revolutionary movements have bonded over the Jewish State as their first target for annihilation.
PART 1: It’s Not Yours
Socialists: The socialist approach to the Western world as it relates to internal matters is that the working class built the infrastructure of society but realize much less of the benefits. The “systemic racism” in America unfairly benefits White men and marginalizes people of color and women. Socialists argue that the wealth and power of the “patriarchy” is essentially reaped from stealing the labor of working people. This is more true externally, where the “West” colonized lands inhabited by Black and Brown people.
Islamic Jihadists: Islamic radicals have advanced alternative history that Jews never lived in Israel or had holy temples there. They see Zionism as a venture of Europeans who both wanted to shed the continent of scheming Jews and plant a colonialist flag in the heart of the Islamic world. They believe that Zionism is inherently built on racism and xenophobia, advancing a notion of “Jewish supremacy” to ethnically cleanse the holy land of the actual indigenous Arab population.
Both movements begin with a premise that the “successful” West and Jewish State are projects of theft and racism from poor Black and Brown people. Those minorities have a rightful claim to the property which is in the hands of the wealthy and powerful usurpers.
PART 2: You Cannot Defend Yourselves
Socialists: The far-left has promoted the idea that White people should “check their privilege.” This is a polite way of saying that when minority groups come to take the elites’ money and power, the rich should quietly accept it as a rightful redistribution of ill-taken goods. As New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio once said “there is plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands,” and socialists are the best arbiters of playing Robin Hood to take from the “wrong hands” of the rich and hand it out to the “right” working class people.
Islamic Jihadists: Islamic extremists know the wrong hands that hold onto the holy land: the Jews, as clearly articulated in the Hamas foundational charter. The Arabs fought many wars, including 1948, 1967, 1973, and several “intifadas” up to the present day, all without dislodging Jews from the land that they believe exclusively belongs to Arabs. Having lost the wars, Muslims demand surrender. People like Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR, declare that Israel, “as the Occupying power,” has no right to self-defense. The Jewish State must accept terrorism as the price for existence – until it no longer exists.
The insidious internal activities started with taking over local school boards to re-educate people in this new vocabulary with word like “intersectionality” and “anti-racist.” They moved the talking points from fringe periodicals into the mainstream media. The newly-trained zealot minions began electing officials to local and national government who then drafted new laws to cement the takeover of capitalism and meritocracy.
Jews are a vulnerable minority-minority, in countries and on the global stage. The Socialist-jihadi alliance knows that it can torment Jews, the “little Satan” as the leaders of Iran call Israel, much easier than the “Great Satan” of the United States. But the goals are the same: confiscate wealth and power from those perceived as “illegal” holders of such privilege and property, and hand it to those whom the woke/jihadi cabal determine are more deserving.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has saddled up with some of the most violent anti-Israel Jew-haters in his New York district. They are now actively coming for Jews.
At the launch of Bowman’s 2024 congressional campaign, he featured Nada Khader who said before a cheering Bowman that Jews in Israel will only be safe when Palestinian Arabs “return to our homeland!” Until then, they can expect more October 7 massacres.
Nada Khader of WESPAC threatening Jews with more attacks if Palestinians do not get to move into Israel, with Rep. Jamaal Bowman cheering “Free Palestine”
Khader has taken her screed directly to Jewish schools.
On March 10, 2024, Khader and about twenty fellow anti-Israel agitators came to the Jewish Leffell School, where Jews gathered to discuss buying homes in Israel.
This seemed like an ideal time and location for Bowman’s supporters to tell Jews that they should be attacked.
Jihadist extremists carry banners in front of a Jewish Day School in Westchester County, NY on March 10, 2024
Khader and friends carried signs to “end the 75 year occupation”, meaning to destroy the Jewish State, as well as to “end Western complicity in Zionism” to rip any protections for Jews, so Muslim extremists can seek “Palestinian Liberation by any means necessary.”
Pro-Palestinian extremists are very clear what “any means necessary” means – more October 7 massacres with raping, beheadings and burning families alive.
NYC – these vile stickers are being spotted all around Union Square.
Khader’s charity, WESPAC, is somehow a tax-exempt entity despite calls for violence. It operates openly in the heart of Westchester County, home to 150,000 Jews.
Nada Khader with allies calling for the rape and slaughter of Jews in front of a Jewish day school on March 10, 2024
Imagine the danger to Westchester’s Jews if Jamaal Bowman prevails in the June 25th Democratic primary.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Rep. Rashida Tlaib shout “Free Palestine” before crowd after the October 7 massacre and mass rape of Israelis by Palestinian Arabs
First One Through 