The Delusion Behind the New Antisemitism

In March 2019, I posted on this blog a piece titled “Surrounded by Antisemitism.”
In that essay, I revisited an article Vanity Fair had published 17 years earlier. “France’s Scarlet Letter,” written by retired French police officer Sammy Ghozlan, documented a disturbing rise in attacks against French Jews by Muslim extremists. It was not speculation. Ghozlan had hard data and was describing something unfolding in real time: Jewish schools threatened, synagogues attacked, families harassed, and ordinary people made to feel unsafe in the country they called home.
His article was a warning. Some French Jews took it seriously and left. Others stayed, hoping the hostility would pass.

It didn’t.

By 2019, the same patterns were becoming harder to ignore in the United States. Ilhan Omar had recently been elected to Congress and as a reward to herself she made a series of antisemitic remarks. Omar suggested that support for Israel was bought with Jewish money, questioned the political allegiance of Americans who defended Israel, and invoked the old suspicion that Jews exercise secret financial and political control.

Her very public comments were not new. They were recycled versions of accusations that have followed Jews for centuries: that they are rich, or poor, disloyal or loyal only for selfish goals, are manipulative, and quietly conspiring against society.
The timing made the remarks chilling. Only five months earlier, a gunman had entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 worshippers. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Yet even in the shadow of that massacre, public figures were still willing to use rhetoric that portrayed Jews as powerful outsiders whose loyalty should be questioned.

Writing in The New York Times, Bret Stephens argued that Omar knew exactly what she was doing. He warned that if such rhetoric continued to gain acceptance, “the days when American Jews can live comfortably within the Democratic fold will be numbered.”

At the time, some dismissed his warning as melodramatic. But it was prescient.
In the last few days, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called Benjamin Netanyahu an “architect of genocide.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has compared Gaza to a concentration camp and described Israel as a genocidal state. The American Psychological Association, my professional home for four decades, elected a president associated with “liberation psychology” whose public positions have prompted grave concern among many Jewish psychologists.
These are not careless people who impulsively chose the wrong words. They understand the historical and emotional weight of terms such as “genocide” and “concentration camp.” They know precisely what they are saying and the intent of their words.

Their accusations do more than condemn Israeli policy. It turns Jewish history against the Jewish state. It recasts the descendants of genocide’s victims as its modern perpetrators. Once Israel is placed in the same moral category as Nazi Germany, almost any action against it can be portrayed as justified. Terrorism becomes “resistance.” Hostage-taking becomes less than a footnote. The murder of civilians is dismissed, explained away as inevitable.

Words shape what people are willing to tolerate. When “genocide” is repeated often enough, hatred begins to sound like justice.

Hamas is not merely a political movement resisting an occupation. It is an armed Islamist organization whose leaders openly praise martyrdom and celebrate killing of Israeli civilians. Its strategy has included massacres, suicide bombings, rocket attacks, hostage-taking, and military operations conducted from densely populated civilian areas. Its fighters have embedded themselves within the population they claim to defend, increasing the danger to Palestinians while gaining propaganda value from every civilian death.

That strategy depends on the outside world forgetting how the war began and ignoring how Hamas chooses to fight it.

Humanitarian facts must also be examined carefully. Israel has facilitated hundreds of truckloads of aid entering Gaza regularly, though distribution, access, and the adequacy of that aid remain fiercely disputed because of Hamas’s piracy. Gaza’s population also grew dramatically. That history does not settle every question about current conduct, but it does complicate claims that Israel has pursued a longstanding plan to exterminate the Palestinian people.

Genocide is a specific legal charge requiring evidence of an intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. Using the term carelessly does not help Palestinians. It weakens the meaning of one of the gravest crimes humanity has named. There is a larger ambition behind this propaganda, one rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision of a worldwide caliphate. Its adherents imagine a global order governed by Sharia, with Jews eliminated, Christians following, and pluralistic democracy replaced by a rigid doctrinaire religion.

This is not an accusation against Muslims as a whole. Millions of Muslims reject Islamist extremism, and many have suffered under it. The threat is a specific political and religious ideology that seeks power through grievance, intimidation, and the demonization of anyone who stands in its way.

At its core, the dream of a worldwide caliphate is a delusion of grandeur built on a lie: the belief that history is destined to deliver the entire world into the hands of one movement, one faith, and one rigid system of rule. It is detached from reality, yet that does not make it harmless. Delusional movements can be exceptionally dangerous, especially when they persuade followers that violence is sacred, compromise is betrayal, and the deaths of civilians are useful steps toward a divine objective.

Social media has made this lie easier to spread than ever. A false claim can circle the globe before the truth has opened its eyes. Graphic images are stripped of context, slogans replace evidence, and historical terms are turned into political weapons. The accusation of “genocide” becomes especially useful because it transforms Israel from a country fighting an enemy into the embodiment of evil.

The worldwide caliphate may be a fantasy, but the campaign to advance it is real. The propaganda is real. Radicalization is real. And the consequences for Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims, secular people, women, LGBTQ people, and democratic societies are real.

Precision matters. The enemy is the totalitarian Islamist ideology that uses religion as a claim to absolute political power and antisemitism as one of its oldest and most effective weapons.

The lie must be named as it is becoming conventional falsehood presented as wisdom and the delusion must be confronted before more people are recruited into it.