Something deeply unnerving is happening beneath the surface of recent antisemitic incidents.
It is not merely the rise in raw expressions of Jew-hatred, nor the shamelessness with which people now voice medieval libels and slurs. What is emerging is a new mechanism of backlash that turns the exposure of antisemitism itself into an accelerant of antisemitism. It is a kind of psychological judo: an ugly act is caught on camera, public anger erupts, and the perpetrator is recast as the supposed victim of Jewish overreaction. The more blatant the antisemitism, the easier it becomes to claim persecution, and the faster the narrative turns on its head.
The model case arrived this week in Mississippi. A former university student, Patrick McClintock, approached
Dave Portnoy
during a pizza review and hurled antisemitic slurs while tossing coins at him, playing off the "cheap Jew" trope. It was not borderline hate nor was it a coded message. It was classic, unmistakable Jew-hatred.
Yet within twenty-four hours, McClintock had become a minor folk hero in certain corners of the Internet. A crowdfunding campaign quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars in his name, promoted through a narrative so inverted that it reads like satire: Jews, we are told, had “overreacted,” had “summoned the authorities,” had tried to “destroy his life for free speech.” None of this was true. Portnoy explicitly declined to press charges and publicly said he did not want the student punished. But the truth was irrelevant once a story could be built around Jewish oversensitivity and supposed “tyranny.”
The lie served a psychological purpose. It recast the aggressor as a victim and the victim as an oppressor. It provided donors with a cause – not the defense of free speech, but the pleasure of striking back at Jews who were depicted as policing public life.
This pattern is not accidental. Over the past few years, research on media and prejudice has shown that neutral or lightly framed news coverage of antisemitic incidents often has a counter-intuitive effect. Instead of generating sympathy for Jews or revulsion toward bigotry, it can produce a backlash among readers who perceive the outrage as excessive. When a story includes the incident and then notes “angry reactions,” or hints at controversy, people inclined to view Jews as powerful or hypersensitive interpret the anger as proof of the stereotype. Their defensiveness sharpens, not softens. Their prejudices deepen, not weaken. The original act matters less than the narrative that forms around the reaction.
In this case, the police reacted quickly and arrested McClintock for disturbing the peace. The fundraisers claim that he was being persecuted for freedom of speech by the entitled, rich Jews.
What the Portnoy–McClintock affair demonstrates is that bad actors no longer have to wait for journalists to provide that framing. They can create it themselves. A viral clip, a fabricated claim that Jews demanded punishment, a call for donations framed as a stand against censorship, and within hours the incident has been rewritten. The backlash becomes more potent than the original hatred, because it is wrapped in a story about principle and resistance rather than open bigotry.
This is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. On the progressive Left, blatant antisemitism like an open blood libel is still difficult to defend in public. When a guest lecturer at University College London,
Dr. Samar Maqusi,
revived the nineteenth century Damascus blood libel and presented it to students as plausible history, the response from the institution was swift. UCL ended her affiliation and referred the case to the authorities. Most progressives are not prepared to go on record defending medieval fantasies about Jews murdering Christians for ritual purposes.
But if we look back to October 7, 2023 and its aftermath, we can see that the underlying playbook on parts of the Left is remarkably similar to what we are now watching around McClintock. After the Hamas massacres, a significant segment of progressive activists and commentators insisted that the most documented atrocities did not really happen. They claimed there were no rapes, no deliberate murders of civilians, that the attack was a legitimate act of “resistance,” and that Israel’s subsequent response was an outrageous overreaction. When Jews described this as antisemitic – not because criticism of Israel is forbidden, but because denying or justifying the murder and abuse of Jews has a very old pedigree – many of the same voices responded by saying that antisemitism was being “weaponized” to silence debate.
The argument around the
IHRA working definition of antisemitism
is another version of this dynamic. The text explicitly states that it is a non-legally binding educational tool, not a law and not intended to criminalize or shut down legitimate political speech. Yet for years, critics have claimed that IHRA is designed to outlaw all criticism of Israel and to censor pro-Palestinian activism. The actual words of the definition, which draw a clear line between normal criticism and antisemitic double standards, are quietly pushed aside. What matters is the narrative that Jews are redefining antisemitism in order to avoid scrutiny and to suppress dissenting views.
Once that frame is in place, the structure is identical for both the Left and the Right. First, minimize or relativize the underlying act: insist that the crime was exaggerated, that the facts are unclear, that what happened on October 7 was just another episode in an ongoing conflict, that a blood libel is just a “controversial interpretation of history,” that shouting slurs at a Jew in public is “one dumb mistake” unworthy of consequences. Second, accuse Jews of overreacting and of trying to relabel a political dispute as bigotry. Third, describe institutional or social pushback as censorship and persecution. At that point, the target audience is no longer thinking about what was done to Jews; they are thinking about what Jews supposedly do to others.
The result is a backlash that is especially powerful for a certain minority of people. These are not the committed neo-Nazis or the most extreme ideologues. They are the ones who already half-believe that Jews are influential and oversensitive, but who also think of themselves as fair-minded. When they are bombarded with stories that combine an antisemitic incident, visible Jewish anger, and a narrative of “weaponized antisemitism,” it confirms their suspicions. They come away less inclined to take future antisemitism seriously, more likely to resent Jews for “crying wolf,” and more open to the very stereotypes that these stories were supposedly exposing.
This is a vector for antisemitism that our society has no real defense against. Traditional methods – public shaming, strong institutional statements, educational campaigns – all feed the mechanism rather than weaken it. Silence is harmful; speaking out is twisted into evidence of Jewish overreach. Institutions that respond appropriately are accused of capitulating to “Jewish pressure.” The more antisemitism rises, the stronger the backlash narrative becomes, because every genuine case becomes raw material for the story that Jews are exaggerating.
That's why we see October 7 denial, why people claim Israeli prisoners of Hamas were treated well and even thanked them, why shouting out in public "Fuck the Jews!" is recategorized as a freedom of speech issue. When the crime is minimized, the reactions can be spun as excessive.
If this logic continues to spread, it will become one of the most effective amplifiers of antisemitism in the digital age: a system in which every act of hatred carries within it the blueprint for its own justification, and in which condemnation becomes the gasoline rather than the extinguisher.
Unless we acknowledge this mechanism and find ways to disrupt it, we will continue to lose ground not because antisemitism is growing more sophisticated, but because it is learning to use our own moral intuitions against us.
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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