amalek

 The respected academic journal Analyse & Kritik just published a paper by Abed Azzam called "‘Blot Out the Memory of Amalek from Under Heaven’: The Gaza Genocide and the Political Theological Legacy of the Biblical Amalek." Here is its abstract:

The biblical command ‘Blot out the memory of Amalek’ surfaced heavily in Israel after October 7, 2023. UN institutions, international and Israeli human rights NGOs and scholars of genocide studies classified the wide use of the Amalek rhetoric across Israeli politics and the military as a clear incitement to genocide. It is acknowledged that such scientific and legal subordination of the present Israeli Amalek rhetoric to the concept of genocide is indispensably important for the Palestinian just cause. However, this paper further singles out this rhetoric to examine it through the analytical lens of political theology. Thus, it first highlights the political-theological carriage of the biblical narrations of Amalek. Second, it situates Amalek as an archetype of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the enemy. Third, the paper traces a genealogy of the Zionist construction of the Palestinian as an Amalekite enemy. Finally, it concludes by showing how this political-theological genealogy culminates in the erasure of the Palestinian from the memory of Western ‘civilization.’

Because I am familiar with the topic, I was quickly able to see that the article was based on false assumptions. I identified two: 

One that Israeli leaders invoked Amalek in the sense of destroying every Palestinian man, woman and child when they were in fact invoking the other Amalek commandment of "remembering Amalek" - that is the verse Netanyahu quoted and consistently used the language of "remember."

The other was that Israeli leaders were referring to Palestinians as Amalek or saying all Palestinians are legitimate targets, and they clearly said the opposite - that Hamas was the target. In fact this paper barely mentions Hamas and while it mentions the date of October 7, 2023 several times, not once does it say what happened that day. 

If any load-bearing assumption behind the paper is false, then the paper is itself wrong. And these aren't the only false assumptions:  the paper assumes "genocide" as a fact, that the "Amalek rhetoric" was widespread in Israel, that there is a traceable "genealogy" from the Torah to early Zionists to the Gaza war of "Amalek" rhetoric, that modern Israeli leaders using "Amalek" rhetoric reflect a coherent theological‑political ideology rather than as a rhetorical device. 

Again, if any of these are provably wrong, the entire paper is wrong. Which it is.

But this post is not meant to be merely a debunking of the paper. It is a story of how anti-Israel rhetoric has become so mainstreamed that even intelligent people can no longer tell the difference between truth and the lies I just listed.

Analyse & Kritik is a peer reviewed journal. A Jewish day school student would know the difference between the two Amalek commandments. Anyone can look up the text of the speeches of Israeli leaders to see what they actually said. Why couldn't the peer reviewers?

The answer, I believe, is that today's academia no longer has a reasonable definition of "truth." There are a number of theories of what truth means, and the one that they use (at least for Israel) appears to be the "coherence theory," which holds that a belief is true if it is consistent with a larger system of beliefs. This paper, and many others I have examined, are coherent - yet they are riddled with falsehoods that aren't just mistakes but that invalidate the entire paper. The reviewers are looking at whether the argument is consistent, but they are assuming that the facts are accurate. 

The anti-Israel narrative has become so widespread that it is now considered the only coherent explanation for anything Israel does. This is why the academics and NGOs are so resistant to correction when their facts are proven wrong - they cannot wrap their heads around any coherent alternative to "Israel is evil."  That is the only fact they are willing to accept, and any actual facts that contradict it are considered aberrant, not disproof. 

The frightening part is that AIs, unless carefully trained, tend to do the same thing. I tried to train a GPT to surface hidden, load-bearing assumptions and tested it with this article. It found some surface-level assumptions but did not detect the deeper ones. It assumed that Azzam's Biblical quotes were all referring to the same commandment. It said that it was wrong to generalize individual politicians to the entire Israeli leadership, but gave examples of genocidal sounding quotes that were themselves taken out of context - because it was trained on the ICJ case and UN documents that did not mention how they misquoted the speeches. Only when I told them the facts did they go to source materials and find out I was right. 

Academics don't know how to search for truth anymore, and AIs are being trained to think the same way. 

We should all be very, very scared.

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icsa

 

Andrew Pessin has launched the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, and in his introductory manifesto he writes:

“We now need entire teams of researchers — serious, methodical, interdisciplinary — to mine the full archive of genocide studies, settler-colonial theory, Middle Eastern studies, and the whole academic nexus where antizionism has taken root… a vast, largely unexamined body of antizionist hate literature, treated as scholarship but functioning as ideology.”

I am not an academic, but I can certainly critique academics on their own playing field. I've quoted and mocked the most egregious examples of anti-Zionist academics and academic literature a number of times. But what is required here is a more rigorous examination showing that the entire field is rotten at the core.. From what I could tell, anti-Zionist academic literature does not simply contain bias. It behaves like a sealed intellectual ecosystem, with its own canonical texts, circular logic, and selective evidentiary filters. The appearance of scholarly rigor is there -  citations, peer review, footnotes  - but the underlying method is adversarial rather than truth-seeking. The conclusions are rarely tested; they are assumed.

This is where AI becomes indispensable.

Taylor and Francis hosts hundreds of academic journals. While most papers there are not available in full text, they show their abstracts - and their footnotes. I realized that with a minimal effort I could have AI examine the papers and their references to see if they are following the patterns of normal academic research or if their evidence is all circular and ignoring any counter-examples.

I found that when searching for papers accusing Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” nearly all of them fail basic academic standards required in the social sciences.

The rot is very deep. Here is what I found in only a half hour of research with Grok:

The Settler-Colonialism Frame: Theory as Template

Searching Taylor & Francis for “settler colonial* + Israel” yields about 110 papers since 2015. In this cluster:

• Patrick Wolfe (2006) is cited ~52%

• Ilan Pappé (2006) ~48%

• Lorenzo Veracini (2010) ~35%

• Gershon Shafir (1996) ~28%

These four sources account for roughly 80% of the network’s intellectual gravity. Virtually every subsequent paper refers back to them.

But here is the problem: these works are rarely challenged, only repeated. Assertions like “Zionism is a settler-colonial project by definition.”are taken not as hypotheses to be investigated, but as axioms to be applied.

Primary sources,  such as Ottoman-era Jewish land ownership, pre-Mandate Jewish presence, or Mizrahi Jewish indigeneity,  almost never receive examination. The fact that Jews have always considered Israel their homeland and have prayed to return for two millennia? Not to be found, because that one fact by itself shows that Jews never considered themselves to be settling someone else's land but returning to their own. 

Even within the larger field of settler colonial studies, there are debates on whether Israel fits the definition the way the US or Australia do. Those dissenting opinions not only might but must be mentioned in serious academic papers - yet they are virtually absent in the context of Israel.

The Apartheid Frame: NGOs as Canon

The apartheid literature is even larger, about 230 papers. But here, the intellectual source code changes.

The top citations are no longer academics but NGOs: 

• B’Tselem (2021) ~75%

• Human Rights Watch (2021) ~68%

• Amnesty International (2022) ~62%

These are not academic papers, but advocacy documents. They are not peer-reviewed; they were created with predetermined conclusions and PR strategies behind them. 

Yet in academic writing, they are treated as if they were definitive legal assessments. The logic often goes something like, “As established by HRW and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid regime.”

But the reports themselves have been directly challenged,  in detail, by Eugene Kontorovich,  Avi  Bell, Gerald Steinberg, CAMERA, and myself. Those critiques exist. They are public and specific. 

And yet,  in the 230 T&F apartheid papers,  they are cited in less than 2% of cases. And when they are cited, it is often dismissively, as “denialist rhetoric,” not as arguments requiring rebuttal.

This is ideological cherry-picking that excludes any contradictory evidence.. It does not reach anything close to accepted academic standards.

The “Genocide” Acceleration

Finally, the most recent wave: the “genocide” framing post-October 7. There have been so far about 150 papers since late 2023 accusing Israel of "genocide," which is astonishing for two years. 

And in these, the primary sources are:

• Francesca Albanese’s UN Special Rapporteur reports (70%)

• ICJ provisional ruling language (65%)

• Amnesty’s December 2024 genocide report (already ~55%)

Again, the pattern holds. These sources are treated as if they constitute established legal conclusions rather than political and rhetorical framing.

Arguments rooted in genocide scholarship, like the specific standard of dolus specialis,  are barely discussed. The ICJ’s own high evidentiary standards (as applied in Croatia v. Serbia) are almost never mentioned.

There are virtually no counter-interpretations, no accurate readings of the Genocide Convention, no documentation of Israeli efforts to warn civilians, no discussion of Hamas embedding military assets among civilians.

Once again, NGO reports are treated not as evidence but as authority.

In other scholarly fields, like  political science, history, and sociology,  academic standards require:

• representing opposing views fairly

• citing dissenting scholarship

• acknowledging uncertainties

• engaging with primary sources

• and above all: practicing falsifiability

What we see instead is the construction of a self-affirming discourse where counter-arguments are not refuted. They are simply not acknowledged.

This produces an illusion of consensus where none exists. It creates the appearance of “settled scholarship” when what actually exists is selective citation and methodological exclusion.

I managed to prove, in less than an hour, what I and probably the members of ICSA have long suspected: that the field of anti-Zionism is not just dismissive but contemptuous of academic standards. It is not a field at all, but an anti-Israel propaganda initiative disguised as scholarship. It does not stand up to the slightest bit of critical scrutiny.

ICSA must adhere to rigorous academic standards to make this case airtight. But I just proved it beyond any reasonable doubt. 

Ideas start in journals, get simplified into lectures, then transmitted to student activists, turned into slogans and then accepted as moral certainties which then become dogma, and dogma that cannot be questioned becomes a weapon. Entire university departments are complicit in this truly horrible hijacking of academia. Any honest researcher should be horrified and want to excise this cancer from the social sciences.

Let's hope ICSA will be the spark to burn this entire false field of study down.

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holo ed

 There has been an uproar over comments by Sarah Hurwitz at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America this month. As JTA reports:

“Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” she said. “But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.’ So when on Tiktok, all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”  

Immediately the "progressive" Left attacked her, saying that she was justifying Gaza "genocide" and other nonsense.

Hurwitz is correct. Holocaust education falls into a number of buckets, all of which are problematic for one reason or another. Some make it into a vapid lesson on generalized tolerance. Others use it as a tool to compare the Holocaust with other genocides, without noting the particular horrors that make it unique. Some concentrate on Jewish victimhood, making Jews passive characters in the only narrative they are confutable teaching, "oppressor vs. oppressed." And yet others concentrate on democracy and anti-authoritarianism, implying that something like this could never happen here.

Everyone is ignoring the real lesson of the Holocaust - how we cannot be complacent, because we can also fall into the same mindset that the Germans did.  Some of the most cultured, educated and technologically advanced people in the world  descended into supporting the horrors of genocide in less than a decade. How could this happen, and how can we ensure it never happens again?

This is a lesson in ethics, a topic that public education seems allergic to for fear of offending someone. But without a strong ethical backbone, any Holocaust curriculum is not going to accomplish what it is supposed to. And there are basic ethical imperatives that everyone should be able to agree upon.

This is exactly where the philosophy I have been developing, Derechology, shows its value. Together with my Derechology AI GPT, I came up with a sample curriculum that makes the Holocaust relevant to today. It doesn't shy away from hard questions - it is meant to make students uncomfortable in an age-appropriate way.

In the derechological curriculum, students don't just learn about the Holocaust: they are trained to think ethically:

• They learn to identify moral collapse through values like Tzelem Elokim (the sacred image in every person), Pikuach Nefesh (life trumps ideology), and Anavah (moral humility).
• They study how professions failed—medicine, law, academia—and how moral distance allowed people to commit atrocities while feeling innocent.
• They engage in Moral Audit Projects—applying Holocaust ethics to modern issues: medical ethics, refugee policy, social media algorithms, and more.
• They reflect on moral resilience—what Jewish tradition preserved under annihilation, and how spiritual courage outlasted empire.

The sample curriculum spans eight modules. Here’s a taste:

Ground Zero of Moral Collapse — This module begins with the question of how a civilized society—full of artists, scientists, and thinkers—could become a machine of genocide. Students are introduced to key ethical values and the idea of structural moral failure. The focus is not on Jews or Nazis yet, but on the disappearance of override values like human dignity and mutual responsibility under the guise of "science "and "progress." Racial theories were accepted as scientific fact by everyone in the early 20th century. Are there any current social theories being taught today that might be disproven tomorrow?

How Antisemitism Functions — Antisemitism is not just another form of hate; it’s a diagnostic tool for system failure. Students learn how antisemitism morphs across ideologies and Jews are blamed for contradictory crimes. They will examine how antisemitic ideas infiltrated German law, theology, education, and popular culture, becoming the emotional and ideological engine of genocide. Students also examine how tropes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—accusations of secret Jewish power, global manipulation, and dual loyalty—have not disappeared but adapted to modern political language. Conspiracy theories portraying Jews as both omnipotent and subversive remain widespread across ideological spectrums. The module challenges students to understand how these narratives persist even when explicitly disavowed, and how they distort ethical reasoning. This module challenges students to recognize similar rhetorical and structural patterns in contemporary discourse. 

Collapse of the Professions — Doctors, lawyers, engineers, and professors were not exceptions to Nazism: they were instruments of it. This module shows how professional codes eroded when they aligned with racial ideology and state power. Medical ethics books justified extermination of "subhumans."   Students learn how moral collapse isn’t chaotic - it can be planned, bureaucratic, credentialed, and efficient. 

Moral Arrogance — What happens when humility is removed from the ethical system? This module introduces Anavah—moral humility—as a structural necessity. Nazis didn't think of themselves as monsters - they were in the forefront of animal ethics while justifying the murder of millions of humans. Students explore how Nazi ideology elevated certainty, hierarchy, and dehumanization over ethical restraint, creating a worldview where genocide felt like progress. 

The Machinery of Death — The Holocaust was a technological, administrative, and logistical operation as much as it was ideological. Students learn about the train systems, data tracking, and bureaucratic layers that allowed millions to die while most participants believed they were “just doing their jobs.” The concept of “moral distance” helps explain how ordinary people justified extraordinary evil. Some resisted but the vast majority did not, thinking that their parts in the genocide were too inconsequential to matter. 

Mass Consent: The Storytelling of Genocide — This module explores how the Nazis used propaganda to normalize the abnormal. Students analyze films, speeches, posters, and school materials that reframed genocide as moral duty and racial hygiene. They study classic persuasion techniques—repetition, euphemism, scapegoating, visual symbolism—and compare them to how modern media and social platforms and advertising shape narratives today. The goal is to train students to detect ethical hijacking before it becomes cultural collapse.

Jewish Ethical and Physical Resistance — Against totalitarian power, Jews didn’t just survive—they preserved structure. Students learn about the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto and in partisan forces. But beyond that, they embraced spiritual resistance: holiday observance, Torah study, mutual aid, even ethical debates in camps. This is framed not as passive suffering but as the fierce refusal to let moral structure die even when they had no control over any other aspect of their lives.

Teshuva Epochs — After the Shoah, some systems tried to reckon with their collapse. Students examine examples of postwar repentance: Christian theological shifts, German reparations, the Geneva Conventions, and the moral rebirth of Israel. The challenge here is to distinguish real teshuva (ethical return) from performative gestures ("we're sorry you were offended.") it is not about guilt, but about a true change in one's derech (moral path.)

Moral Audit Project — In the capstone module, students apply Holocaust ethics to contemporary moral dilemmas. They identify a system where human dignity is at risk, run a derechological analysis, and design an override mechanism. This turns memory into action—and trains moral architects, not just historians.

Students come away not just with knowledge, but with conscience - and tools that would help them navigate real life.

They learn that remembering isn’t enough. “Never Again” means never again on your watch. The Holocaust is not a Jewish story with universal lessons—it is a universal story revealed through the unique Jewish experience.

This is only one version of the curriculum I've developed. There are many other subtopics and ethical entry points into the Holocaust that could be explored. I believe specific vignettes are especially effective—moments students can visualize and emotionally process. For example, while Nazi death camp commandants could spend their evenings listening to music and enjoying a hearty meal with their families after a day of mass murder, Jewish prisoners would sometimes share a single potato peel found in the dirt as if it were treasure. One dinner table preserved privilege; the other preserved dignity.

This curriculum doesn’t teach certainty. It teaches the humility to recognize that you might be wrong and the courage to act before it’s too late.

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dsa

 One of the most useful tools in the Derechology framework I am creating is the falsifiability test. 

In short, it asks a simple but powerful question: Are the load-bearing assumptions of your moral or political system provably false? If the system leans on an assumption that collapses under empirical reality, then the entire moral architecture built on top of it becomes unstable - no matter how noble the intent. 

Let’s apply this to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The DSA is essentially Marxist at its core, and it dresses it up to make it more palatable for voters. But it is not hard to  find that much of DSA’s rhetoric, inherited from Marxist frameworks, rests on a foundational binary as seen in a 2016 strategy document:

The fundamental social relationship in capitalism is between the worker and the capitalist (employee and employer), and the exploitation of workers by capitalists is the primary source of profitability within the capitalist system.

Similarly, in a 2024 statement: 

Elites—the capitalist class,... live through exploiting working-class labor and extracting rent from us... The solution is for working-class people to take political power for ourselves.

These statements as well as many others position the working class as virtuous victims and the capitalist class as exploitative oppressors. That’s not just a structural description. It’s a moral determinacy claim: the system treats structural position as the defining moral feature of a person or group.

But a little thought shows that the working world isn't binary. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts tens of millions of people who are managers - but not at the top tier of executives. Meaning that they are both managers and workers at the same time.

Socialists have come up with with bizarre and contradictory ways to deal with this reality. Sometimes they treat them as workers, sometimes as the capitalist elites, some create a new category called "professional management classes" and others claim that no such class exists. 

But they also ignore, or try to explain away, that there are plenty of companies where workers are treated fairly and are happy. There are managers who genuinely advocate for their teams. There are people who began their careers on the factory floor and ended up as C-suite executives  -  not because they betrayed their class, but because they grew, led, and adapted.

It’s not that there aren’t real structural barriers; of course there are. But refusing to acknowledge the permeability of class boundaries renders the binary assumption empirically false and morally dangerous. The attempts to patch the problem by coming up with new theories and sub-theories to account for reality - when in fact, it is reality that discredits the theories. 

A false assumption discredits a philosophy that depends on it.

But there is another implicit assumption that todays' socialists rely on - how they define the oppressed class. Perhaps this is because they realize that the current economy is not based on factory workers and the 19th century facts of worker oppression and horrible conditions simply does not translate to office workers or even Walmart warehouses. So now they try to include minorities or immigrants to shore up their support - along with a healthy dose of propaganda. 

But by doing this, the socialists are again ignoring reality. There are as many obstacles to success as there are people. Disability, geography, language ability, personality traits, and many others are all challenges people have. By choosing some people as the officially oppressed, they are marginalizing others, enforcing the very inequality that they claim to be against.

Socialism intends to replace political leaders with workers who presumably understand their struggles. Now, let's look at New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. His entire experience as a "worker" was a few years working as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor in Queens, helping low-income homeowners. I don't know if he was working for a non-profit or a government agency, but either way, he does not have any experience at all working for an oppressive capitalist who exploits workers for profit. 

So what qualifications does he have, as a socialist, to lead a city when he knows nothing about the exploitation of workers? The entire point of socialism is to have workers become the leaders, not self-declared socialists. Electing non-workers as political leaders betrays the entire point of socialism.

Even worse, let's look at his campaign. He had hundreds of campaign workers under him being paid. Which means, by socialist definition, Mamdani was one of the capitalist elite exploiting his workers to gain his own selfish goals! Arguably, he has more experience as a leader of an organization than as a worker in any real sense.

Marxism demands revolution. The DSA has to publicly modify the philosophy to fit in a democracy. But it has not come up with a consistent alternative, so it is all about electing not workers, but socialists who are LARPing as oppressed workers. 

The result is an inconsistent, immoral mess that cannot articulate a real positive vision.

The requirement for justice is real. But reducing moral agency to class cosplay collapses under reality. A system that refuses to see people as complex agents will always betray them - even those whom it claims to represent.

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mccl

 Something deeply unnerving is happening beneath the surface of recent antisemitic incidents. 

It is not merely the rise in raw expressions of Jew-hatred, nor the shamelessness with which people now voice medieval libels and slurs. What is emerging is a new mechanism of backlash that turns the exposure of antisemitism itself into an accelerant of antisemitism. It is a kind of psychological judo: an ugly act is caught on camera, public anger erupts, and the perpetrator is recast as the supposed victim of Jewish overreaction. The more blatant the antisemitism, the easier it becomes to claim persecution, and the faster the narrative turns on its head.

The model case arrived this week in Mississippi. A former university student, Patrick McClintock, approached Dave Portnoy during a pizza review and hurled antisemitic slurs while tossing coins at him, playing off the "cheap Jew" trope.  It was not borderline hate nor was it a coded message.  It was classic, unmistakable Jew-hatred.

Yet within twenty-four hours, McClintock had become a minor folk hero in certain corners of the Internet. A crowdfunding campaign quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars in his name, promoted through a narrative so inverted that it reads like satire: Jews, we are told, had “overreacted,” had “summoned the authorities,” had tried to “destroy his life for free speech.” None of this was true. Portnoy explicitly declined to press charges and publicly said he did not want the student punished. But the truth was irrelevant once a story could be built around Jewish oversensitivity and supposed “tyranny.” 

The lie served a psychological purpose. It recast the aggressor as a victim and the victim as an oppressor. It provided donors with a cause – not the defense of free speech, but the pleasure of striking back at Jews who were depicted as policing public life. 

This pattern is not accidental. Over the past few years, research on media and prejudice has shown that neutral or lightly framed news coverage of antisemitic incidents often has a counter-intuitive effect. Instead of generating sympathy for Jews or revulsion toward bigotry, it can produce a backlash among readers who perceive the outrage as excessive. When a story includes the incident and then notes “angry reactions,” or hints at controversy, people inclined to view Jews as powerful or hypersensitive interpret the anger as proof of the stereotype. Their defensiveness sharpens, not softens. Their prejudices deepen, not weaken. The original act matters less than the narrative that forms around the reaction.

In this case, the police reacted quickly and arrested McClintock for disturbing the peace. The fundraisers claim that he was being persecuted for freedom of speech by the entitled, rich Jews. 

What the Portnoy–McClintock affair demonstrates is that bad actors no longer have to wait for journalists to provide that framing. They can create it themselves. A viral clip, a fabricated claim that Jews demanded punishment, a call for donations framed as a stand against censorship, and within hours the incident has been rewritten. The backlash becomes more potent than the original hatred, because it is wrapped in a story about principle and resistance rather than open bigotry.

This is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. On the progressive Left, blatant antisemitism like an open blood libel is still difficult to defend in public. When a guest lecturer at University College London, Dr. Samar Maqusi, revived the nineteenth century Damascus blood libel and presented it to students as plausible history, the response from the institution was swift. UCL ended her affiliation and referred the case to the authorities. Most progressives are not prepared to go on record defending medieval fantasies about Jews murdering Christians for ritual purposes.

But if we look back to October 7, 2023 and its aftermath, we can see that the underlying playbook on parts of the Left is remarkably similar to what we are now watching around McClintock. After the Hamas massacres, a significant segment of progressive activists and commentators insisted that the most documented atrocities did not really happen. They claimed there were no rapes, no deliberate murders of civilians, that the attack was a legitimate act of “resistance,” and that Israel’s subsequent response was an outrageous overreaction. When Jews described this as antisemitic – not because criticism of Israel is forbidden, but because denying or justifying the murder and abuse of Jews has a very old pedigree – many of the same voices responded by saying that antisemitism was being “weaponized” to silence debate.

The argument around the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is another version of this dynamic. The text explicitly states that it is a non-legally binding educational tool, not a law and not intended to criminalize or shut down legitimate political speech. Yet for years, critics have claimed that IHRA is designed to outlaw all criticism of Israel and to censor pro-Palestinian activism. The actual words of the definition, which draw a clear line between normal criticism and antisemitic double standards, are quietly pushed aside. What matters is the narrative that Jews are redefining antisemitism in order to avoid scrutiny and to suppress dissenting views.

Once that frame is in place, the structure is identical for both the Left and the Right. First, minimize or relativize the underlying act: insist that the crime was exaggerated, that the facts are unclear, that what happened on October 7 was just another episode in an ongoing conflict, that a blood libel is just a “controversial interpretation of history,” that shouting slurs at a Jew in public is “one dumb mistake” unworthy of consequences. Second, accuse Jews of overreacting and of trying to relabel a political dispute as bigotry. Third, describe institutional or social pushback as censorship and persecution. At that point, the target audience is no longer thinking about what was done to Jews; they are thinking about what Jews supposedly do to others.

The result is a backlash that is especially powerful for a certain minority of people. These are not the committed neo-Nazis or the most extreme ideologues. They are the ones who already half-believe that Jews are influential and oversensitive, but who also think of themselves as fair-minded. When they are bombarded with stories that combine an antisemitic incident, visible Jewish anger, and a narrative of “weaponized antisemitism,” it confirms their suspicions. They come away less inclined to take future antisemitism seriously, more likely to resent Jews for “crying wolf,” and more open to the very stereotypes that these stories were supposedly exposing.

This is a vector for antisemitism that our society has no real defense against. Traditional methods – public shaming, strong institutional statements, educational campaigns – all feed the mechanism rather than weaken it. Silence is harmful; speaking out is twisted into evidence of Jewish overreach. Institutions that respond appropriately are accused of capitulating to “Jewish pressure.” The more antisemitism rises, the stronger the backlash narrative becomes, because every genuine case becomes raw material for the story that Jews are exaggerating.

That's why we see October 7 denial, why people claim Israeli prisoners of Hamas were treated well and even thanked them, why shouting out in public "Fuck the Jews!" is recategorized as a freedom of speech issue. When the crime is minimized, the reactions can be spun as excessive. 

If this logic continues to spread, it will become one of the most effective amplifiers of antisemitism in the digital age: a system in which every act of hatred carries within it the blueprint for its own justification, and in which condemnation becomes the gasoline rather than the extinguisher.

Unless we acknowledge this mechanism and find ways to disrupt it, we will continue to lose ground not because antisemitism is growing more sophisticated, but because it is learning to use our own moral intuitions against us.

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