It Started with a Lecture, Not a Gun

Two Israeli embassy staffers were gunned down outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.—and some people are shocked?

Are you really surprised?

Because I’m not. Not after years of watching antisemitism normalized in classrooms, mainstreamed on social media, and dressed up as activism by influencers, professors, and the self-righteous class of armchair revolutionaries. These murders didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the logical result of a world that treats Jewish life as negotiable, Jewish grief as political leverage, and Jewish history as a lie.

This didn’t start with bullets. It started with ideas—malicious ones—pushed by people like Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, tenured at Columbia University, where she teaches students that the Jewish connection to the land of Israel is a political fabrication. Her academic career rests on a dissertation so outrageous, so lacking in scholarly rigor, that even academics critical of Israel questioned how it was ever approved. Her book Facts on the Ground, based on that dissertation, accuses Israeli archaeologists of inventing Jewish history to justify territorial claims. Graves, artifacts, ruins—according to her, it’s all a Zionist plot. This is not scholarship. It is gaslighting with footnotes. And she’s training a generation to believe that Jewish identity is fiction.

Other scholars have pointed out that Abu El-Haj lacks knowledge of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and other necessary languages to credibly interpret the very material culture she critiques. Her command of the field is so thin, she either dismisses or ignores thousands of years of archaeological and documentary evidence, including the very “facts on the ground” she claims to investigate. She skips over the countless stele, coins, mosaics, synagogue remnants, and ancient inscriptions engraved with Hebrew text—tangible, datable evidence of Jewish presence in the land.

And that’s just the stone record.

She ignores the treasure trove of Jewish spiritual life preserved in the Cairo Geniza—a vault of letters, contracts, and poetry stretching across centuries and continents, all animated by one enduring longing: to return to Jerusalem. Jews in Spain, Iraq, Yemen, Italy, and Morocco all directed their prayers eastward. Even Jews who lived in the land of Israel—under Islamic rule, Crusader rule, Ottoman rule—longed for the freedom to worship openly at their holy sites. They didn’t dream of “settling” a foreign land. They dreamed of reclaiming the one they never stopped calling home.

But none of that survives in her analysis. She erases it all—and is rewarded with tenure and embraced as a star academic. Just watch her in lectures available online—the inflection in her voice, the expression on her face when talking about Jews and Jewish history. It’s not just indifference. It’s disdain.

Her second book, The Genealogical Science, takes the erasure further—not just denying history, but denying Jewish peoplehood. Abu El-Haj claims there is “no evidence” that a people called the Jews were ever exiled from ancient Palestine or that their descendants returned to establish the modern State of Israel.

In other words: Jews are not a people, and Israel is a myth.

This isn’t just radical—it’s racist. It’s the academic version of Holocaust denial: a total erasure of Jewish continuity, of survival under occupation, and of the exilic dream that bound generations together through the ages. It denies what Jews have lived, sung, fasted, and died for—the right to return. It reduces an ancient longing into a modern political scheme.

And yet, she hides behind her credentials like armor. She has openly boasted about how many scholars approved her dissertation, as though academic recognition is a substitute for truth. But prestige isn’t evidence. The fact that elite institutions validated her work only proves what many of us already know: that anti-Zionist ideology is no longer a radical outlier in academia—it’s the currency of the realm.

This is the danger of intellectual elitism: when credentials are used not to support evidence, but to deflect criticism. Her academic standing is wielded not to encourage open debate, but to silence it. Rather than engage opposing views, she appeals to the status of her approvers—shielding weak claims behind institutional power.

That’s not scholarship, not really, it’s dogma in a doctoral robe.

Her work ignores centuries of archaeological findings, firsthand documentation, and continuous Jewish presence in the land. And if you were to swap out “Jewish” for “Native American” or any other indigenous people, oh boy, the outcry would be deafening. Her revisionism would never be tolerated, it would be condemned as cultural erasure, settler propaganda, academic violence. But because the subject (her target) is Jews, it’s repackaged as liberation theory and handed out as required reading.

And she’s not alone.

Derek Penslar, now co-chairing Harvard’s antisemitism task force, has publicly downplayed the rise in antisemitism, calling it “exaggerated.” He’s a vocal proponent of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism—a document designed not to protect Jews, but to shield Israel’s fiercest critics from accountability.

Ask yourself: would a professor of African American studies who claimed racism was “overblown” ever be asked to lead a task force on racial justice?

Of course not. But for Jews, the standard is different—because in today’s progressive hierarchy, Jews are not oppressed enough to matter, but just privileged enough to be disposable.

What other field exists where professors are celebrated not for preserving a people’s story, but for dismantling it?

Too often, modern Jewish Studies has become a self-immolating discipline. Less interested in continuity than in confession. Less about memory than mea culpas. Its new purpose isn’t to study the Jewish people—it’s to unmake them.

Edward Said, Columbia’s icon of postcolonial theory, spent his career reframing Zionism as imperialism and casting the Jewish return to their homeland as a foreign invasion. His legacy was never about history—it was about hijacking it.

Today, his daughter Najla Said carries the torch. In a recent podcast, she stated outright that “anyone still defending Israel is a sociopath.” She went further, attacking Jewish friends who refer to Israel as their home: “It’s not their home—they’re from Europe. It’s my home.” Her host agreed, adding she used to avoid comparing Israelis to Nazis—“not anymore!” If you have the time to listen to the entire exchange, what you’ll witness is ethnic cleansing by microphone.

Then there’s Alana Hadid—model, influencer, and casual antisemite. She refers to murdered Israeli babies as “unalive,” mocks Jewish trauma, and weaponizes her father’s Nakba narrative to legitimize every slander. She’s never lived in a war zone, never studied history, never lost family to terror—but she knows how to smirk and sneer for the algorithm.

It’s not just Jewish history that’s under siege—it’s Jewish reality. In today’s discourse, anything Israeli is immediately deemed stolen. Falafel? Appropriated. Hummus? Colonized. Shakshuka? Whitewashed.

The culinary traditions of Jews who’ve lived in the land for thousands of years are now framed as theft, as though Jewish farmers and families survived on moral ambiguity instead of olives, figs, dates, and grains grown in their own soil. Apparently, we just wandered through history with manna in our pockets.

And gone is any acknowledgment that long before there were Palestinians, this land passed through the hands of empires—Ottoman, Roman, Arab, British—each leaving a mark on the region’s flavors. Jews lived through all of it. Not just in the land of Israel but throughout the Middle East and North Africa, influencing and being influenced by the cuisines of Persia, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, and beyond.

Nobody owns a recipe—not Jews, not Arabs, not Ottomans. But the need to deny Jews anything—even a cuisine—is the modus operandi of the movement to strip Israel of legitimacy at every turn.

One prominent Palestinian chef, Reem Kassis, even went so far as to claim that Jews appropriated the bagel from Arab cuisine, suggesting that the iconic Jewish bread has its origins in the Arab world. This assertion overlooks the rich history of the bagel within Eastern European Jewish communities and serves as another example of the ongoing effort to delegitimize Jewish cultural contributions.

The obsession with erasing Jews from every cultural category—land, language, identity, even food—isn’t about justice. It’s about annihilation by narrative.

After years of turning Zionism into a slur, after years of enlisting A-listers to “stand with Gaza,” of elevating Jews against Zionism as moral cover, of blacklisting artists for daring to perform in Tel Aviv, of convincing everyone that anything made by Jews must be boycotted—what exactly did you expect? When an Israeli movie star headlines a film, she’s labeled a child killer. But when have we ever seen an Arab celebrity attached to such epithets for the actions of any Arab regime? Not once. And yet it is the Arab world that has occupied this land—and others—with force, with beheadings, with forced conversions. The tribal infighting rages across 22 Arab states and over 50 Muslim-majority nations. And still, in no other context are people collectively vilified for what happens in their homeland—except Jews. You bet we’re different. We’re different because no one has ever been hated like us. And that hatred drags something primitive out of even the most progressive minds. Don’t take my word for it—just look at yourselves. Look over your shoulder. It’s there.

This is the culture. This is the climate. This is what happens when hatred gets tenure, trends, and applause.

Israel didn’t set the stage. Hamas did—on October 7th—with an eruption of violence so grotesque it should have dismantled every excuse. Instead, it fed them. Now, every act of Israeli defense is put on trial. Every Jewish death is filtered through a chain of justification before it’s even confirmed. Murdered embassy staffers aren’t mourned—they’re treated as liabilities to someone else’s narrative. You’ve heard those recycled narratives daily: Tantura, Deir Yassin, Nakba . . . invoked like scripture as if they were comprehensive truths rather than politically weaponized fragments in a far broader history. And if you think they’re just about “truth-telling,” think again. They’re deployed to justify erasure. For more on this topic you can read  “Stop Pretending You Care, You Just Hate Israel” at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/stop-pretending-you-care-you-just-hate-israel/. As if a handful of contested or even dark moments define the entirety of Israel’s existence. As if any atrocities, alleged, real, or embellished justify erasing an entire nation. What other people are told that their sovereignty is void because of how they defended themselves in war? Where else is  statehood treated as conditional on moral perfection?

Regardless, this is where we are.

Not at the start of something terrible, but well into it. A place where reality has been so thoroughly bent that killing Jews can be framed as resistance, and objecting to that framing is labeled oppression.

So no, don’t act shocked.

Ask how many lectures, how many viral posts, how many tenured lies it took to make this possible. This wasn’t inevitable. It was engineered.

And the engineers are still teaching!