A Global Pogrom, Rationalized as Justice
On campuses, Jewish students are barricaded and threatened. On the streets, Jewish businesses are vandalized and mobs chant for the expulsion of Jews. In the media and at the United Nations, unverified claims and blood libels are recycled as fact, echoing through institutions with moral authority.
What we are witnessing is not a scattered collection of prejudices, nor a spontaneous reaction to Israeli policy. It is an antisemitic mass event—a patterned, collective phenomenon unfolding across media, institutions, and public discourse. We might call it a digitally accelerated ritual of scapegoating, in which the Jew once again becomes the symbolic barrier to the redemption of the world.
Historically, antisemitic mass events are not uncommon. Medieval Europe offers a chilling archive: entire towns inflamed by accusations—blood libel, host desecration, well poisoning. In Norwich (1144) and Trent (1475), Jews were murdered following ritual murder claims; in Deggendorf (1338) and during the Black Death, charges of host desecration and well poisoning led to mass burnings, including 2,000 Jews in Strasbourg (1349). These were not merely irrational outbursts but socially structured episodes, often backed by clerics and civic elites. Jews were expelled, attacked, erased—again and again, across centuries and geographies.
Today, we live not in small medieval towns but in a global village, where digital networks allow libel, rumor, and outrage to circulate instantaneously. But the same underlying mechanics apply: a story breaks, Jews are blamed, mobs are incited, and institutions either stand by or amplify the process. The repetition unfolds with a kind of historical clockwork—a structure reawakening under new rhetorics, but with familiar effects.
What is so disturbing about the present moment is not only that this structure has returned, but that it has done so after the Holocaust—after the rupture of a genocide that seemed so absolute, so historically unique, that humanity would have no choice but to move forward from it. And yet, that moral reckoning was short-circuited. The hope that antisemitism had exhausted itself died with two key developments.
First, radical antisemitism persisted in the Middle East, fueled by Nazi ideology that had taken root in the 1930s and 40s and was never dismantled. It fused with the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, which became the progenitor of major Islamist movements—including Hamas. This synthesis produced a distinctly modern theocratic fascism—antisemitic, authoritarian, and totalizing—sharply distinct from the broader Islamic tradition. Over time, it reshaped the region: Hezbollah hollowed out Lebanon; Brotherhood networks destabilized Egypt; Islamists took power in Sudan; and the Iranian Revolution created a regime whose fusion of leftist rhetoric and clerical rule now echoes in Western capitals, where its ideological heirs march under banners of justice.
This legacy was not incidental. As Jeffrey Herf has shown, Nazi Germany invested heavily in antisemitic Arabic-, Turkish-, and Persian-language propaganda during World War II, including radio broadcasts and print material aimed at mobilizing Muslim publics against Jews and the Allies. As Matthias Küntzel has further documented, figures like Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem during Mandatory Palestine, played a central role in fusing European antisemitism with Islamic motifs, laying the groundwork for a postwar Islamist-Nazi ideological synthesis. The genocidal logic of Nazism was not eradicated; it was adapted and redeployed.
Second, in the West, a new ideological formation emerged in the post-1967 era and intensified during the 1970s: antizionism (the lack of a hyphen indicates that this ideology has little to do with really-existing Zionism). Under the influence of Soviet propaganda—as documented by scholars such as Izabella Tabarovsky—this movement began to invert the moral grammar of the Holocaust. Israelis were cast as the new Nazis; Palestinians, the new Jews. The language of genocide was appropriated and turned against its original referent. In this inversion, the obligation of Holocaust memory could be evaded. The moral necessity of Jewish self-defense could be ridiculed. If Jews were no longer victims but perpetrators, then antisemitism could return—rebranded as a form of liberation.
This did not merely distort historical memory. It neutralized it. Traditional antisemitism could now be revived under the guise of justice. The script flipped. And the cycle resumed.
We’ve seen a pattern of algorithmically amplified blood libel throughout the war in Gaza. The accusation that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital was transmitted around the world within hours, sparking protests and diplomatic condemnation. The digital virality of the accusation gave it moral traction before facts could intervene, reversing the burden of proof and embedding the lie into the public narrative. Only later did evidence confirm it was a misfired Palestinian rocket and civilian casualties far lower than reported.
The widely cited claim by the UN that 14,000 babies would die of starvation within 48 hours was not only unverified—it was false. That lie directly helped inflame Elias Rodriguez, a socialist activist who justified the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim using antizionist ideology and language chillingly familiar to anyone who inhabits a university campus or adjacent activist networks. The rhetoric he invoked—of genocide, settler-colonialism, Zionist criminality—was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a discourse already normalized and valorized across much of academic and cultural life.
More recently, the claim that Israel fired on Palestinians receiving U.S. aid was echoed by major outlets and officials, despite conflicting evidence and Hamas-controlled sourcing. What is becoming clearer in the aftermath is not just the fragility of the claim itself, but the extent to which the United Nations has been functionally aligned with Hamas, refusing to collaborate with any aid-initiatives that would wrest control from Hamas and UNRWA.
This is not accidental. It is part of what must now be understood as the evolution of Islamist spectacle warfare, a strategy that continues to evade critique within our universities. The first stage was developed by Al-Qaeda and realized with 9/11: a media-saturated display of terror meant to dramatize Islamist power and Western vulnerability. That attack was theatrical in its staging—iconic imagery, shock, repetition—but it lacked the second stage that Hamas has now perfected.
We now see a more complex, two-stage model, precisely tailored to postcolonial logics of guilt, grievance, and victimhood. The first act is still one of sadistic violence—October 7th was precisely this: filmed murders, mutilations, livestreamed atrocities, all designed to terrorize and to project power through cruelty. But the second act is even more important: the calculated exploitation of civilian suffering. Through mediatized human sacrifice, disinformation, and the systematic infiltration and manipulation of human rights organizations, Hamas curates a spectacle of victimhood in which its own responsibility for suffering disappears. The moral field is inverted. The aggressor becomes the martyr.
And when questions are raised—about narrative construction, disinformation, or the institutional entanglements of sources like the UN or UNRWA—the response of our intellectuals is not analysis, but dismissal: “But it’s true.”
This is a response that humanities scholars and social scientists would never accept in any other domain. Critical theorists and anti-racist scholars routinely interrogate how “truth” is constructed—how institutions like police departments, states, or international bodies produce racialized knowledge, embed bias in statistics, or reproduce structures of dominance. They ask: Who is speaking? What are their interests? How is the story being shaped?
But when the accusation is against Israel, these tools fall away. The UN is taken at face value—despite its long record of disproportionate condemnation of Israel. UNRWA is cited without qualification—despite its acknowledged ties to Hamas and its open opposition to any mechanism of humanitarian aid that bypasses Hamas control. The possibility of bias, distortion, or propaganda is simply excluded—even when the patterns on display would, in any other context, be immediately recognized as a case of institutional racism.
Why? Because many of the intellectuals who should be asking those questions are not merely silent—they are participants. They are too exhilarated by the sense of collective virtue, too entangled in the language of liberation, too invested in the status economy of anticolonial performance. They do not observe the spectacle—they perform it.
As Hannah Arendt warned, one of the harbingers of totalitarianism is precisely this: the alliance of the mob and the elite, the collapse of critical distance, the unification of street and salon under a shared delirium of certitude. This is why the academy cannot diagnose the present moment. It is too implicated in it. Its members are not observing from a distance—they are marching, chanting, signing, and branding themselves with the same accusatory symbols they once taught their students to deconstruct.
These patterns of delirium are not confined to rhetoric. They are visible in the targeting of synagogues and Jewish schools, in graffiti and vandalism, in mobs outside kosher restaurants, in chants of “Zionists off campus,” and in the explosion of antisemitic incidents across cities, campuses, and cultural spaces. The spectacle is unfolding not only in the streets, but inside institutions—cultural, academic, legal, and international—that ought to know better.
Taken together, the accumulation of this data—discursive, institutional, and physical—should make it undeniable that what we are living through is not merely a backlash or protest movement, and certainly not a liberation struggle arising spontaneously in response to Israeli actions, but something far older and more deeply structured: a global pogrom.
It is a transnational reactivation of antisemitic social logics under the sign of justice, displacing their historical forms into a new, moralized register.
To describe what we are witnessing as a global pogrom is not an act of silencing—it is an effort to reopen the space of reason that has been systematically shut down. It is not a refusal of critique, but a demand for it.
The task now is not to reject critique, but to recover it. If we still believe in reason, in responsibility, in the difficult work of thinking across difference, then we must be willing to bring our most powerful tools of analysis to bear even when they cut against our ideological comfort. Especially when the cost of ignoring these demands falls, yet again, on the Jews—targets of a global pogrom, rationalized as justice.