This worldwide resurgence of Jews-as-terror-targets draws urgency to the question, Why? Namely, why has the post-Holocaust pledge “Never Again” been wholly inverted into the hellish reality of “Ever Again”?
While the answer could fill several books, an examination of this trend across America and its democratic allies reveals two causal factors playing an especially decisive role.
The first causal factor is the spread and embrace of Woke ideology across the democracies’ leading opinion shaping institutions – universities, legacy media, and the NGO sector. Drawing from Marxism, Woke ideology has been aptly described as a simplistic “predisposition to see the world as divided between the powerless and the powerful, the oppressed and the oppressors, . . . and to assign moral superiority to the oppressed.”
This ideology has captured much of the Western discourse about the Middle East, especially so in academia, under the rubrics of “de-colonialism” and Palestinianism. In this framework, Israel and its citizens are indicted as morally indefensible oppressors, while Palestinian Arabs are anointed as noble, long-suffering victims. As documented by historian Martin Kramer, for decades this ideological framework has dominated Middle East Studies departments at American universities. Now it has spread across virtually all the liberal arts departments on campuses. As one scholar put it, “Israel stands for the evils of Western modernity . . . [in this] illiberal ideology now dominant in the humanities . . .”
Especially impactful are three foundational falsehoods about Israel that are promoted by this ideology and disseminated by tenured Professors and their impressionable students.
The first of those falsehoods claims that Israel was a “settler-colonial” project imposed by Western imperialists – when in fact, Israel is the epitome of de-colonialism, being a globally persecuted people finally returned to their indigenous homeland.
The second falsehood asserts that Israel’s founding in 1948 involved a genocide of the Palestinian Arabs – when in fact, Israel’s founders agreed to yield much of their indigenous land for an adjacent Palestinian state, whereas it was Palestinian Arab leaders who incited and attempted a genocide of the diminutive new Israeli state.
The third falsehood indicts Israel for supposedly denying Palestinian sovereignty – when in fact, Israel has at least six times since 1937 endorsed specific proposals for a sovereign Palestinian state, all to be carved out of the Jews’ indigenous homeland – and all of which generous offers the Palestinian leaders summarily rejected.
In sum, the truth is the literal opposite of those three foundational falsehoods: Israelis have tried for nearly a century to help foster an independent Palestinian state alongside them, while for their part, the Palestinians have never wavered from their endless public incitement and murderous terrorism that seeks Israel’s destruction.
But the constant dissemination of those foundational falsehoods across so many opinion-shaping institutions has endowed them with extensive but wholly underserved credibility. Most importantly, this makes all the other easily refuted falsehoods about Israel seem plausible – e.g., that Israel caused mass starvation in Gaza; that Israel seeks the genocide of the Palestinians; and that Israel’s role in history is that of victims-become-victimizers, namely, Naziism incarnate.
In a recent Free Press essay, Brendan O’Neill well summed up the results of this tsunami of defamatory academic propaganda: “It is undeniable now that the unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people” – driving such horrors as “an elderly Jewish lady . . . burnt to death by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’” at a Colorado hostages vigil.
But there is a second causal factor that also drives this result: the willful blindness of the Western world’s leadership elites toward radical Islamist ideology, including its radical Palestinian variant.
This blindness was highlighted after the horrific 9/11 attacks, when counterterror experts pointed out the fact that national security agencies had largely neglected the several proponents of jihadist terror who had previously infiltrated the United States and openly declared their violent intentions – like successfully completing the failed 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, published a book in 2009 that comprehensively documented this willful blindness vis-à-vis the oft-expressed murderous intent of Islamist radicals toward America and Israel. In 2016, McCarthy testified before Congress: “Government counterterrorism policy has been willfully blind for a quarter-century to the ideological underpinnings of radical Islamic terrorism.” McCarthy called this ideology “sharia supremacism,” and identified its principal characteristics:
[It] is virulently anti-Western, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. It rejects basic tenets of Western liberalism, including the power of people to chart their own destiny and make their own laws in contravention of sharia. It rejects individual liberty and equality. . . . It endorses violent jihad to implement and spread sharia. And it regards the United States, closely trailed by Israel and Europe, as the principal enemies of Islam that must be defeated.
Of particular relevance here is the unexpected alignment of America’s political camps in response to this ideology. Ordinarily, one would expect partisans of the liberal-left to robustly oppose such a supremacist, misogynist, antisemitic, and homophobic belief system. Yet in fact, individuals from the liberal-left have been among the most determined opponents of publicly addressing and confronting radical Islamist ideology. For all too many self-identified liberals, the demands of Wokeness – which locates Muslims in the “oppressed” category – have taken precedence over the defense of liberal principles. Conversely, conservatives like McCarthy have become the principal defenders of liberal principles against Islamist ideology.
As my own 2021 book on the causes and prevention of terrorism documents, multiple phenomena drive this willful blindness toward Islamist ideology. But one especially salient factor is the desire not to stereotype and impugn Muslims en masse. By itself, this is an honorable motive. But all too often it has been taken too far, to a point where necessary and honest conversations about the sources of Islamist violence are denounced and stigmatized as “Islamophobia.” Such overbroad accusations are often lodged by Muslim lobby groups like CAIR (Committee on American Islamic Relations), and by activist academics from Middle East Studies departments. The resulting political pressures have often brought about a dysfunctional reluctance on the part of policymakers, security offices, and law enforcement agencies to proactively monitor, investigate, and address emergent risks of Islamist violence.
Documenting the full extent of this phenomenon far exceeds the scope of this essay. But the following representative examples from three of the Western democracies illustrate the severity of the problem.
First, from the UK: For over two decades staring in the late 1980s, in the British town of Rotherham, reports of North African and Pakistani immigrant gangs’ sex trafficking of young girls were deliberately ignored, resulting in the sexual enslavement and mass rape of over 1,000 children, year after year. As Douglas Murrray has written, “When the northern Labour [Member of Parliament] Ann Cryer took up the issue of the rape of underage girls in her own constituency, she was swiftly and widely denounced as an ‘Islamophobe’ and a ‘racist,’ and at one stage had to receive police protection.” Subsequent parliamentary inquiries revealed that such scandals had been perpetrated, neglected, and covered up in at least fifty British towns, including Birmingham, Oxford, Telford, Bradford, Manchester, Rochdale, and Oldham.
Next, from America: After Hamas’s October 2023 invasion, murders, mass rapes, and abductions of Israeli civilians, American college campuses erupted in mass celebrations of Hamas’s savage violence amid collective cheers to “globalize the intifada” (i.e., spread Jew-hunting to America and the wider world). Facing repeated harassment, threats, bullying, and blatant civil rights violations of Jewish college students across the country, the leadership of virtually all afflicted universities equivocated: they allowed the illegal protests and assaults to fester, and issued vacuous, equal-time condemnations of both antisemitism and Islamoophobia – despite the overwhelming tsunami of the former and the near total absence of the latter.
And finally, from Australia: On December 14, 2025, as a thousand Jews gathered to celebrate Hanukah at a park alongside Bondi Beach, a father-son team of radical Islamists opened fire on the crowd, murdering 15 and wounding at least 70. A mere two police officers had been assigned to patrol the scene – despite the fact that attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions had greatly escalated across Australia since the October 2023 Hamas invasion, and despite the fact that for several years Australia’s “[s]ynagogues, schools and festivals routinely require[d] guards, bollards and police coordination.”
Moreover, despite Australia’s strict policies of anti-hate speech enforcement (in contrast to America’s First Amendment protections), the authorities had for years permitted Islamist radicals to spread a tsunami of antisemitic incitement to violence. The very day after the October 7 Hamas attacks, at a rally sponsored by the pro-terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sydney Imam declared before a cheering crowd, “I’m smiling and I’m happy . . . . It’s a day of courage, it’s a day of resistance, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory . . . .” The next day, a screaming mob outside the Sydney Opera house erupted in cheers of “Gas the Jews” and “F**k the Jews!” But only one person was arrested: a Jewish man carrying a rolled-up Israeli flag near Town Hall. As Douglas Murray writes, “[d]uring the last two years, synagogues and other Jewish sites in Australia have been repeatedly assaulted. In December 2024, a Melbourne synagogue was firebombed. Jewish businesses have been attacked. And Jews have been the targets of constant harassment.” Before the Bondi Beach massacre, “Jewish groups inside Australia . . . ha[d] been begging the Australian authorities to take threats against the Jewish community seriously.” Instead, they got two patrol officers – and mass murder.
Among the takeaways from these narratives is the fact that the globalization of the Intifada is far from some random unpredictable happenstance. On the contrary: the Intifada’s advocates have made clear for years, often amplified through bullhorns in city centers worldwide, that this was their precise goal, namely, the normalization of threats, ostracism, attacks, and outright murders of Jews around the world.
But even then, it was far from inevitable. What the above-cited facts also demonstrate is, globalizing the intifada was made possible by the conscious choices of leading opinion-shapers across the Western world: professors at universities, columnists in the legacy media, and advocates across the NGO sector – all those who promoted, disseminated, and magnified the foundational falsehoods about Israel, and then willfully blinded themselves and their audiences as to the bloody consequences of this campaign of incitement-by-lies. They created a permission structure for hating Israel and its supporters, by disseminating multiple falsehoods, normalizing double standards of condemnation, and letting the most violent incitement carry the day.
The results are all too visible today, in the shattered bodies along Bondi Beach; in the armed security guards outside synagogues and Jewish day schools throughout the free world; in the active shooter trainings now constantly offered by virtually every Jewish institution; and in the Jews of the Anglophone and European world concealing all external markers of their identity. Because thanks to the globalized Intifada and its ideological enablers among Western opinion shaping elites, it’s Game On – Let the Jew Hunt Begin.
Consequently, the mandate here should be clear: after Bondi Beach, collective Jewish inaction is simply not an option. As regards security, the first priority of diaspora Jewry must now be to confront and shut down the support system for the global Intifada. While the devil is always in the details, the broad strategic objectives of such an effort includes these:
- Recognize that the violence of the Intifada is incubated in the global campaign of lies about Israel – and insofar as possible consistent with free speech protections, go on the offensive against those lies and their promoters in every arena where they are communicated.
- Accordingly, prepare and launch a broad-based campaign to refute and thoroughly delegitimize both the foundational lies about Israel discussed above, and the institutions and influencers who disseminate those lies. A central target of this campaign must be the profoundly anti-Israel bias that dominates Middle East Studies departments across academia. That bias must be exposed, and pressures to rectify it must be brought to bear on university trustees and leaders.
- In addition, launch targeted public efforts to expose and delegitimize both the double standards and the willful blindness that permit illiberal, Israel-loathing ideology to flourish. As the great Yiddish literature scholar Ruth Wisse urges, “demand an answer as to why the Jewish people alone are deprived of the right to a country,” and publicly expose “how this viewpoint [has been] twisted to look like progressivism.”
- Along similar lines, investigate, identify, and expose the extensive sources of foreign funding of the Intifada’s propaganda sources across the Western democracies – and wherever possible, identify and publicize instances where such funding constitutes prosecutable crimes.
- While respecting Palestinian Arabs’ inherent rights to dignity and respect, expose the falsity of their leaders’ bogus claims of eternal victimhood, and make widely known the reality of their century-long genocidal campaign to destroy Israel – which continues through the present, not just by Hamas, but also by the Palestinian Authority.
- Based on that necessary factual exposure, publicly advocate and pressure Western governments to cut and block all aid presently flowing to terror-promoting groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – which latter should be added to the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations as long as it keeps rewarding terror-murderers and their families with lifetime pensions.
- Insist that the democracies’ immigration policies include vetting for acceptance of pluralism – which as regards Muslim applicants, would in no way constitute a blanket “ban,” but that both would and should exclude adherents of Islamist supremacism and its dangerous hatreds.
- And finally, publicly confront and refuse to succumb to baseless accusations of Islamophobia and other make-believe bigotry claims, and relentlessly insist on a single standard of judgment with respect to various ethnic, religious, and national groups’ claims and assertions.
This is far from a new challenge for the Jewish people. Defamatory lies have long been a challenge for Jewish communities to confront and overcome. As the prophet Isaiah sagely warned more than 2,700 years ago, “Woe to those who call the day night, and the night day.” And as we say at Hanukah, spread the light. More than ever, we must do so fearlessly.
Henry Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book “War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom.” Kopel is a graduate of Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is an annual guest lecturer on prosecuting hate crimes at the University of Connecticut Law School. He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.
