Let Me Explain What an Enemy Is

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

A good-looking young Muslim man who came to prominence playing video games while people watch him do so on a streaming service has chosen of late to speak about Jews.

 

He has called Jews and their supporters “blood-thirsty, violent pig-dog[s],” and has said that “it doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7.” He called Orthodox Jews “inbred”—Orthodox Jews, mind you, who number more than 2 million worldwide and come from Yemen and Syria and Morocco and Vilnius and Belarus and Ethiopia and whose various skin colors mark them as among the most physically diverse people on the face of this planet. Given a chance to amend or apologize for his stated view that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, this young man replied that he stood by it—as well as his opinion that the United States deserved to be attacked on September 11.

 

The forum in which he affirmed his opinions was Pod Save America, the wildly popular effort by Obama staffers to influence the Democratic Party in a progressive direction and help the party succeed with voters while enriching themselves in the process. They brought him on to whitewash him, and, perhaps to his credit in some evil sense, this young man refused to be whitewashed.

 

Another successful Internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party booster, Ezra Klein, has taken his trade to the New York Times, where he tries to sound like a voice of sweet reason (following a raging early career on the web during which he suggested someone should “f—k” the late Tim Russert “with a spiky acid-tipped d—k” for not being liberal enough). Klein published a column in April about the controversies surrounding this young man called “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.” (The column’s title was later altered, since whitewashing despicable opinions is the mandate not only of Pod Save America but the New York Times op-ed page, particularly as regards Israel and anti-Semitism.)

 

People like Piker are not without power in this world, especially when their views are amplified. As a voice in the most influential opinion precinct in the Western world, Klein is a gigantic megaphone. He represents what are now deemed acceptable views and, in so doing, advances those views from the acceptable to the respectable.

 

Ezra Klein is a Jew. Hasan Piker supports the mass murder of Jews. If Klein cannot recognize Piker as an enemy, then he has forever branded himself one or all of three things: 1) a moral idiot unaware of the fact that the statements of this supposed non-enemy pose a danger to him; 2) a disingenuous liar who wants to clear Piker’s name because he believes Piker to have influence that will help his chosen political party defeat the party he does not like, further consequences be damned; or 3) an implicit supporter of the idea that the Jewish people from whom he springs constitute an evil force on this earth worthy of erasure.

 

Klein might believe he has some sort of immunity from the evil that Hasan Piker wants to do because of some shared political views, but that’s not the way Jew-hatred works. Jews are hated not for being conservative Jews, or inbred Jews, or Israeli Jews. We are hated for being Jews at all. Hasan Piker is Ezra Klein’s enemy, because no matter what whitewashing Klein does and no matter Klein’s commitment to the cause of his party and ideology over his peoplehood, Piker would, all things being equal, be delighted to see him dead.