The International Court of Justice is preparing to lower the legal threshold for “genocidal intent”; not in South Africa’s case against Israel, which everyone is watching, but Gambia’s suit against Myanmar, which gets less than 1% of the coverage.

If you have rarely, if ever, heard of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim ethnic group facing a systematic military campaign of mass killings, sexual violence and village burnings, that is exactly the point. Despite the urgency and gravity of their humanitarian crisis, they are not the reason the government of Ireland, purported “human rights” groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and U.N. Special Rapporteurs such as the contemptible Francesca Albanese are seeking this new ruling.

To understand why the aforementioned parties see a need to move the goalposts is to reveal their true agenda. A bar is lowered when conduct one wishes to condemn does not remotely clear the current one. This cast of characters has attempted to slander Israel as “genocidal” for decades and has always suffered from the same problem: The facts do not merely fail to support the charge; they refute it.

Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, when roughly 1.4 million people lived there. By 2023 the figure had passed 2.1 million—a rise of better than half in 16 years. Not incidentally, that is one of the highest growth rates on earth. Whatever else was happening in Gaza across those 16 years of alleged extermination, mass murder wasn’t it. No genocide in recorded history has produced that result because that is not genocide. The word has a meaning, and the people deploying it against Israel have always known that the meaning does not fit.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, constructed the word “genocide” in 1944 out of Greek and Latin to name what was then being done to his own family members—49 of them were murdered in the Holocaust. He created the term so that the world would never again be able to say it had no language for what it was watching. But now advocates are pushing to redefine his word to tie that vile crime to Jews as perpetrators rather than victims.

There is a name in psychology for what is happening here: projection. The charge is not an analysis of Israeli conduct; it is a confession of the accuser’s own intent, laundered through the accused.

Hamas has never been coy about its intentions. Its 1988 covenant does not call for a state, border or negotiation; it calls for genocide, the real kind, without exaggeration and without prevarication. It quotes a hadith in which the stones and trees call out to Muslims to come kill the Jews hiding behind them. And lest one imagine this is merely some form of theological hyperbole, Hamas leaders said proudly after Oct. 7 that, if given the chance, they would repeat the massacre of that day again and again until Israel is annihilated.

That is a program for implementing Hitler’s Final Solution, stated in public in the organization’s own words. Thus, those who march for Hamas and cannot say the word “Hamas” without an apology attached accuse Israel of the very crime they are marching to see committed against Jews. They describe their own ambition and put Israel’s name on it.

Consider, as well, a fact that ought to end the argument and never does. John Spencer, who chairs urban warfare studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and has spent a career studying the subject, has stated that Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any military in the history of warfare. This encompasses measures that the United States did not implement in Iraq or Afghanistan, or, for that matter, by any other army anywhere. Evacuation warnings, roof-knocks, leaflets, phone calls, published corridors, daily pauses: Every one of them surrendered surprise, which is to say every one of them risked the lives of Israeli soldiers. Israel has paid for Arab civilian safety in Jewish blood, repeatedly and deliberately.

Hamas spent those same months doing the precise opposite, with equal deliberation. It built its command posts under hospitals and its rocket launchers beside schools; it blocked the corridors Israel opened; and it fought in civilian clothes from inside apartment blocks. This was not indifference to Gazan life, but a deliberate strategy that depended upon needless deaths. Hamas understood that every Arab child killed in a building it had turned into a bunker would be charged against Israel, because it knew that the world has blood-libeled Jews for deaths caused by others for millennia.

The present day is no exception, and this is where the West’s moral scolds come in.

The Hamas strategy depended upon the campus encampments, celebrity statements, U.N. rapporteurs and newspaper editorialists. They were not incidental to Hamas’s calculation; they were the mechanism. Every professor and pop star who blamed Israel for collateral damage caused by Hamas encouraged Hamas to cause more Arab deaths. If you want to know who was responsible for Arab children dying in Gaza, start with Hamas, and continue directly to the people who guaranteed that those deaths would be profitable for the terrorists.

Nor was that the full extent of their culpability. Objectively, if someone is being tortured, starved and forced to dig his own grave, as Evyatar David was until his release, then someone whose only contribution is to slander his rescuers as “genocidal” is a barbarian who is at least indifferent to torture and starvation, if not wanting it to continue. If someone is being sexually assaulted daily, as Arbel Yahoud was, someone slandering her rescuers as “genocidal” is a deviant. And if a months-old baby is murdered with bare hands by his captors, as Kfir Bibas was, someone slandering his rescuers is simply a monster.

QED, the governments of South Africa, Ireland, Iceland, Brazil and several other states—like Cuba, Nicaragua and other “paragons” of human rights—are dominated by barbarians, deviants and monsters. To those with a working moral compass, this is no exaggeration.

So let us understand what the judges at The Hague are being recruited for: They are being asked to take a word that the Jewish people gave international law—purchased at a price no one should have to pay, much less repeatedly—and file its edges down until it can be turned around and weaponized against the Jews.

The judges should be told the rest of it too: A threshold low enough to convict Israel is quite low enough to convict the United States, Britain and every First World peacekeeping force that has ever been forced to fight in a city. That is not a warning. It is the plan.

Lemkin wanted a word so that the world could not plead confusion. It is worth noticing who is now working so hard to make it confusing again.

Photo: Raphael Lemkin, courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society/Center for Jewish History, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

For two years, Motaz Azaiza was the West’s eyes in Gaza. TIME named him one of its 100 most influential people. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. CNN, The Guardian, and GQ Middle East all featured his work, as did UNRWA. Now, in an Arabic-language podcast called Taqarrab, Azaiza has told us what his eyes actually saw – and what he decided the rest of us should not.

He also admitted that every reference to the war in Gaza as a genocide, including his own in speeches across America, was a lie.

“I saw the vehicle of the Al-Qassam Brigades, and there were [Israeli captives] there,” he said. “People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed. But I did not publish those videos.” Why not? “I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them. I did not want to be responsible, even indirectly, for the deaths of those people.”

Read that carefully, because the coverage has mostly framed it as a mere lapse in journalistic ethics. Azaiza did not fail to obtain the evidence. He obtained it, and he weighed it. On one side of the scale were Israeli hostages being beaten by a mob; on the other, the safety of the men beating them. And he chose the mob.

Per journalistic norms, photographs are often withheld to protect victims from further harm. Azaiza hid his photos for precisely the opposite reason: he didn’t want Israel to arrest or neutralize the perpetrators. Innocent civilians had been kidnapped, already sexually abused, and his concern was with the people that beat them and rejoiced at Hamas’ crimes. Jewish suffering was the one category of footage he decided to withhold.

He also told us that he was not alone. “Photographers in Gaza have become accustomed to lowering their cameras the moment someone says something bad about Hamas,” he said, “because anyone who dares to show reality is persecuted relentlessly.” Every image that came out of Gaza for two years passed through that filter. What the world was shown, Azaiza told us, was what Hamas permitted it to see.

Every award and platform he was given rested on the notion that Azaiza was providing us with a “raw” and “unfiltered” account. And that was never true.

But the most important confession in that interview has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

Azaiza is angry at Hamas. Not, Heaven forbid, for October 7. “I support armed resistance,” he explained. Let us be clear about what “armed resistance” meant that morning: families murdered in their beds, women raped, a music festival turned into a killing field, babies carried into Gaza as hostages – soon to be murdered. Azaiza’s objection is not that Hamas slaughtered civilians. It’s that he wanted “results.”

And then he addressed the fact that Hamas didn’t lay down its weapons for two full years. “You could have agreed to that already on October 11, 2023. Why was it so important that tens of thousands would be killed?” “You brought us back to the Middle Ages,” he said.

Sit with that for a minute. Arguably the most celebrated Arab photographer of the entire war said that the war could have ended four days after it began, had Hamas accepted then what it ultimately accepted later. It was, for Hamas, a choice, and he condemned Hamas for choosing instead to let Gaza burn.

Which means, of course, that there was no genocide.

In no genocide in human history have the victims controlled the off switch. The Jews of Europe could not end the Holocaust by releasing hostages. The Tutsi could not stop the machetes by giving up arms. The Armenians, the Cambodians, the Yazidis – none of them could halt their own extermination by agreeing to terms. Genocide requires intent to destroy a people for who they are. In such cases, if the victims lay down what weapons they have, the killing accelerates.

There was no genocide in Gaza, but a war, and every day it continued was because Hamas made a decision. Azaiza knows this, because he lived it. He said so in his own language, to his own audience, with no Israeli spokesman anywhere in sight: Hamas, not Israel, was to blame for two years of death and destruction across Gaza. That is quite an admission, coming from a man who toured America decrying a “genocide” that, per his own statements, never was.

And that brings us back to Ms. Rachel, and to the entire chorus of celebrities, professors, U.N. rapporteurs and editorial boards who have spent the same two years hurling the same bogus charge of genocide against Israel. Just last week, pledging $1 million to Palestinian causes, Ms. Rachel invited “every wealthy White celebrity to match it and speak out against the genocide in Gaza.” Her “friend Motaz” has now told her that the deaths she laid at Israel’s feet were Hamas’s choice, made deliberately and prolonged needlessly. Put two and two together, and he called her a liar.

Do not expect a retraction, much less an end to their friendship. Azaiza called himself a liar as well, but don’t expect his reputation to suffer. The genocide libel was never built on reality; like every blood libel before it, it was built on the need to blame Jews for deaths caused by others.

The Talmud teaches a key principle: hoda’as ba’al din k’meah eidim dami – the admission of a party to the case is like the testimony of a hundred witnesses. Motaz Azaiza hid the footage because he was no impartial observer, but a propagandist on behalf of the terrorists. He still supports the senseless murder of Jews, for which reason he despises Israel. Yet he has admitted to the world that Hamas could have ended this war in October of 2023, and chose not to.

That is an admission worth a hundred witnesses. It is time the people who made him famous chose to listen.

Photo: Motaz Azaiza attends UNRWA USA’s Gaza 5k event in Dallas, 9-28-2024, by FeaturingDallas, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As the summer came to an end, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel stood before a room of Jewish Democrats and reached for the Book of Esther. Jews, she intoned, have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” It is, she said, “perhaps up to us now to follow in Esther’s path and sacrifice the comfort, safety, and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”

For many decades, I have read the Book of Esther at least twice each year, following along on the holiday of Purim as it is read from a scroll in the original Hebrew. And to say that I do not recognize the story Nessel is telling would be an understatement. It seems far more likely that Nessel went to the Bible in desperation, as she sought to defend the unconscionable as somehow moral.

Esther, needless to say, did not sacrifice her people. On the contrary, the cause for which she risked her own life was their survival. When Mordechai first asked her to approach the king unsummoned, Esther hesitated, because unauthorized entry to the throne room was punishable by death. Mordechai’s admonishment to her is one of the most quoted lines in the entire book: “Who knows whether you have attained royal position for such a time as this?” Her obligation was to save her nation.

That is not a minor detail that Nessel got backward. It is the whole point of the story. Esther used what power she had, at personal risk, in open and unapologetic defense of her people. To invoke her name while asking American Jews to set aside “even our own survival” for someone else’s cause inverts the text entirely.

It also inverts the American ethos, which recognizes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable human rights, with life first among them. No person should be expected to sacrifice the safety of his or her community for some purportedly noble cause. Given Jewish history, to make such a demand of Jews is particularly vile. One could hardly find a better example of demonizing Jews for being Jews than to cast Jewish concern for our own survival as a failure of virtue. Nessel may be Jewish, but what she said was unquestionably antisemitic.

And if she wishes to “save the rest of humanity,” she should note how previous groups and governments have fared after they acted with hatred toward the Jewish community. No elected official should advocate for America to follow a millennia-long, unmitigated record of disappearance into the dustbin of history. When Esther saved the Jewish people, she also, for a time, saved the empire that had turned against them.

The great sage Hillel taught all humanity a better approach with three simple questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Note the order. Self-preservation comes first, not as selfishness but as the precondition for everything else a person or a people might contribute to the world. A community with no desire for survival has nothing left to give.

Nessel’s underlying message was stunning: in order to support her party, one must disregard Jewish survival. She claimed that permitting bigotry and hate were prerequisites in order to back her ideology. And while I would argue that, overall, this is certainly not the case, it is most emphatically true regarding several of its candidates, including in her home state. In that regard, at least, the citizens of Michigan would be advised to listen carefully.

Photo: Dana Nessel by Showtime, licensed under CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One year ago, the voice of Charlie Kirk was silenced by an assassin’s bullet. The Torah teaches, however, that a voice is not silenced when a person leaves the world, as long as others study and learn from his words. The message that Charlie shared cannot be lost with him.

If Charlie stood for one thing, it was values. He advocated for the dignity of every person and group, recognizing the spark of the Divine in every human life. He championed peaceful and robust discourse. He spoke often of the importance of family and children, which he also demonstrated through personal example.

For countless Jews in America and Israel, Charlie was a true friend and ally. At a time when standing with the Jewish people became increasingly difficult and, in some circles, socially and professionally costly, Charlie Kirk stood with us proudly, publicly, and without apology.

Charlie understood what too many influential Americans have forgotten: Israel is not merely a modern country or a political project. It is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to which Jews have prayed to return for thousands of years.

His support for Israel was not contingent on polling, applause or political convenience, but rooted in moral clarity. Charlie recognized that Israel stands on the front lines of a much larger struggle between civilization and barbarism, freedom and tyranny, life and those who glorify death.

He understood that antisemitism is never only a Jewish problem. Hatred may begin with the Jews, but history teaches us that it never ends with the Jews. A society that tolerates the demonization of Jewish students, the celebration of terrorism or calls for Israel’s destruction is a society surrendering its own moral foundations.

After the horrors of October 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered, tortured and kidnapped innocent men, women and children, Charlie did not equivocate. He did not retreat into comfortable language, much less the moral rot that took over much of American academia. He defended Israel’s right to protect its citizens and confronted the poisonous spread of antisemitism, recognizing these as part and parcel of his efforts to promote peace, justice, and moral virtue.

Charlie recognized the connection between faith, family and freedom. Although he was a committed Christian, he respected the Hebrew Bible, defended the Jewish roots of American civilization, and encouraged young people to reject the emptiness of radical secularism. He called them back to belief, responsibility, marriage, parenthood and service to something greater than themselves.

Along the way, he consistently demonstrated his concern for ideology over identity. In one notable confrontation, Charlie faced the late founder of “Cosmic Judaism,” who rose to promote socialism by dismissing the value of Jewish Day School education and the clear gap between public and private schooling overall. Charlie could not conscience a purported rabbi calling a Torah education “brainwashing,” and rejected the questioner’s claim to accurately speak for Judaism. “No, you absolutely take the Torah literally,” he interjected. “It’s literally the Torah!”

In an age that rewards caution, Charlie was fearless. In a culture drowning in carefully rehearsed talking points, he spoke directly. He specifically entered hostile spaces because he believed truth should never fear a debate.

We must realize, then, that his murder was not simply another senseless crime. It was an attack upon the American tradition of resolving disagreements through argument and persuasion rather than intimidation and bloodshed. This, of course, is one of many key lessons the Founding Fathers learned from our people.

Judaism also teaches us to answer darkness by creating more light. We answer hatred with moral courage, and answer those who attempt to silence truth by speaking it more boldly.

Charlie left behind a wife, children and a movement that continues to carry his mission forward. Our prayers remain with his family, whose loss is beyond measure. May they find comfort in knowing that his life changed millions and that his friendship will not be forgotten by the Jewish people.

May his courage inspire a new generation to stand for values and against antisemitism, to defend life, marriage, Israel, and the freedom to speak the truth. And may we honor him not only with words, but by continuing the work for which he gave his life.

Photo: Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary was a clarifying moment. By endorsing the winner, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) abandoned all pretense of serving as a shomer, or “guardian,” of the beleaguered Jewish community. It is not just that Schumer indicated that he would endorse even an antisemite for political gain; it is that he did.

El-Sayed has not hidden his attitude toward Jews, which wallpapers slogans about Israel and Zionism over classical antisemitism. No one of intelligence could fail to see the similarities between his beliefs and those that overtook Germany less than a century ago.

He regards the Jews as a collective threat, stating without evidence that the Israeli government is “just as evil as Hamas,” the genocidal terrorists responsible for the worst anti-Jewish massacre since the Holocaust. El-Sayed claimed that rescuing hostages from torture and rape, and neutralizing those genocidal terrorists, constitutes “genocide.” Jewish lives, in other words, have no value in his view.

In a modern spin on the old “Chosen People” myth, he accuses Jews of racism, calling the only Middle Eastern country that gives both Jews and Arabs civil rights an “apartheid” state. And like his ideological forebears, he considers a boycott of Jews an appropriate “response.” Perhaps worst of all, El-Sayed used these depraved lies about Israel to justify violence against Jews in his home state. This is no different than the Nazis blaming Jews for the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938.

No one who values Western civilization or basic human decency would consider El-Sayed remotely fit to be a U.S. senator.

This brings us back to Schumer, who is placing political gain ahead of moral principle. During the primary, he backed the more moderate, pro-Israel candidate Rep. Haley Stevens. But once El-Sayed prevailed, Schumer immediately pivoted and was quite forthright about why. He issued a statement with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) that declared they were “united by a common purpose” with El-Sayed: “taking back the Senate.”

To Schumer, party cohesion and electoral math come first, while the character of the nominee takes a distant second. That is why he and Gillibrand both supported the now disgraced Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine, despite his Nazi tattoo and a series of scandals, until a sexual assault accusation from a former Platner girlfriend sent them scurrying like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

For a lesson in moral courage, Schumer could learn from Boy George, who released a new song, “Od Nirkod” (“We Will Dance Again”), standing with the Jewish community at great professional and personal cost. In fact, he could study a political leader Schumer himself has accused of antisemitism in the past: U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump has openly stated that El-Sayed hates Jews and Israel. Though entirely accurate, one could dismiss this as political posturing based upon party affiliation. This, however, would fail to recognize Trump’s penchant for repeatedly getting it right about hatred of Jews and Israel. He demonstrates this most clearly not when his targets are his political adversaries or adversarial college administrators, but his fellow Republicans.

Trump has distanced himself even from former allies over antisemitism, pushing back when they cross into anti-Jewish bias and conspiracy theories. He forcefully rejected former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and actively campaigned against soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), both Republicans.

After podcaster Tucker Carlson’s interviews with a series of antisemitic bigots and his subsequent attacks on Trump’s policy on Israel and Iran, including claims that attacked Jewish organizations, Trump declared that Carlson “has lost his way,” is “not MAGA” and does not represent “America First.” Trump has said his movement has no room for antisemites.

This difference in attitude has an obvious practical impact upon the two parties. The most powerful Democratic leaders, including one who proudly trots out his personal Jewish identity whenever it suits him, treat fighting antisemitism and the demonization of the Jewish state as secondary to gaining power.

Leaders on the other side, including Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), dismiss erstwhile allies and refuse to include them and their bigoted views for political profit.

This is what Jews in America need: not calculations of which candidate is electable in a purple state, but clarity on who will defend their security and legitimacy without apology.

El-Sayed’s primary victory, coupled with Schumer’s subsequent endorsement, demands a moral choice that transcends political inclinations. True friendship with the Jewish community is evaluated based on actions and adherence to principles, rather than on birth certificates or party affiliations. In this regard, the Democrats’ record is not even close to that of the Republicans.

Photo: Chuck Schumer official photo by U.S. Senate Photographic Studio/Jeff McEvoy, public domain (U.S. federal government work), via Wikimedia Commons

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s bogus threat against Israel’s prime minister revealed something essential about his political career — and even more about his sycophants. When Mamdani promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should he set foot in the United States, only to admit that this would be both impossible and illegal just days later, his fan club did not blink, much less assess whether he was prone to reckless, false claims. They simply moved on.

That indifferent reaction is the point: Mamdani’s followers are not impressed by truth or history.

A fact-free mob is dangerous, often more likely to justify violence than to condemn it. One can expect that they will respond to his new call for “protest” by conducting themselves like those described on CNN as “mostly peaceful” while stores burned in the background. As NYPD Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry put it, “violent agitators will assume they have permission to cause as much havoc as possible.” Already, a deranged man yelling Allahu Akbar attacked bystanders (including a Jew coming from prayers) in NYC just days after Mamdani’s racist tirade.

And Mamdani must have known he was inciting his crowd. He gave them not only permission but pretense, stating as fact that Netanyahu was a “war criminal,” deserving of a violent welcome. He claimed that Israel’s rescue of hostages being tortured, starved and raped, and the elimination of the terrorists responsible, constituted a “genocide.”

He wants us to imagine that it’s simply coincidence that the victims whose rescue he condemned were primarily Jews. Surely he would deny being the monster and sexual deviant that such condemnation makes him out to be.

But, crucially, his entire effort is based upon such obvious lies. Equating the neutralization of terrorists to murder of civilians is the least of his problems.

That honor goes to the underlying narrative of “Palestine,” which Mamdani and his followers defend with fervor and without curiosity.

The Bible refers to Israel thousands of times as both a nation and a homeland. “Palestine,” on the other hand, was invented by Greco-Roman colonialists, and instituted by Hadrian to replace the indigenous name Judea, identified with the Jews he was driving out.

The “Palestinian” flag flown at rallies is derived from that of the Arab Revolt of 1916, representing no new identity, but the Jihadists’ dream of a unified Arab kingdom from Syria to Yemen. Old administrative maps of the British Mandate, and similar bureaucratic charts dating back hundreds of years, are exploited to rewrite the historical record of the land they depict.

The history of the region called Palestine is real — and overwhelmingly Jewish. It produced the Palestinian Talmud (also called the Jerusalem Talmud) and the Palestinian Gaonate.

The four central cities of Jewish scholarship — Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias — fundraised together for centuries as “the Four Holy Cities of Palestine.” Maimonides, Rabbi Yosef Karo, the Ari, and Rabbi Moshe Cordovero all lived and taught there. Safed alone produced a revolution in Jewish mysticism.

None of the foregoing related to “Palestine” as anything more than the name used by Greco-Roman and Christian scholars. And notably, there is no parallel Arab or Muslim, much less “Palestinian,” intellectual tradition tied to the region, until Arafat’s PLO determined that manufacturing one would serve their bigoted cause.

In other words, the modern Palestinian national narrative is a mid-20th-century political fiction, built upon the erasure of two millennia of Jewish history and the denial of the land’s holy status to Jews as their homeland and center of Jewish religious practice. That is not a judgment about any individual Arab or Muslim, much less “Islamophobia.” It is simply historical fact.

Thus it is fair and accurate to describe Mamdani’s followers as indifferent to the truth. The tragedy is not that Mamdani is so wrong, so malevolent, and so clearly adversarial towards American values, but that his followers have lost the ability to care.

That is why his reelection isn’t just plausible, but likely — at least until New Yorkers recognize that following in the historical footsteps of Berlin and Moscow is a truly bad idea.

Photo: Zohran Mamdani Speaking at a DSA 101 Meeting at the Church of the Village in NYC by Bingjiefu He, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are moments when you leave a gathering feeling not simply encouraged, but genuinely inspired. Less than three years after the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and amid a worldwide resurgence of antisemitism, attending Christians United for Israel’s annual conference was one of those moments. This is not simply because CUFI is home to millions of admirers and supporters of the beleaguered Jewish community, but because of the courage found among them.

When antisemitism is surging around the globe, Jewish students are harassed on college campuses, and synagogues require heightened security, the easy course is to keep one’s distance. Some would even call that prudent. CUFI celebrates those who do just the opposite, who lean in against those who threaten us. CUFI’s founder and creator, Pastor John Hagee, put it this way: “If a line has to be drawn, draw it around Christians and Jews. We are united.”

In the federal FACE Act case born from the mob that blocked access in November 2024 to a synagogue in West Orange, N.J., the defendants are asking the courts to abandon the constitutional protections of religious freedom that make America great, while disregarding Jewish law, prayer and lived experience. One could hardly seek better proof that the defendants in this instance discarded both the law and America’s founding principles in their pursuit of antisemitic bigotry.

The legislation was initially designed to protect people entering abortion clinics from being harassed; eventually, it was expanded to apply to the entrances to houses of worship.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation New Jersey, American Muslims for Palestine New Jersey and numerous individual defendants all outrageously insist that the synagogue event they disrupted—one that memorialized a murdered Israeli rabbi and encouraged Jewish life in Israel—was not religious at all. They arrogate for themselves the right to decide what Judaism is, what Jews believe and which parts of Jewish life count as religious. That is not a legal defense, but an act of erasure, as antisemitic as it is unconstitutional.

The court filings could hardly make their intent and animus more blatant. One defendant asserts therein that encouraging Jews to live in the Holy Land “could not plausibly be interpreted” as a religious activity. Another compares such a real estate fair to “bingo night in a church basement.” A third faults the government for failing to prove, from Jewish law, that it’s a mitzvah (“commandment”) for Jews to live in the land of Israel, as if U.S. attorneys should be expected to research Jewish sources to establish basic Jewish tenets.

All of these attempt to force the courts into unconstitutional entanglement with religious doctrine, while denying and distorting obvious Jewish beliefs.

The First Amendment, to be certain, forbids the courts from wading into this argument; they cannot be called upon to determine what is or is not a Jewish religious activity. American courts cannot claim expertise in the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel, the relevant mitzvot (“biblical commandments”) or how they apply today.

At the same time, the defendants’ attitude is so obviously at odds with Jewish belief and so dismissive of the Jewish experience as to prove antisemitic bias. The desire to live on holy ground is a theme that saturates Jewish prayer, holy texts and halachah (“Jewish law”). Antisemitism does not only target Jews as individuals, but Judaism as a religion, and the defense filings openly express that the defendants share this familiar and repugnant hostility.

To claim that a synagogue event about land in Israel is “not religious” requires, first of all, that one deny the mitzvah of yishuv ha’aretz, “settling the land,” affirmed by the Ramban and rooted in Torah. It demands nullification of the pleas for rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, restoration of the Davidic Kingdom and return of the Divine Presence that are at the core of every Jewish prayer service, every day of the year.

And, of course, it erases religious expression by Jews. Whether those making aliyah come from the United States, France, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Argentina or anywhere else, political Zionism is rarely even a secondary concern. The overwhelming majority move either to escape Jew-hatred or to fulfill numerous religious commandments, including living in the Land of Israel and participating in its rebuilding. Maimonides, Rav Ovadiah of Bartenura, Rav Yosef Karo, in addition to the hundreds of students of the Vilna Gaon and Ba’al Shem Tov who moved to the Land of Israel, all did so exclusively as an expression of their Jewish religious beliefs.

Most fundamentally, to insist that their motivations are “not religious” is to tell the Jews targeted at Congregation Ohr Torah that their own lives, fears, hopes, beliefs and commitments do not matter. That is not a defense. It is an expression of transparent—and transparently hateful—disregard for Jewish humanity.

The FACE Act protects all forms of religious exercise, not only ritual. Congress enacted it to protect houses of worship and religious communities from intimidation and obstruction. This protection is not limited to prayer services, but encompasses the full spectrum of religious life, including gatherings that express, celebrate or advance a community’s religious identity. A synagogue event discussing Jewish life in Israel is unquestionably part of that spectrum.

If a court accepted the defendants’ framing, that would set a chilling precedent. Jewish prayer would be protected, but attempts to realize the commitments expressed in those prayers would not. That would hamper Jewish religious liberty no less than attacks on circumcision or kosher meat. It would have the courts annul the parts of Judaism that anti‑Israel activists find inconvenient.

The defendants’ argument is unconstitutional because it asks the court to define Judaism, and antisemitic because it expressly denies both Judaism’s own self‑definition and the religious beliefs of the targeted Jews. In other words, the defendants want the courts to declare their activities not to be hateful or bigoted, precisely because they are.

This is dangerous not only for Jews who seek to fulfill mitzvot, but for all Americans who share the reverence of the country’s Founding Fathers for religious freedom and tolerance.

Consider that without those principles, Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Mennonites in Pennsylvania and Anglicans in Virginia could not have united to build the world’s dominant superpower. The defendants have thus proven both their guilt and their hostility towards Judaism, Jewish life and the values that make America great.

By the time Tucker Carlson trashed the Book of Esther, describing the source of the Jewish festival of Purim, it was already Passover. But timing was the least of his errors, and since he took it upon himself to rewrite Scripture and misinform the masses, those who revere the Holy Bible must now take a stand for God and his Word.

Carlson told his listeners that the Book of Esther was “controversial,” that the Book describes: A Genocide of Persians. Oh yeah, 75,000 Persians… Not just people who committed crimes but people who were Persian, and that’s why they were killed.

I would suggest that such a grievous misreading requires not only a “low IQ,” as President Trump recently put it, but a mind burdened by hate. Call it “Jew Derangement Syndrome.” And far from being an affliction limited to Carlson and a few others, this particular mental illness afflicts the multitudes claiming Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza, rather than Persia. And that is why it is so crucial that those who wish to learn from the Bible, rather than rewrite it to serve their own bigoted interests, emphatically correct the record.

The account in the Book of Esther is quite the opposite of Carlson’s. There was indeed a planned genocide, but of the Jews, architected by the evil Haman. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, King Ahasuerus was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves.

The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

Perhaps Carlson’s greatest offense was to claim that the mob was targeted because they were Persian. “That’s why they were killed,” he said. Scripture could not be more clear; those killed were “of those who hated them,” says Esther 9:16. They came from all 127 nationalities of the empire; their unifying characteristic was murderous hatred for Jews.

The obvious motivation for this inversion, misportraying a genocidal band of antisemites as innocent victims of Jewish bigotry, is that Carlson shares their same hate. Allowing Jews to defend themselves is what he terms “genocide.” By telling a lie so obvious, Carlson exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people.

The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability and hateful motivations of those that launched the attack is ignored. Context is ignored, in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain.

This is just as obvious in media reports relying upon the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry as it is in Carlson’s dystopian version of Esther. This type of inversion is found not only in the charge of genocide, but also in the details. For example, it is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit war crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To offer a specific illustration, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, outlets from the BBC to NPR to CNN reported the “outrage” that Israel bombed a “hospital” and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune—the oppressed rising up against their would‐be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter. And that is the account found in the most published Book on earth.

Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, tells us how dangerous misinformation can be, especially when motivated by hate.

Newscasters can reverse victims and villains. Pundits can invert the moral order of a story. And podcasters can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers both modern lessons, and an obligation to stand up in its defense.

When Tucker Carlson described the Book of Esther as celebrating a “genocide of Persians,” he did the world a favor. Not because his perspective was correct or well-informed, but just the opposite. His obvious lie, so clearly detached from reality, unwittingly revealed the true nature of the more contemporary charges of genocide leveled at the same People of Israel.

The Book of Esther offers no possibility for error regarding who was responsible for the violence. It tells us that Haman convinced the Persian king, whose empire stretched to the very limits of the civilized world, to issue a decree seeking annihilation of the Jews. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, the king was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

The text emphasizes this in the same verse that tells us that 75,000 were killed (Esther 9:16). It tells us that, contrary to Carlson’s delusional retelling, the dead were neither Persians nor members of any one nation or faith. Instead, the casualties are described as “from those who hated them.” Their one unifying characteristic was that they had come out to kill Jews.

Yet in Carlson’s twisted version, all of this context was erased. The initiating threat vanished. The murderous mob disappeared. All that remained was a single statistic reframed as evidence of Jewish aggression, self-defense recast as “genocide.” Carlson only found the Book of Esther “controversial” after he had deprived the sacred text of both meaning and value.

This was no innocent misreading of the Bible. On the contrary, it exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people. The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability of those that launched the attack is ignored. The mechanism is simple: remove chronology, agency, and intent. Reduce everything to a single, emotionally charged statistic, and then use that casualty figure to invert reality.

And that brings us to the recent conflict in Gaza.

Here, too, numbers were presented without the events that produced them. The initiating attack was omitted, along with the stated intent of the attacking party. The distinction between targeting civilians and combatants was blurred or erased. And what remained was a false narrative in which the party responding to violence was portrayed as the aggressor, while the party that initiated the violence was treated as a passive backdrop.

To be clear, the parallel is not between Esther and Gaza as historical events, but between the use of the same rhetorical mechanism to distort them. In both cases, context is erased in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain. Numbers alone determine guilt, while history is deemed irrelevant.

Reality, of course, does not work that way, but all too many political and media figures routinely partner with Haman’s ideological descendants to demonize Jews.

It is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Moreover, once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit such crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To take a specific example, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, CNN reported upon the “outrage” that Israel bombed a hospital and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune-the oppressed rising up against their would‑be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter.

When Carlson stripped away that context, he was not offering a “new interpretation” but a grotesque distortion. He took a story of self‑defense and deliverance and turned it into a false tale of aggression.

The lesson of Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, is not that numbers are irrelevant, but that numbers without context are dangerous. They can reverse victims and villains. They can invert the moral order of a story. And they can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers practical lessons as applicable today as at any time in the past.

Image Credit: Book of Esther by Anita Gould with CC BY-NC 2.0 license on Flickr