‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.

As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The following sentence in the Telegraph contains an absolutely gobsmacking statistic:

 

“The BBC has reported the deaths of 53 ‘journalists’ in Gaza who have been claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other groups.”

 

Fifty-three. That’s out of (in the BBC’s case) somewhere just north of 180.

 

And counting, by the way. That 53 number is more likely to go up than down.

 

I’ve written about this particular problem before, but the Telegraph’s reporting has implications beyond just the obvious.

 

The fact that every facet of the “genocide” accusation against Israel has fallen apart, along with the disintegration of numerous other false claims, raises a serious concern. The debunking of the claims of genocide, deliberate starvation/famine, mass targeting of journalists, and others, plus the near-halving of the number of war dead that can be reasonably attributed to Israel, means that the war that happened was entirely different from the war that much of the media-consuming population thought happened.

 

Therefore the test put before the public is the following: Can these folks admit they were wrong about their whole impression of the war and acknowledge that they were fooled—willingly or unwillingly—by a global propaganda scheme on a scale we’ve probably never seen before?

 

This question is especially relevant in democracies. A self-governing people must inhabit a shared reality. The villainous portrayal of Israel during the war was exactly backwards. Can these folks join the rest of us here, where the truth lives?

 

Over the weekend, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party. Ever since her novel Station Eleven, which was about a global pandemic, Mandel has been obsessed with alternate paths and realities. Exit Party tackles the idea of dimension-hopping, and there is a moment when we meet a character who has just arrived from an alternate version of the same physical location, and he has to get briefed on what life is like in this timeline.

 

That’s how I feel about everyone who bought into the post-October 7 anti-Israel narrative.

 

First of all, welcome. Acclimating to reality will be disorienting, but it is essential that the totalitarian ideology of the Western Hamasnik cult be punctured by the truth.

 

Stalinism is probably the closest relative this toxic ideology has. Stalinism was a way of speaking that eventually became, for all too many, a way of thinking.

 

When the supposed genocide “consensus” was found to be a mirage, Israel-haters only clamped down further on dissent. It was shocking to witness just how important it was to these people that the word “genocide” be used. But it wasn’t hard to figure out why the specific use of that word had suddenly become all that mattered. “Genocide” was a way of ending conversations before they started. You might object to the extremism of someone’s political tactics, to which they would respond well if you won’t make exceptions for GENOCIDE then your norms are worthless. The point of saying “genocide” was twofold: First, it allowed you to say and do whatever you wanted to the “Zionists” in your life. Second, it stopped you from having to defend your worldview.

 

If you replaced the word “genocide” with what actually took place in Israel-Gaza, which was “a war,” you would have to discuss and debate the complexities of that war. Since the “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West’s preferred victim was the one who started the war, that would get uncomfortable real quick.

 

The obsessive, Stalinist insistence on using only the word “genocide” was to prevent as many people as possible from understanding what actually happened.

 

But the truth broke through anyway. It’s there, it’s easily accessible, and even the purveyors of the Big Lie are finding it difficult to avoid. So the BBC doesn’t refute the claims made against it, but rather meekly insists its reporting was “based on the information available at the time it was published.” The UN’s affiliated food agencies post statistic-rich reports in which the lack of starvation in Gaza is made clear and unambiguous. And so forth.

 

Reality is steadily intruding in such ways. How, and to what extent, the adherents of the anti-Israel propaganda cult can welcome its arrival will tell us whether we all can in fact inhabit reality together.

El-Sayed’s Selective Condemnation of Oppression

By Raleigh Adams

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

During a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed returned to his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

 

His homecoming featured expected critiques of the Trump administration and allusions to a Kamala Harris 2028 presidential run, but tensions rose when student Iman Dashti questioned El-Sayed about the violence in Iran.

 

“My cousin was hunted in the streets of Iran by the IRGC because her hijab wasn’t on right,” Dashti said, going on to describe other members of his family beaten by the regime. He asked the candidate to state “unequivocally” that he is against IRGC violence and political oppression.

 

El-Sayed responded that the United States has too often acted as “the world’s policeman” while affirming his support for democratic movements abroad. “I will always stand for and with democratic movements, always,” he said, but added that America was wrong “to go to war to topple the government of Iran. . . . It is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like.”

 

Dashti pressed him further with a simple question: “You stand with us?”

 

El-Sayed again affirmed his support for freedom and democracy . . . so long as change came from the Iranian people.

 

This would be an unremarkable exercise in a politician avoiding an uncomfortable foreign-policy question were El-Sayed ordinarily so reticent about passing moral judgment on foreign governments. He is decidedly not.

 

El-Sayed has explicitly called Israel’s conduct in Gaza “genocide,” campaigned against American military assistance to Israel, and defended making Gaza an issue even when politically costly. He could have easily answered Dashti in one sentence: Yes, I condemn the IRGC’s repression, and no, I don’t believe America should impose regime change.

 

Quick and simple. And yet, El-Sayed wouldn’t say that.

 

El-Sayed’s hesitation around Iran points toward a broader distortion in American politics: Suffering now arrives pre-interpreted, neatly wrapped in red and green with a ready-made vocabulary of victims and oppressors, resistance and complicity. Other suffering must first pass through its thicket of qualifications before that same moral fervor can even begin to be applied.

 

That is what makes the peculiar place of “Palestine” in leftist politics worth examining. It increasingly functions not merely as a foreign-policy cause but as a totalizing political symbol. The issue stretches into every aspect of life: Does supporting Palestine mean having to go to a Macklemore concert? Does your instructor have a contract that honors adjunct professors’ struggle and its obvious equivalency to Palestine? Must Pride have a foreign policy? Even more pressingly, must cheese?

 

The peculiarity does not lie in caring about the conflict in Gaza, where there is  abundant human suffering worthy of moral attention. But, ironically enough, there is fitting language within the Marxist tradition for what El-Sayed is exemplifying: fetishism. Considering that he keeps close ties to Marxists and socialists, El-Sayed should at least be vaguely familiar with the concept.

 

Marx was writing about commodity fetishism, but the structure of his argument is useful here. “Gaza” or “Palestine” becomes an ideological object detached from the realities of the people there: a political fetish. Particular Palestinians and their suffering matter insofar as they symbolize abstractions — colonialism, oppression, resistance — while suffering elsewhere that complicates that symbolic function is pushed aside.

 

An Iranian woman chased through the streets because her hijab doesn’t meet morality-police standards invites qualifications about intervention, sovereignty, and the proper limits of American foreign policy. A Palestinian killed by Israeli military action, by contrast, is immediately legible: victim, oppressor, injustice. The suffering of Palestinian women under the rump Hamas regime who are being sold for food or coerced into marrying the man who raped them is no less Palestinian, but it sits outside the black-and-white narrative that activists rigidly uphold.

 

Even Palestinians themselves can become strangely incidental to the Americanized politics of Palestine.

 

That is the trouble with any political fetish. Some Palestinian suffering readily acquires enormous political meaning when it suits Western leftist agendas. Other suffering, when not politically convenient, is discounted.

 

Dashti wasn’t asking El-Sayed to invade Iran. He was asking him to name an oppressor. El-Sayed has demonstrated throughout his campaign that he does understand the difference. Naming “oppressors” has been central to his politics. The question put to him last Wednesday exposed the way his moral vocabulary shrinks when the subject is Iran.

Anti-Zionism: An Anti-Jewish History

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

A common story told to Jewish schoolchildren is about a town that commissions a cover for its Torah scroll. When it finally arrives, the cover is stunning, but it’s clearly too short to cover the whole scroll. The townsfolk come up with a fix: They’ll just trim the Torah.

 

This story is told to children because the absurdity of the “solution” is obvious even to the young. Yet I fear that Benjamin Moser took the wrong lesson from it.

 

Moser’s new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is the presentation of a worldview so narrow that Judaism has to be pared down considerably in order to fit inside it. Moser begins by declaring that the Jews are not a people, a nation, a civilization, or a society. They are adherents of a religion, strictly in the modern sense. They are Protestants with bagels and lox.

 

This ahistorical and narrow presentation of Judaism is the core problem faced by anti-Zionists. The Jews are an ancient people who have survived into the present. Modern terminology doesn’t have a category for them. That can be confusing, even threatening, to those who need everyone to fit into a modern framework. Therefore, “religion” is the least threatening box to put them in: If Judaism is “just” a religion, the Jews are just like everyone else.

 

Complicating this picture greatly is the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the historic Jewish homeland with the establishment of the state of Israel. The movement that brought this to fruition was Zionism, which can most accurately be defined as the Jewish right of self-determination. Today, Jewish anti-Zionists are a fringe group fighting a long-finished conflict, like Hiroo Onoda hiding out on some remote island in the Philippines.

 

Fringe, but dangerous: Post-1948, anti-Zionism seeks the dismantling of the state of Israel. To establish this undoing as a legitimate goal, anti-Zionists must argue that Jewish sovereignty is itself illegitimate, because there’s no such thing as “the Jewish people.”

 

Thus we have Moser stating the following about Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism’s political program, and his famous book The Jewish State: “Der Judenstaat is short. It defines the Jews as a ‘people—one people,’ ein Volk. In the nineteenth century, this word’s associations were political and above all racial, and therefore clashed with the traditional definition of the Jews as a community of religious believers.”

 

Moser clings to this idea like a life raft. After an introduction in which Moser calls Herzl “thoughtless,” “childish,” and likely mentally ill, and in which the author expresses resentment toward his parents for not telling him that this Herzl guy was a madman, Moser introduces us to the first of his 12 subjects: Aaron Samuel Tamares. A small-town rabbi in modern-day Poland but a prominent figure in the Jewish intellectual world as the 19^th century turned into the 20^th, Tamares was known for his pacifism. This put him in conflict with some of his fellow Zionists and estranged him from the wider movement.

 

Tamares is a compelling figure, but Moser uses him as a tool to shame the Zionists for being impious. The desire for a national home was “undignified and irreligious, Tamares insisted: Judaism was ‘independent of land, kings, and lords,’” Moser writes.

 

Moser returns to this theme in his chapter on Dutch poet Jacob Israël de Haan, who, like Moser and Tamares, began as a Zionist but became deeply disillusioned and joined the anti-Zionists. “Without the laws that had kept the Jews together through the centuries, Zionism would become just another vulgar chauvinism,” Moser writes of de Haan’s views.

 

Yet it turns out that Moser considers the Orthodox to be dispensable too. Moser celebrates the anti-Zionist rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel, who became the spiritual leader of an infamously anti-Zionist synagogue in Houston in the 1940s. Schachtel “rejected the Zionist idea ‘that we are Jews by race and nationality.’” But he also enforced a bizarre synagogue policy: Zionists and observant Jews could only be nonvoting members. Moser says that Schachtel and his congregants understood how “Superstitious abracadabra, the thousands of petty directives governing diet and dress … was getting in the way of a universal message.” They therefore put strict limits on their congregation’s tolerance of traditional Judaism.

 

By the end of Anti-Zionism, the People of the Book aren’t a people and have no book.

 

Believe it or not, this isn’t the only problem with Moser’s work. There’s a reason Anti-Zionism has received harshly negative reviews from the New York Times and The New Yorker, outlets that regularly defend the concept of anti-Zionism, and that reason is Moser’s fundamental dishonesty. The New Yorker, in particular, picks apart Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt, which Moser uses to portray Zionism and Nazism as enthusiastic and like-minded allies. The New Yorker’s review uncovers a slew of falsehoods and factual errors in this chapter.

 

The Arendt chapter focuses on her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it may be where Moser is at his sloppiest. He quotes the following passage from a contemporary review by then-Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz: “In the place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in the place of the Jew as a virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in the place of the confrontation of guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim.”

 

Moser cites this as an example of how, to Zionists, “the only permissible lesson of the Holocaust was Jewish moral spotlessness.” But Podhoretz was making a passing stylistic contrast between Arendt’s and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s approaches to writing about victimhood, not arguing for moral spotlessness. The point of Podhoretz’s review was to debunk Arendt’s claim that, without Jewish collaboration, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Arendt’s own past scholarship on totalitarianism, Podhoretz pointed out, shows that it is society-wide collaboration, not piecemeal administrative grunt work by a small group of prisoners, that makes such mass murder possible. Moser pretends such substantive engagement with Arendt by her critics didn’t exist at all.

 

This cheap deceit is a perfect distillation of Moser’s writing throughout Anti-Zionism. And it explains why publications that are so critical of Israel and Zionism, like the New York Times and The New Yorker, were so clearly disappointed: Moser’s book does more to discredit anti-Zionism than to revive it.

 

Another form of Moser’s dishonesty is his refusal to give agency to anyone except his story’s villains. In the chapter on Ahmad Sadiq Saad, an Egyptian Jewish communist who opposed Zionism, Moser writes the following about the conflict that followed Israel’s declaration of statehood: “Egypt found itself at war with the new State of Israel.” By “found itself at war with,” he means “invaded.”

 

Moser makes a habit of skipping over how a conflict or an incident began so he can avoid uncomfortable truths. Regarding the 1921 Arab Jaffa riots, for example, Moser is beyond parody: “The degree of mutual enmity, the bizarre conspiracy theories doing the rounds, made it hard to ascertain the reasons for the outbreak. The Arabs whispered that twelve hundred Arabs had been killed by airplanes. The Jews whispered that the Arabs had poisoned all the milk.”

 

But the 1921 riots are no mystery: They began when there was a street fight between two Jewish groups, during which the Arabs of the area took advantage of the commotion to go on a murder spree. Moser eventually throws up his hands: “Whatever the origins of the unrest …”

 

There is surely an interesting history to be written about Jewish anti-Zionism. But the operative word there is “history.” In the bloody chaos of the first half of the 20^th century, a debate raged over whether fighting for statehood in the Holy Land was the best way to secure the Jewish future. That debate ended the day the state of Israel was born.

 

Schachtel, leader of the most famous anti-Zionist synagogue of its day, had a change of heart after 1948. It was “futile to argue with history,” he said. In a letter that Moser quotes, the rabbi wrote: “Anti-Semitism is being defeated by the courage of Israel. The name Jew is now associated with courage, stamina, heroism, fighting power—the anti-Semites have been confounded.” Schachtel would from then on be among Israel’s loudest cheerleaders.

 

As for Tamares, he died in 1931 at the age of 62, leaving behind his wife and six children. Four of those children immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. His wife and the other two children stayed behind. They died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.

 

Then there’s Saad. After his fellow communists barred Jews from the movement, Saad and his wife converted to Islam.

 

All those stories are in Moser’s book too. And that is the final irony of his feeble attempt to claim vindication for an idea that belongs squarely in the dustbin of history: Moser intended to praise anti-Zionism, but instead he buried it.

Check Your Palestine Privilege

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

There is a moment in the lifespan of every cause célèbre when the hard truth must be faced: The privileged place to be is in the shoes of the underprivileged.

 

Call it the Dolezal Moment.

 

Rachel Dolezal, you’ll remember, was the white woman who was exposed as having pretended to be black so she could run an NAACP chapter, work her way up the academic-administrative ladder, and benefit from minority hiring practices.

 

It was a cultural moment precisely because it brought to public attention the fact that in certain important institutional pipelines, it was better for white people to claim to be black.

 

Well, I give you Hannah Gann. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

 

A Philadelphia teacher is being called the ‘Palestinian Rachel Dolezal’ after being caught lying about her background — a deception that has stirred strong emotions in education and racial justice organizing circles.

 

Hannah Gann, a veteran Philadelphia School District educator, has claimed at times to be Palestinian and Black, and was so outspoken a mobile billboard once parked outside her school calling her ‘Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.’

 

The problem: “Gann, it turns out, is white and Jewish, and lied about her identity for years.”

 

Palestinian identity is the golden ticket in the West at the moment. Palestine is the omnicause—the one issue everyone must dedicate themselves to at the expense of all others. In the Democratic Party, the Palestinian omnicause is the only litmus test for political participation.

 

Culturally, Palestinian clout is just as strong. Want relevance in the music world? Say “free Palestine” until you’re blue in the face while wrapped in a keffiyeh. Want more acting jobs? Javier Bardem says the answer is a single-minded public obsession with smearing Israel as a genocidal state and, of course, wearing the keffiyeh.

 

If you want a Pulitzer, write pro-Palestinian essays. If you want an Academy Award, make a pro-Palestinian film. Want the Special Jury Prize in Venice? Make a piece of easily debunked agitprop about Israelis killing Palestinians. Want a book deal? Write a novel about Being Palestinian Today. Want fame in the art world? You know the drill.

 

And, hey, want tenure? How quickly can you erase Israel from a map and a syllabus?

 

Plus, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card in many jurisdictions. Want those charges dropped? Say you did it “for Palestine.” In the U.S., you can still get away with a whole assortment of crimes, though if you kill a Jew in broad daylight while yelling about Palestine you might have to spend a year in the slammer.

 

It’s true, none of this actually frees Palestine. But in America, only when one is “for Palestine” can one be truly free.

 

And so Hannah Gann was living the new American dream:

 

Gann, who teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, was front and center in education activism work after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

 

In 2024, for instance, Gann participated in a West Philadelphia ‘teach-in’ on ‘scholasticide’ — the destruction of educational infrastructure — in Gaza. Her biography for that event identified her as a Palestinian American…

 

According to a document compiled by the Philly Palestine Coalition and obtained by The Inquirer, Gann has made frequent references to Palestinian family, including a Palestinian-born grandfather whom the PPC found was actually born in Baltimore, citing historical draft records and her great-grandfather’s U.S. naturalization papers. Her family abroad live in Israel, according to the group’s extensive, footnoted research.

 

In fairness, who doesn’t have a Palestinian grandfather these days? Forget the coalminer grandfather or the mailman father, if you want to run for office get yourself a nakba backstory.

 

Just make sure you cover your tracks. Hannah Gann didn’t, and when her Palestinian and Palestinian-adjacent friends and colleagues investigated her, the story quickly unraveled. The Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine asked Gann to “publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” which she promptly did on social media.

 

Now she must atone for her sins. But can you blame her for trying? She went to an Ivy League university, where presumably she learned the hard way that being “white and Jewish” is no way to go through life. She wanted a taste of real privilege. Such is what it means to be a victim in America today: Suddenly, all the doors are open to you.

 

 

Beware the Bursting Bubble

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Sometimes, you start to wonder if the current rise in anti-Semitism is a bubble that’s getting close to bursting. The events of this past week or so have me thinking about it. There was the Center of Attention media study revealing the world’s obsession with Israel, the canceling of Ed Sheeran for ditching Macklemore, the protests and walkouts over Benjamin Netanyahu’s presence at UNGA, the release of the anti-Israel propaganda film NAZA, a million new iterations of the genocide lie, and more hate-fueled assaults on Jews. Doesn’t such obvious overkill expose the whole campaign as preposterous? Isn’t it just too exhausting for its supporters to keep up with?

 

That’s the hope, but I’m reluctant to indulge it all that much.

 

We have to remember that to talk of anti-Semitism in terms of bubbles is to use a metaphor, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that thinking metaphorically about the topic may do more harm than good.

 

Anti-Semitism seems to resist metaphor altogether. It’s not, for instance, a disease or virus that one catches by chance. To describe it as such recasts the anti-Semite as a kind of victim.

 

The problem in trying to wrap your head around anti-Semitism is that it’s as singular a phenomenon as the Jews are a people. It’s so unlike any other form of bigotry that it constitutes a different category.
Anti-Semitism is a theory of how the world functions.

 

But, also unlike any other prejudice, it is spread most effectively by those who don’t necessarily believe its core theory or hate its targeted group. You don’t need to hate the Jews to believe the lie that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In fact, to believe and transmit any slanderous lie about Israel, you need only have been told it under certain circumstances: You must sufficiently trust the source (such as the mainstream media); the claim of the lie must be couched in a moral concern (such as humanitarianism) that has no explicit connection to bigotry; and you must not know a whole lot about Israel, the Jews, and their enemies. The anti-Semites behind the original lie are obscured by multiple degrees of separation, allowing their claim to advance far beyond the bounds of the bubble itself.

 

Of course, it can be reassuring and therefore tempting to think of anti-Semitism as a bubble. But that’s only because we take the metaphor so superficially. We don’t consider what actually makes a physical bubble burst. Something like a soap bubble bursts, for example, because its wall becomes too thin and surface tension tears it apart. It’s an inevitable outcome of the bubble’s continued growth. Sadly, there’s no guarantee that political, cultural, or economic trends must comport with a comparable dynamic.

 

In the case of anti-Semitism, it’s as if the opposite applies. Left alone, it will grow and grow until someone takes action to stop it. If anything, the anti-Semitism inside the bubble is contained by a membrane of civil norms and social taboos, and once those wear thin and the bubble bursts, Jew-hatred is unleashed in all directions. I fear that might already have happened.

This Is Who the Protesters Are

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

What did the celebrities, activists, and politicians who joined the terrorist-curious group Jewish Voice for Peace outside the U.N.’s headquarters on Thursday, blocking traffic and forcing the reluctant NYPD officers on duty to haul them away in handcuffs, chant? Beyond vacuous slogans alleging that Israel is still — nearly one year after combat operations in Gaza concluded and with an epochal “famine” having been miraculously supplanted by a minor outbreak of childhood obesity — engineering a “genocide,” the protesters defamed themselves further still. “Let Iran live,” they demanded.

 

By this, they must mean the Islamic Republic’s theocratic apparatchiks. What else could they mean? As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted, the professional activist circuit didn’t hold tearful vigils on behalf of the tens of thousands of Iranians the Islamic Republic’s security services slaughtered in the streets not even one year ago. They seem to care little for the women the regime’s morality police maim, blind, or murder. They’re similarly nonplussed by the persecution and summary execution of gays and lesbians — whose rights they’re uniquely sensitive to when oppression can be blamed on Western interests and institutions.

 

When they say, “Let Iran live,” they’re talking to the U.S. and Israel, both of which have gone to great lengths to limit collateral damage in their war against a foe that is soaked with the blood of Israeli and American civilians (targeting errors, which are not war crimes, notwithstanding). So, they must be referring to the Islamic Republic’s figureheads, the occupants of its military facilities and dual-use enterprises, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which is to say, those who quite literally will not “let Iran live.”

 

Nor does this cast of rabble-rousers seem all that concerned about the Palestinian people. Thanks in no small part to their endless hectoring, the war in Gaza ended last October with Hamas still in uncontested control of about one-third of the Gaza Strip. There, that lawless, totalitarian gangster government carries out summary executions of those who are even suspected of representing a political threat to the rump regime. The protesters could care less about that, just as they evince no concern for the welfare of Palestinians living under the thumb of the incompetent kleptocracy that governs the West Bank — at least, not until Israelis become part of that story.

 

Why would we expect one of yesterday’s arrestees, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, to care? We have few indications that she was anything but supportive of the Hamas-led slaughter that started the war in the first place. After all, she and her fellow democratic socialists rallied in support of Hamas’s actions on October 8, 2023, while Hamas terrorists were still on the loose inside Israel. She has even walked out of radio interviews when asked to explain the moral inversion to which she’s committed. As the co-founder of a group that promises to “undermine and eradicate America” by translating “resistance in Gaza to unrest and violence in America,” Chevalier’s radicalism is as sincere as it is poisonous.

 

It is well past time to withhold a charitable attitude toward professional protesters like these. We’re told that they are burdened with an excess of empathy, that their hearts are in the right place, that they care deeply for their advocacy even if they are a little fuzzy on the details. Nonsense. These are not altruists. They are consumed with hatred. It is what defines them — what gets them out of bed in the morning. What they seem to want more than anything is to see the U.S. and its allies humbled before our shared civilizational enemies.

 

And they’re not coy about it, either. It’s up to us to listen when they tell us precisely who they are.

NAZA Is a Jump-the-Shark Moment for Israel’s Critics

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

The title of the “documentary” NAZA, which received a mandatory Stalinesque record-breaking ovation at the Venice film festival, is an acronym for the Hebrew term for “collateral damage.” It concerns a system developed by the Israeli military to predict the collateral damage of any strike before it is approved.

 

And that explains why the project, made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has landed with a thud rather than an explosion—at least outside any venue in which participants were required to clap.

 

Why would Israel need a system to calculate the collateral damage of a near-term strike before it’s approved? There are three possibilities.

 

The first: So the IDF can reduce civilian casualties. If one needs approval for a strike, and one is required to note for the record how many people would die in that strike, one is less likely to have that strike approved.

 

The second: So the IDF can increase civilian casualties. The assumption here is that Israelis are psychopaths who gamify war and therefore they will only carry out a strike if the collateral damage is above a certain level.

 

The third: For no reason at all. According to this theory, the IDF doesn’t care how many people die in a strike. It has gone through the effort and high cost to design a world-leading technology to predict collateral damage because… someone needed a cool party trick? I guess?

 

This multiple-choice question is easy: The only possible answer is the first, that the purpose of NAZA is to reduce civilian casualties.

 

Does that automatically let Israel off the hook for every single anonymously sourced claim in the anonymously sourced film? No, of course not. There is the possibility that the casualty limit was too high during the most recent war. Nobody has shown this to be the case, however, and that is unlikely to change.

 

The film hasn’t been screened widely because the filmmakers didn’t want the IDF to have a chance to respond to the allegations before launch. That’s because the point of the film isn’t accuracy in reporting but to establish a baseline narrative in which Israel is guilty until proven innocent. But what has been available thus far does not bode well for the possibility that the full film establishes NAZA as a tool of civilian death.

 

For example, the film’s biggest accusation seems to be that NAZA returned an estimate of 500 casualties for one strike. Since there is no record of such a strike—and the Gaza Healthy Ministry, as Hamas is often called in news reports, is famous only for inflating numbers like the floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade—the conclusion one is left with is the following: NAZA said 500 would die and the IDF commander in charge called off the strike.

 

But again, the filmmakers have been hiding the film they are so proud of from the general public until their narrative can gain a firm footing. So it’s possible they have something damning. More likely, they simply don’t understand what they’re looking at. Who are the soldiers interviewed? Nobody knows. We have no evidence that the filmmakers spoke to anyone who knew anything about complex high-tech IDF systems and the officers who oversee their use.

 

Should we have expected this? Yes. Last year, Abraham wrote a piece intended to have the same effect: establish a narrative, bury the counter-evidence. The claim was that the overwhelming majority of casualties in Gaza were civilians according to the IDF’s own calculations. To demonstrate this, Abraham referred to a database of known terror operatives from only two groups operating in Gaza and considered any death not on that list of operatives to be a civilian.

 

In other words, it doesn’t account for unnamed deaths, for unknown operatives, for any militant or combatant who wasn’t on Israel’s list for just two terror groups, etc.

 

The share of civilian casualties given by the article is, therefore, entirely debunked by the article itself. You just have to read far enough past the headline.

 

The level of sloppiness in that story made it very clear that this was not a “documentarian” whose work could be trusted without extensive re-reporting.

 

The larger point, to me, is that this is another example of a broader problem among Israel’s critics: They take something Israel has done as a means of protecting civilians and turn it around into a nefarious sci-fi plot.

 

You can see this mode of argumentation in Israel’s determination to evacuate neighborhoods before dropping heavy bombs on them. The number of bombs dropped, together with the physical destruction of the bombed area and the low numbers of civilian casualties in those specific bombings combine to show that the IDF stalled its own offensive in order to move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. So the world decided that these evacuations were themselves the crime, some form of “ethnic cleansing” or other crime.

 

In some cases, Israel’s humanitarian steps undermine its legitimate military aims. It delayed the progression of its Rafah mission during the war until it could evacuate the area, ultimately moving nearly a million Palestinians out of harm’s way. So, again, the world called the Rafah evacuation the crime.

 

And so it is with Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties by forcing commanders to record the number of expected deaths from a strike before approving it. NAZA’s impact has been limited by its implausibility, but no matter: Everyone knows you should never be the first one to stop clapping.

Benjamin Netanyahu Turns the Tables on Zohran Mamdani

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rarely misses an opportunity to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to accuse him of various crimes, and to allege that he is the font from which so much Israeli perfidy springs — at least the sort that’s not endemic among the Jewish people.

 

During his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu gave as good as he got:

 

 

Speaking directly to the “antisemitic mayor of New York,” Netanyahu issued a prolonged indictment of Mamdani’s character, judgment, and associations — establishing a pattern of behavior that fits the charge.

 

Netanyahu scolded Mamdani for praising “criminals convicted of supporting Hamas.” He attacked him for counting among his friends Hasan Piker, dwelling for a moment on the streamer’s belief that Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks. He wondered why it was that Mamdani welcomed into his home a Palestinian journalist who subsequently admitted that he not only filmed Hamas’s atrocities but covered the footage up so as to avoid embarrassing the terrorist group. Netanyahu even criticized Mamdani’s wife for having “liked a post praising the October 7 massacre” and another post that contended that the Israeli city of Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist.”

 

Contrary to the New York Times’ preemptive effort to throw itself in the path of the barbs Netanyahu hurled at the mayor, it’s all true. Mamdani did heap praise on the Holy Land Five, “who were blamed by a jury for the killing of a 17-year-old Jewish boy from New York City outside Jerusalem,” the Free Press reported. Mamdani did pal around with Piker during his bid for mayor despite — or because of — the streamer’s penchant for anti-American and anti-Israeli radicalism. He did embrace Motaz Azaiza, a gadfly Palestinian journalist who recently confessed to filming the events of October 7 and burying the footage. “I didn’t want to ruin the lives of the people filmed,” Azaiza explained. Mamdani’s wife did like those posts, although she has since apologized for her “harmful” social media habits.

 

Prior to his attack on Mamdani, Netanyahu addressed the foremost allegation against him and his country to which the mayor and his comrades are partial: the charge of genocide. With exasperation, Netanyahu described Israel’s efforts to protect civilian life. He described the “millions” of texts, calls, and leaflets sent out to alert Palestinian populations of impending Israeli action — an independently verifiable account, if any of Israel’s critics were to develop an interest in verification. “What genocidal regime gives one million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That’s one ton for every person,” Netanyahu asked. “Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.”

 

Netanyahu went on to accuse Mamdani of his own criminal negligence: “Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.” The city, he said, has become a place where the visibly Jewish are harassed, assaulted, and even stabbed — not at random but amid a growing campaign of anti-Jewish violence. “This isn’t the city we remember,” he said. “It changed so quickly.”

 

There’s truth to that, too. While anti-Jewish violence in New York started from an intolerably high baseline when Mamdani took office, the problem has only gotten worse under his tenure. “Antisemitic hate crimes are up 8% so far this year and make up more than half of the incidents in New York City,” CNN reported early this month.

 

“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here,” Netanyahu concluded. “You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”

 

Mamdani often contends that the Israeli prime minister must answer the allegations that the mayor so regularly hurls at him. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Mamdani to hold himself to the same standard.

Ireland Is in the Grip of “Paddystinian” Tyranny

By John McGuirk & Sarah Ryan

Saturday, September 19, 2026

 

On this week’s podcast – and thanks to all of you pushing it towards being one of our biggest yet – Sarah and I discussed something that we both feel and have felt for a while: That talking about Ireland, Israel, and Palestine in this country is just not worth it.

 

This is now, after all, a country where the President’s own sister can be quoted on CNN saying that the White House should be “flattened” - an explicit call for violence - and not one Irish politician or media outlet can even dare comment on the propriety of it, for fear of the backlash they would get.

 

There is no room for reasoned discussion. It does not exist. Express dissent from the RTE/Irish Times/Siptu/Simon Harris view of the world, and you will not, I promise, get a reasoned argument as to why the Palestinian leadership repeatedly failed to turn the extraordinary concessions on offer during the Clinton peace process into a lasting settlement; or a convincing explanation of why Israel would be safer if it just tore down the border and let the Palestinians wander around Israel proper, at will.

 

What you will get is roared at. If it’s online, you’ll get a hundred tweets from the same, endless anonymous accounts, calling you a Zionist or a bootlicker or, in some of the more honest cases, a Jew-lover. If it’s in person, you’ll get the horrified how-could-you-think-that, replete with the performative gasp, that is not actually a question at all, but an indictment. (They rarely want, it turns out, to hear how, or why, you could think that).

 

Paddystinianism (worth remembering, that was a term invented by “Paddystinians” themselves, not a term of abuse) is not a set of political beliefs. It is an identity. It cannot be reasoned with. It does not want to discuss, or debate, or persuade. What it wants to do, like all identities, is to express itself, endlessly, and at any cost.

 

It has become intertwined with something that has always been a feature of Irish identity since independence – a desire to express moral superiority over the rest of the world, but particularly over the British, Americans, and Europeans. And it shares much with the former expression of that instinct; the 1950s and 60s uber-Catholicism of John Charles McQuaid’s Ireland, which loved to ban books and films, denounce pornography and communism, and make sure that RTE never showed anything of which it disapproved.

 

Ironically enough, the last time there were widespread calls for the Irish national team not to play a game, it was in 1955, when McQuaid demanded that the FAI withdraw from a match against Yugoslavia over its communism and hostility to the Church.

 

That match, like the Israel games, went ahead anyway – because the FAI, to its considerable credit, refused to submit to the pressure.

 

McQuaid urged Catholics to boycott the game. Radio Éireann did not broadcast it. The Army band stayed away. The state withheld official representation. Players were pressured not to take part. FAI secretary Joe Wickham was reportedly denounced from the pulpit in his own parish as “a Judas who had sold Christ the King for a mere game of football.” (Lots of things change in Ireland, but some little undertones always remain.)

 

And 22,000 supporters attended the game anyway, in Dalymount Park, defying McQuaid.

 

In today’s Ireland, by contrast, the FAI cannot stage its nominal home game against Israel in Dublin. Whatever euphemisms are employed about “operational challenges”, the authorities clearly do not believe this fixture can safely and normally be staged in the capital.

 

Another thing has happened: The Irish media have given up any pretence, whatever, of objectivity or fairness or impartiality. Here’s the Journal’s sports department, this morning, plaintively begging their readers not to punish them for covering a sports match:

 

 

 

 

 

RTE, for its part, cannot cover the matches fully because of an impending staff revolt. An Irish Independent report this morning quoted an RTE Union representative saying that “There is no middle ground on this. Silence is treachery”.

 

Consider that statement: “Silence is treachery”. That is the view of a great many of the Paddystinian cult – not that you are permitted to go about your business, keeping your views to yourself, but that you are treasonous if you do not affirm their views loudly, and publicly.

 

Nor are these empty threats. They will, in fact, go after you, regardless of how big you are. Witness what happened to Ed Sheeran this week, when a national newspaper published an article by one of its own senior editors saying that he should never be welcomed in Ireland again. In that context, read this tweet by luvvie and actor and general pain in the arse Liam Cunningham:

 

 

This has moved well beyond the stage of these people simply being loud, annoying, and rather pointless. We’re now at the stage where they are openly attempting to rule the country by fear of consequence, should you differ from them.

 

The great irony of all of this is that none of it – not one iota of it – does a single solitary thing to help the Palestinian cause.

 

Hamas played its cards on October 7th, and the result was a crushing and soul-destroying military defeat, and what appears to be the permanent loss of yet more land, as customarily happens in war (look at a map of Germany in 1913, and the same map today, if you don’t believe me).

 

It is all the culmination, in many ways, of decades of Palestinian political failure. Their leaders have repeatedly chosen maximalism over settlements that might have produced a Palestinian state, and the consequences have repeatedly been borne by ordinary Palestinians.

 

Nothing that Ireland does or can do will change that.

 

What is happening, however, is that Irish people are now being subjected to a campaign of coercion, repression, and tolerated abuse by supporters of that cause, which goes entirely unchallenged in the public domain.

 

And across the country, in offices, schools, workplaces, and in the public domain, a lot of Irish people have internalised the lesson: You do not challenge the Paddystinians. The price is too high. The cost is too great. It’s not worth it.

 

When you hear people “speaking out” on this, you may well be hearing sincere conviction. But increasingly, you’re just hearing people who don’t want to be the next Ed Sheeran, as Liam Cunningham charmingly put it.

 

Say the line. Put your head down. Hope they leave you alone.

 

Of course, they won’t.

 

Why would they?

 

It’s working.

 

 

The Media’s Weird Obsession With Israel

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

No one likes to think they’re being hysterical. And nothing makes hysterical people angrier than being described as such. So, let me offer my apologies in advance for what follows.

 

Jeremy Musighi, an independent researcher, recently released a study analyzing 14.7 million news articles published across 65 languages over the last decade. He found that, in 2024, news outlets published “more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.”

 

Given that many countries focus on Israel to distract from their own problems, that’s not that shocking. But Musighi also found that, “On American cable news, Israel was the most-mentioned country—ahead of Iran, Russia, Ukraine, China. On the BBC’s news channel, 1 in every 17 broadcast minutes mentioned Israel.”

 

One might argue that given Israel’s recent actions, it earned such coverage. But Israel gets wildly disproportionate coverage in peacetime, too. In 2019, long before the war in Gaza, “1 of every 112 news articles on Earth—from all the world’s outlets minus Israel’s—was primarily about Israel. 1.8 million international articles mentioned it.”

 

Now, I have reservations about Musighi’s methodology, given how media outlets recycle and syndicate content. But rather than wade into the statistics, for argument’s sake let’s just cut all of his findings in half. That would still be hard to defend rationally.

 

Also, this says nothing of the quality of the reporting. If it was objective, the quantity wouldn’t matter much. But a sizable portion is objectively anti-Israel, often taking Hamas’ claims at face value. When Hamas shrieked that Gaza was on the brink of famine, the Western press breathlessly repeated the claim, which was utterly false.

 

In a recent interview on Taqarrab, an Arab-language podcast, acclaimed photo “journalist” Motaz Azaiza admitted that he refused to publish images of Hamas abuses—to protect the abusers. The New York Times’ Nick Kristoff launched weeks of coverage with the claim that Israelis train dogs to rape Palestinians. American media covered the controversy over rapper Macklemore’s criticisms of Israel as though he were a free speech martyr.

 

In fairness, a lot of coverage is driven by news, like when the United Nations condemns Israel, which it has done 187 times since 2015—nearly six times more often than it has condemned Russia, and 17 times more often than Iran or North Korea.

 

Founded in 1948, modern Israel is middle-aged as countries go.

 

Look at a list of 195 countries in order of their founding dates, and Israel ranks somewhere between the 85^th- and 90^th-oldest (if we acknowledge biblical Israel, then it’s the fourth-oldest nation in the world). And yet many talk about Israel as if it’s a sort of recent mistake, easily remedied, like outgoing mail that hasn’t been picked up yet.

 

Israel is only slightly older than modern Tibet, which was, according to the Chinese government, “liberated” in 1951. Many Tibetans use the term “occupied.”

 

We don’t hear much about “occupied Tibet” from people fixated on the evils of occupation. Nor do we hear about China’s system of apartheid—another charge casually hurled at Israel. Nor do we hear about China’s genocidal policies toward the Muslim minority Uyghur population in Xinjiang. The charge of cultural genocide is irrefutable, but there’s also strong evidence of more literal genocide thanks to the regime’s violent and coercive reproduction policies, slashing birthrates in half.

 

Nor do we hear much about China’s policy of settler colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang, where Han Chinese are incentivized to migrate as part of the regime’s policy of “sinicization.” I think China’s pretty powerful, but criticizing Israel, according to the popular online streamer Hasan Piker (who will not condemn China), is “speaking truth to power.”

 

To that end, we hear a lot about Israel’s occupation, settler colonization and genocide. We don’t have the space to contend with all of these charges, so for the sake of brevity and reasonableness let’s concede, for now, the first two. Besides, it’s the false genocide charge that fuels anti-Israel obsessions more than any other. The claim is more than 40 years old. And yet, since the founding of Israel, the Palestinian population has grown more than fivefold.

 

When you hear that Israeli genocide proves Israelis are the “new Nazis” keep in mind that the Holocaust killed 2 out of every 3 European Jews.  

 

A new documentary, Naza, that purports to prove that Israel is committing genocide bases its claim on the fact that Israel goes to great lengths to track collateral damage. Never mind that there’s no such thing as collateral damage when you intend genocide.

 

It should take the average reader five minutes to read this column. When Naza debuted at the Venice Film Festival this month, the audience’s standing ovation lasted five times as long. That, I’m sorry to tell you, is a sign of hysteria.

What Anti-Zionists Learned from Segregationists

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

I used to wonder how segregationists could unabashedly espouse their ideology while also insisting that they harbored no hate in their heart—that they just wanted what was in everybody’s best interests.

 

Then I listened to Western anti-Zionists, and I stopped wondering. It’s like having a time machine.

 

I understand why pundits and activists and politicians would insist they aren’t anti-Semitic. The question that has vexed me is: Why would anyone self-identify as an anti-Zionist?

 

Let’s be extra-generous and pretend for a moment that “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism,” as the human bumper stickers constantly chirp. I think the past few years have made this assertion, which has always been wrong but at least facially plausible, an entirely irrational and self-discrediting pose.

 

But even if we grant a meaningful distinction, it’s a bit like pleading down from murder 1 to reckless homicide. It’s certainly not an assertion of innocence.

 

Anti-Zionism is the opposition to Jewish self-determination. In purely practical terms, that requires the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of empowering those who proclaim their desire to murder all the Jews. So the key distinction is that the anti-Zionist claims to be unprejudiced as he brings about the conditions of the inevitable mass killing of Jews.

 

Because anti-Zionism is literally an anti-rights ideology, it also gives us a glimpse into the politics around segregation at a time when opposition to it was not yet the broad consensus and required an attempt at finessing the difference between bigotry as a motive and bigotry as an end goal. (George Wallace’s public speeches are a good example of this rancid Orwellian demagoguery.)

 

To be an anti-Zionist now, at this moment, is to be, by definition, the adherent of a violent ideology. It is to be an enemy of peace. To pretend otherwise is to be the defensive coordinator of a football team while claiming to be “personally anti-tackling.”

 

And so, again, I just keep wondering: What kind of person identifies with this? What kind of person claims to oppose scientific bigotry but embraces practical bigotry? And how on earth would a person expect this to be exonerating?

 

We can be even more generous to the anti-Zionist and say the following: Perhaps they haven’t thought at all of what this means for the status of certain nation-states; they oppose a movement for equal Jewish rights out of some other ideal.

 

That ideal would be irrelevant. No one should care why someone opposes equal Jewish rights. An admission of such opposition is enough to tell me this person is both refreshingly honest and reprehensible.

 

All of which makes the constant stream of artists and celebrities and pundits and others staking their claims to be “just anti-Zionist” so strange. And it conflicts with their other excuse: that they’re just criticizing a foreign state.

 

Criticism of Israeli policy isn’t anti-Zionism; in fact, it can arguably conflict with anti-Zionism in interesting ways. Anti-Zionism holds the state of Israel to be illegitimate. It therefore doesn’t fully recognize Israeli state policy as state policy. If you believe that “Palestine is occupied,” for example, Israel’s legitimate nation-state authority is unrecognized.

 

Accepting the legitimacy of the State of Israel is the key. If you do so, you aren’t anti-Zionist. (Though you might still be an ignoramus; there are many of those around too.) If you are anti-Zionist, it’s much harder to claim you’re just criticizing policy within the nondiscriminatory norm of such criticism.

 

Either way, anti-Zionism itself is an essentially violent ideology that a society dedicated to freedom and democracy and human rights would oppose unreservedly. “I’m just an anti-Zionist” is still an embarrassing self-incrimination.

‘Woke’ Is Not Dead

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

With President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, many cheered what they took for a cultural counter-swing, a meaningful movement away from radical progressive ideology and toward something resembling common sense.

 

Woke is dead! We’ve broken free from far-left ideological capture. We’re so back!

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news: “Woke” is not dead. It has merely evolved, as recent events attest.

 

If you’re the type of person who checks social media or the news only infrequently, you may have been shocked last week to learn that bombshell starlet Sydney Sweeney had personally attacked female athletes and set gender equality in sports back a thousand years.

 

She did nothing of the sort, obviously. She simply appeared — half naked with her unmentionables obscured by athletic gear — in a racy ad for a sports-prediction company. That’s the entire story. The “scandal,” if we must call it that, can be summed up in one sentence: a company put a hot, scantily clad blonde in a commercial. Except for the overreaction, there is nothing more to say about it.

 

But try telling that to the harridans and too-online weirdos who treat anything short of born-alive or late-term abortion as an assault on women: a cohort that, ironically enough, claims powerlessness as an identity even as it drives whole news cycles and endless debates about whatever has offended it that day.

 

There is no logic to it. Only raw emotion and bottomless grievance. In other words, “woke.”

 

Or, consider the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who killed her daughter and two sons. In this episode, activist jurors set out to correct perceived historical wrongs, rather than decide the matter directly before them.

 

Clancy has admitted to the murders. The question was never whether she did it; it was whether she was in her right mind when she did.

 

Yet, the jury did not return a verdict of “not guilty” by reason of insanity, nor did it convict her of murder or manslaughter. After days of deadlock, the judge declared a mistrial. Eleven of the twelve jurors — nine women and two men — were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible. The lone holdout was a black man.

 

The crazy thing is not necessarily that those eleven jurors, including every woman on the panel, believed Clancy was insane (and therefore not responsible for her actions) when she strangled her three children. It is that most of them — including nurses who leveraged their professional credentials to serve as unofficial expert witnesses in the jury room — seemed determined from the get-go to acquit her because they thought a not-guilty verdict would start a broader conversation about women’s mental health.

 

Juror Paula Devlin said as much after the mistrial. The jury, she told Fox News, “had a chance to get a conversation started that could change something.” She hoped “no other woman or husband has to go through this.”

 

Three majority jurors, including the forewoman, said after the mistrial that “they would be in court every single day supporting Lindsay Clancy” in a retrial, according to an NBC News affiliate.

 

Meanwhile, the real reason the jurors were there — to decide what justice for the murders of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months, should look like — went by the wayside.

 

For the modern radical progressive, the lives of children are always secondary to the almighty cause.

 

A brief review of the news last week might also leave you thinking there is an epidemic of racist lynchings in the United States.

 

There isn’t, but you try telling that to people such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, importantly, is at the forefront of the effort to recast “woke 1.0” as merely a series of passionate dialogues rather than a period of violent and destructive progressive excess.

 

On September 10, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) wrote: “Black folks are being found hanged in America. This is a national crisis and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country. We’re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings.”

 

Said Ocasio-Cortez on social media, “This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

 

In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, Pressley and nearly 60 colleagues wrote: “In 2026 alone, there have already been at least 10 reported hangings of Black people. They were as young as 18 years old and lived in different parts of the country, including Mississippi, Michigan, and New York.”

 

The letter cited an August 27 Washington Informer article that highlighted the hanging deaths of nine black people, four of which occurred between 2024 and 2025.

 

Of the nine, eight have been ruled suicides or cases where investigators have found no evidence of foul play, though some families dispute the findings. One exception produced a homicide charge, but nothing so far shows it as a racial lynching. The man charged in the murder is black.

 

The states where the deaths occurred include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina.

 

The Informer article did not mention every case from this year. There are at least two more: one ruled a suicide, and one still under investigation.

 

For context, nearly ten non-black people were also found hanged in public and outdoor places between 2024 and 2026. One of them, Cory Zukatis, a white homeless man in Mississippi, was even found hanging from a tree on the same day as one of the cases cited by the Informer.

 

Zukatis’s death, which went basically unnoticed by activists and national media, was ruled a suicide.

 

In 2024 alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 11,453 suicide deaths by hanging or suffocation. Roughly 8,500 to 9,500 of them were white.

 

Despair and depression make people do terrible things, regardless of the color of their skin.

 

Yet this truism did not stop Ocasio-Cortez from spreading a hate-crime panic, nor did it stop newsrooms from giving her the headline she wanted.

 

From the Associated Press last week: “Cases of Black people found hanged in the U.S. South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history.”

 

It is not much of a “ding-dong, the woke is dead” moment if we are still running with these hate-crime hoaxes.

 

There is more.

 

In Seattle last week, a coalition of business leaders begged Mayor Katie Wilson to reactivate the city’s surveillance camera network in high-event areas, an ask that came just weeks after a mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival. Wilson declined. She maintained her support for the city’s Office of Civil Rights, which argues that the cameras could threaten “disparate impacts on racially and socioeconomically marginalized communities.”

 

Then there is the New York Times, the most powerful news organization in the country, which last week questioned the average Israeli’s perception of the October 7, 2023, slaughter.

 

“[Israelis] still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” the report initially said of the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

 

An editor’s note later explained: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.”

 

The amended version still says, “Only a small minority of Israelis have protested against the military’s conduct in the war.”

 

Hate-crime hoaxes, bogus narratives in major media, exploiting murder as a “teachable moment,” the abuse of the English language, and hard-on-law-enforcement whackadoodle social experiments — this all sounds a lot like 2016–2024, if on a slightly smaller scale.

 

In Maryland this month, the University of Maryland Senate voted 108–22 to strip all instances of the term “DEI” from its bylaws and replace it with “belonging and community.” It also voted to rename its “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee” the “Belonging and Community Committee.”

 

But don’t get too excited: Only the labels changed. The services and policies remain the same.

 

No, woke is not dead. It’s not even on life support.