Every Jewish conspiracy is true, just not about Jews.

The accusations projected onto Jews and Israel reveal dark realities across the Muslim world.

Oh the irony. (photo by t s/Unsplash)

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For decades, the world has rehearsed the same set of accusations about Jews and about Israel, accusations so old that they have become cultural reflexes.

Jews control the media. Jews manipulate governments. Jews secretly run the world’s wealth. Jews silence critics. Israel is an apartheid ethno-state. Zionism is colonialism. These ideas have shaped political imaginations from Cairo to Karachi, from Doha to Detroit. They are recited as if they were truth, or tradition, or both.

And yet when you examine the map of modern power — not mythological power, not folkloric power, but actual, tangible institutional behavior — you discover a strange and uncomfortable reality: Almost every Jewish conspiracy is real, but it is not Jews who are doing any of it.

The traits projected onto Israel and the Jewish People are, with uncanny consistency, the very traits that describe the governments, movements, monarchies, and ideological regimes of the Muslim world. Not secretly, not conspiratorially, not in shadowy cabals. Openly. Proudly. Systemically. Loudly.

Take, for example, apartheid. Israel, the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, is the favorite target of the world’s apartheid accusers, even as nearly every Muslim-majority state practices the real thing. Saudi Arabia bans churches; Iran and Afghanistan enforce gender apartheid so literal it could be photographed; the Gulf states prohibit conversion out of Islam; minorities across the region live under systems of de facto or de jure segregation.

Meanwhile, Arabs in Israel vote, serve as diplomats, sit on the Supreme Court, and run hospitals. If Israel is “apartheid,” then words have no meaning. To see genuine apartheid, you go where the accusation is loudest.

Or consider the moral crime of deliberately targeting civilians. Here the projection becomes pathological. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad do not accidentally hit civilians; they target them by design. They embed rocket launchers in homes and schools precisely so that children die on camera. They livestream kidnappings and executions. They celebrate it. They train for it. It is their doctrine.

And yet Israel is accused of the very crime that Islamist movements not only commit, but require as strategy. In this case, the projection is not just hypocrisy; it is psychological warfare.

What about ethnic cleansing? Middle Eastern Christian communities, once flourishing across the West Bank, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, have been driven to the edge of extinction. Bethlehem, historically Christian, is now nearly empty of its original population. Indigenous minorities across the Muslim world (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Copts, Berbers) have been persecuted, displaced, erased.

Israeli Jews, by contrast, have revived a land that is historically, archaeologically, and spiritually our own. Yet Israel is the indigenous nation accused of “colonizing.”

And what of that accusation itself: colonialism? Zionism is the Jewish return to the single strip of land where Jewish civilization emerged, lived, prayed, died, and resurrected itself for 3,000 years. Islam, by comparison, expanded from Arabia across three continents through conquest, forced conversion, cultural Arabization, and mass enslavement. It is the longest-running imperial project in recorded human history, nearly 14 centuries of uninterrupted expansion.

Yet the one ancient Middle Eastern people who returned to their homeland is the one accused of being the “colonizer.” Colonialism has rarely been so thoroughly inverted.

If the charge is “ethno-state,” the irony deepens. There are 49 Muslim-majority countries, each with an explicitly Islamic cultural identity, some with Islam as a constitutional religion. Israel is the only Jewish-majority country on earth (0.2 percent of the Middle East) and it is somehow the only country not permitted, in the eyes of its critics, to have a majority identity at all. Self-determination for everyone except the Jews.

And then there is one of the most explosive accusations of all: genocide. Israel — one of the few countries on earth that warns civilians before striking, pauses fighting to deliver aid, and loses soldiers rather than bomb indiscriminately — is routinely called a genocidal state. Across the world, people eagerly labeled the Israel-Hamas war a “genocide,” as though the term now signifies nothing more than personal displeasure.

Yet the history of actual genocides in the Muslim world is long, well-documented, and ongoing. The Ottoman Empire annihilated 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in the early 20th century, an atrocity still denied by many Muslim-majority states. In Sudan, the Islamist government oversaw the mass slaughter of Black Africans in Darfur. In Nigeria today, Islamist militias are carrying out campaigns of mass murder and village erasure that meet every legal definition of genocide. The Yazidis faced a genocidal extermination attempt by ISIS; the Kurds have endured repeated campaigns of killing and cultural erasure; Hindus and Sikhs across the subcontinent have faced mass killings under Islamist regimes.

This is not ancient history; it is continuous history. Yet the one nation that has never committed genocide, that rescued Jews from genocide, that absorbed genocide survivors and built a society of minorities, is the one most accused of the crime. Once again, the pattern repeats: The charge is not a description but a projection. Those who shout “genocide” the loudest are often those with the longest record of committing or excusing it.

Then there is the charge of “occupation,” as if Israel is uniquely guilty of controlling land. The reality is that Muslim-majority states have a long history of military occupation, annexation, and enforced control over territories far beyond their borders. Turkey still governs parts of Cyprus it invaded in 1974, Morocco claims and militarizes Western Sahara, and Iran exerts influence over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen through proxies. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad openly reject coexistence with Israel and call for control over the entire land between the river and the sea.

Yet Israel, a country that makes its laws public, conducts elections, and negotiates over borders under international scrutiny, is repeatedly denounced as an “occupier.” The accusation isn’t about law or legitimacy; it’s about narrative control. The only occupation that seems to provoke moral outrage is the one Israel is accused of, while far larger, longer, and deadlier occupations in the Muslim world pass with muted attention. Once again, projection disguises itself as moral clarity.

And then we get to the conspiracies about power.

Who actually controls the media? Qatar’s Al Jazeera, an explicit instrument of state policy, holds 136 congressional press credentials, vastly more than the New York Times. It broadcasts in English and Arabic with two different editorial lines: one for Western liberals, one for regional ideologues. It shapes global perception of Israel more than any Jewish institution on earth.

Yet somehow Jewish media control is the obsession.

And who controls the money? The Arab world owns one-sixth of global wealth. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund holds enormous stakes in Facebook, Google, Disney, Uber, and more. Tiny Qatar is the largest foreign funder of U.S. universities, pumping $6.3 billion into American campuses; Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University alone has received $1 billion. If a Jewish organization ever did this, the planet would melt down. But when Qatar does it, it’s considered diplomacy.

Who controls politics? Qatar’s lobbying network in the United States is unmatched: The Qataris have 31 Foreign Agents Registration Act registrants, 22 of whom are in D.C. Nearly $250 million spent on 88 lobbying and PR firms since 2016. Over 600 in-person political meetings recorded between 2021 and 2025. In 2018, they targeted 250 influencers to shift U.S. policy. Israel is accused of what Qatar actually does.

And what of free speech suppression? Jews are often accused of “silencing critics,” an imaginary system of thought policing. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, blasphemy laws imprison or execute people for speech. Journalists are jailed, disappeared, tortured. Criticism of rulers is a criminal offense. Iran censors its entire internet. Qatar allows global criticism of everyone except itself. The Muslim world actually has the mechanisms of censorship that Jews are accused of.

At the global level, if you want to talk about control of international institutions, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with 57 member states, is the largest voting bloc on earth. It dominates United Nations agendas, Human Rights Council resolutions, and Israel-related votes. The idea that Jews control the world is a mathematical impossibility; the Muslims do.

Historically, the pattern is even clearer. Jews thrived in Europe, India, Ethiopia, China, and the Americas, but under Islamic rule they lived as dhimmis, second-class subjects obligated to pay special taxes, forbidden from rising socially, and often targeted by mob violence. Almost a million Jews were expelled or forced out of Arab lands in the 20th century. The modern Muslim world’s relationship to Jews is not rooted in Jewish power; it is rooted in the Jewish refusal to remain subordinate.

Even the slave trade conspiracies collapse when examined. The Arab-Muslim slave trade lasted six times longer than the Atlantic one, enslaved twice as many people, and castrated millions of African boys. Slavery in Mauritania persisted openly into the 21st century. Yet the moral stain of domination is projected onto the one people who abolished slavery the moment they regained sovereignty.

And when it comes to territorial ambition, Islamist maps are not subtle. ISIS publishes a globe-spanning caliphate. Iran openly declares a Shiite crescent from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Turkey flirts with neo-Ottoman nostalgia. Morocco claims Western Sahara. Pakistan claims Kashmir. Azerbaijan targets Armenia. So-called “pro-Palestinians” chant “From the River to the Sea” — a call for erasure, not coexistence. The region’s political imagination is saturated with expansionist dreams. Yet Israel, a tiny country, is treated as the empire.

And perhaps nowhere is the double standard more revealing than in the way language is policed. When critics attack Jews, Jewish history, Jewish identity, or the Jewish state, they insist it is merely “legitimate criticism,” and any Jewish objection is dismissed as antisemitism. Jews, uniquely, are expected to endure even the most hostile rhetoric about their existence without describing it accurately.

Yet when someone makes a factual claim about the Muslim world — about laws, institutions, war crimes, political structures, cultural tendencies, or historical patterns — the response is immediate and scripted: “Islamophobic.” The content doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter. The data doesn’t matter. The charge is designed to shut down conversation before it can begin. It is a shield against scrutiny disguised as a defense of tolerance.

Criticizing Jews is framed as courage; criticizing anything Muslim is framed as hatred. Jews are told that recognizing antisemitism is manipulative, but Muslims are told that recognizing factual analysis is bigotry. The inversion is not accidental; it is strategic. It is how a narrative protects itself from the burden of reality.

The pattern is so consistent it begins to reveal its psychological core. The Muslim world’s anti-Israel fixation is not about Jewish behavior. It is about Jewish non-compliance with a centuries-old hierarchy in which Jews were expected to be quiet, vulnerable, deferential. A sovereign, resilient, armed, intellectually vibrant, globally connected Jewish state is an existential insult to an old worldview. The projection of conspiracies onto Israel is not a description of what Jews do, but of what Muslim regimes have done, or are doing, or fear will be exposed if the mirror is held too still.

And that is the deeper truth: Israel is not the conspiracy. Israel is the mirror, a mirror that reflects uncomfortable realities about power, politics, media, religion, empire, and modernity in the Muslim world; a mirror that exposes what governments prefer to deny; a mirror that shatters the mythologies that undergird regional identity.

That is why the accusations never stop. Not because they are true, but because they redirect attention away from the truth. Projection is not merely a tactic; it is the architecture of the narrative. Almost every “Jewish conspiracy” is real. But it is real in the places where the accusation originates, not in the place where it lands.

Israel’s existence doesn’t create these contradictions; it reveals them. And that, more than anything else, is the reason the conspiracies will continue. The mirror is too clear, and too bright, for those who fear what their own reflection might show.

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