The Odious Champions of Western Civilization Seize on the Murder of Jews

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

 

When Republicans pounce, seize, or otherwise take notice of events that reflect poorly on their political opponents, they are usually held to account for it in the press. The formula, as I understood it a decade ago, can be summarized in an axiom: When the subject of the story makes Democrats look bad, the story is never the story. Rather, the story becomes the reaction to the story — preferably reactions that are gauche, immature, or gratuitous. In this way, readers are dissuaded from associating themselves with the Democratic Party’s critics.

 

We now have a new corollary to that maxim, one that is certain to test your capacity for contempt. Via the execrable one-time director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, the world was treated to a version of the exhausted “Republicans pounce” rubric that accuses the global right of displaying an untoward level of concern over the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Australia.

 

 

The article to which he drew the world’s attention is as detestable as the excerpt. After some perfunctory throat clearing about the inhumanity of it all, Australian author Em Hilton pivots breezily to the worst aspect of the Bondi Beach massacre: “right-wing politicians and public figures” attributing the attack to “anti-Zionist sentiment and pro-Palestinian activism.”

 

After all, we do not yet know the motives of the killers, she insisted before helpfully noting in a parenthetical that Australian “authorities have since linked the two men to ISIS” — not that you can draw any firm conclusions from such associations. Indeed, Hilton rattles off one Western politician after another who rushed to conclude that this display of violent anti-Jewish pathology looks a lot like the many similar episodes of antisemitic violence that are occurring with increasing, and increasingly horrible, regularity. How dare they!

 

“It is obscene how quickly the right has seized on this horror to advance an Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian agenda,” Hilton insisted. “And it is disgusting to see Israel’s politicians almost gleeful at the opportunity to distract from their genocidal onslaught in Gaza by using our pain and grief as a political weapon.”

 

In retailing the verifiably untrue claim that Israel was engaged in anything resembling a genocidal project in Gaza, Hilton clings to the delusion that animates the murderers. Indeed, in even making the association between the actions of the Jewish State and the supposed collective complicity of the Jewish diaspora, she’s evincing her own attachment to that very delusion.

 

While the author gently condemns the degree to which social media posters “justified or even celebrated” the death of one of the 15 victims, Rabi Eli Schlanger, she couldn’t help but notice that he had “supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza” — as demonstrated by his support for the Israeli Defense Forces’ post-10/7 mission. And “there is also no indication that Schlanger was targeted because of his views.”

 

That’s true. He wasn’t targeted for his views. He was targeted because he was a visibly Jewish man attending a Hanukkah celebration. A cautious reader cannot help but conclude from the inclusion of Schlanger’s imagined sins in the text that Hilton cannot rule out the notion that he got what was coming to him.

 

Indeed, the real victims of the Bondi Beach attack were those who languish in the shadow of the “settler-colonial ethnostate.” Hilton includes herself among their ranks, all of whom have “a target on our backs” as members of one of many communities who experience no “sense of safety in the unfolding era of political violence and instability.”

 

The message is clear: If you want to be regarded as a serious person in the supposed “pro-Palestinian” community, you cannot evince too much sympathy for dead Jews. They’re one of many victims here, if they are victims at all. The story is not the story. The reaction to the story is the story.

 

It’s a threadbare journalistic trope. In America, the “Republicans pounce” phenomenon has been picked apart to the point that it’s reasonable to conclude the reporters who still rely on it know they’re being provocative, if not wholly propagandistic. The rest of the world had been spared our torment until now.

 

In their desperation to look away from the scene of the slaughter, anti-Israel obsessives concede tacitly that their monomania is unsustainable when confronted by the threat posed by radical Islamist antisemitism. To admit as much would be to concede ground to Israel, even lending credence to the notion that its post-10/7 wars were a moral enterprise in defense of civilization itself. And we can’t have that.