The Antisemitic Thing About Antisemitic Things
The hatred never dies. It just updates its software.
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Everyone talks about antisemitism like it’s an abstract idea — a thing that happens in books, history lessons, or “somewhere else.”
But living through it is something else entirely. It’s not the clean, well-defined hatred you read about in textbooks; it’s the uneasy pause in a conversation, the email that goes unanswered, the “nothing personal” after something deeply personal.
Everyone loves saying “Never Again,” but no one wants to admit that “Again” never really stopped. It just changed form — from swastikas to slogans, from ghettos to hashtags, from bullets to boycotts.
And no matter how much success, goodwill, or history Jews accumulate, the world still finds creative new ways to make being Jewish feel like a liability.
This week, the New York Times published this headline: “Hamas Takes a Big Risk in Deal to Release Hostages” — as if the New York Times is doing the negotiating for a genocidal terrorist organization. And it’s all kosher because of who Hamas is holding hostage: Jews.
In fact, nothing says “genocide victims” quite like weighing the strategic risks of returning the people you abducted — you know, to stop the “genocide.” Who knew that all the Jews had to do was kidnap a couple hundred Germans and hide them in the sewers of the Warsaw Ghetto to stop the Holocaust. If only someone had shared that little trick with the Cambodians, the Rwandans, or the Sudanese. It seems every people on earth could have ended their suffering, if only they’d mastered the art of hostage-taking.
History offers no shortage of double standards. When Russia expelled millions, no one marched. When Poland and Czechoslovakia displaced populations, the world shrugged. Turkey cast out a million Greeks, Algeria a million Frenchmen, Indonesia an untold number of Chinese — and not a single global refugee movement was born. Yet the Arabs displaced by a war they started in 1948 became the world’s eternal refugees, their suffering repurposed for political theater, generation after generation.
In Nigeria, some 50,000 people have been murdered. 19,000 churches burned. An ongoing massacre that dwarfs Gaza in scale, yet barely registers a headline. No hashtags, no protests, no celebrity posts. Apparently, it’s more fashionable to oppose a fake genocide than to confront a real one.
Consider this contrast: Muslims immigrate to Western nations and, too often, continuously condemn the very countries that took them in. Jews, by and large, do the opposite — grateful, law-abiding, and industrious citizens who build, contribute, and produce. Imams declare that “America will become a Muslim nation.” Rabbis would never say that America will become a Jewish one. And yet somehow, Jews remain “the problem.”
Then there’s Italy, another case study in inherited prejudice. A country of beauty and cuisine, yet with a moral rot passed down like a family heirloom. One of our guest writers recently rented an Airbnb in Rome’s old Jewish ghetto, across from the Holocaust museum and a short walk from the Vatican — the same Vatican that only in 1962 decided Jews weren’t guilty of killing God. Today’s Italians sip espresso and cheer for Hamas, hating the same people their grandparents hated, who hated the same people their ancestors locked behind ghetto gates at sundown.
And Spain? Its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, channels his animus toward Israel not out of conviction, but out of convenience. His anti-Israel fervor is a political smokescreen, a way to distract from the scandals suffocating his own government. As a Spanish satire show quipped, “The Prime Minister’s hatred for Israel is simply the easiest way to change the subject.”
Meanwhile, in Britain, Health Minister Wes Streeting admits that the National Health Service is “completely failing to protect Jewish patients” amid antisemitic abuse from medical staff. Imagine if white doctors treated black patients that way. The nation would implode. But when it happens to Jews, it’s excused away.
On the two-year anniversary of October 7th just a few days ago, a National Health Service doctor posted this on social media: “Glory to the breaking of the 17 year long illegal siege. Glory to the Palestinian resistance. Glory to our martyrs.”1 As the Russian-British satirist Konstantin Kisin commented:
“In Britain, if you’re a famous comedy writer who makes a joke on X about trans people, you get arrested by 5 armed police officers. If you celebrate October 7 on its anniversary, you get to work in the National Health Service.”2
In Britain, even Jewish murder has become predictable. News broke that a British man of Syrian background — and yes, his name was actually Jihad — murdered two people at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. The most chilling part? British Jews weren’t surprised. Jews were murdered in Britain at a synagogue on the Jews’ holiest day, and everyone just nodded like they saw it coming.
Here’s how British broadcaster Esther Krakue captured it: “How did we get to a point where Jewish people in this country, overwhelmingly hardworking, patriotic, and accommodating, aren’t surprised to be targeted on the holiest day of their calendar? If that isn’t a national disgrace, what is?”3
And in New York City this week, a “Hamasmobile” was spotted cruising through the streets—draped in Palestinian flags, with fake blood smeared across its windows and dripping down the doors. The driver’s face was covered, his identity hidden behind the mask of “activism.” Can you imagine the response if a car rolled through Manhattan covered in KKK insignia and fake blood? The city would explode.
A Black man is senselessly killed, and protests erupt, feverishly demanding everyone related and unrelated join their cause. But when a Jew is senselessly killed? People just shrug and move on. That’s the quiet part of antisemitism: the normalization of Jewish death, the expectation that Jews will simply absorb it, process it, and carry on without asking anyone else to care.
Attacking Jews in the diaspora does not “free Palestine.” What it does is prove, again, why Jews need our indigenous homeland, Israel. Every assault on a Jew in Paris, New York, or Sydney reinforces the necessity of a place where being Jewish is not a liability, but a birthright.
The loudest virtue-signalers in the West, the same self-appointed humanitarians who have spent two years staging protests, blocking highways, and chanting for a “ceasefire,” are now somehow furious that a ceasefire has finally been reached. Why? Because Israelis get our hostages back. It turns out “peace” was never really the goal. The tragedy for these activists isn’t that the war might end; it’s that Israel might win, and Jews might live.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’ founders, has gone on television, podcasts, and even stood before the United Nations to declare that Hamas is nothing short of a death cult. But because the terror group’s chosen enemy happens to be the Jews, the world shrugs. Apparently, even the son of Hamas can’t compete with the world’s favorite moral inversion: that evil becomes forgivable when it targets Jews.
And now, as scenes from Gaza flood social media following the ceasefire announcement, the curtain is slipping. Crowds pour into the streets flashing the V-sign for victory. Children clutch the latest iPhones. Plump, well-fed babies. Functioning hospitals. A city that somehow looks far less like Dresden 1945 and far more like the aftermath of a well-choreographed PR campaign. The world, it seems, is about to realize just how spectacularly it has been deceived — all in the fashionable name of Jew-hatred.
And so the pattern endures. Most people said nothing when Jews were gassed and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Most said nothing when Jews were forced to convert or expelled from their homes simply for being Jewish. But the moment Jews defend themselves, suddenly so many people seem to find their voice.
That’s the antisemitic thing about antisemitic things. The hatred never dies; it just updates its software.
Dr Rahmeh Aladwan on X
Konstantin Kisin on X
“I no longer recognise this country.” Two cents.
We've all learned new things in the past 2 years in re the Jews and their enemies, and while I've unfortunately had to learn that most people will parrot any lie or slander, no matter how false or malicious, as long as that mindless parroting allows them to keep their job and friends and cash, I've learned one other valuable lesson:
In my dealings with the Free Palestine! crowd, who are all filled with rage and hatred yet seem to imagine they're motivated by love and compassion, I've noticed a commonality: they're usually mediocre people, very light on achievement or any visible accomplishment, often physically unattractive, the men usually very shabby and angry and the women usually very unstable, and in the place of rational argument the most they can muster is the repetition of slogans and slurs and a grasp of history and reality so one-sided and oversimplified it would embarrass a bright teenager.
Thus I've been led to conclude that Jew haters are simply the lowest rung of every society, the world's most miserable losers looking for a handy scapegoat to blame for their shitty lives. Anti-Semitism is like a reverse Mensa, a way for stupid ugly souls to mix and mingle and feel important. Maybe Anti-Semitism is eternal because spite and envy are eternal?
It’s time to stop using German anti-Semite Wilhelm Marr’s ‘anti-Semitism’ term and begin using the more accurate term ‘Jew hatred’. That we still use a word created by a German Jew hater beggars belief. Enough of this already.