When societies stop solving problems, they start blaming Jews.
More than a 120-year-old libels & conspiracies are still shaping the world today. From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to modern antizionism, the accusations change but the scapegoat remains the same.
My latest Times of Israel article explores why rising Jew-hatred is often a warning sign of societal failure, not Jewish wrongdoing: https://t.co/WgZxh8xfPu
The level of delusion here is staggering.
I am 51. My DNA is 100% Ashkenazi Jew. So is my husband's. Our great grandparents fled pogroms to come to America.
Do you know how many times my ancestors had to resist assimilation and intermarriage? Do you know how many of their relatives died rather than abandon their faith? Do you know how much of my life has been shaped by Jewish community, Jewish education, religious observance, religious charity, summer camp, kosher food? Do you know how hard I worked to raise observant Jewish children in a modern world?
And yet the average user thinks they can throw up one poorly made meme about big bad Israel, or cite one Jew who did one bad thing one time, and I am going to denounce everything I and my ancestors held dear.
It is truly pathetic. And it says everything about the kind of person who posts them, and how cheaply they would trade their own soul.
NGOs “get their reports, their claims, their accusations, their propaganda, their lies, all of that into the New York Times, into the Washington Post, into Newsweek, into CNN…What gives them that influence?” NGO Monitor President @geraldNGOM on the NGO ecosystem behind @NickKristof’s infamous NYT oped.
@Jerusalem_Post@SamHalpern1
Once again, Associated Hebrew School (@AHSToronto ) has demonstrated what real moral leadership in education looks like.
By teaching students about the role of “Token Jews” in the cycle of libels and Jew-hatred, AHS is equipping the next generation with the critical thinking, resilience, and confidence to stand proudly in their identity and recognize manipulation when they see it.
This is world-leading education.
This is how we break the cycle.
StopAntizionism delivers elite research-driven education and training that equips individuals and institutions to recognize, understand, and confront the evolving threat of antizionism with clarity and confidence.
Break the Cycle of Libels.
Learn more or bring a program to your institution:
https://t.co/B0zkFgSD5p
The ABC’s shock decision to employ as a podcast host Grace Tame, who described corroborated reports of Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli women as ‘propaganda’ which had been ‘debunked’ and led a pro-Palestine rally chanting ‘globalise the intifada’, is untenable.
How can Australians be expected to trust the ABC when it hires a high-profile activist who spread false information about the barbaric October 7 terrorist attacks and engaged in conduct which promotes hostility towards Jewish people?
➡️ https://t.co/nSTokr28Ub
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Jew-hatred works and it leads to a critical error: thinking that this has anything to do with free speech. Across all three historical phases of Jew-hatred, antijudaism, antisemitism, and antizionism, the logic is consistent: take whatever a society holds as sacred, then accuse Jews of desecrating it. Unfortunately, @coldxman make a categorial error in his interview with @ggreenwald . He begins with the wrong frame: free speech. And this misunderstanding has a direct consequence. Because Jew-hatred is misread as ordinary bigotry, the antizionist can reframe any pushback against it as censorship, accusing Jews of shutting down legitimate “criticism of Israel.”
Coleman Hughes pre-emptively sides with Greenwald: of course, we should be allowed to call Israel a “racist state” because to forbid it would be censorship. But this concession reveals the same core misunderstanding of how Jew-hatred actually works. Every era has its own moral vocabulary, and “antisemitism” has always spoken fluently in it. In medieval Europe, the highest moral authority was the Church, and the gravest sin was defying God. So, Jews were accused of killing Christ. In the nationalist nineteenth century, the gravest sin was betraying the nation. So, Jews were accused of being a state within a state, loyal to no country but their own interests.
Today, the reigning moral framework is human rights. The United Nations, today’s church, was built around protecting human rights. And the gravest sins within that framework have names: racism, colonialism, genocide, apartheid. So when antizionists label Israel a racist, apartheid, genocidal, colonialist state, they are not simply levelling policy criticisms. They are deploying the most powerful moral accusations available in contemporary society. Calling Israel “racist” today functions exactly as calling Jews “Christ-killers” did in medieval Europe; it's the same structure, updated for a new moral language.
Next, when Coleman brings up the IHRA definition, Greenwald quickly snaps back and says, “look at what the Jews are doing: they are having the federal government get involved in speech on campus.” Greenwald thinks he has made a strong point because he believes this proves that Jews have this secret power to control, in this case, speech on campus. Surprisingly, Coleman, who is smart, did not immediately bring up Title VI, the 1964 civil rights act as an example of when the government did get involved with bigotry at work against black people.
The problem with all of this is that they think, or at least Coleman thinks that he is a having a stimulating “intellectual” conversation when he is engaging with a bigot, albeit a sophisticated one. But see we do not have distance from the antizionism era the way we do from the previous two eras of Jew-hatred so we really believe that these are normal conversations when they are not. They are today’s permission slips to do find Jews morally repugnant and thus necessary to be “dealt with.”
There is a history lesson that the British Museum might usefully teach, were it still in the business of teaching history rather than surrendering it to the heckler’s veto.
It goes like this: when a society can no longer protect its Jews in the public square, cannot guarantee that a talk about ancient archaeology will not be shut down by a mob, it has already lost something foundational. The Jews are not the only ones who should be alarmed. They are simply the first.
Yesterday the British Museum, founded in 1753, repository of civilisation's deepest memory, cancelled a Jewish Culture Month event on the kingdoms of Ancient Israel and Judah. Not because the content was controversial. Not because the speaker, Dr Paul Collins, was provocative. But because a "significant number" of registered attendees had pre-planned to disrupt it. The bullies, in other words, didn't even need to show up. The threat alone was sufficient. The institution folded. A talk about archaeology, about pottery and inscriptions from a civilisation nearly three thousand years old, was considered too dangerous to host.
Let that sink in. This is Britain in 2026.
The museum's statement was a masterpiece of institutional euphemism. It spoke of its “responsibility to ensure that events hosted within the Museum can proceed safely.” It noted, with some delicacy, its commitment to "freedom of expression in a democratic society." What it did not say - what it could not quite bring itself to say - is that a group of activists committed to the erasure of any Jewish connection to the land of Israel decided that even academic archaeology was an affront, and that rather than face them down, Britain's foremost cultural institution chose to stand aside.
This is not a security decision. It is a political one. And it carries a clear message: that organised intimidation works.
Worse still, it is not even an isolated incident. Last year, the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth postponed an exhibition on Jewish life in the town, citing “security concerns” and what it called a “sensitive time.” The exhibition, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, celebrating a century and a half of Jewish community life, was quietly shelved. It came after a Jewish man had been shot with an air rifle in Bournemouth's East Cliff neighbourhood and swastika graffiti had been painted on a local rabbi's home.
Then there was Edinburgh. Last summer, two Jewish comedians had their shows cancelled from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe after staff members raised "safety concerns". One of them, Philip Simon, said afterwards: "I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish."
This is a story that Jews in this country have grown sickeningly familiar with. The language changes slightly each time - "security concerns," "sensitive period," "logistical challenges" - but the outcome is always the same: Jewish culture retreats and the mob advances.
And now the British Museum. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the incremental, bureaucratically managed exclusion of Jews from British public life - achieved not through legislation, not through violence, but through the quiet, cowardly calculation that accommodating the mob is less trouble than standing with the minority it targets.
"London is for everyone" - except, it appears, for Jewish Londoners who wish to attend a talk about ancient history without requiring a security cordon and police guard. "Antisemitism has no place here" - except, it seems, at public galleries, comedy and theatre venues, university campuses across London, and now the British Museum. When a city's most celebrated cultural institution cannot guarantee the safety of a lecture on ancient pottery, the mayor's solemn pledges ring not as reassurance but as insult.
The British Museum's statement said the decision was taken "to protect the event, not to diminish it." This is precisely the kind of sentence that tells you everything while appearing to say nothing. What the museum was actually protecting was not the event - which it cancelled - but itself: its staff, its management, its desire not to be in the newspapers for the wrong reasons. The result, of course, is that it is in the newspapers for the worst possible reason. The protesters won without stepping through the door. And the institution that holds the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, that has survived the Blitz and two world wars and three centuries of global upheaval, has demonstrated that it cannot survive a vocal mob with bad intentions.
Public money flows generously to these institutions. If they cannot maintain a basic standard of intellectual courage in exchange for it - if they will cancel Jewish history at the first whiff of organised hostility - then serious questions about that compact are not only legitimate but urgent.
What is needed is not sympathy but spine. The British Museum should have taken the measures necessary - whatever they were - to allow the event to go ahead on the planned date. If it lacked the resources, it should have asked for them. If it lacked the legal tools, the Government should long since have provided them. The Director should have stood at the door, personally if necessary, and said: this institution does not negotiate with intimidation. Instead, it issued a statement of regret, rescheduled to a date yet to be confirmed and hoped the story would blow over.
My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. She spent the remainder of her long life trying to understand how a continent of supposedly civilised nations - with their museums, their universities, their cultural institutions - had permitted the systematic exclusion, humiliation, and ultimately murder of its Jews: one bureaucratic decision at a time, each supposedly reasonable in isolation, each contributing to a logic that ended in catastrophe. She did not ask future generations to simply remember. She asked them to act.
The British Museum will, no doubt, host the talk eventually. It will be rescheduled for a quieter moment, with more security, with fewer registered protestors, with a smaller Jewish audience too. It will be, in all the ways that matter, a diminished thing. And the people who believe that Jewish culture has no place in British public life will note that their tactics worked. And they will use them again.
Once again, the antisemitic mob has scored a victory.
The British Museum has announced that an event to mark Jewish Culture Month in the UK entitled “Ancient Israel and Judah in the British Museum” has been postponed.
According to its press statement, this was due to the museum being “informed that a significant proportion of registered attendees were individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event, preventing others from participating in good faith and undermining the purpose of the programme.”
In modern Britain, you can’t have a Jewish Culture Month.
Soon enough, in modern Britain you may not have many Jews either, given the percentages of them who say that they are considering leaving the country.
The Prime Minister recently talked about how Jewish people are being bullied out of the arts: now we’re seeing it at the country’s leading museum.
We are still waiting for some brave institution to stand up and say that the Jew-hating mob will not win in their space.
One wonders if there are any still left in modern Britain.
https://t.co/ikM8h7PiaQ
@bigvorch@thewebbie To raise proud Jews, we must teach both the timeless wisdom of Torah and the extraordinary modern story of Israel and the Jewish people.
We have a crisis on our hands - the lack of education about Judaism and Israel allows the lies to spread. It's time to take action and do something about it.
https://t.co/af6CIaLG0u
BREAKING: The U.S. Government has officially added Francesca Albanese, the UN's de facto spokesperson for Hamas, back to its sanctions list.
“The following individual has been added to OFAC's SDN [Specially Designated Nationals] List:
ALBANESE, Francesca Paola
30 Mar 1977”
Which U.N. officials are taking money from Qatar, China, and Russia?
Today at 6 pm Geneva time (12 noon in NYC) we are releasing a 100-page exposé.
Stay tuned.