Jewish genius keeps becoming a weapon used against us.

Some of our greatest innovations have empowered our fiercest enemies.

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This is a guest essay by Irina Velitskaya, a student at Berkeley University majoring in Near Eastern Studies, Biblical Hebrew, and Ancient Greek.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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The history of human innovation is a chronicle of extraordinary ingenuity intertwined with a stubborn and deliberate indifference to the consequences of that ingenuity.

Throughout history, we have witnessed time and again the products of our restless creativity grow to gross proportions, escape our control, and rampage against the fragile battlements of civilization.

But there’s a particular, and painful, Jewish element to this timeless story of hubris and unintended consequences when we examine the multitude of marvelous real-world inventions created in whole or in part by Jews — that have subsequently been turned against us with evil intent. These technological betrayals are too numerous to list in full, but in this century and the last one, three of the most egregious are the automobile, the atomic bomb, and the Internet.

The curious and disturbing alliance of the industrial architect Albert Kahn with the ugliest and most vile of 20th-century American antisemites, Henry Ford, stands as an example of how Jewish enterprise and creativity have historically been turned against the Jews.

Ford, the most prominent of the early automotive pioneers, also was publisher of the infamous antisemitic newspaper “The Dearborn Independent,” a primary source of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories — including the reprinting of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — and of “The International Jew,” a multi-volume anthology of screeds originally published in the Independent.

Both the books and the newspaper were sources of inspiration for Hitler and other prominent Nazis in planning the “Final Solution,” and Hitler praised Ford in his book “Mein Kampf” as “the only single great man in America.” Another leading member of the Nazi party, Heinrich Himmler, said of Ford that he was “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.”

And yet, when it was convenient — and profitable — for him, Ford abandoned his grotesque scruples by daintily overlooking the Jewishness of Kahn, the one man perhaps most responsible for the phenomenal early success of both Ford the man and Ford the company, other than Henry Ford himself.

Kahn, a German Jew known as the “Architect of Detroit,” and his company built the immensely influential Rouge River Plant and designed more than a thousand other automotive plants for Ford and other automobile manufacturers. Indeed, the very innovation for which Ford is best remembered, the assembly line, was made possible both by Ransom Olds’ earlier innovations and by Kahn’s design for the Highland Park (Michigan) Ford Plant.

No doubt Ford would have preferred to have used someone non-Jewish instead, but by historical consensus, there was no greater industrial architect in the world at that time than Kahn. Did Ford ever have second thoughts about his Jew-hate when he saw the industrial marvels created by Kahn? And did Kahn himself have any misgivings about enabling the success of one of the 20th century’s most noxious antisemites

History does not record the thoughts of either on this score, and Kahn died in 1942, so he was fortunately never able to witness the mechanized mass murder that decimated his Jewish brethren in Europe thanks in no small part to his former employer, Henry Ford.

photo: Thomas M/Unsplash

The journey from automobile assembly line to automated industrial human slaughter is, of course, an indirect one. Not so the connection between the Internet and the contemporary pandemic of Jew-hate.

The brilliant minds (an impressively disproportionate number of them Jewish) who created social media, search engines, messaging apps, and artificial intelligence technologies are now witnessing their own inventions being leveraged with monstrous unfairness by Jew-haters against Jews, with an incessant and overwhelming barrage of hateful rhetoric, incitement, and blood libels enabled by the very technologies they pioneered. Day after day, on X, Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, TikTok, and even LinkedIn, there is a constant, drone-like attack on the safety and sensibilities of Jews and Israelis, unopposed as yet by any cyberspace equivalent of David’s Sling or the Iron Dome.

Robert Kahn (the co-inventor of the Transmission Control Protocol that undergirds the Internet), Paul Baran (one of the inventors of the “packet switching” technology that enables computer networks), Jan Koum (the co-founder of WhatsApp), Mark Zuckerberg (the co-founder and CEO of Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram), David Karp (the founder of the pioneering blogging platform Tumblr), Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI), and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (co-founders of the search and advertising behemoth Google) are all Jewish. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, is half Jewish.

All have (unintentionally, to be sure) enabled muttering nutcases who once had no audience greater than their fellow stool-dwellers at a local tavern to broadcast their seething hatred and antisemitic conspiracy theories to the world.

Having contributed so substantially to the marvel of the modern Internet, I wonder if these Jewish inventors and innovators (along with their many non-Jewish colleagues) look at the way their shiny devices have been flooded with raw sewage and exclaim in anguish, “What hath God wrought?” On the basis of Mark Zuckerberg’s public persona, one rather doubts he gives the issue much thought at all. Others, such as Larry Page, are largely opaque, though Google’s acquisitions of Israeli tech innovators Waze and Wiz speak volumes about Google’s stance on the subject.

The parallels between the early days of the automotive industry and social media — the most visible part of what was, after all, once called “the information superhighway” — are evident. Like the automobile, social media has allowed the general public to, in effect, go anywhere at any time. And, just as automobile driving was not restricted to professional drivers but available to anyone with a car, so too is social media available to anyone who can afford a computer or smartphone.

In both cases, terrible crashes have ensued.

Weren’t these creators of social media, so farsighted in other ways, capable of envisioning the consequences of their inventions? Certainly they were, no less so than the group of physicists and engineers, many of them Jewish, who conceived of and built the first atomic bomb. Here is yet another example of a substantially Jewish invention being used against Jews: For of all of the countries in the world today that either possess or are close to possessing nuclear weapons, only one, the Islamic Republic of Iran, actively and regularly threatens another country — Israel — with nuclear destruction.

Do the Irish worry about a nuclear attack from England? The question is absurd. For that matter, do Persians worry about Israel attacking them with nuclear weapons? And yet, both before and after the partial destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has directly and indirectly threatened Israel with nuclear annihilation. And an Iranian state media outlet post on X as recently as June 18, 2025, for example, showed a hand lovingly stroking a dummy nuclear warhead bearing the word “Maybe.”

To be clear, this isn’t only a Jewish problem. All of civilization is threatened by the abuse of technology and, perhaps more dangerously, the passive acceptance of technology’s deleterious consequences despite all warnings. But warnings are never the final verdict on a matter, and our decision to proceed is just as often beneficial as it is harmful.

In August 1945, for example, just a few days after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the “Association of Manhattan District Scientists” warned of “the dangers inherent in the mishandling of this tremendous force,” and of “a disaster in which as much as a quarter of our population and the major part of our industry will suddenly disappear.”

And yet, even with foreknowledge of the terrible powers they were about to unleash, they proceeded with what was right and necessary at the time, bringing to a decisive halt the deadliest war in human history — and, some historians argue, preventing a Third World War between the U.S. and its allies and the Soviet Union.

In a similar but slightly less apocalyptic vein, even before Henry Ford was ruling his automotive empire, the future impact of the automobile could be easily predicted. From the moment in 1886 that Bertha Benz and her children wheeled her husband Carl’s Benz Patent Motor Car onto a road carved out by horses’ hooves, it became possible to envision our barren present reality of spaghetti-bowl interchanges, isolated exurban housing developments, and ever-mounting carbon emissions.

Even in the face of widespread ridicule — “Get a horse!” — there were visionaries who knew that “it is only a question of a short time when the carriages and trucks of every large city will be run by motors,” as Thomas Edison put it in 1895. In those early days, it was common for journalists to envision the choking fumes and traffic jams that would result.

(It should be noted, incidentally, that even before Carl Benz’s automobile, a rudimentary cart powered by an internal combustion engine was created in 1870 by the Jewish-German inventor Siegfried Marcus, but his invention never went anywhere, for practical reasons and as a consequence of antisemitism; his legacy was largely erased when the Nazis came to power.)

Nonetheless, it is much more to our credit than our discredit that the human species has never quailed before the future consequences of present ingenuity. Whoever first harnessed fire, I am certain, was clever enough to understand that the same phenomenon that cooked a joint of mastodon could also cause a great conflagration in their fragile dwelling places. But once the pleasures of warmth and illumination and barbecued meat were discovered, there was no turning back.

If the automobile had been abandoned in its earliest stages of development, and we were still using horses, we would be facing far worse problems, including an inability to feed a growing population, rural isolation and poverty, and the animal cruelty and pollution fostered by our continued dependence on beasts of burden for transportation and agricultural work.

The weaponization of social and search technologies — and, now, AI — is emblematic of a larger issue. Radical Islamists have long co-opted Western freedoms to destabilize Western societies, taking advantage of remarkable and largely Western advances such as tolerance, minority rights, and democracy to install themselves in positions of power with the intent, over time, to replace those very advances with sharia law. (Call it the Mamdani Maneuver.)

At the same time, terrorists weaponize Western technologies that they have neither conceived nor manufactured, including cell phones, automobiles and, yes, weapons themselves, to wreak havoc on their enemies, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The Druze in Syria and Christians in Nigeria are only the latest victims in a line of conquest stretching back to the Arab Conquests of the 7th century, but now featuring semi-automatic rifles instead of swords.

Though one of the favorite canards of the antisemite is that Jews continually use the “victim card,” the very success of these Jewish entrepreneurs and engineers demonstrate how absurd the charge is. Claiming perpetual refugee status and collecting billions in foreign donations from credulous Western donors after starting a war whose explicit purpose is creating civilian casualties? That is the very definition of a victim card.

But the Jews of the Mizrahi and European diaspora did precisely the opposite, building a modern democratic state just three years after the Holocaust; defeating the massed Arab armies that sought to annihilate it the very same day it was formed; founding universities, research labs, and start-ups; and leading the world in medical, agricultural, and high-tech innovations.

photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

In a similar sense of forward-looking enterprise, one cannot reasonably expect the Jewish giants of tech to have reined in their energy and innovativeness merely because they might have predicted that their tools would someday be used against their fellow Jews by the world’s haters. While they certainly considered the issue in the early days of social media, they probably assumed that the minimal content moderation tools they initially put into place would be sufficient.

Additionally, the sheer momentum of enterprise and innovativeness — and the very usefulness of the tools that were created — meant that these companies had little incentive to regulate themselves effectively, even as the very values that fostered their creation were being undermined by their users.

Furthermore, excessive regulation from the very beginning would have discouraged innovation and experimentation and quite possibly killed social media in the cradle. And, to be clear, social media has also brought us many unalloyed societal benefits, such as the ability of otherwise marginalized people — including Jews — to reach around the globe and form communities that offer support and encouragement.

Indeed, social media would not have become so wildly popular in the first place if it didn’t create in its users a sense of satisfaction and belonging. Further, there isn’t anything uniquely evil about social media per se. The perpetrators of the 1929 Hebron massacre, the Farhud, and the Holocaust did just fine without it, spreading death and destruction the old-fashioned analog way.

Here, again, the parallel to the development of the automobile is useful. In its early days, the automobile industry had hundreds of competing firms, all with their own designs, business models, and even means of propulsion, some of which led to explosions and terrible accidents. These early car companies devoted minimal energy to regulating themselves.

By the time that governmental bodies could no longer ignore the death toll created by unsafe vehicles, unregulated roads, and the damage caused by pollution and carbon emissions, the automobile industry had shrunk to about 15 major global corporations that manufacture the vast majority of the world’s cars and trucks. This meant that it was relatively easier to institute and manage global safety and emissions standards for both traditional gasoline-powered cars, as well as the new hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

Today, virtually none of these major corporations, nor automobile buyers themselves, question the advantages of clean, safe, and efficient modern vehicles in general (though it’s true that the manufacturers sometimes continue to fight against incremental safety regulations). None of this would have been possible in a world in which hundreds or thousands of automobile manufacturers existed; there would have been a chaos of competing standards and regulations, or none at all.

It may well be that the same regulatory revolution may be on the verge of occurring in the world of social media, messaging, and search, which has seen countless companies come and go — MySpace, ICQ, Vine, Friendster, Google Plus, AIM, Ask Jeeves, StumbleUpon, and so forth — but now appears to be consolidating.

Can the jihadist be put back in the bottle? One way or another, it is entirely possible that governments in the free world will come to the conclusion that they will no longer be able to tolerate the threats to social cohesion created by the hate speech, slander, and incitements to violence and terrorism that are enabled by today’s social media, and will institute, in effect, “emissions” standards — more sophisticated moderation tools enabled by artificial intelligence — to curb the pollution of truth and decency that we have witnessed, while leaving legitimate critical voices untouched.

Somewhere, we can hope, the clever minds behind Israel’s devastation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its seven “ring of fire” terror proxies, and the partial destruction of its nuclear weapons capabilities, are also working on new methodologies that, without suppressing the freedom of speech, will “demilitarize” social media and place some sensible limits on the moral Holocaust it has become.

As ever, human ingenuity — and especially Jewish ingenuity — will very possibly turn our latest marvels to our benefit rather than our degradation and destruction.

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