You Cannot Define Antisemitism Without Defining Jews

Antisemitism, etymologically and by definition, means being against Jews. Everyone agrees on that much. The problem is that before you can define antisemitism, you need to define what Jews are.

This seems obvious once you think about it. Yet none of the major definitions of antisemitism tackle this.

This is one reason every major definition is perpetually contested. The endless arguments about how to define antisemitism are, at bottom, arguments about how to define Jews — conducted by proxy, with neither side naming what they are actually arguing about.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, written in explicit response to IHRA, and structured to exclude most forms of anti-Zionism, has no independent, positive definition of Jewish identity. It defines antisemitism as hostility toward Jews as Jews — which simply assumes everyone already knows what Jews are. When the JDA then adjudicates which forms of anti-Zionism are or are not antisemitic, it is making implicit decisions about whether Jewish nationhood is a core dimension of Jewish identity or a separable political position. It never states that premise openly. It builds the conclusion into the framework and presents the result as analysis. But their language of “Jews as Jews” implies that Jews are not a people, not a nation, not a collective at all - just a faith and maybe a shared ancestry with little else in common. The definition constructs an implicit and fuzzy definition of Jews, quietly, by deciding which attacks on Jewish identity count.

The same problem runs through every major framework, at varying levels of severity.

The widely adopted IHRA working definition of antisemitism is better than most. It gets the Israel-related examples right but cannot derive them from first principles, because it never states the premise that makes them follow. Open the text and the hedging is immediate. Antisemitism is defined as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred” — a certain perception, unspecified; may be expressed, not necessarily. The examples “may serve as illustrations.” Manifestations “might include the targeting of the state of Israel.” And the examples themselves apply only when they “could, taking into account the overall context,” constitute antisemitism. That’s four layers of qualification in the definition and its introduction alone. The drafters were not careless. The hedging is structurally required because without a stated account of what Jews are, IHRA cannot say confidently what attacks on Jews look like. Every “may” and “might” and “taking into account the overall context” is a door left open for someone operating from a narrower definition of Jews. Denying Jewish self-determination — well, in context, that might not be antisemitic. IHRA did not accidentally leave that door open. It had no foundation from which to close it.

The Nexus Document acknowledges Jewish nationhood but treats it as subject to moral constraints that other nationalisms are not. That asymmetry is load-bearing and also unstated — which means it also cannot be defended, only assumed.

Because all three fail to define what they are claiming to defend, they must fall back on examples as guidelines. IHRA has eleven. The JDA has fifteen. The Nexus Document runs to several thousand words. None of it resolves the ambiguity, because examples cannot substitute for a definition — they can only multiply the surface area available for dispute. Every new case becomes an argument about whether it fits a specific example rather than an argument from first principles. The debates are endless by structural necessity, not by accident.

In reality, Jews are simultaneously an individual identity, a people, a religion, an ethnic group, and a nation — with Israel as the contemporary political expression of that last dimension. These are not alternative descriptions of the same thing. They are distinct, all of them real, all of them historically continuous, and all of them targets of anti-Jewish hostility at various points in history and in the present. Indeed, each new type of antisemitism carefully distinguishes itself from previous ones because it defines Jews differently - Christian antisemites attacking the Jewish religion, racial antisemites defining Jews as a race and claiming to be more scientific, Protocols pretending that they are only against shadowy Jewish manipulators but not the entire population, and the current versions denying Jewish peoplehood and therefore their right to self determination. After all, religions do not require self determination - a people does.

Jews are a people, with a religion, a civilization, an ethnicity, and a have a historical attachment to a specific land that predates the modern state by three millennia. Denial of any of those aspects is itself antisemitic. Arabs argue that Jews are European because that protects their claim to the land of Israel; white supremacists insist Jews are Middle Eastern because their racial theories must categorize Jews as inferior to their Aryan ideal. No single theory of antisemitism can work without recognizing this wide divergence of hate.

Some will object that identifying Israel with the Jewish nation conflates two distinct things — that am Yisrael, the Jewish people, is not identical to medinat Yisrael, the Israeli state. The theological and demographic distinction is real, but in this case it is a distinction without a practical difference. Israel is the only state in the world that defines itself as Jewish; it is home to nearly half the world’s Jews already; 80% of its population is Jewish and a constitutional Law of Return that treats Jewish immigration as a national right rather than a bureaucratic privilege. Israel is the most visible manifestation of Jewish peoplehood, and more often than not those who are anti-Zionist also deny Jewish peoplehood and attachment to the land. If the Jews are a people they have the right to self determination in their ancestral lands; those who want to deny the latter inevitably end up denying the former.

A few years ago, I created a definition of antisemitism that addresses this gap.

Antisemitism is hostility toward, denigration of, malicious lies about or discrimination against Jews — as individuals, as a people, as a religious community, as an ethnic group, or as a nation.

This formulation does not pick one dimension of Jewish identity and protect only that. It enumerates all of them, which means it cannot be gamed by reducing Jews to any single one. Indeed, denying the existence of any of these dimensions of Jewish people is antisemitic itself., which means that the anti-IHRA definitions that deny Jewish peoplehood are not only bad definitions but part of the problem. They don’t want to say explicitly that they believe Jewish peoplehood is a fiction, or that three thousand years of continuous attachment to a land does not constitute an indigenous relationship, or that the only legitimate Jews are those who have stripped their identity down to private religious observance. Yet those are the actual claims required to make the narrow definitions work. Stated plainly, they are recognizable as anti-Jewish positions.

In fact, because my definition defines Jews as well as antisemitism, it is exhaustive. Any act or language that fails my definition is not antisemitism. There is no need for "context” or “mays” or “mights.”

The arguments about antisemitism definitions are arguments about what Jews are. Define Jews first, and the arguments have to be conducted honestly.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

The "Human Resources Hero" who hates Israel - but tells companies what antisemitism is

Shakil Butt is a human resources consultant in England who calls himself "HR Hero For Hire."

He is quoted as an expert in HR Magazine in an article on how companies should deal with exploding antisemitism in the workplace. 

The article starts off strong:

Researchers for the inclusion consultancy Pearn Kandola found in 2024 that incidents of antisemitism had increased by 50% since the events of 7 October 2023, and that many Jews felt unsafe at work.

“There were examples of people being stereotyped, but also of verbal as well as physical abuse occurring,” says Pearn Kandola’s senior partner, Binna Kandola. “[Recent violence] has escalated precisely because not enough action was taken back then.” Kandola found a marked difference from the response to George Floyd’s murder in 2020, when many organisations reached out to support their black staff, and the lack of any such action towards Jewish employees.

It then goes on to quote from a variety of HR consultants, including Butt:

“Employers need to understand the difference between Zionism and Judaism,” says Shakil Butt, CEO of consultancy HR Hero for Hire, “one being a political ideology and the other being a faith practice. Part of the issue has been the conflation of the two”, he argues. “Similarly, extremist acts carried out in the name of the Islamic faith should be regarded as horrendous criminal acts separate from the Muslim community,” he adds.

Butt advises employers not to police discussions by closing them down. Instead, allow views to be aired respectfully, by reminding staff of organisational values and by referring them to codes of conduct around professionalism, courtesy and kindness.

So Butt is defining what Judaism is - and telling HR departments that Zionism, the insistence that Jews have the right to self-determination, belongs in the same analytical category as terrorism. 

To the HR audience, this all sounds like a reasonable framework. But to Jewish employees, this sets off alarm bells. Butt is telling HR departments what is and is not acceptable political opinion in the workplace — and that Zionism belongs in the same analytical category as terrorism.  This advice could end the careers of most Jewish employees if HR departments absorbs that framework.

Sure enough, while Butt's  X account has not been updated in a couple of years, it was filled with vicious antizionist rhetoric - including retweeting a speech by a British journalist and political adviser himself who makes up a ridiculous definition of antisemitism:

After the Holocaust, an anti-Semitic European phenomenon, the Jews went to the only haven they knew. They came to Muslim lands in Palestine and unfurled the banner: Please don't do to us what the Europeans did to us. Do not let them change history.

The anti-Semites are the ones supporting genocide. The anti-Semites are the ones who are supporting the massacre of the Semites, for whom the Palestinians belong. I, as a Semite, make it absolutely clear: the aim of the Palestinians is justice. It's to return home. The Palestinians are not the ones who fought for genocide. They fought for coexistence.

But this rabid Zionist project wants to eradicate Palestine. You saw Netanyahu in the United Nations holding up the map that erased Palestine, but Palestine lives in your heart and it runs from your heart and the Zionist project is on its last legs.

Free, free Palestine from the river to the sea. Palestine will be free.

The person who endorses this hate advises companies on how to deal with antisemitism in the workplace. And he managed to sneak his hate towards most Jews into an article meant to advise employers how to combat antisemitism. 

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

05/28 Links Pt2: VDH: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies; Yad Vashem to open first Holocaust education center outside Israel in Munich

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies

Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel.

The campuses, the left-wing media and Democratic Socialist officials, following the cue of student activists and leftist professors, have painted Israel and its Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world.

This is nonsensical.

The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on Oct. 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced.

Instead, it spawned a storm of antisemitism.

The libels of genocide and ethnic cleansing being cast at the Jewish state apply far more accurately to a host of other nations.

Over the decades, we have sold arms and given billions of dollars in military aid to Turkey — yet between 1915 and 1920, the Turkish government conducted a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against their Armenian population, for which it has never apologized and which it continues to deny.

None of the current critics of Israel seems worried that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and ethnically cleansed Northern Cyprus of its Greek inhabitants.

There are no demonstrations anywhere in America on behalf of the far more recent “Nakba” of the Cypriot Greeks.

Did Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil ever rally his armies of idealists to damn the Islamic-driven ethnic cleansing of the ancient population of Christian Armenians, or to call for the United States to sever its joint arms deals with Turkey?

Before the 1967 war, nearly 1 million Jews were living in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, descendants of those who had been there for centuries.

But during the serial Arab-Israeli wars of the 20th century, they were almost entirely pushed out of those countries.

None appear today before television cameras, shaking the keys of their confiscated homes in Algiers, Amman, Baghdad or Cairo.

Of course, no one dares to say Arabs “ethnically cleansed” almost all their Jewish citizens.

Between 1987 and 1989, the Somali Marxist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre began slaughtering entire rival Somali clans. The eventual death toll may have reached nearly 200,000.

When Barre’s murderous regime finally imploded, thousands of Somali refugees who had either supported Barre or belonged to his clan fled to the once-despised West, especially the United States and Europe.

Among those pro-Barre refugees were apparently members of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s family, including her father, a colonel and regimental commander in Barre’s army.

It’s a bitter irony that Omar is now such a sharp critic of Israel and the United States, given that America granted refuge to her family.

Yet we are not aware that any Somalis today are now being accosted by strangers — as Jews are — and lectured about what their former leader’s regime did to those thousands of innocent civilians.

Ruth S. King: As Antisemitism Rages, Jewish Organizations Have Sidelined Themselves They did so by embracing partisan politics, rather than focusing on their core mission—protecting Jews around the world, including America and Israel.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish politician, writer, historian, and academic, once said, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” The phrase is often invoked to explain sudden, violent resurgences of antisemitic sentiment in modern times. It has now awakened with gale-force winds, and Jewish political clout and influence have disappeared.

Many Jewish organizations, some of which are political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel, have allied themselves with the “progressive” left. This is odd, as I searched all the Psalms and the “shalt not” commandments, and there is absolutely nothing about abortion rights, global warming, or transgender ideology. Furthermore, “woke” is a verb, not a Jewish mandate.

This is not the first time a single-issue political organization has picked a side in America and lost all its clout. An excellent example from the past is the old “China Lobby,” which went to the extreme right—and embraced antisemitism.

When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he had to contend with a hegemonic institution: the powerful “China Lobby,” an influential bipartisan coalition of voters who adamantly advocated for U.S. recognition and protection of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Taiwan, and fiercely opposed diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China.

The lobby successfully influenced foreign policy, securing the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan through legislation like the Formosa Resolution of 1955.

To say the lobby was a political powerhouse is an understatement. The group forced the cancellation of Ross Y. Koen’s The China Lobby in American Politics. Macmillan had already started printing copies, but the book was withdrawn from publication in response to the political pressure. Only a few copies survived.

What happened to the China Lobby, which originated as a focused bipartisan group?

The group moved sharply to the right, collaborating with far-right isolationist and anti-communist coalitions, including early ties to militant grassroots organizations such as the John Birch Society. Among its protagonists were Senators William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, alongside publisher Henry Luce and academic organizations like the Committee of One Million, a political pressure group that operated from 1953 to 1971.

The lobby actively allied with militant right-wing politicians to push an aggressive, pro-Nationalist foreign policy, attacking moderate U.S. diplomats and attempting to purge government officials who were deemed “soft on communism.”

Influential conservatives like J.B. Stoner advocated for radical antisemitism and segregation.

This was not the premise of the original lobby, which was concerned only with protecting Taiwan’s international status. Because it became embroiled in other political issues, it effectively came to be seen as a conservative fringe group and lost members, influence, and political clout.

For the past many years, Jewish organizations have made the same mistake. They were once political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel. Now, though, they’ve allied themselves with the “progressive” left. (Not all have done this, thankfully. Two outstanding organizations that continue to support Jews and Israel are the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) and AFSI (Americans for a Safe Israel).)

Zionism, After the Fact By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. A number of Israel-supporters have noted that the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” are, from a present-day perspective, confusing or even insulting. As Zionism refers to a belief and a movement that sought to establish a modern Jewish homeland, does it make sense still to speak of Zionists when that homeland has existed for more than 75 years?

Coleman Hughes remarked in a recent episode of his podcast that it makes as much sense to declare oneself a Zionist today as it would to self-describe as an abolitionist. The State of Israel is a long-established fact, and American slavery has long been abolished. In this reading, perhaps the term Zionism is an anachronism that’s intended to cast a shadow of impermanence or erasure over the Jewish state.

I think Hughes makes a powerful point in comparing the relevance of Zionism and abolitionism. But it’s equally illuminating to contrast the two.

There is, after all, a reason that self-proclaimed abolitionists no longer exist while Zionists do: While there is no active anti-abolition movement, there’s a massive, coordinated, and armed anti-Zionist campaign looking to undo history and destroy Israel.

Now, let’s keep the contrast going with a little thought experiment. What if a modern anti-abolitionist movement suddenly arose? How would elite opinion respond to those actively fighting to repeal the 13th Amendment and reinstate slavery?

With fury, of course. Western liberals would be disgusted and outraged by the political organization of retrograde racists.

Read More

05/28 Links Pt1: UN envoy slams ‘political decision’ to blacklist Israel; US Probe of UNRWA: 1,500 Staffers Suspected of Hamas Ties; IRGC plotted to assassinate Ivanka Trump

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Thank You For the Hezbollah View

Twenty years ago, the great White House Press Secretary Tony Snow gave the world a memorable moment at the podium. Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent and anti-Semite—she told Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany—was ranting and raving about Israel’s actions in Lebanon during a war Hezbollah had started a week earlier.

“We have gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine,” she said, blaming the U.S. for not forcing Israel to stand down in the face of relentless attacks against its civilians.

To which Snow responded: “Well thank you for the Hezbollah view.”

I thought of this when I saw that Alex Crawford of Sky News had once again carpet-bombed the internet with her arsenal of ignorance.

After repeating Hezbollah talking points as if she were reporting the news, critics pointed out that the reason for Israel’s counteroffensive was to stop Hezbollah from firing into its northern towns. Crawford responded: “Israel was bombing and invading Lebanon long before Hezbollah existed.”

Now, this is technically true. Israel had reason to go into Lebanon before Iran planted its proxy force there. Crawford says this is “a point repeatedly brought up by Hez[bollah] supporters.” This is also correct: The reason Hezbollah repeats this talking point is to claim that the group itself is some kind of organic response to Israeli occupation.

Thus Crawford was demonstrating a common complaint against her: that she uncritically serves up Hezbollah propaganda. Israel did not cause Hezbollah’s rise: It had, with the diplomatic support of the Reagan administration, uprooted the Palestinian state-within-a-state occupying South Lebanon.

Iran's New 'Nuclear' Weapon: What Happens If the U.S. Declines to Fight for the Strait of Hormuz

Donald Trump appears on the cusp of an agreement to demilitarize, at least temporarily, the Hormuz Strait. Ancillary to this may be certain Iranian nuclear promises and U.S. sanctions relief. Whatever the actual details of this accord are, no matter whether it later, in part or entirely, falls apart, this agreement flows directly from Tehran dueling Washington to a standstill.

An indisputable truth: A massive bombing campaign by Israel and the United States has allowed Tehran to see the incomparable utility of the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon against the global economy and its primary enemies. A reanimated Islamist regime-and we don't doubt that senior commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now think they are winning-might even refuse a generous nuclear deal because it's having so much fun humbling its foes.

If the Islamic Republic can hold Hormuz hostage, Tehran will severely wound America's self-confidence, reputation, and capacity. Even if some arrangement can be made to allow commercial traffic to pass without paying tolls, once most of the U.S. armada returns home, the odds of the warships returning aren't good. The odds of the Islamic Republic demanding tolls later are a near certainty.

The American and Israeli killings of Iran's leaders precipitated a shift within the regime, elevating those who had grown weary of what they regarded as Ali Khamenei's nuclear timidity in the face of mounting danger. A series of articles in Javan, a mouthpiece of the Revolutionary Guards, introduced a new doctrine dubbed "offensive deterrence." The series began by taking a swipe at the martyred supreme leader: "Iran's previous doctrine was defined in controlling tensions below the level of war, but the 40-day war was the starting point for deterrence through expanding the geography of crisis."

The new Iranian leaders highlighted the geographical weapon that the regime had always boasted about in its propaganda but never attempted to use: the Strait of Hormuz. The world economy's critical dependence on this route makes this source of income absolutely unsanctionable and transforms the structure of Iran's political economy from crude oil sales to sustainable transit income." Ali Nikzad, the deputy speaker of Parliament, went so far as to declare, "The Strait of Hormuz is Iran's atomic bomb."

Unless the United States is leaving the Middle East with its tail between its legs, a bloody struggle with the Islamic Republic will continue. Iran's revolutionary elite knows that. Do we?

Eugene Kontrovich: Trump Can Close Hamas's Front Office

Twenty-five U.S. senators and more than 90 representatives have urged President Trump to "take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA." The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has supported Palestinian radicalism for many decades, in the process becoming Hamas's front office.

Mr. Trump cut UNRWA's funding in 2018 and again in 2025, citing revelations that a dozen employees participated in the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But U.N. agencies, and UNRWA especially, are designed to be insulated from accountability. UNRWA was created by the General Assembly in 1949 as a temporary mechanism to assist Arabs displaced during Israel's War of Independence. While it can be closed only by the General Assembly, strategically applied pressure from the U.S. could go a long way.

UNRWA pays its Gaza staff in U.S. dollars wired from a New York bank account. Those dollars need to be converted into Israeli shekels, Gaza's de facto currency. Hamas takes a substantial cut on every money exchange, turning UNRWA's payroll into a revenue stream. The U.S. Treasury can block the dollar transfers under existing sanction authorities.

Read More

Iran pretends to love Jews when speaking English. In Farsi, though...

I saw this video at the Tehran Times that argues that Iran treats its Jews wonderfully and the Jews love the Iranian regime right back, and hate Israel.

So I decided to look up the Farsi word for "Jews" in Google and see what they really think.

The first native Iranian site I could get to (after Wikipedia and a number of sites that were off the Internet) was this Farsi-language humanities encyclopedia site with thousands of articles on different topics. \\

Intro:

The Jews, with baseless and delusional ideas, considered themselves the chosen people of God and refused to accept the prophethood of Jesus (peace be upon him) and the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him and his family) and stubbornly and obstinately lined up in front of the Prophet of God; they also attributed racist ideas and the claim of the survival and exclusiveness of religion in the religion of Moses (peace be upon him) to their holy book and sought to support their false thinking by clinging to parts of the Old Testament; therefore, it is necessary that the book of the Old Testament and its revelation or non-revelation be examined, so that it becomes clear that, firstly, the Jewish people are not the chosen people; secondly, the Old Testament, which is considered the document of this idea, has been distorted.

Some choice quotes:

Forging Revelation

The Jews, in addition to forgetting parts of the divine revelation, resorted to forgery and considered their own creations as divine revelation in order to achieve material and worldly goals:

...They  knowingly conceal the truth.

This concealment of the truth was due to the conflict between the religion of Islam and the worldly interests of the Jews; because they thought that with the advent of the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him and his family), the Jews would become the unconditional owners of the world; but after the advent of the religion of Islam, they realized that this religion only seeks to achieve the truth and spread justice and does not recognize any privileges or superiority for specific individuals and nations. For this reason, they fought against Islam and hid parts of the divine revelation that had remained in their books and were for the benefit of Islam and Muslims. 

The main reasons for the Jews not to submit to Islam were (1) Racism:

According to the Jews, only the tribe of Bani Israel has the right to rule over the people of the world and God has placed prophethood, the Book and the kingdom only in their descendants. It is natural that a Jew with such a mindset would never be satisfied to follow a prophet who is from the descendants of Ishmael.

...Another reason for Jewish racism is the historical situation of this people. For various cultural, political, and economic reasons, other peoples could not tolerate the Jewish people among them, and they were constantly subject to displacement and migration. The only unifying factor that could unite them in all parts of the world was the issue of a single race. The dispersed Jewish people could only sustain themselves physically and spiritually in the light of their own shame. The synagogue and the Talmud were the necessary refuge and support for a people who were offended and bewildered, whose lives depended on hope and their hope on their faith in their God.

In sum, racism was an important factor that caused the Jews to take a stand against Islam. Dr. Ahmad Shalabi says in this regard:

The Jews wanted the prophet to be from among them and for them, to strengthen their dominance over the people and to elevate their status, but Islam came to a man from the Arabs who was not a Jew, and established equality among the people, so it did not leave the Jews as a superior people.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

05/27 Links Pt2: Dara Horn: The answer to the Jewish question; The unforgivable betrayal of the Nova Festival victims; Dem congressional candidate volunteered with Al-Qaida-tied group in Bosnia

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: A Plea to Jews: Don’t Do the Anti-Semites’ Dirty Work for Them

The erasure of Jews from the public square since October 7 has been extensively chronicled and documented here at COMMENTARY and elsewhere. But it has reached a new and poisonous stage.

In the recent past, the erasure was carried out by the erasers, not by those being erased. But the purpose of an all-consuming culture of fear and suspicion is to get to the point at which people erase themselves.

I don’t blame many of the people seeking to stay out of the limelight. But this is a much worse state of affairs than one in which the anti-Semite is forced to do his own dirty work, both for Jews and for wider society.

For Jews, the reason is obvious: As history shows, no one can make us disappear. The enemy’s only hope is that we withdraw of our own free will.

Speaking of which: Internalizing fear means forfeiting freedom. As Jews, we are the world’s foremost ambassadors of liberty. We have a responsibility to act like it.

As for what this does to society: If people can pretend that what’s happening isn’t actually happening, they don’t have to look themselves in the mirror. The best hope of waking a society from a nightmare is to ensure the anti-Semites see exactly what they’ve become.

Seth Mandel: What Platner Has Done to the Democratic Party

Yet even two high-powered progressives on the outs can come together for a certain cause: Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo.

Chakrabarti declared war on Platner’s congressional critics: “Auchincloss should be primaried.” In other words, there is room either for people sporting Nazi tattoos or people who object to them, but not both, in the preferred Democratic Party of AOC’s former chief of staff. (Ocasio-Cortez’s own embrace of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories only got worse after Chakrabarti left her office, so we know she didn’t object to that part of Chakrabarti’s political persona.)

Chakrabarti and others claimed that this was Auchincloss’s way of endorsing the Republican in the race, Susan Collins. Auchincloss clarified that no, he was simply saying Nazis are bad: “Susan Collins is a rubber stamp for the worst admin in history. Claims that I would endorse her, implicitly or otherwise, ignore my track record supporting Democrats to take back both chambers. As I said months ago, I find Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his commentary about it personally disqualifying. If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary.”

But Auchincloss’s nuance fell on deaf ears. Back the Nazi tattoo guy or you might as well be a Republican.

Between Chakrabarti and Auchincloss, there is no question who has taken the more heterodox position on Nazis. After all, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is also backing Platner’s campaign, as is the party’s relevant campaign committee.

Hasan Piker, the Jew-baiting anti-American influencer popular among progressive Democratic candidates, also chimed in against Auchincloss, calling him part of the “straight up israel first democrats.”

But of course, Auchincloss didn’t mention Israel in that statement. He said Nazis are bad. Piker was, by the way, not the only left-winger to bring up Israel in response to Auchincloss. It was a telling moment: Somehow, suddenly influential progressives openly associate anti-Nazism with disloyalty to America.

Enjoy your new friends, Chuck Schumer.

Taryn Thomas was a committed member of the pro-Palestine movement. Then she went to Israel

Her post opened the floodgates. In November 2025 she then posted a video online talking about how her views had shifted. “By the end of the month, the video had reached millions of views. As it spread, my social world began shrinking. Classmates steadily cut me off, people blocked me, and I became the target of online exposure campaigns and cyberbullying.

“I lost every single friend,” she says. Classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

The weight of it all left her “deeply depressed”.

“Then my therapist came across the video and decided to end our professional relationship, asking me to find a new provider after learning about my views as a Zionist.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period was the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learnt from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’
Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza, and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it, too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.

“I’m not Jewish; I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”

Read More

05/27 Links Pt1: Trump suggests he may not sign Iran deal without Abraham Accords commitments from Gulf countries; Somaliland’s president: ‘Anyone who doesn’t like our alliance with Israel can mind their own business!’

From Ian:

House lawmakers urge Trump to dismantle UNRWA over alleged ties to Hamas

More than 90 House members, led by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), urged U.S. President Donald Trump to dismantle the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, citing longstanding allegations tying the agency to Hamas and other terrorist groups.

“Rather than resolving the refugee crisis, UNRWA has perpetuated and expanded the problem through its unprecedented policy of conferring refugee status across generations—transforming what was once a finite humanitarian issue into a permanent and growing political challenge,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter sent to the president. Most of the signatories were Republicans.

Established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1949, UNRWA provides education, healthcare and social services to Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Unlike the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which generally limits refugee status to those directly displaced, UNRWA extends eligibility to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars as well as their descendants.

The lawmakers argued that the agency’s structure has entrenched Palestinian dependency while discouraging host governments from pursuing long-term solutions.

“By fulfilling these needs, UNRWA has reduced incentives for host governments to pursue long-term solutions, leaving millions dependent on the agency and prolonging the refugee crisis,” the letter states. “Additionally, UNRWA has faced longstanding concerns about its educational curriculum, which has been found to promote antisemitism and glorify terrorism.”

“This has raised serious questions about the agency’s role in radicalizing Palestinian youth,” the letter adds.

The United States and several other countries suspended funding to UNRWA after Israel uncovered documentation alleging that staff members participated in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The lawmakers said the allegations following Oct. 7 reinforced broader concerns about the agency’s operations and neutrality.

Former BBC pundit who ranted about ‘chosen people’ was in Iran negotiating team

A former BBC commentator who ranted about the “chosen people” believing they “have exceptional rights to the whole region” on Radio Four’s Today programme was part of Iran’s delegation during negotiations with the US in Pakistan, the JC can reveal.

Sayed Mohammad Marandi was seen alongside senior Iranian regime officials including chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi during the talks last month.

Marandi appeared on multiple BBC programmes between 2017 and 2024, and on other UK broadcasters’ news shows.

He has used his platform to promote Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist group – which he described as “heroes” in a Channel 4 interview – and made extreme statements about Israel, which he has accused of carrying out a “Holocaust” in BBC and Sky interviews.

Now the shadow culture secretary is calling for greater scrutiny of pundits on British television.

Tory MP Nigel Huddleston described his repeated appearances as “deeply concerning” and said broadcasters must improve due diligence over contributors’ positions.

“Public service broadcasters have a responsibility to deliver impartial news. The BBC is guilty of breaking its own rules if they present people as objective commentators when they may, in fact, have an agenda and bias, as appears in this alarming case.

“We expect and require our national broadcaster to have rigorous due diligence processes regarding who they put on air and to be transparent when someone has a clear agenda,” he said.

During one interview on BBC HARDtalk, presenter Stephen Sackur described the pro-regime figure as “an experienced Iranian academic and sometime adviser to his government during international nuclear negotiations”, as well as “a consistently loyal defender of the government in Iran”.

Amin Abu Rashid acquitted by Dutch court of financing Hamas, convicted of sanction evasion

Alleged Hamas financier Amin Abu Rashid was acquitted of providing funds to the Palestinian terrorist organization, according to a Wednesday ruling by the Rotterdam Court, but was convicted of evading sanctions and continued management of a prohibited organization.

Abu Rashid was sentenced to a suspended sentence of six months, with a one-year probationary period, a far cry from the three-year prison sentence sought by the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service (PPS).

There was not enough evidence that the 58-year-old Leidschendam transferred approximately €8 million to Hamas between 2010 and 2023, according to the court. While prosecutors argued that the organizations that Abu Rashid worked with were affiliated with Hamas, the court wasn't convinced of the ties to the terrorist group.

While there was no disagreement that the funds were funneled into Gaza, the court said that it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Hamas specifically benefited over general Gazan recipients. The evidentiary threshold was also not met for proving that Abu Rashid knew that the funding destination was under the control of Hamas.

The court viewed an expert's testimony on the matter as insufficient, and having been based on news articles and reports by the US and Israel. The court also expressed concern that the expert held a bias against the defendant.

Abu Rashid was convicted of continuing the operation of the al-Aqsa Foundation through the Israa Foundation, the former of which was sanctioned by the European Union until 2014. The removal of the al-Aqsa Foundation was done as the organization ostensibly dissolved, but it did not follow through with that measure. According to the court, the defendant remained the de facto manager of the Israa Foundation, continuing the banned group's operations.

Read More

Antisemitism Is a Symptom. What's the Disease?

In The Abrahamic Metacritique, Nina Saadat has written one of the more honest assessments of American Jewish self-presentation in recent memory. Her essay surveys the major frameworks that Jewish institutions, philanthropists, and advocates have deployed against antisemitism and delegitimization of Israel, and finds them all to be not merely tactically ineffective but structurally misconceived. Here’s a summary:

The first framework treats antisemitism as a species of racism, positioning Jews alongside Black Americans in a shared drama of oppression moving toward liberal-democratic redemption. Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl advertisement — a nebbishy Jewish boy bullied by a white kid in a red baseball cap, rescued by a tall Black classmate who covers the “Dirty Jew” sticky note with a blue one — is her Exhibit A. The framework depends on a philosophy of history that assumes the arc bends toward justice and that the enemies of progress are identifiable as bigots and reactionaries. History does not have an arc.

The second framework — which Saadat labels “We’re Here, We’re Queer” — presents Israel’s multiracial composition and progressive gender and sexuality policies to American liberals. Tel Aviv Pride parades, Arab Israeli Knesset members, women in the IDF, all are used to argue that Israel should be evaluated by the same standards applied to other Western liberal democracies. The problem is that the intended audience isn’t applying those standards in good faith. Leftist anti-Zionism reads Israel’s extension of liberal rights as a settler-colonial fig leaf, and whatever Israel does to demonstrate progressive credentials becomes further evidence of its cynicism. The framework cedes the entire premise to people who built the premise specifically to exclude Jews.

The third framework, which she calls Israelism, is the most substantive: a narrative running from ancient indigeneity through exile and persecution to the Holocaust and the establishment of the state, culminating in Israel’s military and technological achievements. It correctly grasps that Jewish survival requires a state with military power. But it contains a structural contradiction. The first half positions Jews as morally sympathetic through powerlessness and suffering. The second half demands admiration for exactly the opposite: competence, organization, and victory. The listener who absorbed the first half’s logic finds the Palestinians occupying the role the narrative prepared them for, as the new stateless underdogs. The framework argues against itself.

The fourth framework, Western Civilizationism, runs from think tanks and conference circuits through the various institutions that have sprung up to defend the Athens-and-Jerusalem inheritance against its enemies. It is directionally more accurate about geopolitics than its predecessors — the adversaries really are adversaries, the Abraham Accords really do matter. But it flattens the Western canon into a loose aesthetic, cannot tolerate the possibility that American and Israeli interests might diverge, and functions, in Saadat’s sharp observation, as institutionalized self-soothing: a well-funded apparatus that reassures donors their camp still has vitality while persuading nobody outside it of anything.

Her conclusion reaches for the Book of Jonah. The sailors’ questions — what is your occupation, where do you come from, of what people are you — are the questions every hasbara campaign has been trying to answer. Each framework conscripts the Jew to a vision built by others and waits for the fire that doesn’t come. Jonah’s answer refuses every available vision: I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven. There is no transaction, no alliance, no shared victimhood. Saadat reads this as the model: stop performing for an audience that will never be satisfied, turn inward, confront what you’ve been fleeing.

She is right about the diagnosis. But her analysis falls one step too short.

---

There is a shared assumption underneath all four frameworks that Saadat doesn’t name. Every one of them is a form of historical determinism. The progressive framework has the arc bending toward justice. Western Civilizationism has the Fukuyaman end of history. Israelism has the Holocaust as the catalyst that makes the state’s existence historically inevitable. Even the religious supersessionism that shaped Western moral vocabulary has history moving toward a predetermined redemptive conclusion. They all assume the direction is fixed and the job is to align yourself with it correctly — to be on the right side of history, to survive long enough for the arc to complete its bend.

That assumption is empirically false and morally enervating, and the damage it does is specific. If the arc bends inevitably, what you do matters less than which side you’re on. Activism becomes positioning. Advocacy becomes signaling. The actual work — building and maintaining the moral, institutional, and relational structures that make human flourishing possible — gets replaced by the performance of alignment. There is no arc. There is entropy, which is the default, and there is the ongoing, effortful, never-finished work of building structure against it. Progress is real but contingent; it exists where people built it through obligation and maintained it through accountability, and it degrades when they stop. The Holocaust didn’t make Israel inevitable; people made Israel through extraordinary effort against enormous resistance. Liberal democracy didn’t emerge from history’s logic; it was constructed and has to be continuously reconstructed. Antisemitism doesn’t fade as enlightenment advances; it mutates and finds new frameworks when old ones collapse. Moral structure, like every other structure, requires maintenance. The determinists forgot to budget for it.

---

The reality is that antisemitism is a symptom, and we have been treating it as the illness.

I came to this conclusion by a route that might seem backwards. Last year I asked myself what all the diverse types of antisemitism share. Religious antisemitism, racial antisemitism, leftist anti-Zionism, Islamist eliminationism — the specific hatreds differ enormously in vocabulary and justification. Yet the structure is surprisingly similar. In every case, Jewish existence doesn’t merely offend the system. It falsifies it.

Medieval Christianity needed Jews to convert or disappear because a remnant community still practicing the original covenant undermined supersessionism — the claim that the church had replaced Israel as God’s people. A living Jewish community was a permanent theological refutation. Racial antisemitism needed Jews eliminated because an inferior people who should have disappeared via social Darwinism should have disappeared long ago. Leftist anti-Zionism needs Jewish nationalism dissolved because a people with a three-thousand-year particular identity who returned to and thrive in their own land breaks all progressive theories, like decolonial theory and the oppressor/oppressed binary. In each case Jewish existence is constitutively threatening, because it embodies exactly the particularism that every totalizing framework must eliminate to remain coherent.

Once that pattern is visible, the conventional responses to antisemitism look less like solutions and more like the wrong operation on the wrong organ. Every initiative Saadat describes accepts the premise that the surrounding culture’s moral vocabulary is basically functional and that the defect is in Jewish self-presentation or in the specific pathology of Jew-hatred. That premise is what needs examining.

The Western moral tradition has been operating without a coherent ontological foundation for centuries, and the frameworks Saadat catalogs are all downstream of that failure. Progressive identity politics reduces every moral question to a single axis of oppression and liberation. Western Civilizationism gestures toward a canon it can’t actually read without finding contradictions it prefers to ignore - Athens and Jerusalem are more at odds than similar. Post-colonial Israelism borrows the oppressor-oppressed binary from the tradition it’s trying to resist. Each produces pathologies — the campus chaos, the inability to adjudicate competing claims without collapsing into raw power, the exhaustion of institutions built on premises nobody quite believes anymore — and antisemitism is one of those pathologies. A framework that requires simple, universal rules will always find the Jew to be a problem, because Jewish existence has spent three millennia refusing clean categories.

Fighting antisemitism within any of these frameworks is approximately as productive as treating fever with ice packs. The temperature drops temporarily. The infection continues.

---

The question that follows is what a functional moral epistemology would actually look like — and whether the tradition being attacked might have preserved the tools to build one.

Judaism preserved tools that other traditions let atrophy. I’m not talking about theology, but the ontological and epistemological scaffolding underneath the theology. It treats truth as real but only asymptotically approachable, something to be pursued through argument and lived obligation rather than possessed by whoever argues most confidently. It centers relationships rather than individuals as the primary unit of moral analysis, so that ethics emerges from actual accountability built into relationships rather than from overly simplistic rules that only see individuals. It talks about obligations, not rights. Judaism provides a way of building on a narrow universal floor — the basic conditions without which no moral community can function — above which genuine pluralism is a feature, not a problem to be managed. The Talmudic tradition didn’t produce relativism; it produced a methodology for holding irreducible disagreement without dissolving it or weaponizing it, a methodology refined across centuries of arguing about the exact questions contemporary moral discourse keeps breaking itself against. It works because it contains self-correction mechanisms — the tradition has produced rigidity and failure as well as wisdom, and the honest account of why it generates insight includes the internal dissent that kept it honest. We give lip service to pluralism, but most Western philosophies cannot handle it. Judaism does, because it never claimed to be universal. The methodology is the achievement, not the people who carried it.

In a framework built on those foundations, moral progress looks like maintenance rather than inevitability — the ongoing work of obligation, relational accountability, and truth-pursuit against the default of entropy. And Jewish particularity requires no defense within it. It is an instance of something the system is designed to protect: a community maintaining specific obligations and a specific identity across time, demonstrating that particularity and ethical seriousness are compatible, that covenantal commitment doesn’t require the elimination or subordination of any other group The eliminationist logic that drives every flavor of antisemitism — this group’s irreducible difference threatens the coherence of my system — disappears, because the system no longer requires that kind of coherence. It was built for a world where the person standing across from you is irreducibly other, and that is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be honored.

I’ve been developing this framework, which I call Derechology, initially as an attempt to understand antisemitism and increasingly as a broader project. The Haggadah commentary I wrote this past Passover touches on parts of it, as does my recently completed book on the American covenant. The full argument is still being written. But its origin is worth naming: it did not begin as a theory. It began as a question about why every system that tries to eliminate Jews needs to eliminate them, and what that pattern reveals about the systems rather than about the Jews.

Jonah’s answer to the sailors — I am a Hebrew, I fear the Lord, our situations are simply different — is the right response. It is not the full extent of what the encounter offers. Jonah eventually delivered his message. The sailors, the text records, feared God greatly and offered sacrifices and vows from their encounter with him. Their frameworks didn’t survive the storm unchanged. That part of the story gets less attention than the whale, and perhaps it shouldn’t.

The alternative is to keep treating the fever, and the infection has been running long enough.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More