At its August 2025 biennial convention in Chicago, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) adopted a powerful resolution, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA“. The resolution, which the 1200 delegates passed by 56 to 44 percent, has been recognized as a significant step forward for the organization. It makes “organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause a priority until Palestine is free” and recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to resistance and self-determination, with Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.
The resolution stipulates that candidates for office, seeking national DSA endorsement or a DSA chapter endorsement, must “support the BDS movement, refrain from any and all affiliation with the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups, and pledge to oppose legislation that harms Palestinians and support legislation that supports Palestinian liberation.” The resolution also requires that previously endorsed candidates holding office, who fail to uphold these expectations, must have their endorsements revoked. Much the same applies to DSA members themselves. Members face expulsion for making statements such as, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” or for knowingly providing financial aid to Israel.
The rationale for DSA’s anti-zionist resolution is clear. Zionism is a form of racism. Therefore, zionist members should be no more tolerated by a socialist organization than membership in the KKK, or any other manifestation of racism by a member. And yet, at the DSA chapter level, the Los Angeles chapter in particular, where I am a member, the struggle against liberal zionism continues.
When an article describing the new resolution was posted on a DSA-LA Signal chat, in August 2025, the response was largely negative. One person wrote that the resolution is “truly terrible” and should have been voted down. Another complained that the resolution might unfairly preclude people from making donations to synagogues that send collected money to Israel, and lamented, “like there just aren’t synagogues in la that don’t give money to israel.”
Another post expressed worry that Bat Mitzvah photos with Israeli flags in the background could violate national DSA’s anti-zionist resolution.
These and other oppositional posts received multiple positive emojis from other DSA-LA members. By contrast a post that called for honoring DSA’s commitment to BDS, and another which pointed to the Star of David on the Israeli flag as a hatesymbol (for examples from around the world, see here, here, here, here, here, and here) were broadly denounced. Indeed, criticism of the Star of David was censored by the DSA-LA chat administrators.
One might suppose that this recent discord is just an anomaly. But DSA-LA has a history of missteps when it comes to zionism. The most striking examples were the chapter’s multiple endorsements of Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman. Following DSA-LA’s first endorsement of Raman in 2019, she also sought the endorsement of “Democrats for Israel Los Angeles” (DFI). DFI withheld its endorsement for her first four-year term in 2020, but endorsed her second successful electoral run in 2024, as did DSA-LA again. DFI’s change of heart may have come about as a result of Raman’s services to zionism. She voted to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with anti-zionism, despite public opposition from the L.A. Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Raman also co-authored a resolution to support an anti-Palestinian school district resolution, which was later used to help defeat a pro-BDS teachers union policy resolution.
DSA-LA was aware of Nithya Raman’s DFI endorsement as well as her pro-zionist activities, but the chapter voted to reconfirm its second endorsement anyway, albeit with a perfunctory letter of censure. Remarkably, in her 2023 DSA-LA “Incumbent Candidate Questionnaire”, Nithya Raman reaffirmed her support for the racist IHRA definition of antisemitism. She declined a pledge to reject funds from organizations that profit off of Palestinian occupation and refused to promise to decline “education trips” to Israel sponsored by pro-Zionist organizations. During an interview with DSA-LA members she even verbally declined to identify herself as a socialist. Yet, the chapter endorsed her without questioning those responses.
Another endorsed candidate for local office gave mostly satisfactory answers on a similar DSA-LA questionnaire, but also wrote, “The Likkud Government of Israel and Hamas are both responsible for war crimes; Likkud for its asymmetrical warfare, domicide, and ethnic cleansing, and Hamas for its sickening willingness to use its own people as pawns in a greater geopolitical game,” thus creating a false symmetry and blaming Palestinians in part for their own genocide. This response should have been probed prior to endorsement but was not.
As the genocide progressed in 2023 and 2024, DSA-LA appropriately undertook actions in support of a ceasefire, but some were compromised. In a DSA-LA organized demonstration at a local congressional office, DSA-LA leaders led with the chant, “from the river to the sea,…”, except that the usual rejoinder, “Palestine will be free” was replaced by “everyone will be free.” This was presumably done to appease zionists who complained that the standard chant is “antisemitic.”
To its credit, DSA-LA formed a Palestine Solidarity Working Group in December 2023, which continues its activism to the present day. But soon after its formation, it was proposed that the working group request a meeting with the chapter’s Electoral Politics Committee for the purpose of discussing ways in which that committee could better flag and respond to pro-zionist statements by candidates for office seeking DSA-LA endorsement. However, this proposal was rejected. While DSA-LA has broadly supported Palestinian human rights, publicly called for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide, it has been unwilling to engage in its own “zionist house cleaning.”
When the DSA was founded in 1982, its leader, Michael Harrington, supported Israel, and described zionism as a “national liberation movement.” The national organization has since progressed well beyond its beginnings. At the national level, DSA has taken important steps to disengage from its zionist foundations, but the degree to which the policies identified in its new resolution, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” will filter down to the chapter level remains an open question.
The University of California, Berkeley has provided Trump officials with the names of at least 160 students, faculty and staff in cases of alleged antisemitism on campus, in response to the administration’s sweeping crackdown on Palestinian solidarity activism. The administration has already threatened to cut off federal funding from academic institutions and has targeted international students…
The LA Holocaust Museum has made a public apology for posting a graphic of arms with various skin colours and a caption saying:
Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews.
The ‘offensive’ LA Holocaust Museum post.
LA Holocaust Museum: forced into a grovelling apology
The message that genocide must never be perpetrated against anyone triggered outrage among supporters of Israel. They were outraged that condemning genocide against anyone is critical of Israel (which of course they deny is committing genocide anyway, but what does logic matter?) – in such numbers as to force an apology from the institution.
The LA Holocaust Museum quickly withdrew its post. It put out a new one with a grovelling apology for trying to promote inclusivity and a promise “to do better” in future (in capitals in case anyone should miss it) at protecting the feelings of supporters of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians:
HOLOCAUST MUSEUM LA, THE FIRST SURYIVOR-FOUNDED AND OLDEST HOLOCAUST MUSEUM IN
THE COUNTRY, IS COMMITTED TO ITS CORE MISSION TO EDUCATE, COMMEMORATE AND INSPIRE.
WE RECENTLY POSTED AN ITEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA THAT WAS PART OF A PRE-PLANNED SOCIAL
MEDIA CAMPAIGN INTENDED TO PROMOTE INCLUSIVITY AND COMMUNITY THAT WAS EASILY OPEN
TO MISINTERPRETATION BY SOME TO BE A POLITICAL STATEMENT REFLECTING THE ONGOING
SITUATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THAT WAS NOT OUR INTENT.
IT HAS BEEN REMOVED TO AVOID ANY FURTHER CONFUSION. WE PROMISE TO DO BETTER AND WE
WILL ENSURE THAT POSTS IN THE FUTURE ARE MORE THOUGHTFULLY DESIGNED AND THOROUGHLY
VETTED.
WE HAYE TAKEN ACTIONS INTERNALLY TO INSURE [sic] OUR MESSAGE ALWAYS REMAINS CLEAR AND
REFLECTIVE OF OUR MISSION TO INSPIRE HUMANITY THROUGH TRUTH.
US journalist Ryan Grim commented sarcastically:
If you denounce genocide, some might think you’re being critical of Israel and we can’t have that.
Israel is a terror state committing genocide. ‘Never again’ must mean ‘never again for anyone’ – including the Palestinian people, almost half a million of whom have been murdered by Israel since October 2023 – nine out of ten of them civilians – according to analysis of its military’s own data.
There will be no apology for that statement from us.
The US State Department’s latest Human Rights Report condemns Venezuela for serious abuses. Weaponizing human rights, accusations are selectively applied to serve a destabilization campaign. In this article, a mirror is held up to Uncle Sam to see how well “America the beautiful” holds up to the same charges, while also exposing the role of sanctions, compliant NGOs, and military threats in Washington’s hybrid war on Venezuela.
The carceral state
The US report indicts Venezuela for “arbitrary or unlawful killings.” Meanwhile, in the land of the free, police killings hit a record high in 2024. Impunity is high with charges brought against offending officers in fewer than 3% of cases. The FBI itself admits that transparency is hampered.
Prolonged solitary confinement, recognized as torturous, is widespread in US prisons and ICE detention centers, affecting over 122,000 people daily. A US Senate report on torture documented CIA abuses, yet meaningful accountability has failed. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in penitentiaries in the US and in Guantánamo, the majority of whom are people of color. Roughly 70% of local jail inmates are held in pretrial detention, often pressured with coercive plea deals, undermining equality before the law.
The US has the largest prison population in the world (about 1.8 to 2 million) and an incarceration rate over 2.5 times greater than Venezuela’s. Even after release, about four million citizens remain disenfranchised due to felony convictions, disproportionately affecting Black communities.
Freedom to protest
Washington faults Venezuela for limiting freedom of expression. Yet, numerous US states have passed or considered anti-protest laws (e.g., “critical infrastructure” bills) that civil-liberties groups warn chill peaceful assembly.
Reporters without Borders (RSF) observes, “the country is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history.” This accusation is particularly notable because RSF is stronglybiased in support of the US and receives funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Arrests and detentions of journalists surged in 2024; schoolbook bans spiked across 29 states. In April 2024, Congress reauthorized and expanded FISA §702, enabling warrantless surveillance according to legal scholars.
As the US-based Black Alliance for Peace observes, “domestic repression in the US colonial/capitalist core is imperative to support the aggressive militarism abroad.”
This coupling of domestic subjugation with the international is painfully evident with the US imperialist/Israeli zionist aggression abroad in Gaza, while pro-Palestine advocates are suppressed at home. Zionist curricula are being imposed at all levels of education; at least half of the US states now require so-called “Holocaust education.” Pro-Palestine faculty, students, and staff are being purged.
Washington’s accusation of Venezuelan antisemitism cites President Nicolás Maduro calling Israel’s assault on Gaza “the most brutal genocide” since Hitler. Its charge of antisemitism conflates Venezuela’s political criticism of the zionist state with hatred of the Jewish religion. If “antisemitism” includes Muslim Arabs, US culpability is so blatant that it requires no additional documentation.
Meanwhile, the US accuses Venezuela of failing to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This projection does not deserve any rebuttal other than to mention that the US has a documented history of family separation of migrants and deaths in custody.
Likewise, the world’s rogue nation does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and similar institutions, while reproaching Caracas for attempting to “misuse international law.” If anything, the Maduro government has gone out of its way to defend international law with initiatives upholding the UN Charter.
Social welfare
The US report scolds Venezuela for a minimum wage “under the poverty line.” Yet, its own federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009; insufficient to lift a full-time worker out of poverty.
A UN special rapporteur for human rights estimated that sanctions – more properly “unilateral coercive measures” – by the US and allies have caused over 100,000 excess deaths in Venezuela. Yet purported human rights NGOs Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRC), and the Washington Office on Latin American (WOLA) omit this glaring human toll in their reports on human rights in Venezuela.
Predictably, they make nearly identical evaluations of the Venezuelan human rights situation as does the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) and the US State Department itself. Their reports (AI, HRW, WOLA, US, OAS) either ignore or, at best, make passing references to the sanctions. No mention is made of the illegality of sanctions under international law – they are a form of collective punishment.
In other contexts, the NGOs have acknowledged the horrific human impact of sanctions. Regardless, they were in a panic that the Trump administration might ease sanctions over the Chevron license, thus rewarding bad behavior. For these soft power apparatchiks of the US imperial project, the pain endured by the Venezuelans is worth it. WOLA has been particularly vocal about counseling against direct US military intervention, when sanctions afford an equally lethal but less obvious form of coercion.
Hybrid war on Venezuela
In his first term, Donald Trump levied a $15m bounty on Maduro, framing the Venezuela government as a transnational criminal enterprise tied to terrorism. This lowered the potential threshold for extraordinary US measures. Joe Biden seamlessly upped the bounty to $25m, which Trump then doubled on August 7.
Evidence-free allegations linking the Venezuelan president to the dismantled Tren de Aragua drug cartel, the fictitious Cartel of the Suns criminal organization, and the actual Sinaloa Cartel (which is in Mexico) were conveniently used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is supposed to be a wartime measure. This is coupled with the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and periodic threats of US military intervention.
This is from the country that is the world’s biggest launderer of illicit drug money and the largest consumer of illicit drugs. Even US agencies recognize that very few of these US-bound drugs move through Venezuela.
Most recently, the US deployed an additional 4,000 troops and warships to the Caribbean and around Latin America. Venezuela responded by mobilizing its navy in its territorial waters.
Leading Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado expressed her “immense gratitude” for the imperialist measures against her country. In contrast, thousands of her compatriots took the opposite stance and marched in protest. Venezuela-American Michelle Ellner calls the US policy “a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law.”
Weaponizing human rights for regime change
Venezuela is caught in a hybrid war that is as deadly as if it were being bombed. Washington’s strangling of its economy, making wild accusations against its leaders, sponsoring opponents, and threatening armed interventions are all designed to provoke and destabilize. Venezuela’s response is best seen as self-defense against an immensely powerful foreign bully that exploits any weakness, imperfection, or lapse in vigilance.
The US weaponizes human rights to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Its exaggerated or outright fabricated allegations are echoed by the “human rights industry.” Where problems exist, they must be viewed in the context of US economic warfare, which has strained Venezuelan institutions. North Americans genuinely concerned about Venezuelan human rights should be highly skeptical of corporate media reports and recognize the need to end US interference. Escalating provocations will only necessitate Venezuela’s greater defensiveness.
The US State Department’s latest Human Rights Report condemns Venezuela for serious abuses. Weaponizing human rights, accusations are selectively applied to serve a destabilization campaign. In this article, a mirror is held up to Uncle Sam to see how well “America the beautiful” holds up to the same charges, while also exposing the role of sanctions, compliant NGOs, and military threats in Washington’s hybrid war on Venezuela.
The carceral state
The US report indicts Venezuela for “arbitrary or unlawful killings.” Meanwhile, in the land of the free, police killings hit a record high in 2024. Impunity is high with charges brought against offending officers in fewer than 3% of cases. The FBI itself admits that transparency is hampered.
Prolonged solitary confinement, recognized as torturous, is widespread in US prisons and ICE detention centers, affecting over 122,000 people daily. A US Senate report on torture documented CIA abuses, yet meaningful accountability has failed. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in penitentiaries in the US and in Guantánamo, the majority of whom are people of color. Roughly 70% of local jail inmates are held in pretrial detention, often pressured with coercive plea deals, undermining equality before the law.
The US has the largest prison population in the world (about 1.8 to 2 million) and an incarceration rate over 2.5 times greater than Venezuela’s. Even after release, about four million citizens remain disenfranchised due to felony convictions, disproportionately affecting Black communities.
Freedom to protest
Washington faults Venezuela for limiting freedom of expression. Yet, numerous US states have passed or considered anti-protest laws (e.g., “critical infrastructure” bills) that civil-liberties groups warn chill peaceful assembly.
Reporters without Borders (RSF) observes, “the country is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history.” This accusation is particularly notable because RSF is stronglybiased in support of the US and receives funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Arrests and detentions of journalists surged in 2024; schoolbook bans spiked across 29 states. In April 2024, Congress reauthorized and expanded FISA §702, enabling warrantless surveillance according to legal scholars.
As the US-based Black Alliance for Peace observes, “domestic repression in the US colonial/capitalist core is imperative to support the aggressive militarism abroad.”
This coupling of domestic subjugation with the international is painfully evident with the US imperialist/Israeli zionist aggression abroad in Gaza, while pro-Palestine advocates are suppressed at home. Zionist curricula are being imposed at all levels of education; at least half of the US states now require so-called “Holocaust education.” Pro-Palestine faculty, students, and staff are being purged.
Washington’s accusation of Venezuelan antisemitism cites President Nicolás Maduro calling Israel’s assault on Gaza “the most brutal genocide” since Hitler. Its charge of antisemitism conflates Venezuela’s political criticism of the zionist state with hatred of the Jewish religion. If “antisemitism” includes Muslim Arabs, US culpability is so blatant that it requires no additional documentation.
Meanwhile, the US accuses Venezuela of failing to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This projection does not deserve any rebuttal other than to mention that the US has a documented history of family separation of migrants and deaths in custody.
Likewise, the world’s rogue nation does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and similar institutions, while reproaching Caracas for attempting to “misuse international law.” If anything, the Maduro government has gone out of its way to defend international law with initiatives upholding the UN Charter.
Social welfare
The US report scolds Venezuela for a minimum wage “under the poverty line.” Yet, its own federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009; insufficient to lift a full-time worker out of poverty.
A UN special rapporteur for human rights estimated that sanctions – more properly “unilateral coercive measures” – by the US and allies have caused over 100,000 excess deaths in Venezuela. Yet purported human rights NGOs Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRC), and the Washington Office on Latin American (WOLA) omit this glaring human toll in their reports on human rights in Venezuela.
Predictably, they make nearly identical evaluations of the Venezuelan human rights situation as does the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) and the US State Department itself. Their reports (AI, HRW, WOLA, US, OAS) either ignore or, at best, make passing references to the sanctions. No mention is made of the illegality of sanctions under international law – they are a form of collective punishment.
In other contexts, the NGOs have acknowledged the horrific human impact of sanctions. Regardless, they were in a panic that the Trump administration might ease sanctions over the Chevron license, thus rewarding bad behavior. For these soft power apparatchiks of the US imperial project, the pain endured by the Venezuelans is worth it. WOLA has been particularly vocal about counseling against direct US military intervention, when sanctions afford an equally lethal but less obvious form of coercion.
Hybrid war on Venezuela
In his first term, Donald Trump levied a $15m bounty on Maduro, framing the Venezuela government as a transnational criminal enterprise tied to terrorism. This lowered the potential threshold for extraordinary US measures. Joe Biden seamlessly upped the bounty to $25m, which Trump then doubled on August 7.
Evidence-free allegations linking the Venezuelan president to the dismantled Tren de Aragua drug cartel, the fictitious Cartel of the Suns criminal organization, and the actual Sinaloa Cartel (which is in Mexico) were conveniently used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is supposed to be a wartime measure. This is coupled with the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and periodic threats of US military intervention.
This is from the country that is the world’s biggest launderer of illicit drug money and the largest consumer of illicit drugs. Even US agencies recognize that very few of these US-bound drugs move through Venezuela.
Most recently, the US deployed an additional 4,000 troops and warships to the Caribbean and around Latin America. Venezuela responded by mobilizing its navy in its territorial waters.
Leading Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado expressed her “immense gratitude” for the imperialist measures against her country. In contrast, thousands of her compatriots took the opposite stance and marched in protest. Venezuela-American Michelle Ellner calls the US policy “a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law.”
Weaponizing human rights for regime change
Venezuela is caught in a hybrid war that is as deadly as if it were being bombed. Washington’s strangling of its economy, making wild accusations against its leaders, sponsoring opponents, and threatening armed interventions are all designed to provoke and destabilize. Venezuela’s response is best seen as self-defense against an immensely powerful foreign bully that exploits any weakness, imperfection, or lapse in vigilance.
The US weaponizes human rights to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Its exaggerated or outright fabricated allegations are echoed by the “human rights industry.” Where problems exist, they must be viewed in the context of US economic warfare, which has strained Venezuelan institutions. North Americans genuinely concerned about Venezuelan human rights should be highly skeptical of corporate media reports and recognize the need to end US interference. Escalating provocations will only necessitate Venezuela’s greater defensiveness.
Zarah Sultana has come at swinging at the depressingly inevitable accusations of anti-Semitism. As the Canary’s Joe Glenton reported just yesterday, Sultana had an incredibly frank interview where she set out her assessment of the Jeremy Corbyn years, and what needs to change.
As right-wing media began their attempts to spin her remarks, she was refreshingly abrupt on her own social media:
It’s a renowned tactic of Israeli propaganda to accuse those objecting to the fascism of Zionism as actually being anti-Semitic. However, Sultana quickly nipped that shit in the bud:
The fact that Oliver Kamm, an Oxford-educated journalist for The Times has since deleted his tweet accusing Sultana of anti-Semitism speaks volumes.
Zarah Sultana stands firm
It would appear that Zarah Sultana’s direct approach is stopping the smears in their tracks. Journalist Asa Winstanley praised the route one approach:
This is a historically important tweet.
Members of the “Your Party” initiative — the refugees of Corbynism — have been crying out for this sort of combative approach for years. https://t.co/VsK4Rvew1A
As disgraceful as this statistic around Zarah Sultana is, it is also something that is a testament to the rot of British colonialism.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration is widely seen as one of the primary facilitators of the 1948 Nakba where Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. And, the declaration has been a vital step in the creation of the Zionist state of Israel. As Al Jazeera’s Zena Al Tahhan explains:
Earlier drafts of the document used the phrase “the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish State”, but that was later changed.
In a meeting with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1922, however, Arthur Balfour and then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George reportedly said the Balfour Declaration “always meant an eventual Jewish state”.
Britain’s role in the creation of the contemporary genocidal Zionist state of Israel is central. The claim, then, that to oppose Zionism is to be anti-Semitic is not only empty rhetoric, it is profoundly ignorant and wrong-headed.
In fact, Arthur Balfour, the architect of the declaration, was what Muhannad Hariri of the The Electronic Intifadacalled:
an unapologetic anti-Semite.
Hariri explains:
In 1905, he [Balfour] supported laws to restrict migration into Britain – laws that were largely anti-Jewish in focus. Once he met Weizmann, however, Balfour felt that Zionist plans for a home in the Middle East might nicely cohere with British interests both domestically – to keep Jewish people out of Britain – and internationally – as the English sought to keep the French far from their colonial territories.
By turning Palestine into a home for Jewish people after world war two, Balfour:
understood that Britain’s interests coincided with those of the Zionist party on the question of establishing a state in Palestine.
His aim was not to keep Jewish people safe or protected; his aim was to keep them away from Britain.
Face your front
In this context, Zarah Sultana’s comments are even braver than they first appear. The criticism of a media establishment who parrot Zionist propaganda are insultingly ignorant. But, they’re more than that. They’re an extension of a foundationally British relationship to Zionism that weaponises Jewish identity as strategic political leverage: never actually for the benefit of Jewish communities.
Sultana’s approach is a breath of fresh air. And, it’s a stark contrast to the reticence and politeness of the last Corbyn era. Corbyn’s apparent unwillingness to confront the smears of antisemitism was a product of a belief in the establishment. The idea that eventually, truth will prevail. Sultana, evidently, as a woman of colour who faces sexism and misogyny every day knows better because she’s had to know better.
Nothing will teach you the harsh lessons about how truth is immaterial to the corporate media quicker than the raw reality of living in a sickening swirl of racism and misogyny.
“You’re very much into God in this room and that’s very nice,” President Donald Trump told a group of business leaders at a July 14 luncheon hosted by the White House Faith Office. In attendance were dozens of corporate executives, including Hobby Lobby CEO David Green and oil billionaire Albert Huddleston, along with senior administration officials. “You’re more than just CEOs and business…
Columbia University has agreed to pay a $200 million fine and make other significant concessions to the Trump administration in a deal to restore federal grants canceled earlier this year as part of the president’s assault on institutions of higher education. Under the terms of the settlement, which was released Wednesday, Columbia agreed to “conduct a thorough review” of its educational…
Australia’s race discrimination commissioner has warned there is limited detail in how Jillian Segal’s plan to combat antisemitism would be implemented, and said he would work with her to ensure it does not restrict fundamental rights and freedoms.
Giridharan Sivaraman has responded to the antisemitism envoy’s 20-page plan, released last Thursday, which made a range of recommendations, including withholding government funding from universities that “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism” and monitoring media organisations “to avoid accepting false or distorted narratives”.
The Pentagon announced that it signed a contract with Elon Musk’s AI firm with a value of up to $200 million on Monday — just days after the company unveiled an update to its chatbot, Grok, that unabashedly spewed antisemitic rhetoric and referred to itself as “MechaHitler” The company, xAI, announced a new product called “Grok for Government” that xAI says would be used for purposes like…
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of social media giant X, abruptly announced her departure from the company on Wednesday less than a day after the social media platform’s AI chatbot started calling itself “MechaHitler” and promoting a policy of mass extermination. Writing on X, Yaccarino said that she’d decided to step down “after two incredible years” at the company in which the social media…
Who is the ‘regular’ Jew – your neighbour, friend, colleague and why are they feeling so anxious this week?
In this piece, you’ll meet a regular Jewish family and hear how they experience the world and why recent events are such a worry for them – and what we can all do about it.
I say to you as their rabbi, there can be no making peace in the world if it’s at the cost of Jews…and their history and deeply held core aspects of their identity.
Until that is accepted, there is a clear label for opposition to such a stance: anti-Jewish racism.
Meet the Smiths: an ordinary Jewish family in anxious times
Allow me to introduce you to the Smith family. They’re an imaginary family from middle England and they are Jewish.
They’re almost definitely members of a Progressive synagogue and certainly strongly identify with their Jewish identity.
They’ve lived in Britain all their lives and worked hard. They’ve raised their children, sent them to university, paid taxes. And when they go to synagogue, they want their synagogue to be liberal, tolerant, inclusive.
They love the fact that their rabbi is a woman and their community has a Pride Shabbat.
They are as close as you can get to what you probably imagine is the good Jew…(though for some, they are not ‘good enough’ Jews because they haven’t disavowed Zionism and believe in Israel’s right to exist).
If you saw them walking down the street you probably wouldn’t even know they were Jewish… Except for the fact that they probably invited you to their children’s weddings, bat mitzvahs and maybe even a home Chanukah lighting.
A legacy of resilience and refuge
The Smiths ended up in the UK because half of the family were refugees from Nazi Europe.
Two-thirds of this side of the family was murdered and a third survived. Some came to the UK. Some had sought refuge in what was then British Mandate Palestine – there were no other places in the world that they could go.
The other side of their family were refugees from Egypt. Around the time of the Suez crisis the family had to leave Alexandria. A few of the family came to the UK.
The rest of the family, because they couldn’t get visas anywhere else, went to Israel. Of course, there were also the cousins who were already in Israel along with the dispersed family across practically every corner of the globe.
For centuries, no matter where their families were, they prayed in the direction of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
Why am I spending so long introducing the Smiths to you?
Because this is the Jewish Household which makes up the majority of the approximately 250,000 Jews that live in the UK ( at least those that live outside of the main Jewish population centres).
They’re not famous, they’re not VIP’s, they’re not politicians, they don’t have podcasts or public social media profiles, they don’t work in the Jewish community, they’re not on the streets, they don’t fly flags.
They donate to Jewish charities. And they will be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
And there’s every chance that they live in a part of the UK where the Jewish community numbers just 0.3% of the population.
The closest they get to identity politics is that they wear a small Star of David necklace and have placed their mezuzah on the door outside of their house.
Although lately they’ve considered moving it inside.
And they regularly turn up to interfaith activities and help coordinate the Holocaust Memorial Day service in their local council chambers.
Following the atrocities experienced in the concentration camps in 1945, a group of 300 child Holocaust survivors came here, to the Lake District, to heal from the trauma of their childhood experiences. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/4A9Yfpr16o
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) September 21, 2021
The shifting ground beneath their feet
Lately, though, the Smiths have become more and more anxious.
There’s regular graffiti in the villages and towns. Sometimes it’s just swastikas. But it’s also included calls for death to Jews or to ‘F*** Israel’.
They’ve heard from their friends that their grandchildren are being targeted in school in the playground and “I love Hamas” has been graffitied on to the desks.
But that’s not what’s making them anxious lately. That’s just since 7th October 2023.
Lately, the tone of political discourse has become coarser and more violent.
The Smiths admit they’re probably online too much and seeing the viciousness of debate, sometimes they go to bed feeling scared. And it’s not just in person and online discourse.
There have been recent murders of Jews and Israelis in other parts of the world and it always feels close to home. Violent acts of vandalism and abuse on the streets.
The campaigning is apparently to help the Palestinians and draw attention to the plight of Gazans. But for them it appears to be at the cost of their security as citizens of the UK.
They don’t feel that they can trust the national broadcaster, the BBC, because whilst the excuse of broadcasting violent chants for death seems to be ‘it was a mistake’, it feels too contrived.
And they saw the hordes of concert goers, at a festival, not only supporting the chant for death of Israelis, but also calling for a ‘Free Palestine’ which is deniable but seems to be clearly a shorthand for ‘Free from the river to the sea’ and destruction of Israel.
It looked to them like something from a far-right rally or the 1930s.
The chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” was ubiquitous in anti-Israel protests in the UK. But did you know it's a slogan used by Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas & Palestinian Islamic Jihad?
They know what this means. And they know what it means because they’re no longer allowed to discuss, display or give voice to their support for Zionism.
They know what it means because their nephews and nieces have all served in the IDF and now apparently they deserve to die.
Cousins’ homes have been destroyed from the missile barrages from the Islamic Republic of Iran and this has been celebrated by throngs of people.
They know what it means because they go to their synagogue and hear prayers for peace, for Palestinians and Israelis, and they see no equivalent anywhere else – just for freeing Palestine and certainly barely a call for a release of hostages.
Members of their community have got relatives and friends who have been murdered or were taken hostage.
Where they are praying for peace and are desperate to change the humanitarian situation in Gaza and end the horror of innocent deaths, it feels like everywhere else is calling for destruction.
They know what it means because in living memory their families were made unwelcome in the countries in which they found themselves.
And the small number of Jews that ended up in Britain have always thought that this would be their forever home. Even though they were separated from other family members whose forever home is the State of Israel.
They know what it means because they see online that Israeli (Jewish) influence is constantly the centre of conspiracy theories of global power.
They know what it means because their local MP refuses to speak out on the question of Jewish and Israeli lives in as public and regular way as they regularly speak out about Gaza and Palestinians.
They’re told it’s because of the size of their mailbox.
They know what it means because the synagogue activities require a password and a security guard and no publicity.
They know what it means because the local peace and justice group which obsesses about either the rights of Palestinians or the environment has nothing to say when chants for death are heard on their television screens.
And there is no outrage from the councillors who are never shy about how they want the world to live in peace.
They know what it means because it’s no longer good enough for them to have been a good Jew. They now must be either a closet Jew or change their opinions.
They know what it means because their grandchild’s university can run a course about ‘Religion and War’ in 2024 with several lectures about Islam and Gaza but without any mention of Jews, Hamas and anti-Judaism.
And the same university had to cut short a meeting because of fears for safety of Jews in the room due to protestors.
They know what it means because it seems no matter how much their rabbi is involved in local interfaith social cohesion projects their local MP and council seems to be disinterested in tackling deep rooted anti-Judaism.
And they know what it means because apparently the cost of Jewish community security in this country and their concerns about the calls for violence which were broadcast on the national broadcaster are dismissed as irrelevant in the face of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
The BBC's claim is therefore a completely misleading representation of the exchanges between the BBC and CST on that day. CST informed the BBC of this before today's report was published but they have gone ahead anyway. Their behaviour is appalling and deeply damaging.
And I say to you as their rabbi, there can be no making peace in the world if it’s at the cost of Jews, like the Smith family, and their history and deeply held core aspects of their identity.
Until that is accepted, there is a clear label for opposition to such a stance: anti-Jewish racism.
My Rabbinate changed: a call to action
My rabbinate changed in 2023.
I realised that I had to work harder and in a more focused way on the need for social cohesion here in the UK with the Jewish voice actively engaged in the wider conversation. Even when I hear and see problematic material sometimes shared by other faith community leaders.
My task was to build bridges with sincere and serious friends across all faiths and none in the hope that we could jointly diminish the radicalised voices and amplify the voice of hope.
I needed to pray harder for peace which seemed beyond all our reaches and pledged my support for people involved directly in the hard work of building a better more peaceful world for Israelis and Palestinians and all life on this planet.
And I needed to redouble my efforts to protect my community and ensure that they could continue to celebrate every aspect of their identity, including a connection to the land and State of Israel, with every political hue of member who comes to our services. Including when that means calling out uncomfortable truths on their behalf.
The unacceptable price of “peace”
Graffiti equating a Star of David with a Swastika. A direct comparison between Jews and Nazis (Norwich, October 2024). Source: Community Service Trust (CST) Antisemitic Incidents report (2024).
But…let me be clear: if there can only be peace without Jews and their ideas, there is a name for that. Anti-Jewish Racism.
The Smiths know it. I know it. And it’s about time the rest of the world said they knew it and called it out too.
But sadly the Smiths don’t have much confidence in that happening and sadly, neither do I.
Credits
This blog was written by Rabbi Neil Janes and was first published on 01/07/2025.
This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.
Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”
Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”
Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).
Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”
‘A Holocaust in Gaza’
Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).
It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.
Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”
Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”
Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”
‘Antisemitism forever!’
Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.
If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.
Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.
Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”
Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).
‘Generated threats of personal violence’
A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.
Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.
Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”
After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.
It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.
Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.
In a momentous vote, the National Education Association’s 7,000-member policymaking body cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League. On July 6, the NEA’s national Representative Assembly approved New Business Item 39, committing that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.” The reasoning…
Zohran Mamdani to Kristen Welker (Meet the Press, 6/29/25): “Freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.”
Meet the Press host Kristen Welker (6/29/25) showed courage by interviewing Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary for New York, after he’d been widely attacked by corporate media. But unfortunately, she fell into a trap that has been set repeatedly in recent months to smear Mamdani. She asked him to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” claiming—without offering evidence—that the term “intifada” refers to “violence against Jews.”
I doubt Welker is an Arabic linguist. But as a Palestinian journalist who covered the Intifada and helped introduce the term to Western media, I am appalled by this misrepresentation. Not only is the translation wrong, it’s an insult to the thousands of New York Jews who voted for Mamdani.
For the record, intifada translates to “shake off.” Palestinians used the term to describe their popular resistance against an Israeli occupation of their land that had no end in sight. It emerged amid a steady expansion of illegal settlements, which were systematically turning the occupied territories into a Swiss cheese–like landscape, precisely designed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
As someone who reported on the Intifada and explained its meaning to international audiences, I can say unequivocally: Intifada was used by Palestinian activists to describe a civil resistance movement rooted in dignity and national self-determination.
Metaphor for liberation
The Arabic-language version of the website of the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto “Uprising” as “Intifada”—until blogger Juan Cole (5/1/24) pointed this out. (Creative Commons photo: Phil Kalina.)
Let’s begin with the word’s literal meaning. As noted, in Arabic, intifada simply means “shaking off.” Since many—including Jewish leaders, Christian Zionists and GOP officials—have distorted the peaceful intentions behind the word, I turned to a source that might resonate more clearly with people of faith: the Bible.
In the Arabic version of the Old Testament, the word intifada appears three times, both as a noun and a verb. Looking at its English equivalents in the New International Version (though other translations are similar) offers enlightening context:
Judges 16:20: “Samson awoke from his sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’”
Isaiah 52:2: “Shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem. Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive.”
Psalm 109:23: “I fade away like an evening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust.”
Each of these examples uses the term intifada—shaking off oppression, captivity or anguish—as a metaphor for liberation, not violence.
While Google Translate and other modern tools often render intifada as “popular uprising,” its literal meaning—“to shake off”—captures the spirit with which Palestinians adopted the term. When they launched the first Intifada in 1987—after 20 years under a foreign military occupation—it was an expression of a desire to wake up, rise and throw off the chains of subjugation. It is not inherently antisemitic, nor does it refer by default to terrorism or violence.
While accompanying international journalists covering the protests, I often discussed this with them. In Jerusalem, I explained to LA Times bureau chief Dan Fisher, the Washington Post’s Glenn Frankel and the New York Times’ John Kifner what Palestinians meant by the word. I told them that throughout Palestinian patriotic literature and slogans, two distinctions were always made: The Intifada was a protest against the Israeli occupation, not against Jews or the existence of Israel, and that the ultimate goal was to achieve an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Fisher, Frankel and Kifner included these clarifications in their reports, helping the Arabic term intifada enter the global lexicon with its intended meaning.
‘Bringing terror to the streets of America’
To define “intifada,” Fox News (5/23/25) brought on Douglas Murray, who calls Islam an “infection” and declares that “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.”
But today, as protests against Israel’s devastating war on Gaza mount, the word is being twisted. When Rep. Elise Stefanik grilled the presidents of UPenn, Harvard, and MIT in December 2023 about pro-Palestinian chants invoking “intifada,” she equated the term with “genocide of Jews.”
The university presidents faltered. They should have said clearly: Genocide against Jews—or any people—is abhorrent. But intifada is not synonymous with genocide. To equate a call to end the Israeli military occupation with a call for genocide or violence against Jews is a gross distortion—a bizarre reversal that paints the victims as aggressors.
And yet this distortion persists. [Gillibrand] Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled Mamdani antisemitic. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt—who likely doesn’t speak Arabic—claimed on X that intifada is “explicit incitement to violence.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) added that the word is “well understood to refer to the violent terror attacks.” Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told WNYC public radio (6/26/25), “The global intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.”
Media echoed the politicians’ misrepresentations of intifada. “Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians,” ABC (6/29/25) reported. “Many Jews consider it a call to violence, a nod to deadly attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinians in uprisings in the 1980s and 2000s,” wrote the New York Times (6/25/25). Of course, “many Jews” do not hear the word that way—but the more important question is, what is the accurate understanding of the word as used by Palestinians?
Fox News (5/23/25) didn’t mince words: “‘Intifada’ Means Bringing Terror to the Streets of America,” it said in a headline, citing notorious Islamophobe Douglas Murray. To the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/1/25), “What Intifada Really Means” is “giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.”
Even liberal podcast host Donny Deutsch repeated the same claim while speaking on MSNBC (Morning Joe, 6/30/25):
I’m outraged that we have a candidate for mayor of New York, Mr. Mamdani, that cannot walk back or cannot condemn the words “globalize the intifada” and his nuance of, “Well, it means different things for different people.” Well, let me tell you what it means to a Jew—it means violence.
Brutal suppression of protest
The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, December 21, 1987 (photo: Efi Sharir).
The first Intifada embraced principles of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. My cousin, Mubarak Awad, who established the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, encouraged boycotts of Israeli products, labor strikes and grassroots economic development in preparation for statehood. He translated, printed and distributed Arabic translations of Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolence throughout the occupied territories. Mubarak was deported on the eve of the Intifada by then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
After Shamir came Yitzhak Rabin, who called publicly to “break the bones” of Palestinian stone throwers. During the first Intifada, Israeli soldiers and settlers responded to the nonfatal protests with extreme violence. In the first phase of the uprising—a little more than a year—332 Palestinians were killed, along with 12 Israelis (Middle East Monitor, 12/8/16).
This brutality did not suppress the protests, but merely escalated the violence: At the end of six years, more than 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, and 400 Israelis—18 of whom were children—were dead, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.
The same pattern recurred in the second Intifada: Only after the initial protests were met with massively disproportionate force did Palestinians, led by Hamas, turn to suicide bombing as a desperation tactic (Al Jazeera, 9/28/20). To treat the response to the brutal suppression of protest as though it represented the essential nature of intifada is intellectually lazy and politically cynical.
Zohran Mamdani never used the words “global intifada.” But he refused to denounce calls for the world to wake up and speak out against atrocities in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary—supported in part by Jewish New Yorkers—shows he is neither antisemitic nor willing to renounce an Arabic word that has been hijacked and misused by people who would rather Palestinians remain silent and submissive under occupation.
Research assistance: Shirlynn Chan
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Daoud Kuttab.
In the last few months, we witnessed two violent attacks on pro-Israel events organized by American Jewish groups, by perpetrators who shouted “Free Palestine!” as they acted. The attacks — which killed two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and severely burned participants in a “Run for Their Lives” event in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages — have been roundly…
This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.
The former head of Human Rights Watch — and son of a Holocaust survivor — says Israel’s military campaign in Gaza will likely meet the legal definition of genocide, citing large-scale killings, the targeting of civilians, and the words of senior Israeli officials.
Speaking on 30′ with Guyon Espiner, Ken Roth agreed Hamas committed “blatant war crimes” in its attack on Israel on October 7 last year, which included the abduction and murder of civilians.
But he said it was a “basic rule” that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other.
There was indisputable evidence Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza and might also be pursuing tactics that fit the international legal standard for genocide, Roth said.
30′ with Guyon Espiner Kenneth Roth Video: RNZ
“The acts are there — mass killing, destruction of life-sustaining conditions. And there are statements from senior officials that point clearly to intent,” Roth said.
He cited comments immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas from Israel’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who referred to Gazans as “human animals”.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also said “an entire nation” was responsible for the attack and the notion of “unaware, uninvolved civilians is not true,” referring to the Palestinean people. Herzog subsequently said his words were taken out of context during a case at the International Court of Justice.
The accusation of genocide is hotly contested. Israel says it is fighting a war of self-defence against Hamas after it killed 1200 people, mostly civilians. It claims it adheres to international law and does its best to protect civilians.
It blames Hamas for embedding itself in civilian areas.
But Roth believes a ruling may ultimately come from the International Court of Justice, especially if a forthcoming judgment on Myanmar sets a precedent.
“It’s very similar to what Myanmar did with the Rohingya,” he said. “Kill about 30,000 to send 730,000 fleeing. It’s not just about mass death. It’s about creating conditions where life becomes impossible.”
‘Apartheid’ alleged in Israel’s West Bank Roth has been described as the ‘Godfather of Human Rights’, and is credited with vastly expanding the influence of the Human Rights Watch group during a 29-year tenure in charge of the organisation.
In the full interview with Guyon Espiner, Roth defended the group’s 2021 report that accused Israel of enforcing a system of apartheid in the occupied West Bank.
“This was not a historical analogy,” he said, implying it was a mistake to compare it with South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
“It was a legal analysis. We used the UN Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statute, and laid out over 200 pages of evidence.”
Kenneth Roth appears via remote link in studio for an interview on season 3 of 30′ with Guyon Espiner. Image: RNZ
He said the Israeli government was unable to offer a factual rebuttal.
“They called us biased, antisemitic — the usual. But they didn’t contest the facts.”
The ‘cheapening’ of antisemitism charges Roth, who is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust refugee, said it was disturbing to be accused of antisemitism for criticising a government.
“There is a real rise in antisemitism around the world. But when the term is used to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel, it cheapens the concept, and that ultimately harms Jews everywhere.”
Roth said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long opposed a two-state solution and was now pursuing a status quo that amounted to permanent subjugation of Palestinians, a situation human rights groups say is illegal.
“The only acceptable outcome is two states, living side by side. Anything else is apartheid, or worse,” Roth said.
While the international legal process around charges of genocide may take years, Roth is convinced the current actions in Gaza will not be forgotten.
“This is not just about war,” he said. “It’s about the deliberate use of starvation, displacement and mass killing to achieve political goals. And the law is very clear — that’s a crime.”
Roth’s criticism of Israel saw him initially denied a fellowship at Harvard University in 2023. The decision was widely seen as politically motivated, and was later reversed after public and academic backlash.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Inquiry concludes college’s management failed to help Jewish students ‘feel welcome and safe from antisemitism’
Goldsmiths College in London has apologised to Jewish students and staff after an independent inquiry found it had allowed a “culture” of antisemitism to build up on its campus over a number of years.
The inquiry concluded that Jewish students were subjected to antisemitism during their studies at Goldsmiths and that the college’s management failed to help Jewish students and potential applicants to “feel welcome, included and safe from antisemitism”.
Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.
One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”
‘Demonization and double standards’
To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”
The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).
But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”
There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:
Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.
Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.
The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.
The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally opposeethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rightsgroups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.
Antisemitism as pretext
The Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.
The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.
The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”
The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky:@NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
Ten local groups have unequivocally called out a Cornwall councillor over an antisemitic, holocaust-denying rant he made at a recent far-right rally.
Groups call out Cornwall councillor’s antisemitic rant
Groups including All Under One Banner Kernow, Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union Kernow, Cornwall Resists, Kernow Anti Fascist Network, Palestine Solidarity Cornwall, have signed a joint statement to Mylor Parish Council ahead of its Extraordinary meeting on 5 June. The signatories also include Penzance Socialists, Trade Union Council Cornwall, Unite the Union Community Branch, West Cornwall Against Racism, and Yes Kernow.
All the groups either supported or attended the protest, co-ordinated by Cornwall Resists, where British Democrats councillor Peter Lawrence was caught on film saying the holocaust was “massively over-exaggerated” and that antisemitism doesn’t technically exist.
On Thursday, councillors at a Mylor Parish Council meeting voted through a motion to condemn Lawrence’s speech.
The statement therefore expresses gratitude to the council for its swift response to the footage. It addresses the impact of Lawrence’s words, and provides additional information the council should be aware of. In particular, it points out his association with the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative.
Alongside this, it documents a catalogue of Lawrence’s antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Specifically, the statement notes that:
In other videos he talks about ‘Jews controlling the world’, echoing the grossly antisemitic great replacement theory. Another captures one of his much repeated and bizarre rants, telling us to look up Karl Marx’s real name, and his belief in some nefarious Jewish-communist conspiracy theory. In another, he tells us to look up henrymakrow.com – a site full of vile antisemitic conspiracy theories.
‘Words have consequences’: no place for hate speech
As the statement highlights:
This wasn’t an isolated two minute conversation, this was the culmination of over twenty minutes of him ranting antisemitic conspiracy theories at us. The first question asked in the video – “do you believe in antisemitism?” – was asked because of the blatant antisemitism he continually espoused.
Other videos show the support he received from the crowd he was a part of. He wasn’t challenged. This wasn’t one lone voice.
The video stops at the point Lawrence denies the holocaust because the person filming, who is Jewish, couldn’t take it any longer and had to walk away.
It continues:
Words have consequences. In a personal statement posted on social media last week, the person who filmed the discussion described how Lawrence’s rant had made them feel “unsafe as a Jewish person in Cornwall” partly because Lawrence’s prominence as a councillor and his platform in the local media as a spokesperson for the Farmers Movement in Cornwall gives him legitimacy.
The statement further points out that:
This is not a free speech issue. This is an issue of an unelected councillor, in a position of trust in his community, advocating Nazi ideology. Lawrence can say what he wants – and we’re glad he did – as it helped us expose him. Despite Lawrence’s appalling words almost certainly constituting a hate crime, we have not reported him to the police, or advocated for prosecution.
We believe in free speech because we trust our community groups, businesses and institutions to take action against fascists. This action is already happening through the Parish Council’s Extraordinary meeting, and the number of local businesses disassociating from him. Soul Farm, in particular, has taken a courageous stand handing in their notice with Lawrence, despite the fact this will impact on their business.
Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) published a statement, ostensibly from embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, “citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest.”
Elias Rodriguez is the suspect in the murder of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Journalist Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) has posted what he believes to be an authentic manifesto of the alleged shooter, a story that was subsequently reported on in the Jewish and Israeli press (Forward, 5/22/25; Israel Hayom, 5/22/25; Jewish Chronicle, 5/22/25). If the document is authentic, it appears the alleged gunman was violently opposed to the bloodbath in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.
Invoking the Palestinian death toll, the statement said, “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” It referenced the 1964 attempt on the life of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saying McNamara’s attacker was “incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam.”
Rodriguez (AP, 5/22/25) reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
‘Part of global surge’
Details are still emerging about how and why the shooter chose these two people at this particular event. The Washington Post (5/25/25) noted that the victims were both employees of the Israeli Embassy who had attended the Young Diplomats Reception, an annual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist organization. There is nothing in the public record that suggests Rodriguez harbored antisemitic sentiments or targeted his victims for being Jews. Rodriguez’ reported statements suggest that the assassinations were motivated by opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” do not appear in his purported manifesto.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (5/22/25) reported that Rodriguez’ Chicago apartment had many political signs, including one that said “‘Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.’” The wire explained, “Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repair the world’ that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.” It’s a phrase commonly used by progressive Jews, and dubious decor for an antisemite. (FAIR readers might remember the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which recently closed—Forward, 4/15/24).
The New York Times (5/22/25) framed the embassy murders as “an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”
But a New York Times report (5/22/25) asserted definitively that Rodriguez’ violent action was antisemitic and must be understood in the context of global anti-Jewish hate. “Slaying Outside DC Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism,” announced the headline over the piece by White House correspondent Michael Shear. Its first paragraph implicitly attributed rising antisemitism to the Hamas attack of October 7, describing “a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”
The Times quoted a number of politicians and activists who labeled the shooting antisemitic. Shear wrote, for instance:
The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that “these horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!”
Another key passage pinned rising antisemitism in the United States on the pro-Palestinian movement:
In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.
“You can’t draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,” said David Wolpe, who’s the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.
“But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, ‘globalize the intifada’ looks a lot like this.”
‘Corrosive to America’
The New York Post (5/22/25) said the embassy shooting was “antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all ‘anti-Zionist’ action.”
None of these statements were ever countered or questioned in the piece, which more or less presented their viewpoint as unchallenged fact. While the Times prolifically cited those quick to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, it failed to acknowledge that a great many American Jews have been protesting against the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza, or to cite scholarship like that of Yael Feinberg, who has found that “there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation.”
This Times news story fits neatly into the message of the right’s editorials on the shooting. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/22/25) said that, in light of the shooting,
anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.
Calling the killings “antisemitic terrorism,” the New York Post editorial board (5/22/25) said, “Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: ‘Globalize the intifada.’”
The Times jumped in on this Murdoch media rhetoric in a news article by Sharon Otterman (5/23/25), saying the killings
cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.
It included this nugget:
Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”
Guilt by association
The New York Times (5/18/25) described the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther as an effort at “branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’” (It dubiously calls this “an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism.”)
The Times‘ Shear joined the right-wing Post and Journal in framing the attack as an act of antisemitism, as well as building a “guilt by association” narrative, implicating peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters rather than acknowledging any responsibility on the part of Israel’s war and its US backers. They suggest that, to stem antisemitism and acts of political violence against Israel, the logical solution is not to end the genocide, but to suppress and punish pro-Palestinian protest—something that the Trump administration will almost certainly use the embassy worker killings to do even more harshly (Jewish Currents, 5/23/25).
His reporting might have been better informed if he had read the piece by his Times colleague Katie J.M. Baker (New York Times, 5/18/25) about the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to destroy pro-Palestine activism. Baker wrote of Heritage’s “Project Esther“:
It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.
Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (5/19/25) followed up to note that Project Esther targets “the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language.” It “describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a ‘Hamas caucus’ in Congress, one that’s also supported by the Jewish senator Bernie Sanders.” Goldberg observed that “there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism,” because it so often “tags Jews as perpetrators.”
Antisemitic Zionists
Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick told NPR (5/14/25): “If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost they wouldn’t be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration.”
These passages in the Times allude to a point pro-Palestine advocates have made for a long time, which is that anti-Zionism not only isn’t antisemitism (many Jews are not Zionists, just as many Zionists are not Jews), but that a large part of the right-wing Zionist movement is inherently antisemitic. It’s often rooted in Christian apocalyptic fantasies in which Israel’s creation brings about the End Times.
The bookOne Palestine, Complete, by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev makes the case that under British rule in Palestine, between World War I and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, the imperialists sided with Zionist forces against the Arabs not despite their Christian antisemitism, but because of it. In a fiery assessment of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, journalist Christopher Hitchens told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360°, 5/15/07) that the minister spent his life “fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendos into American politics,” along with other right-wing evangelists like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The white nationalist Richard Spencer admitted that he looked to Israel as a model of the white, gentile Xanadu he desired (Haaretz, 10/19/17).
Here at FAIR (5/1/05, 6/6/18, 11/6/23, 8/9/24, 2/19/25), we grow tired of having to point out that media, in the allegiance to the Israeli government narrative over Palestinian voices, use the insult of “antisemitism” to discredit criticism of Israel. Rodriguez’ alleged actions, of course, are not criticism but violence—murder is murder. But the Times’ evidence-free assertion that this attack was antisemitic adds to the false narrative that support for Palestine is inherently tied to bigotry against Jews.
In fact, news coverage of Jew-hatred should focus on the growing power of the racist right. The worst recent antisemitic incident in the United States was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (Axios, 6/16/23), carried out by a shooter obsessed with right-wing media tropes about Jews and immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18).
That case was often linked to Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer. While Roof targeted Black Christians, his manifesto “railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims”; Roof said that Adolf Hitler would someday “be inducted as a saint” (New York Times, 1/5/17). In short, anti-Jewish vigilantes put antisemitic ideas in their manifestos, which it appears Rodriguez didn’t do.
By contrast, these chilling ideas are widespread on the right. The QAnon movement, a proximate cohort to MAGA Trumpism, is enmeshed with antisemitic conspiracism (Guardian, 8/25/20; Just Security, 9/9/20; Newsweek, 6/28/21). NPR (5/14/25) reported that its investigation “identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a ‘Nazi sympathizer,’ and a prominent Holocaust denier.” Though the Jewish Democratic Council of America (5/21/25) lists the numerous antisemitic offenses of the Trump administration, that doesn’t seem to steer the coverage of the politics of antisemitism in the Times the way ADL’s spurious equation of pro-Palestinian with anti-Jewish does.
‘A much wider smear campaign’
Guardian (10/3/24): “Among the most violent incidents of the last year were the fatal Chicago stabbing of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume and a Vermont shooting of three Palestinian college students that left one of them, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani, paralyzed.”
It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment has also increased since the October 7 attacks of 2023 (NBC News, 4/13/24; Guardian, 10/3/24; Al Jazeera, 3/11/25). An Illinois man was convicted earlier this year of “fatally stabbing a Palestinian-American child in 2023 and severely wounding his mother,” who reported him saying, “You, as a Muslim, must die” (BBC, 2/28/25). ABC affiliate WLS (5/24/25) reported that in the window of Rodriguez’ home in Chicago, law enforcement found a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old victim in this crime.
In New York City, a pro-Israel mob terrorized a random woman mistaken for a pro-ceasefire activist; in addition to hurling rape threats, the crowd was heard chanting “death to Arabs” (PBS, 4/28/25; Battleground, 5/2/25). No arrests have been made at this time (Hell Gate, 5/23/25).
Benjamin Balthaser, an associate professor of English at Indiana University/South Bend who writes widely on Jewish subjects, told FAIR:
Over the past year and a half, we have seen an intensification of claims that all criticism and protest against Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza are just masked antisemitism, culminating with the deportation of students, the defunding of major universities, and the banning of lawful student organizations. The Heritage Foundation, as part of its “Project 2025,” has gone further, to claim that Palestine solidarity organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace are directly connected to armed militant organizations such as Hamas, despite JVP’s commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful solution to the now nearly century-long conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Equating a lone gunman with campus protest not only lacks evidence, it is part of a much wider smear campaign with the sole intent to criminalize legitimate, legal protest for peace and human rights. It not only runs afoul of cherished American principles of the First Amendment, it also cheapens and hollows out any attempt to hold antisemites, such as in Trump’s cabinet, accountable.
What happened in DC was alarming news that needed to be reported. But Shear’s piece, along with propaganda in the Murdoch press, added to the false Israeli line that all the people condemning genocide in Palestine are violent Jew-haters—or, in the case of Jewish activists for Palestine, self-hating Jews.
Featured image: Embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, interviewed by Scripps News (1/23/18) at an anti-Amazon protest in 2018.
Dozens of the roughly 200 cryptocurrency traders who were invited to a private dinner held by President Donald Trump last week hold other crypto assets with symbology linked to far right ideologies, white nationalism and neo-Nazism, a government watchdog says. According to a recent report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), 50 of the invitees hold crypto assets…
This article was initially set out to focus onThe Encampments, Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s impassioned documentary that chronicles the Columbia University student movement that shook the United States and captured imaginations the world over.
But then it came to my attention that a sparring film has been released around the same time, offering a staunchly pro-Israeli counter-narrative that vehemently attempts to discredit the account offered by The Encampments.
October 8 charts the alleged rise of antisemitism in the US in the wake of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian fighters.
A balanced record though, it is not. Wendy Sachs’s solo debut feature, which has the subhead, “The Fight for the Soul of America”, is essentially an unabashed defence of the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.
Its omissions are predictable; its moral logic is fascinatingly disturbing; its manipulative arguments are the stuff of Steven Bannon.
It’s easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across .
Ignoring October 8 would be injudicious, however. Selected only by a number of Jewish film festivals in the US, the film was released in mid-March by indie distribution outfit Briarcliff Entertainment in more than 125 theatres.
The film has amassed more than $1.3 million so far at the US box office, making it the second-highest grossing documentary of the year, ironically behind the self-distributed and Oscar-winning No Other Land about Palestine at $2.4 million.
October 8 has sold more than 90,000 tickets, an impressive achievement given the fact that at least 73 percent of the 7.5 million Jewish Americans still hold a favourable view of Israel.
“It would be great if we were getting a lot of crossover, but I don’t know that we are,” Sachs admitted to the Hollywood Reporter.
Zionist films have been largely absent from most local and international film festivals — curation, after all, is an ethical occupation — while Palestinian stories, by contrast, have seen an enormous rise in popularity since October 7.
The phenomenon culminated with the Oscar win for No Other Land.
October 8 . . . “easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across.” Image: Briarcliff Entertainment
But the release of October 8 and the selection of several Israeli hostage dramas in February’s Berlin Film Festival indicates that the war has officially reached the big screen.
With the aforementioned hostage dramas due to be shown stateside later this year, and no less than four major Palestinian pictures set for theatrical release over the next 12 months, this Israeli-Palestinian film feud is just getting started.
Working for change The Encampments, which raked in a highly impressive $423,000 in 50 theatres after a month of release, has been garnering more headlines, not only due to the fact that the recently detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil happens to be one of its protagonists, but because it is clearly the better film.
Pritsker and Workman, who were on the ground with the students for most of the six-week duration of the set-in, provide a keenly observed, intimate view of the action, capturing the inspiring highs and dispiriting lows of the passionate demonstrations and wayward negotiations with Columbia’s administrations.
The narrative is anchored from the point of views of four students: Grant Miner, a Jewish PhD student who was expelled in March for his involvement in the protests; Sueda Polat, a protest negotiator and spokesperson for the encampments; Naye Idriss, a Palestinian organiser and Columbia alumni; and the soft-spoken Khalil, the Palestinian student elected to lead the negotiations.
A desire for justice, for holding Israel accountable for its crimes in Gaza, permeated the group’s calling for divesting Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment funds from weapons manufacturers and tech companies with business links to the Netanyahu’s administration.
Each of the four shares similar background stories, but Miner and Khalil stand out. As a Jew, Miner is an example of a young Jewish American generation that regard their Jewishness as a moral imperative for defending the Palestinian cause.
Khalil, meanwhile, carries the familiar burden of being a child of the camps: a descendant of a family that was forcibly displaced from their Tiberias home in 1948.
The personal histories provide ample opportunities for reflections around questions of identity, trauma, and the youthful desire for tangible change.
Each protester stresses that the encampment was a last and only resort after the Columbia hierarchy casually brushed aside their concerns.
These concerns transformed into demands when it became clear that only more strident action like sit-ins could push the Columbia administration to engage with them.
In an age when most people are content to sit idly behind their computers waiting for something to happen, these students took it upon themselves to actively work for change in a country where change, especially in the face of powerful lobbies, is arduous.
Only through protests, the viewers begin to realise, can these four lucidly deal with the senseless, numbing bloodshed and brutality in Gaza.
Crackdown on free speech Through skilled placement of archival footage, Pritsker and Workman aptly link the encampments with other student movements in Columbia, including the earlier occupation of Hamilton Hall in 1968 that demonstrated the university’s historic ties with bodies that supported America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Both anti-war movements were countered by an identical measure: the university’s summoning of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to violently dismantle the protests.
Neither the Columbia administration, represented by the disgraced ex-president Minouche Shafik, nor the NYPD are portrayed in a flattering fashion.
Shafik comes off as a wishy-washy figure, too protective of her position to take a concrete stance for or against the pro-Palestinian protesters.
The NYPD were a regular fixture outside universities in New York during the encampments during 2024 Image: MEE/Azad Essa
The NYPD’s employment of violence against the peaceful protests that they declared to have “devolved into antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric” is an admission that violence against words can be justified, undermining the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects free speech.
The Encampments is not without flaws. By strictly adhering to the testimonials of its subjects, Pritsker and Workman leave out several imperative details.
These include the identity of the companies behind endowment allocations, the fact that several Congress senators who most prominently criticised the encampments “received over $100,000 more on average from pro-Israel donors during their last election” according to a Guardianfinding, and the revelations that US police forces have received analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli army and Israeli think tanks.
The suggested link between the 1968 protests and the present situation is not entirely accurate either.
The endowments industry was nowhere as big as it is now, and there’s an argument to be made about the deprioritisation of education by universities vis-a-vis their endowments.
A bias towards Israel or a determination to assert the management’s authority is not the real motive behind their position — it’s the money.
Lastly, avoiding October 7 and the moral and political issues ingrained within the attack, while refraining from confronting the pro-Israel voices that accused the protesters of aggression and antisemitism, is a major blind spot that allows conservatives and pro-Israel pundits to accuse the filmmakers of bias.
One could be asking too much from a film directed by first-time filmmakers that was rushed into theatres to enhance awareness about Mahmoud Khalil’s political persecution, but The Encampments, which was co-produced by rapper Macklemore, remains an important, urgent, and honest document of an event that has been repeatedly tarnished by the media and self-serving politicians.
The politics of victimhood The imperfections of The Encampments are partially derived from lack of experience on its creators’ part.
Any accusations of malice are unfounded, especially since the directors do not waste time in arguing against Zionism or paint its subjects as victims. The same cannot be said of October 8.
Executive produced by actress Debra Messing of Will & Grace fame, who also appears in the film, October 8 adopts a shabby, scattershot structure vastly comprised of interviews with nearly every high-profile pro-Israel person in America.
The talking heads are interjected with dubious graphs and craftily edited footage culled from social media of alleged pro-Palestinian protesters in college campuses verbally attacking Jewish students and allegedly advocating the ideology of Hamas.
Needless to say, no context is given to these videos whose dates and locations are never identified.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve the victimisation card by using the same language that informed the pro-Palestine discourse
Every imaginable falsification and shaky allegation regarding the righteousness of Zionism is paraded: anti-Zionism is the new form of antisemitism; pro-Palestinian protesters harassed pro-Israel Jewish students; the media is flooded with pro-Palestinian bias.
Other tropes include the claim that Hamas is conspiring to destabilise American democracy and unleash hell on the Western world.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who defected to Israel in 1997, stresses that “my definition of Intifada is chaos”.
There is also the suggestion that the protests, if not contained, could spiral into Nazi era-like fascism.
Sachs goes as far as showing historical footage of the Third Reich to demonstrate her point.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve Israel’s victimhood by using the same language that informs pro-Palestine discourse. “Gaza hijacked all underdog stories in the world,” one interviewee laments.
At one point, the attacks of October 7 are described as a “genocide”, while Zionism is referred to as a “civil rights movement”.
One interviewee explains that the framing of the Gaza war as David and Goliath is erroneous when considering that Hamas is backed by almighty Iran and that Israel is surrounded by numerous hostile countries, such as Lebanon and Syria.
In the most fanciful segment of the film, the interviewees claim that the Students for Justice in Palestine is affiliated and under the command of Hamas, while haphazardly linking random terrorist attacks, such as 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting to Hamas and by extension the Palestinian cause.
A simmering racist charge delineate the film’s pro-Israel discourse in its instance on pigeonholing all Palestinians as radical Muslim Hamas supporters.
There isn’t a single mention of the occupied West Bank or Palestinian religious minorities or even anti-Hamas sentiment in Gaza.
Depicting all Palestinians as a rigid monolith profoundly contrasts Pritsker and Workman’s nuanced treatment of their Jewish subjects.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism
There’s a difference between subtraction and omission: the former affects logical form, while the latter affects logical content.
October 8 is built on a series of deliberate omissions and fear mongering, an unscrupulous if familiar tactic that betrays the subjects’ indignation and their weak conviction.
It is thus not surprising that there is no mention of the Nakba or the fact that the so-called “civil rights movement” is linked to a state founded on looted lands or the grand open prison Israel has turned Gaza into, or the endless humiliation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is also no mention of the racist and inciting statements by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Nor is there mention of the Palestinians who have been abducted and tortured and raped in Israeli prisons.
And definitely not of the more than 52,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date.
Sachs’ subjects naturally are too enveloped in their own conspiracies, in the tightly knotted narrative they concocted for themselves, to be aware of their privilege.
The problem is, these subjects want to have their cake and eat it. Throughout, they constantly complain of being silenced; that most institutions, be it the media or college hierarchies or human rights organisations, have not recognised the colossal loss of 7 October 7 and have focused instead on Palestinian suffering.
They theorise that the refusal of the authorities in taking firm and direct action against pro-Palestinian voices has fostered antisemitism.
At the same time, they have no qualms in flaunting their contribution to New York Times op-eds or the testimonies they were invited to present at the Congress.
All the while, Khalil and other Palestinian activists are arrested, deported and stripped of their residencies.
The value of good journalism October 8, which portrays the IDF as a brave, truth-seeking institution, is not merely a pro-Israel propaganda, it’s a far-right propaganda.
The subjects adopt Trump rhetoric in similarly blaming the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies for the rise of antisemitism, while dismissing intersectionality and anti-colonialism for giving legitimacy to the Palestinian cause.
As repugnant as October 8 is, it is crucial to engage with work of its ilk and confront its hyperboles.
Last month, the Hollywood Reporter set up an unanticipated discussion between Pritsker, who is in fact Jewish, and pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig.
The heated exchange that followed demonstrated the difficulty of communication with the pro-Israeli lobby, yet nonetheless underlines the necessity of communication, at least in film.
Mazzig spends the larger part of the discussion spewing unfounded accusations that he provides no validations for: “Mahmoud Khalil has links to Hamas,” he says at one point.
When asked about the Palestinian prisoners, he confidently attests that “the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners” — hostages, as Pritsker calls them — they have committed crimes and are held in Israeli prisons, right?
“In fact, in the latest hostage release eight Palestinian prisoners refused to go back to Gaza because they’ve enjoyed their treatment in these prisons.”
Mazzig dismisses pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the pro-Palestinian Jewish students who participated in the encampments.
“No one would make this argument but here we are able to tokenise a minority, a fringe community, and weaponise it against us,” he says.
“It’s not because they care about Jews and want Jews to be represented. It’s that they hate us so much that they’re doing this and gaslighting us.”
At this stage, attempting for the umpteenth time to stress that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not one and the same — a reality that the far-right rejects — is frankly pointless.
Attempting, like Khalil, to continually emphasise our unequivocal rejection of antisemitism, to underscore that our Jewish colleagues and friends are partners in our struggle for equality and justice, is frankly demeaning.
For Mazzig and Messing and the October 8 subjects, every Arab, every pro-Palestinian, is automatically an antisemite until proven otherwise.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism.
Emotionality has no place in this increasingly hostile landscape. The reason why The Bibi Files and Louis Theroux’s The Settlers work so well is due to their flawless journalism.
People may believe what they want to believe, but for the undecided and the uninformed, factuality and journalistic integrity — values that go over Sachs’ head — could prove to be the most potent weapon of all.
Joseph Fahim is an Egyptian film critic and programmer. He is the Arab delegate of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, a former member of Berlin Critics’ Week and the ex director of programming of the Cairo International Film Festival. This article was first published by Middle East Eye.
New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has upheld complaints about two 1News reports relating to violence around a football match in Amsterdam between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.
The authority found an item on “antisemitic violence” surrounding the match, and another on heightened security in Paris the following week, breached the accuracy standard.
In a majority decision, the BSA upheld a complaint from John Minto on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) about reporting on TVNZ’s 6pm 1News bulletin on 9 November 2024.
This comprised a trailer reporting “antisemitic violence”, an introduction by the presenter with “disturbing” footage of violence against Israeli fans described by Amsterdam’s mayor as “an explosion of antisemitism”, and a pre-recorded BBC item.
TVNZ upheld one aspect of this complaint over mischaracterised footage in the trailer and introduction. This was originally reported as showing Israeli fans being attacked, but later corrected by Reuters and other outlets as showing Israeli fans chasing and attacking a Dutch man.
“The footage contributed to a materially misleading impression created by TVNZ’s framing of the events, with an emphasis on antisemitic violence against Israeli fans without acknowledging the role of the Maccabi fans in the violence – despite that being previously reported elsewhere,” the BSA found.
A majority of the authority found TVNZ did not make reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy.
It considered the background to the events was highly sensitive and more care should have been taken to not overstate or adopt, without question, the antisemitic angle.
The minority considered it was reasonable for TVNZ to rely on Reuters, the BBC and Dutch officials’ description of the violence as “antisemitic”, in a story developing overseas in which not all facts were clear at the time of broadcast.
The authority considered TVNZ should have issued a correction when it became aware of the error with the footage. It therefore found the action taken was insufficient, but considered publication of the BSA’s decision to be an adequate remedy in the circumstances.
Western media’s embarrassing failures on Amsterdam violence. Video: AJ’s The Listening Post
In a separate decision, the authority upheld two complaints about a brief 1News item on 15 November 2024 reporting on heightened security in Paris in the week following the violence.
The item reported: “Thousands of police are on the streets of Paris over fears of antisemitic attacks . . . That’s after 60 people were arrested in Amsterdam last week when supporters of a Tel Aviv football team were pursued and beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters.”
TVNZ upheld both complaints under the accuracy standard on the basis the item “lacked the nuance” of earlier reporting on Amsterdam, by omitting to mention the role of the Maccabi fans in the lead-up to the violence.
The authority agreed with this finding but determined TVNZ took insufficient action to remedy the breach.
“The broadcaster accepted more care should have been taken, but did not appear to have taken any action in response, or made any public acknowledgement of the inaccuracy,” the BSA said.
The authority found the framing and focus careless, noting “the role of both sides in the violence had been extensively reported” by the time of the 15 November broadcast. TVNZ had also aired the mischaracterised footage again, not realising Reuters had issued a correction several days earlier.
As TVNZ was not monitoring the Reuters fact-check site, the correction only came to light when the complaints were being investigated.
Other standards raised in the three complaints were not breached or did not apply, the authority found.
The BSA did not consider an order was warranted over the item on November 15 – deciding publication of the decision was sufficient to publicly acknowledge and correct the breach, censure the broadcaster and give guidance to TVNZ and other broadcasters.
AP (3/13/25): “Demonstrators from [Jewish Voice for Peace] filled the lobby of Trump Tower…to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University.”
In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.
JVP, an organization of Jewish Americans in solidarity with Palestinians, organized the March 13 sit-in of Trump’s Manhattan property in protest against ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil.
As Jewish solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide does not fit neatly into the channel’s narrative that pro-Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic, Fox’s all-day coverage of the protest either cast doubt upon the organization’s Jewish identity or minimized mentioning JVP by name altogether—all while painting demonstrators as antisemites.
What’s more, discussion of the protest veered into unabashedly antisemitic conspiracy theories about how George Soros and his supposedly paid anti-American protesters seek to overthrow the West.
The coverage comes as an absurd reminder that while right-wing fearmongers cynically paint opposition to genocide or violation of due-process as antisemitic, the most-watched US cable news network has no problem echoing Goebbelsian talking points.
‘Don’t give them any advertisement’
“Look at some of the signage in here…. They hate Jewish Americans,” says Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner (3/13/25), while playing footage of protesters holding up signs proudly proclaiming their Jewish heritage.
The argument made on other programs that the protesters were antisemitic, anti-American and aligned with Nazis, requires a specific hesitance towards profiling JVP probably best captured in an interview on the Story (3/13/25) with NYPD Chief John Chell. Asked who the group was that organized the protest, he responded, “We’re well-versed in this group, I don’t wanna give them any advertisement.”
He only neglected to say the quiet part out loud—that a shout-out for JVP might advertise a reality in which protesters in solidarity with Palestine and campus demonstrators weren’t motivated by antisemitism.
On Fox‘s Outnumbered (3/13/25), host Harris Faulkner and other panelists spent ample time portraying the protesters as antisemites—while intentionally obfuscating the overtly Jewish messaging of the demonstration.
It’s not as though the panelists or reporter Eric Shawn were somehow unaware of who was protesting: About seven minutes into the coverage, panelist Emily Compagno read the back of one of the T-shirts, printed “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Without missing a beat, she pivoted into an incoherent rant about how the Democratic Party and Ivy League universities venerate Hamas. A few minutes later, Eric Shawn stammered the group’s name once in passing, then never again.
Unsurprisingly, these two incidental mentions were drowned out by relentless accusations that the protesters voiced overt hatred for Jews.
Faulkner set the tone of the conversation with some of her leading remarks: “Look at some of the signage here…. They hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are Anti-American.” (Such virulently antisemitic signage included “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” “Opposing Fascism Is a Jewish Tradition” and “Never Again for Anyone.”) She then asked her audience, “If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”
Guest panelist Lisa Boothe added that protesters “hate the West,” arguing that they “are supporting the Nazis.”
‘Some said they were Jews’
“Some said that they…were Jews,” the Five panelist Greg Gutfeld (3/13/25) stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it! And they will not check…who paid for those signs, who paid for those T-shirts, and…who paid for the protesters.”
When the Five (3/13/25) first mentioned the Jewish identities of the protesters about eight minutes into the broadcast, they did so to cast doubt upon the premise that Jews would engage in such an act: “Some said that they…were Jews,” Greg Gutfeld stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it!”
(It’s unclear who Gutfeld considers to be “the media,” given that he’s a panelist on the top-rated show at the most-watched cable news network.)
Like on Outnumbered, the Five panelists accused protesters of supporting antisemitism while only mentioning the demonstrators’ Jewish identity in passing. Jesse Watters summarized the panel’s position best, stating that protesters were “supporting an antisemite” who “hates Jews” and “[blew] up Columbia.”
The commentary hinges on the assumption that an Islamophobic audience will hear that an antisemitic crowd rallied at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil “blow[ing] up Columbia”—and not follow up on who organized the rally, or why.
Such buzzword-laden obfuscation reveals a paranoia in such coverage: If viewers do choose to follow up and learn more about the protesters, it might give the game away. The hoards of supposed antisemites might be raising perfectly reasonable questions about erosion of due-process and US bankrolling of genocide. Some such protests, like the one at Trump Tower, might even be Jewish-led.
‘Hands in many protest pots’
Fox News discussed George Soros as though he’s the Palestine movement’s top financier—though according to its own graphic (Will Cain Show, 3/13/25), Soros is only JVP’s fifth-biggest funder, donating a third as much as its largest donor, and accounting for less than 2% of the group’s total financing.
Curiously, for all of their concern for antisemitism, Outnumbered, the Story, the Five, the Will Cain Show (3/13/25) and Ingraham Angle (3/13/25) all had one thing in common: a conspiratorial fascination with allegedly astroturfed leftist financing. Laura Ingraham was particularly explicit:
The group Jewish Voice for Peace…bills itself as a home for left-leaning Jews…and it gets its biggest funding from groups associated with George Soros…. Soros himself has his hands in many protest pots, stirring up a toxic brew of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
She cited a graphic displayed on the Will Cain Show, which was also referenced on the Five. It depicted Soros’ Open Society fund as the fifth-biggest funder of JVP for 2019–21, contributing $150,000. Given that JVP has an annual budget of more than $3 million, this suggests that Soros is responsible for less than 2% of the group’s financing.
Ingraham nonetheless felt the need to rail against Soros and the broader Jewish left. She also went on to characterize the pro-Palestine movement as “the overthrow-of-the-West cause.”
So the “antisemitic” pro-Palestine protests are bankrolled by an anti-American Jewish billionaire seeking to overthrow the West? Like her peers on Outnumbered and the Five, Ingraham is empowered to advance such harmful tropes, so long as she also tacks on a spurious charge of “antisemitism.”
Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes
Five panelist and former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (3/13/25) condemned protesters “want[ing] Mahmoud [Khalil] to have all of his constitutional rights,” implying that violation of Khalil’s due process is legal because he “hates all of our Western values.”
Fox’s obfuscation of the protest’s overtly Jewish messaging is underpinned by another assumption—that Palestinian-led or immigrant-led protest against the genocide is somehow less legitimate than Jewish American–led protest. Coverage not only obscured JVP’s role in organizing the protest, but used anti-Arab tropes and calls for deportation to smear the legitimacy of protesters’ demands.
When Jesse Watters evoked fantasies of student protesters blowing up universities, or Outnumbered guest panelist (and former Bush White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer accused protesters of being illegal residents that “should all be deported from this country,” they played to the racist impulses of their audiences.
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian-Syrian immigrant—thus, his opposition to a genocide in which Israel has killed at least 51,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 presumed dead under the rubble, is illegitimate. And if JVP protesters are Arab immigrants too, then their opposition to repression and genocide is meritless and antisemitic.
It’s another reason why it’s in Fox’s best interest not to identify the Trump Tower protesters—to allow for the assumption that they’re Arabs, or immigrants, which somehow discredits them.
Enemies with no name
As a Jewish-led organization in solidarity with Palestinians, JVP stresses the importance of challenging false antisemitism smears against their Palestinian partners and in creating a Jewish future divested from Zionism.
Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50.
Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism.
“We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”
To be clear, conservative and centrist outlets’ continued preoccupation with the supposed antisemitism of opponents of Israel’s genocide is never in good faith—as when the New York Times (4/14/25), reporting on “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Universities,” blithely claimed that “pro-Palestinian students on college campuses…harassed Jewish students,” without noting that many of the pro-Palestinian students were themselves Jewish. But the charge of antisemitism is even more ludicrous coming from an outlet that uses antisemitic tropes to make its own attacks on the pro-Palestine movement.
And the charge is most ridiculous coming from a network that is too afraid to name its enemy, as if the mere acknowledgement that some Jews oppose US support for Israel’s genocide might shake the foundations of its whole narrative.
