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CAIR’s 9/11 Curriculum: Erase the Jihadists, Center Muslims as Victims

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On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people. They were followers of Osama bin Laden, who had declared jihad against the United States and explicitly invoked religion, Jews and “Crusaders” in explaining the war he believed he was fighting.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a guide for teaching September 11 to American children in grades 6 through 12. Its approach to that history is remarkable: don’t call the people who committed 9/11 “jihadists,” but make sure students learn extensively about Muslims as victims after 9/11.

CAIR’s Remembering and Reflecting on Sep. 11, 2001 in the Classroom tells educators to avoid language that “associates” the mass murder with Islam and Muslims. It specifically identifies three terms it considers “inaccurate and inflammatory”: “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists” and “radical Islamic terrorists.”

“Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims. For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “radical Islamic terrorists.”” – CAIR teaching guide

The objection to “jihadists” is particularly revealing. The word does not describe Muslims generally. Quite the opposite: it distinguishes a radical movement from the enormous population of Muslims who do not subscribe to it. Likewise, adding “radical” to Islamic terrorism is an explicit qualifier. A teacher can explain precisely what al-Qaeda believed while simultaneously making clear that its ideology was rejected by countless Muslims.

CAIR instead recommends removing the distinction.

That might seem like a dispute over terminology until one reaches the guide’s recommended reading list. Then the editorial direction becomes unmistakable.

Among the eleven articles CAIR recommends are “Commemorate 9/11 by Confronting Islamophobia,” “9/11 at 10: Lessons Learned From Anti-Muslim Haters,” “Muslims in America, post 9/11,” “Hope and Despair: Being Muslim in America After 9/11,” “How Being Muslim In America Has Changed Since 9/11,” “Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks,” and “How 9/11 Caused An Increase In Islamophobic Hate Crimes.”

Seven of the eleven titles are explicitly centered on Muslims, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim discrimination. Another recommended reading concerns federal civil-rights engagement with Arab and Muslim communities.

The videos follow much the same path. Students are offered “How 9/11 Shaped the Lives of American Muslims,” “Minorities targeted in 9/11 ‘revenge attacks,’” “9/11 Changed Life For American Muslims,” and “Post 9/11 Detention Of American Muslims.”

What is conspicuously absent from CAIR’s article list is a comparable body of material about why September 11 happened in the first place and who conducted the heinous acts of mass murder.

There is no recommended article devoted to al-Qaeda’s ideology. None to the development of jihadism. None examining bin Laden’s religious declarations. None exploring why al-Qaeda spoke of Jews and “Crusaders,” or why its followers believed their mass murder of civilians was justified as jihad.

Instead, CAIR explicitly tells teachers what they should add: Muslim condemnations of the attacks, solidarity from Muslim-majority countries, Muslim leaders joining President George W. Bush at a mosque and Muhammad Ali participating in a fundraiser. When discussing the aftermath, teachers are instructed to include hate crimes and bigotry against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs and other minorities.

Those are legitimate subjects. Americans who attacked innocent Muslims, Sikhs or Arabs after September 11 committed reprehensible crimes. Muslim Americans who died in the World Trade Center deserve to be remembered alongside every other innocent victim.

But that is precisely why the imbalance matters.

A history lesson should be capable of holding two ideas simultaneously: radical Islamists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people on September 11, and innocent Muslims subsequently became targets of bigotry by people who wrongly held them responsible.

In fact, accurately naming the first proposition makes the second easier to understand. “Jihadist” separates the extremists from Muslims generally. “Radical Islamist” identifies an ideology rather than an ethnicity or an entire faith. Students can then examine that ideology, understand why most Muslims reject it and understand why blaming ordinary Muslims for al-Qaeda’s crimes is both factually wrong and morally indefensible.

CAIR takes the opposite route.

Religion becomes something educators should carefully detach from the perpetrators, even though the perpetrators themselves repeatedly invoked it. Then religious identity becomes central when discussing the victims of the aftermath.

The inversion is extraordinary.

Consider what a student following CAIR’s bibliography is encouraged to encounter. The student can read about anti-Muslim haters, Islamophobic hate crimes, Muslim life after 9/11, Muslim heroes, Muslim victims, Muslim detention and civil rights for Muslim communities.

But where is the corresponding invitation to study the jihadists?

Where is bin Laden’s worldview? Where is al-Qaeda’s theology? Where are its declarations? Where is its obsession with “Crusaders” and Jews? Where is the intellectual history that transformed religious extremism into airplanes crashing into buildings filled with civilians?

September 11 did not begin with Islamophobia. It began with an ideology and 19 men prepared to murder thousands of strangers in the name of radical Islam.

CAIR is not asking schools merely to protect Muslim students from collective blame. It is asking educators to perform something far more consequential: strip the perpetrators of the language that identifies their radical ideology while repeatedly directing students toward the victimization of Muslims that followed their attack.

That is not historical sensitivity. It is historical inversion.

And it invites conspiracy theories that Jews committed 9/11, when the slaughter was done in the name of genocidal jihad.

Graffiti in London in 2019 claiming that Jews did 9/11, or that another mass murder is coming for Jews

CAIR’s approach leaves students with a grotesquely rearranged history: the Muslims who suffered bigotry after 9/11 retain their religious identity, while the jihadists who caused 9/11 are stripped of theirs.

CAIR calls that responsible teaching. A better description is laundering the ideology of the killers out of the history of their crime.

Related:

Your Neighbors Are Celebrating December 7, 9/11, and October 7 (December 2024)

On 9/11, Commit To Blocking Iran and Saudi Arabia From Ever Possessing Weapons Of Mass Destruction (September 2022)

Trends in Anti-Muslim and Anti-Semitic Attacks Post-9/11 (September 2021)

The Audience Has Changed

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On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim walked out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They were young Israeli Embassy employees and a couple. Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose.

Alas, Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian anarchist, fired approximately 20 rounds at the couple shouting “free Palestine.” Inside the museum afterward, he allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Rodriguez had brought an explanation with him.

His manifesto, Explication, dated the previous day, defended the “morality of armed demonstration.” He wrote that he had considered such violence justified during the 2014 Gaza war, but understood that most Americans then would have found it “illegible” and “insane.”

By 2025, he believed America was different. “I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

In his mind, the violence had not changed. The audience had.

Rodriguez described armed action as “theater and spectacle.” He had watched enormous demonstrations against Israel, accusations of genocide become commonplace and supporters of Israel portrayed as complicit in mass killing. Yet, he complained, “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.”

The violence would be the spectacle. The manifesto would tell the audience how to read it.

Especially because of the timing: May 20, 2025.

Rodriguez penned his manifesto on the same day that UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid reached them.

The claim was completely false. The comment was a distorted derivative of a report that approximately 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children might occur over the next year. And he placed all of the blame on Israel.

The accusation spread quickly. That afternoon, CAIR issued a call for action after the UN said 14,000 Palestinian babies could die under what CAIR called Israel’s “forced starvation campaign.” Genocide supplied the larger charge.

Shortly before his murder the next day, Lischinsky reportedly shared criticism of Fletcher’s claim that called it a “blood libel.” The blood libel was much more than a charge of accusing Jews of killing children; it gave license to an audience to kill Jews in their defense.

Rodriguez had another word for encouraging the crowds to murder: Legible.

And he was right.

Eleven days later, in Boulder, Colorado, prosecutors say a man attacked a peaceful gathering supporting Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine.” One victim died.

In August 2026, popular pro-Palestinian podcaster Hasan Piker said that if American Jews continued publicly associating themselves with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Keep associating with those falsely accused of genocide, and people will come for you.

Anger and frustration are being harnessed through podcasts and manifestos to inflame passions and violence. The audience is all too happy to join the spectacle these days.

Because the violence is legible.

So crowds cheer on the killer of a United Healthcare executive, gunned down in the streets. They listen to their alt-left congressman shout on the streets that the rape of Jewish women never happened, to turn the victims into aggressors. They watch an Ariane Grande video of a frustrated musician cutting old white men to pieces to rapture and applause.

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the alt-left Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman, November 2025. (start at 52:00)

Legible.

Once upon a time – say 2010 – the mass murder by an angry person was viewed through a lens of pity and disbelief. What did we do as a society that enabled isolation and frustration to turn into heinous violence? Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is a cry out of pain – for the victims and the shooter. There are no winners, just anguish.

No longer. The audience has changed. We revel in the spectacle. If the dead are cast as privileged and powerful, part of a caste that keeps people down, the revolution will celebrate the rolled heads.

More, they will want to participate.

There has always been violence, assassinations and terrorism. But we are no longer appalled universally, only selectively. The crowds have read the jihadi-socialist manifestos and they appallingly read “sane.” LEGIBLE.

James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, spoke to the United Nations in June 2023 – months before the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Gazans – and bemoaned “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” He warned that the mob – his own people – had become so twisted that they were itching for Jewish blood.

That same deformity showed itself on American university campuses right after October 7. It has continued to spread outward to American streets as false charges of genocide and mass starvation make the violence “the only sane thing to do.“

And it is no longer just the alt-left drowning in the empathy swamp. All of those little screens that we carry every waking second make us an addicted audience, barraged by posts and podcasts, amplified by bots and armies of American foes. We listen to idiots and lies openly and frequently, and have lost our moral compass in the process.

We have reached a point where the reluctant assassin may become more willing to join the anarchy, believing the crowd might finally understand and appreciate mass murder as a noble cause, rather than a heinous crime.

We have crossed the tipping point of moral collapse. Sensing the panic, we point a finger at artificial intelligence as the problem, willfully blind that the toxin is already in the bloodstream. AI is just an accelerant, not the root of the sickness.

We are entering a new year in the Jewish calendar. As we read from the special Rosh Hashanah prayer book and ask God to have mercy on humanity, consider how many people have internalized very different – and deeply evil – texts and messages. Pray that the sound of the shofar will not only reach Heaven, but awaken the audience on earth from the hypnotic spell that has deformed their moral judgment.

Related:

The End of Old Politics: Attention Has Replaced Trust (August 2026)

Normalized Violence (April 2026)

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

The Asynchronous Audience At Jihadists’ Auto-da-Fe (November 2023)

Names and Narrative: Terrorist and Genocide

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Hamas has been a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, when the list was first developed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers invaded Israel, deliberately murdered civilians and kidnapped over 250 people.

It was designated terrorists committing terrorism.

Yet “terrorist” became a troublesome word for mainstream media and alt-left politicians.

The Associated Press advises journalists to describe specific acts and generally attribute the terms terrorism and terrorist to people or organizations, rather than independently apply them. Amnesty International has gone further, explaining that it generally avoids the terms because they lack an agreed legal definition and carry strong political and emotional connotations.

That restraint evaporates around “genocide.”

Genocide is the more demanding accusation. Death, destruction and even war crimes do not establish it. The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Israel emphatically denies that intent, maintaining that it went to war to defeat Hamas – the terrorists which had committed mass terrorism – and recover its hostages, not destroy Palestinian Arabs.

Amnesty nevertheless declares that Israel is committing genocide. The same organization that will not call Hamas a terrorist organization after its deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians has no hesitation resolving the vastly more difficult question of Israeli intent.

Progressive politicians follow the same linguistic path. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was accusing Israel of genocide within weeks of October 7 and later called Benjamin Netanyahu a “genocidal maniac.” Zohran Mamdani repeatedly describes the October 7 massacre as a “horrific war crime” rather than a terrorist act, while calling Israel’s war “genocide” and Netanyahu the “architect of a horrific genocide.”

The burden of proof has been turned upside down.

Calling October 7 terrorism requires looking simply at what Hamas did: a designated terrorist organization deliberately murdered and kidnapped civilians for political and ideological purposes. It is plainly terrorism.

Calling Israel’s war genocide requires establishing why Israel fought it: that its actual intent was to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a people rather than defeat Hamas in a defensive war.

Yet the first conclusion is treated as dangerously judgmental while the second is repeated as established fact.

Mehdi Hasan offered an almost grotesque demonstration this week while attacking a New York Times essay by Gazan Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib urging Palestinians to resist Hamas. Hasan called people sharing the essay “pro-genocide people,” Israel “the genocidaire,” the essay “a pro genocide piece” and the war “this current genocide.”

Hasan suffers a genocide stutter.

He cannot bring himself to say clearly and unambiguously that Hamas is a terrorist group and committed a heinous terrorist act, but cannot get the word “genocide” out of his mouth as he tries to hypnotize viewers into believing the unbelievable about Israel.

And the accusation does not remain attached to Israel’s government. Once genocide becomes the premise, anyone defending Israel can become pro-genocide. Even a Palestinian Arab arguing that his own people must resist Hamas can produce a pro-genocide piece for the obsessive compulsive stutterer.

That is how a defamatory vocabulary spreads.

Genocide is among the gravest accusations that can be made against a people or state. Repeating it as established fact without establishing the specific intent the crime requires does more than distort a war. It tells millions of people that Israel is deliberately destroying Palestinian Arabs and that those who defend Israel are defending that destruction.

That is an incendiary allegation in a world where Jews and Israelis are already threatened and attacked over Gaza.

Meanwhile, terrorist is handled delicately when describing the organization that deliberately slaughtered civilians on October 7 in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

The asymmetry is morally grotesque. Hasan, Tlaib, Mamdani are trafficking in the asymmetry of whataboutery as a heinous veneer to protect antisemitic terrorists, plain and simple.

The Illiberal Global South’s War on the Liberal Global North

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From 9/11 to October 7

On September 11, 2001, jihadi terrorists turned passenger airplanes into missiles and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.

Only three days later, while bodies were still being recovered, ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—was formed to protest what America might do in response.

The name was important.

ANSWER viewed American military power abroad and racism at home as pieces of the same system: a wealthy, largely Western “Global North” dominating the poorer, disproportionately black and brown “Global South.”

For this anti-Western group, America was not defending itself. It was exercising imperial power. Those fighting it could be engaged in “resistance.”

Seven months after 9/11, Israel was pulled into the same framework.

On April 20, 2002, ANSWER organized more than 100,000 people in Washington under “Free Palestine, No War on Iraq.”

The Iraq War had not even begun.

Later that year, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and others founded CODEPINK to oppose the coming Iraq War. The organizations forming around it had a broader worldview: America and its allies represented imperialism, while their opponents represented oppressed peoples fighting back.

Israel became another perfect target.

It was democratic, prosperous, militarily powerful and allied with America. It therefore became part of the “Global North.”

Never mind that roughly half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Never mind that Israel’s citizens include Arabs, Druze and other minorities. The supposedly racial framework somehow classified this remarkably diverse Middle Eastern country as the white colonialist.

That classification did something important.

It determined who was allowed to fight back.

Palestinian Arab jihadi violence could be “resistance.” Israeli force became “aggression.” ANSWER could call itself an antiwar organization while defending Palestinian attacks because it wasn’t really applying a rule against war. It was applying different rules to different sides.

Then came October 7, 2023. Thousands of Gazan terrorists invaded Israel, murdered roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250.

Israelis were still recovering bodies when ANSWER was mobilizing for “Free Palestine.”

The parallel with September 11 was remarkable. America gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining America. Israel gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining Israel.

Twenty-two years separated the attacks, but the ideological framework had barely moved.

The liberal societies being condemned have been spectacularly successful. People from every race, religion and continent continue trying to move to the United States, Canada, Europe and other liberal democracies. Israel itself absorbed Jews fleeing Europe, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

People vote with their feet. They generally flee toward societies with elections, property rights, women’s equality, education, religious freedom and economic opportunity—not away from them.

The divide is not really white versus brown or North versus South. It is between those who view successful liberal societies as achievements worth defending and those who view their success and power as evidence of oppression.

September 11 exposed that divide in America. October 7 exposed it again in Israel.

The anti-Global North’s victims of preference changed from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine. And the vocabulary remained: imperialism, colonialism, oppression and resistance.

And so did the fundamental question: When terrorists attack a successful liberal society, who has the right to resist whom?

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.

A Student Conference, a Presidential Endorsement, and the Heroes We Choose

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When a head of state opens a student conference, the message extends far beyond procedural remarks. It is a statement about the values and aspirations a society hopes to pass to its next generation.

That is why Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s patronage of the 11th General Conference of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) deserves careful attention. In its official announcement, the conference proudly celebrated the organization’s history by declaring that it produced leaders including Yasser Arafat, George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, and Walid Khalidi.

Three of those names stand apart.

George Habash founded and led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), responsible for airline hijackings, bombings, and attacks on civilians. Nayef Hawatmeh founded the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), whose history likewise includes attacks targeting civilians. Yasser Arafat led Fatah during decades in which its armed wing carried out numerous attacks against civilians before the Oslo era.

No one reading the official announcement could miss the point. This was not merely a history lesson. It was an effort to present these figures as part of the proud lineage of Palestinian student leadership.

That should concern anyone who hopes for a future of coexistence.

Every society chooses whom to celebrate before its young people. Some elevate scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, artists, and peacemakers. Others elevate military heroes. But when organizations whose leaders orchestrated attacks on civilians are held up as exemplars at a student conference, the lesson is unmistakable: these are people worthy of admiration and emulation.

PA President Mamoud Abbas continued that the program is “a school for developing future leaders, and a bridge connecting generations of Palestinian students in the homeland and the diaspora,” and the hope that Palestinian Arabs who “invest in the education and awareness of their youth cannot be defeated by occupation or have their cause extinguished.”

Defenders may argue that these figures are important because they shaped the Palestinian national movement. History should indeed be taught honestly. But there is an important distinction between teaching history and celebrating it. Germany teaches students about Adolf Hitler without holding him up as a model. The United States studies the Ku Klux Klan without celebrating its founders. Context matters. So does moral judgment.

A student organization launching a new generation of leaders has every opportunity to highlight Palestinians who built universities, hospitals, businesses, charities, diplomatic institutions, or scientific achievements. Instead, its official narrative deliberately included men whose names are inseparable from campaigns of terrorism.

If Palestinian leaders genuinely seek to prepare young people for peace, they should be encouraging students to surpass the generation that embraced violence—not to walk in its footsteps.

Peace requires more than negotiations. It requires choosing different heroes.

Riding the Waves of New York

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I took this photograph at the 9/11 memorial in Westchester the morning after the Knicks’ victory. Above the memorial, two airplane contrails crossed in the sky. For a moment, the come from behind basketball victories and terrorist tragedies made time collapse. The memory of loss, the joy of victory, and the story of New York itself all appeared in a single frame.

No city I know lives more intensely between triumph and tragedy.

This is the city that stood at the center of the world, nearly went bankrupt, reinvented itself, endured the horror of September 11th, and somehow found a way to rise again. It is a place of breathtaking architecture, relentless ambition, and an economy that continues to attract dreamers from every corner of the globe.

It is also a city of contradictions. A city capable of extraordinary tolerance and extraordinary intolerance. A city that nurtured one of the greatest Jewish communities in history, yet today struggles with normalized antisemitism many thought belonged to the past. A city whose institutions remain among the world’s finest, yet whose values are constantly being tested.

For much of my life, I thought Sinatra’s line—“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”—meant New York was the ultimate destination. The summit. The place where success itself was measured.

Standing beneath this memorial, I wondered whether I had misunderstood the lyric.

Maybe New York’s greatest lesson is not that it’s the “top of the heap.” Maybe its lesson is resilience.

To make it in New York is to learn how to navigate uncertainty. To endure setbacks. To celebrate victories without believing they will last forever, and to face disappointments without believing they are permanent. The city rises, falls, and rises again. So do the people who call it home.

And if you learn to survive the waves here, you will never fear the next horizon.

Names and Narrative: Violence

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Even a word as straightforward as “violence” can no longer be exchanged among people who strongly disagree.

On October 7, while Israeli families were still being burned alive in their homes, while women were being brutalized and dragged into Gaza, while children and grandparents were being taken hostage, the Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians and calling for an end to violence.

Read that sentence again.

Solidarity with the side carrying out the massacre whicle simultaneously being opposed to violence.

Under any normal understanding of language, those two positions cannot coexist. Even if one sides with Palestinian Arabs doing the slaughter, one cannot deny that killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 people hostage is anything but violence.

Yet for much of today’s activist left, there is no inconsistency because violence has been redefined.

Violence is no longer judged by the act itself. It is judged by the political identity of the actor and the victim. Violence against the oppressed is evil. Violence by the oppressed is resistance.

That single inversion explains nearly everything.

It explains why people can chant “globalize the intifada” and insist it is not a call for violence. Because intifada, in their lexicon, is not violence. It is justice.

But words have histories. And intifada has a very specific one.

The fact is that the Second Intifada was not a symbolic protest. It was suicide bombings on buses, massacres in cafés, shootings in markets, families murdered at holiday tables. The later “stabbing intifada” turned sidewalks and bus stops into hunting grounds. The “car intifada” transformed vehicles into weapons aimed at civilians.

So when Jews hear “globalize the intifada,” they do not hear an abstract call for liberation. They hear a political tradition with a body count. They hear the globalization of a tactic that has repeatedly targeted Jewish civilians.

That is why the argument over this slogan so often goes nowhere.

Congressional committee on the phrase “Globalize the intifada” on June 24, 2025

One side hears history. The other hears ideology. One side sees violence in the act itself. The other sees violence only when the “wrong” people commit it.

The socialist-jihadi moral framework launders murder into resistance and terror into liberation, because the victims are placed on the wrong side of the political hierarchy.

October 7 exposed with horrifying clarity that while the massacre itself was monstrous, the reaction to it revealed something even deeper: a political culture that could look directly at burned families, raped women, butchered children, and kidnapped grandparents and still speak of “ending violence” while standing in solidarity with those who had just committed it.

And when Jews and decent people watch those same people – in the same breadth – call for following the charge of a young aspiring politician named Zohran Mamdani to redefine both violence and “peace” in the cause of annihilating the oppressor class, they have reason to fear.

The sanitation of violence against certain undesirable groups – Zionists for example – was voted into power in New York City. With easy smiles that come from people who have long internalized that eradicating “oppressors” is a noble cause in which bloody hands do not stain the oppressed.

The End of Civilization

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The defining moral line of civilization is simple: civilians are off limits.

Once that line breaks, atrocity is no longer an exception. It becomes a method.

Over the last five years, some of the worst deliberate mass killings of civilians have come at the hands of jihadist movements and regimes built on political Islam.

In Sudan, militias tied to the Rapid Support Forces slaughtered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, largely from the Masalit community. Whole neighborhoods were emptied through organized murder.

On October 7, thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel and hunted Jewish civilians deliberately—families in their homes, young people at the Nova Music Festival, children, the elderly. Terror itself was the objective.

In Iran, the regime’s 2025–2026 crackdown on protests has left more than 6,000 civilians dead, according to rights monitors, killed for dissent against an Islamic revolutionary order.

Across Nigeria and the Sahel, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province continue village massacres, church bombings, kidnappings, and executions. Civilians are the intended victims.

These conflicts differ in geography and politics. Sudan is tribal and ethnic. Hamas is nationalist and religious. Iran is a regime. Boko Haram is insurgent.

What unites them is the same moral collapse: the civilian is no longer protected by being uninvolved. Civilian blood becomes a signal of conviction.

And here is where the West has developed its own moral blind spot.

For years, parts of the activist left have embraced an oppressor-oppressed framework so rigid that civilian status itself becomes negotiable. The first question is no longer who was killed, but who held power.

That inversion was laid bare after October 7, when elements within Democratic Socialists of America and allied activist circles framed the massacre in the language of “resistance” and “decolonization,” making slaughter politically understandable so long as it came from the “oppressed.”

The jihadist says civilians may die because ideology sanctifies it. The regime says civilians may die because dissent threatens power. The activist says civilians may die because power determines innocence.

Different justifications. Same result.

Once innocence becomes conditional, civilization becomes conditional too.

Because the moment civilians become fair game, everyone eventually becomes fair game.

Trauma in Present Tense

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There was something fitting about Lior Raz standing in Chappaqua, New York last night raising money for Magen David Adom. Raz built his career dramatizing the hunt for terrorists. Magen David Adom exists for the moments after the hunt fails.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

For those unfamiliar with Raz, he is more than an actor. Before becoming one of Israel’s most recognizable cultural figures, he served in an undercover Israeli military unit operating inside Arab communities, gathering intelligence and carrying out operations in hostile environments. He grew up with Iraqi and Algerian parents speaking Arabic, making him deeply bi-cultural in Jewish and Arab worlds. That experience and background became the foundation for Fauda, the global hit he co-created and stars in, a drama centered on Israeli undercover units hunting terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza.

What made Fauda different was never simply its action but its realism. Israelis and Palestinian Arabs were not rendered as symbols, but as human beings moving through an intimate, brutal conflict where ideology, family, fear, and violence occupy the same space. For international audiences it was compelling fiction. For Israelis and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) it often felt closer to lived reality.

Then October 7 collapsed whatever distance remained between fiction and reality.

At the fundraiser, Raz put words to what that rupture did to Israel.

Israel, he said, is living in trauma, not PTSD. It was not an echo of horror but the continuation of it.

It was the most important thing said all night because it captured something essential about the country after October 7. PTSD belongs to memory. Trauma belongs to the present. PTSD is what remains after danger has passed. Trauma is what happens when danger tears through your assumptions and reorganizes how you live.

That is Israel now.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The hostages are home or accounted for. The war has shifted phases. But the rupture remains embedded in Israeli life. The confidence that catastrophe could be anticipated and contained has been broken. Every family understands more intimately how quickly ordinary life can split into irreversible loss. The danger may have changed form, but the nervous system of the country remains altered.

That is where Magen David Adom enters the story.

If Fauda is about the front edge of violence—the raid, the chase, the interception—Magen David Adom lives on the back edge: the ambulance, the paramedic, the trauma room, the blood bank, the race to preserve life after violence has already landed. Security exists to stop attacks. Emergency medicine exists for when stopping fails.

Raz spoke with particular pride about what Magen David Adom represents: Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims working side by side to save lives. In a region where identity so often organizes conflict, MDA operates at the level beneath identity, at the essence of humanity. No politics, no theology, no tribal sorting. Just the oldest civilizational imperative there is: preserve life.

It is one of Israel’s deepest strengths that even under permanent security pressure, its emergency institutions remain organized around life itself.

Raz also looked forward. The next season of Fauda which will come out in a few months, he said, will directly reflect October 7 and the years after, with half of it set in Marseille, France. That choice is revealing. Marseille is one of Europe’s great pressure-point cities, where migration, communal fragmentation, criminality, radicalization, and fractured civic identity collide. It is a city where many of the tensions Israel has lived with for decades are becoming visible in European form.

The movement of Fauda into Europe suggests something larger. The Israeli condition is no longer entirely Israeli. The fractures Israel has lived with for decades—terror, divided loyalties, imported ideological battles, fear in public life—are increasingly visible across Western democracies. Israel was simply earlier, home to 45% of global Jewry. The anti-Jewish attacks and growing anti-Western attacks are everywhere.

When Raz was pressed on American politics, he declined to engage. He understood the trap of America’s partisan machinery and would have no part of it. He was there to fight violence from wherever it came from, not from a single ideology.

At an event raising money for ambulances, blood banks, and emergency responders, it became clear that this too belongs to the same mission.

Raz is known for Fauda, for portraying the hunt for terrorists, the intelligence work, the raids, the violence used to stop violence. But that is only the outer layer. Beneath it lies something older and deeper.

The mission is to save lives.

To save lives in Israel when violence breaks through. To protect Jewish life abroad when antisemitism rises. To defend the perimeter and preserve the people. These are not separate missions. They are one.

For most of Jewish history, Jews endured violence dependent on the mercy or restraint of others. Now there is a Jewish state with power, intelligence capabilities, and institutions of rescue, carrying with it not only sovereignty but obligation. That obligation no longer ends at Israel’s borders. A Jew threatened in Paris, attacked in New York, harassed in London, or targeted in Melbourne enters the same moral universe.

The perimeter has widened.

Fauda may be about counterterrorism and Magen David Adom may be about emergency medicine. Together, they represent the fight against antisemitism which lies in the same ancient Jewish imperative: protect life, preserve the people, continue.

That may define the ever-present trauma among Jewry today: the need to constantly think about personal and communal safety, without the calm to simply sit at a cafe or send one’s kids to school and purely enjoy life’s moments.