But read today’s news, and the stories have been rewritten. The jihadists are airbrushed out. In their place, new villains are supplied: Israel, Republicans, conservatives. Hamas’s October 7 slaughter becomes “anti-colonial resistance.” The Pulse massacre becomes proof of “alt-right bigotry.” The killers vanish; scapegoats stand in their stead.
The New York Times article on August 24, 2025 essentially blaming Republican anti-gay attitudes surrounding the Orlando nightclub killings. Nowhere does it say that the murderer was a radical Islamist who was interviewed several times by the FBI for involvement with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.
This is the age of villains of preference.
A Hamas gunman disappears, Netanyahu is written in.
An ISIS bomber is scrubbed out, Trump takes his place.
Jihad becomes invisible, conservatives become the menace.
This isn’t sloppy reporting—it’s deliberate redirection. Our society, already awash in the viral toxicity of social media, is being pushed to focus obsessively on politics and demonizing your neighbors. It’s red vs. blue, right vs. left. The situation courses with the ultimate stakes: life and death. The reframing empowers a radical socialist agenda that uses a domestic enemy to mobilize its base. Jihadists don’t fit the script, but Republicans and Zionists do.
The real clash—radical Islam against democracy and freedom—is inconvenient to acknowledge. So it’s erased. In its place we’re told the true battle is internal: conservatives are dismantling democracy; Israel is committing genocide with American support; capitalism is the ultimate evil that threatens the world. The foreign killers who target Jews, Christians, and gays are excused, while the West turns on itself.
Anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist politicians-in-waiting, Jamaal Bowman and Zohran Mamdani
The creed is simple: protect the victims of preference, attack the villains of preference—Jews, conservatives, capitalists. They are being lined up for your bilestorm. Your retweets. Your ire. Your protest. Your vote.
It is a purposeful rerouting of outrage, weaponized by radicals who despise capitalism and democracy, and cheered on by regimes like Qatar and China that profit from the West’s collapse.
The jihadists told us why they killed. Our media tells us to look away. Because in the new faith, truth is expendable while villains of preference are eternal.
There is a subtle subtitle to mainstream news articles today. It is a chorus that is growing louder and closer, lifted from killers’ manifestos: “There is only one solution: Intifada Revolution.”
Henri Dunant (1828-1910) was a humanitarian who created the International Red Cross in 1863 which helped lead to his selection as the first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He is also known (although such mention has been stripped from Wikipedia) for being a strong Christian Zionist, as far back as 1866 when he advocated for “the re-settlement of Palestine by the Jewish people.” His advocacy led Theodore Herzl to invite him to the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
The dream of Jews returning to their homeland gathered momentum in the second half of the 19th century, despite the Ottomans making it hard for Jews to move to Palestine. In 1800, Jews made up about 3% of the region of Palestine, growing to 8% by 1882 and nearly 14% by the close of the Ottoman period in 1914.
Jews have moved to the land of Israel in far greater percentages than either Christians or Muslims since 1800
This predated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British government appreciated the Zionist Federation’s appeal to reestablish their national home in Palestine.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Despite Zionism being about the GOAL of creating a Jewish national home in Jews’ historic homeland, the term continues to be used decades after the modern State of Israel was established in 1948.
Gil Troy, a historian and author of “The Zionist Ideas,” explained that Zionism has three principle components: that Jews are a nation; that Jews have ties to their particular homeland in the land of Israel; and that Jews have a right to establish a state in that homeland, much like other people have rights to their own country. The first two principles are simple facts while the third is a matter of rights, not aspirations. Such definition makes Zionism an ongoing principle rather than that a mission which was accomplished in 1948.
Pro-Israel books using “Zionist”
The view of Zionism as a relevant reality or historical ideology arises in the national anthem, “Hatikvah”, written in 1877 as the Zionist movement gathered initial momentum.
“As long as within our hearts / The Jewish soul sings, / As long as forward to the East / To Zion, looks the eye / Our hope is not yet lost, / It is two thousand years old, / To be a free people in our land / The land of Zion and Jerusalem”
Today, some object to the lyrics speaking of Israel from a purely Jewish perspective when 25% of the population is not Jewish. Others do not like the fact that it has no religious foundation and only speaks of being “free” in the land. I would add that the text is inherently dated with words like “our HOPE” and “TO BE a free people” when Israel has long been a reality.
Israeli flag at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
Significantly, discussions around “Zionism” have continued in political fora as if the world is still debating the FORMATION of Israel.
In November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Res. 3379 which stated “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” by lumping it into a category of trespasses including “colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, apartheid and racial discrimination.” The resolution was rescinded in 1991 through the efforts of the United States.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general and one-time member of Congress once said “Zionism, the ideological undergirding of Israel, is a debatable political philosophy,” making the foundation of the Jewish State a questionable endeavor.
Linda Sarsour, a member of the anti-Israel Democratic Socialists of America said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” invoking the old UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism.
Steve Erlander wrote in The New York Times that “Zionism was never the gentlest of ideologies. The return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there have always carried within them the displacement of those already living in the land,” repeating the stale U.N. slander.
Israel’s enemies continue to call it a “Zionist entity”, refusing to mention the name of the country, as if to do so recognizes its existence or right to exist.
The continued use of the word “Zionism” today by anti-Israel agitators is not a theoretical review of Jewish aspirations to return to their homeland in the 19th century and early 20th century, but a concerted effort to demonize and/or destroy Israel today.
For starters, by attempting to define Zionism as a form of racism, people mark Israel as a racist and apartheid state regardless of its actions. While it is the most liberal country in the entire Middle East, if Israel’s underpinning ideology was built on “colonialism” and “racial discrimination,” then its existence is a continuation of the racist ideology, permeated by original sin.
Secondly, if Israel is not viewed as a functioning liberal and democratic reality but merely a vehicle of “Zionism,” its existence entails the continued “displacement of those [Arabs] already living in the land.” When Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution in Congress about the “Ongoing Nakba,” she was not discussing 1948 history but a belief in the “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for illegal settlements.” She imagines the entire history and ongoing reality of the reestablished Jewish State as a “catastrophe.”
Further, anti-Israel people believe that when JEWS use of the word “Zionism,” it means that the goals of the Jewish State are far from completed. Not only does Israel seek the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL/ “West Bank”) and Gaza, but it seeks “Greater Israel” encompassing “the area from the Nile to the Euphrates,” as speakers at the United Nations contend. It means Jews want to see a third Temple built on the Temple Mount in place of the Dome of the Rock.
In short, when anti-Israel people use the term “Zionism,” they are discussing more than a philosophy but an evolving reality. Anti-Israel activists seek a future which resembles 1947 or 1917, when there was no Israel and no international support for a Jewish State. When those same people hear Jews use “Zionism,” they believe that Jews want a future which looks like 2,000-plus years ago, with a Jewish Temple and sprawling Jewish kingdom.
In other words, Zionism is not just a highly charged word for some, but conjures up the perception of ongoing goals as opposed to actual present facts.
The facts are that Israel is the most pluralistic society in the Middle East where Arabs have more rights and a higher standard of living than in neighboring Arab countries. Israel has shown its willingness to SHRINK its borders for peace. Israel has proven that it can create a viable, functioning economy and society, despite regional actors refusing to accept its existence.
The plain truth is that Israel is a model state to be replicated, while cast as a Zionist ideology to be terminated.
Zionism was a dream and Israel exists. The transition was marked in the last line in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.” Israel supporters should acknowledge Israel’s declaration and stop calling themselves “Zionists” as it enables anti-Israel fanatics to whitewash their desire to destroy the Jewish State.
A proud “Zionist” woman at the Celebrate Israel parade in New York City in 2019 (photo: First One Through)
People are pro-Israel, anti-Israel or Israel-ambivalent today. Do not let those who seek the destruction of Israel to hide behind a “debate” about the “political philosophy” of Zionism.
The war against the Jewish State began militarily at Israel’s inception, as the armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel in 1948 in a war to annihilate it. In June 1967, the Arab world attempted the same but failed spectacularly.
Since that time, the armed conflict by Muslim countries has continued with more modest ambitions, as the goal of destroying Israel is considered too remote a possibility, unless and until Iran obtains nuclear weapons. The violent attacks against Israel have mostly been about pestering and killing Jews to obtain concessions. The 1973 Yom Kippur war ushered in a willingness for Israel to hand the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt, and Palestinian Arabs believe that the Second Intifada War made Israel abandon the Gaza Strip. The various Hamas wars from Gaza since 2008 and the political-terrorist group’s kidnapping of Israelis, secured the release of thousands of fellow terrorists and other modest gains.
The failure to destroy Israel did not make the Muslim countries accept its existence. In fact, it has done its utmost to deny its existence.
Immediately after the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab League passed the Khartoum Resolution declaring a policy of ‘Three No’s’: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” For the Arabs, the Jewish State had a name but was to be ignored until the Arabs could prevail at destroying the foreign presence.
In the 1970’s, the Arab League enlisted allies to their cause. Leveraging their control of the oil markets, and with a former Nazi sitting as head of the United Nations, the Muslim and Arab countries got the world to pass UNGA Resolution 3379 in November 1975 that declared that “Zionism is a form of racism.” This was an attempt to deny Israel’s legitimacy broadly.
Meanwhile, faced with the impossibility of destroying Israel, the Arabs and Muslims went after Jewish “soft targets,” like plane and boat hijackings (Dawson’s Field in 1970, Rome and Vienna airport shootings in 1985, and Achille Lauro in 1985), as well as blowing up Jewish community centers (Argentina 1994) and synagogues (Turkey 1986). If people inside Israel were too difficult to kill, the Muslim world came for the Jews around the world.
While the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution was ultimately thrown out in 1991 due to the efforts of the United States, it simmered as the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 anticipated a peace deal in September 2000. Instead of finally accepting peace, the Palestinians launched the Second Intifada War which only subsided with the erection of Israel’s security barrier in 2004-5. That led to two new movements which are unfortunately thriving today: the demonization of the Jewish State and the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest and Sanction), both economic wars.
Demonization of Jews and Zionists
The 2001 Durban Conference against racism served as the global launch party to amplify and expand upon the prior “Zionism is racism” propaganda.
As the world no longer relied on oil as it had in the 1970’s, the Muslim Arab world hoped to convince the western world to join their war against the Jewish State based on democratic values, a sly and peculiar approach for autocratic regimes. The global conference advanced a new lexicon to vilify Israel with terms like “apartheid,” “settler-colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “crimes against humanity” to name a few. It similarly painted Palestinians as noble victims, misusing words like “desperate,” “resistance,” and “dignity.”
This approach is more insidious than used during the 1970’s and 1980’s which relied on far-flung violence. The violent attacks against Jews around the world by Arab Muslims made it difficult to portray the Palestinian Arabs as “desperate.” Instead, since 2001, the demonization tactic has penetrated the west through the education systems, the media and the democratic system itself.
The Arab world funneled billions of dollars and tens of thousands of students to universities including New York University, MIT, Columbia and Tufts. The donations funded Middle East Studies departments and Divinity schools with anti-Israel narratives. Due to this activity, college campuses have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, often denying Jews the right to participate in public spaces as perceived Zionists and racists.
These young voices have been indoctrinated with a new anti-Zionist vocabulary and worldview over the past twenty years. They are now running the western liberal media, working at “human rights” organizations and voting for far-left anti-Zionist politicians endorsed by the Democrat Socialists of America.
The 2001 Durban campaign, now 20-plus years running, has been very successful in not only demonizing Israel, but demonizing Zionists. Under this current version of “Zionism is racism,” Jews in Israel and around the world are no longer only being attacked by Arab Muslims but by their fellow citizens. While the legitimacy of Israel is still being denied, the focus has expanded to Israel’s supporters.
The movement seeks to boycott not only Israeli products but those companies that do business in Israel. It wants universities to bar Israeli professors and athletes to refuse to compete with Israelis.
It has even gone after its own, turning on Arab Muslim states which normalized ties to Israel such as the United Arab Emirates.
After failing to destroy the Jewish State militarily, the Arab Muslim world has gone through three stages to destroy it economically, with the current effort enlisting global support against all Zionists
The current Muslim and Arab war against the Jewish State is being fought everywhere, as Zionists of any religion or ethnicity are falsely branded “racists” who should be canceled. The intent is to pressure people and governments everywhere to sever ties with the Jewish State, making it vulnerable and weak by every measure.
The war against Israel has mutated since the country was founded but the goal remains the same: the end of the Jewish State. What has alarmingly changed now is that YOU are being asked to participate in that anti-Semitic endeavor by your neighbors, schools, media and elected officials.
The Holocaust decimated the Jewish population in Europe from 1939 to 1945. After the war, the vast majority of the remnant of European Jewry moved to either France, the United States or the Mandate of Palestine. Just three years after the end of the genocide of the Jews, the modern state of Israel was born.
Many people believe that the world endorsed the notion of a Jewish State because of the terrible tragedy which befell the Jews. While some countries may have indeed voted at the United Nations in favor of recognizing Israel because of the Holocaust, its reestablishment was sponsored by the global community years before World War II.
First by the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, then by the League of Nations in the 1920 San Remo Agreement and the 1922 Mandate of Palestine, the leading countries of the world supported Jews reestablishing their homeland. In the late 1930’s the British specifically called for creating a distinct Jewish State in Palestine. All of these actions were taken before the genocide of European Jewry.
Similarly, God’s promises of the land of Canaan to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob predated the Children of Israel becoming slaves in Egypt. The divine promises for a particular family to have a particular plot of land are found throughout the Book of Genesis and include:
“The Lord appeared to Abram and said ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’” (Genesis 12:7)
“For all the land which you see, I will give it to you and your descendants forever.” (Genesis 13:15)
“To your descendants I have given this land.” (Genesis 15:18)
“And I will give to you and your descendants after you, the land of your sojourning, the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:8)
“To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 24:7)
The Promised Land is an integral part of Judaism. It is a unique dynamic among world religions that a particular people is tied to a specific parcel of land. The history of Jews in their holy land goes back thousands of years.
Yet people confuse the nature of the Jewish State and how it came to be reestablished in 1948. The global community did not create Israel as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust; it voted to reestablish the Jewish homeland years before the Holocaust. Further, Zionists do not aspire for a Greater Israel from “the Nile to the Euphrates” the way anti-Semites at the United Nations claim; they want to live, pray and have autonomy in their small patch of the world promised to them by God.
The relevance of the Holocaust to Israel today is about underscoring the absolute imperative of Israel’s security, which means ensuring that the country’s neighbors cannot threaten it. Critical features include: Israel having full control of its borders and airspace; no military for a possible future Palestinian State; no ability for terrorist groups like HAMAS in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack Israel; and most significantly, no nuclear weapons for Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has threatened to wipe Israel off of the map.
The anti-Zionist false narrative connecting the Holocaust and the Promised Land spins a web of lies that European countries created a safe haven – a metaphorical “Promised Land” – for Jews as a gift to allay its guilt in permitting and participating in the Holocaust, an act of charity taken on the backs of Palestinian Arabs. The slander of original sin of the theft of “Arab Land” to create a Jewish State leads to noxious claims that Jews will continue to try to steal more land as “colonialists” as well as demands that the British apologize for the Balfour Declaration. It falsely inverts the indigenous Jews to invaders; those needing protection to aggressors who must be held in check.
The Promised Land of Israel is an eternal gift from God to the Jewish forefathers thousands of years ago and to their descendants in the present day, not from European nations in response to the Holocaust. The critical lesson of the Holocaust is to protect the Jews in Israel from neighbors who wish to do them harm, politically, economically, militarily and most definitely, journalistically.
Israeli soldiers prepare to enter Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel (photo: First One Through)
There are several forms of Holocaust denial that have found a foothold in anti-Semitic societies. As described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, (USHMM), Holocaust deniers “are generally motivated by hatred of Jews and build on the claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.”
The most common form of denial is that the Holocaust did not happen. The entire event is described as a fabrication. The religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran said “the Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened.” The Iranian government then went on to promote a Holocaust cartoon competition.
The second type of denial is not absolute, but about scale and purpose. Those people question whether Jews were intentionally targeted by Nazis for death, or whether the six million Jewish victims figure was grossly exaggerated. The peddlers of these theories seek to minimize Jewish suffering to further exaggerate the “plot to advance Jewish interests.”
The third form of denial is not commonly sold: It is that Jewish Zionists actively helped kill the Jews of Europe.
Never heard of that one? It is advanced by the acting-President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
Acting-President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas
Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis about an evil Holocaust plot that Zionists were desperate to attract more Jews to Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. In order to encourage immigration to Palestine from Europe, Zionist Jews collaborated with the leaders of Nazi Germany to make life unbearable for Jews so that they would flee to Palestine. Abbas claimed that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and sabotaged Jewish rescue operations.
This was Abbas’s doctoral thesis, written over many years. A new form of Holocaust denial with malevolent messages.
Jews as Schemers
The Abbas Holocaust denial takes a very different tack than the classic forms of questioning the scale of the destruction of European Jewry. Abbas does not focus on the number of Jews killed. His argument is that the Zionist Jews were schemers. His sick form of denial was that Jews always controlled their own fate, even in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a story of Zionist Jews against European Jews.
Zionism was Unpopular
In Abbas’s worldview, Jews had no love or attachment to the Holy Land. They were content with where they lived; they had no connection to Palestine. Most Jews had no interest of ever moving to Palestine.
However, a handful of Zionist Jews needed to force European Jews to move in great numbers to make the Jewish State viable. These Zionist Jews were so hell-bent on their mission, that they thought nothing of instigating the destruction of European Jews to achieve their mission.
Imagine What Zionists Can Do to Arabs
According to Abbas, if Zionists could perpetuate the slaughter of their own Jewish brethren, why should anyone be surprised of their treatment of Arabs? The Zionist Jews were so selfishly consumed by their mission to create a foreign transplant of a Jewish State in the Arab soil of Palestine, that the killing and expulsion of Arabs from the land in the “Nakba” looked like an after-thought after their participation in the annihilation of fellow Jews.
According to the USHMM, most anti-Semites concoct a Holocaust denial narrative for particular reasons. “Holocaust denial, distortion, and misuse are strategies to reduce perceived public sympathy to Jews, to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel—which some believe was created as compensation for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust—to plant seeds of doubt about Jews and the Holocaust, and to draw attention to particular issues or viewpoints.”
Mahmoud Abbas has spent his lifetime with a particularly noxious form of Holocaust denial which he has peddled at the United Nations and capitals around the world: The Jewish Zionists are schemers and murderers. They have no connection to the land of Palestine and think nothing of killing Jew or Arab to steal a country.
People around the world have been upset about the fighting in Israel and have reacted in a variety of ways.
Many communities around the world focused on sending packages to soldiers in Gaza. Items ranged from letters, pizzas, underwear and socks.
Some communities held fund-raisers, such as selling challah in support of Leket, the Israeli food bank, and the Friends of the IDF.
Many people flew to Israel and volunteered to help disabled people who have difficulty getting to bomb shelters amid the constant attacks from Hamas. Others went to staging areas near Gaza to help set up food stations. Many went to funerals for people they never met.
While the global media has often repeated that the Operation Protective Edge has been fought during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, they have neglected to discuss that the timing is also the Jewish period of mourning – the Three Weeks – that culminates on August 5th with the 9th of Av.
The Three Weeks is a period when many tragedies happened to the Jewish people throughout history. The common belief is that the various tragedies – especially the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem – happened because Jews did not treat each other with respect nor did they care for each other.
In 2014, the tremendous support within Israel for the Israeli government, and the global Jewish communities’ constructive responses to the attacks from Gaza may lead one to believe that these three weeks may lead to the building of the Third Temple.
First One Through 