When The New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s piece “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” replete with accounts of Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli foreign ministry finally said what many have been claiming for decades, that these are blood libels. But medieval blood libels are very different from the current accusations against Israel; they were about secret rituals made up by the Church, these are about war crimes reported by serious journalists. How can one compare the two?
I’d like here to offer some definitions that may help understand these issues.
Medieval ritual blood libel: An accusation that the Jews ritually slaughtered Christian boys to use their blood in making matza. It was based on paranoid fantasies about a malevolent presence in society, confirmed with tortured confessions. It reflected a primitive fear of Jewish religious rituals: they were predatory, targeting “us Christians.” Judaism was literally a death cult whose supreme ritual called for the death of a gentile boy. It was in large part a projection of Christian supersessionist hostility to Jews onto the Jews themselves, attributing things to the Jewish religion that Jews considered abominable – consuming blood, killing innocents – while the supreme Christian rite, the Eucharist involved drinking the blood and eating the body of a dead Jew. The first blood libels (1144, 1173) arose in the wake of the Crusaders’ massacre of Jews, including children (1096). And these terrible accusations legitimated hate-driven violence against the Jews, sometimes legal – torture, execution (flames), dispossession; sometimes wild rampages of rape and slaughter. Over the many centuries in which this accusation threatened to break out every Passover/Easter into assaults on the Jewish community, it mutated into a vast, even global conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Christians and their religion. In 1840, the blood libel was introduced into the Middle East in Damascus by Christians, and subsequently acculturated by Arab Muslims.
Modern blood libel: At the dawn of modernity, the blood libels gave birth to the secular version, the equally forged, Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903). It was a response to the emancipation of the Jews in democracies and their striking success. If, in 1800, it was the Masons who were driving the democratic conspiracy, in 1900, it was the Jews, using modernity (markets, free press, constitutional republics) as a means to enslave all mankind. The Jews were approaching the point where their hidden conspiracy was about to move into its open phase of world conquest (the global victory of democracies). And again, the accusations were projections of the imperial Christian mindset – rule or be ruled – that at that time was exploiting Western technological prowess to conquer the world.
Thus, the medieval ritual accusation is a particular form of a larger phenomenon of anti-Jewish discourse, which can be accurately called a blood libel–Namely, that the Jews deliberately target their neighbors, especially children, for death; that they do so because of their boundless malevolence towards gentiles. A religion that demands child sacrifice is a death cult, and its worshippers are the enemy of mankind; they deserve whatever violence is aimed at them. In the modern West, however, where Jews were freed from the formal subjection to the dominant religion, the problem intensified for the Judeophobes: now Jews would pursue their nefarious goals more openly. Global conspiracy, about to snap shut, replaced religious ritual as the core accusation. It now had apocalyptic resonance that found favor among the Nazi millennialists.
Muslim Blood Libels: Began in 1920s, when Jews first began to have autonomy in a “modern” state (British protectorate). They accompany the introduction of the genocidal apocalyptic hadith of the Rocks and the Trees. These libels still originate in a religious setting, although both the teller of the tale and the alleged victims are now Muslims, whose political superiority to Jews was under challenge by the presence of autonomous Zionists. Here the libels concerned Jewish desecration of Muslim sites rather than ritual deeds, but they emphasized the malevolent intent, and they justified the violence against Jews, sometimes massacres of hundreds and thousands. For those telling these tales, Jewish autonomy – Israel – was the next stage in the Protocols, now above board and targeting (supremacist) Islam. Arabs accused Israel of everything heinous: rapes, massacres, racism, imperial ambitions to conquer from the Nile to the Euphrates (as they had done), genocide (as they had attempted). These accusations included both Protocols conspiracism, and, more specifically, “ritual blood libels.”
In this context one of the less visible aspects of the medieval ritual blood libel became more prominent: the role of projection. Virtually every accusation that Palestinians level at Israel is something they have either done (targeting children, raping, slaughtering civilians, apartheid racism), or openly aspired to doing (committing genocide, mass starvation, global imperial ambitions). All the malevolence they attribute to Israel, they themselves express for Israel, for infidels, for “heretics.” Most recently, PMW posted a Palestinian program claiming that Jews believe that if you kill an Arab you go up a level in heaven. This heinous belief is precisely what Jihadis promise their warriors, “Kill a Jew, Go to Heaven.”
But by and large, these accusations by post-Naqba Muslim supremacists did not spread in the post-Holocaust West in the later 20th century. Even when the more “secular” accusations gained some traction in the West (e.g., Sabra and Shatilla massacre, 1982), they did not overthrow the consensus within the post-war public sphere that comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, or accusing her of genocide, was morally sadistic rhetoric, rather than depictions of reality. Few Western researchers seriously compared the Nakba of half a million displaced with six million murdered, especially considering the millions slaughtered and tens of millions displaced in another Muslim-infidel war of “liberation” in India-Pakistan the very same years.
This changed dramatically in 2000 with the outbreak of the “second intifada” (i.e. al-Aqsa intifada, aka Oslo Jihad). The first Arab blood libel to succeed in the West was the accusation that the IDF had targeted a civilian Gazan and his son with a rain of bullets, badly wounding the father and killing the 12-year-old son, crouched in fear, Muhammad al-Durah. What made it a blood libel was not the tale itself – boy killed in crossfire is tragic but not mythic – but its packaging and reception. Palestinian sources insisted this was deliberately, “in cold blood,” heinous malice. Again, the projection was complete, Palestinians have always, openly and repeatedly targeted children and innocent civilians and they take great pride in their accomplishments. For them, successfully accusing Israel of their own sins to an infidel audience is delicious.
More to the point, this lethal narrative – Israelis killed a 12-year-old Gazan in cold blood – immediately went viral and touched mythic nerves both in the Muslim world and the West. Bin Laden seized on it as proof of the infidel war on Islam – in killing this boy they killed millions of Muslim youth – and turned it into a recruiting theme for global Jihad. In the West it became the key to Holocaust Inversion. Noted one French journalist, speaking for many in her circles, “this death annuls, erases, the picture of the child in the Warsaw Ghetto.” Israel was the new Nazi.
The graphic (without the quotation) was posted prominently at A.N.S.W.E.R., the “anti-war” movement that dominated public demonstrations in the early aughts (‘00s).
From that point on, Western journalism covering the war twixt river and the sea became increasingly “lethal,” in the sense that it consistently reported the war propaganda of the Palestinians – all variants on the blood libel – as news. The “Jenin Massacre” (2002) displayed a striking pack journalism that reported Palestinian claims of hundreds even thousands deliberately massacred, Nazi-style, as news for weeks on the word of Palestinian sources alone. When Israel denied the accusation and explained why they had to fight in Jenin, Kofi Anan, then Secretary General of the UN replied, “I don’t think the whole world . . . can be wrong”, and Israel right. Even after such claims proved completely false (56 dead, 40 combatants), the most lethal of the journalists – Guardian, Le Monde, BBC, France2, CNN – neither corrected, nor, in some cases, desisted from excoriating Israel.
Lethal journalism took its toll: by the mid-aughts (‘00s) pluralities in Europe believed that Israel was committing genocide. The most heinous of crimes, committed by the Jewish state.
Post-modern blood libels: This was not modern professionalism, which is so allergic to running war propaganda as news, they wouldn’t even do it for their own side’s war effort. It did not examine all claims with a critical eye for deception, speaking truth to power (including collective delusions). It was post-modern journalism in which facts yield to narrative, in which the lethal accusation – deliberate slaughter, like the Nazis – is told as plausible if not “true” and then, when shown false, moves to the next libel. This modus-operandi, so consistent in the 21st century until today, violates every basic principle of modern journalism: checking sources, looking for independent corroboration, examining the evidence critically, acknowledging and correcting errors so as not to repeat them.
As a result, jihadis, inspired by the same religious supremacism that prevailed among medieval Christians, told malicious stories that projected the worst of their own aspirations – genocidal slaughters – onto Israel, and postmodern journalists delivered these blood libels as news.
These post-modern blood libels appear in significantly different circumstances from the medieval: prevailing socio-political and religious conditions have changed fundamentally. Whereas in medieval times the Jews were powerless and their enemies were religious, today the Jews have power and can defend themselves from the hostility of non-Jews. To the blood-libelers, this is the ultimate nightmare: having projected their own most heinous desires onto the Jews when they were defenseless, the Jewish accession to power meant certain catastrophe for them. Surely, they thought, the Jews will take revenge for all we have done to them (i.e. the paranoid fantasies of the imperialist Christians in the Protocols). For Muslim supremacists after the twin ‘Nakbas/Catastrophes’ of the end of the Caliphate, 1924, and creation of autonomous infidel state in Muslim land in 1948, the accusations became all the more hysterical, all the more nakedly projective: the very people whose slogan was drive the Jews into the sea, complained of genocide. The Arabs have a saying for it: “He hit me, he ran ahead and cried.” And Westerners take this seriously?
The Kristof Dog-Rape Opinion Piece
Kristof’s piece embodies all these traits: the Palestinian blood libels, the active Western participation in making them “public knowledge,” the systematic erasure of the key pieces of knowledge: the testimonies are from combatants on the side actually committing systematic and sadistic rape. Indeed, Kristof’s piece was a timed blow designed to prevent people from understanding who the rapists are. The NYT had already turned down covering the Israeli investigation that documented in horrifyingly painful, empirical detail how Hamas used rape as a sadistic and deliberate weapon in its jihad on civilians. The day before CNN was to cover the Israeli report, the NYT ran Kristof’s collection of accusations made by people in the very rapist movement.
And true to the Pattern of blood libels, it was not just the deeds, but the malicious intention. Noted Yuki Zeman,
Kristof’s column depends on this… drift from caveat to heinous accusation. Individual accounts become a pattern; the pattern becomes a structure; the structure becomes a national indictment. By the end of the essay, readers are no longer asked to consider whether or not instances of abuse have occurred in Israeli detention facilities, they are invited to condemn Israel tout court. The Times transforms unresolved, poorly corroborated, and politically mediated claims into a totalizing moral portrait of a nation.
When queried on the possibility that his sources had lied, Kristof thought the very prospect “far-fetched,” echoing Andrea Koppel’s response to people challenging her sources about the Jenin Massacre in 2002: “oh so they’re all liars now.” (Yes, they were.) A quarter of a century of errors trusting systematically dishonest Palestinian sources… nothing corrected, nothing learned. The poisonous narrative trumps the evidence: post-modern lethal journalism purveys post-modern blood libels to suicidal Westerners.
It gets worse. Not only does Hamas rape Israeli and infidel women, they rape their own Muslim women. There was indeed a “silence that meets Palestinian rape” at that very moment when Kristof was turning up the Hamas-originated accusations against Israel. Courageous women, widows of the war Hamas started, were telling tales of being raped by Hamas commanders in the refugee camps to which they had fled. And their young daughters were being “married” to Hamas fighters.
These genuinely innocent Palestinian Muslim women’s voices criticizing Hamas were not covered by CNN or the NYT. On the contrary, only Israeli and “right-wing” publications carried them. Had Kristof’s article been about that, he could justifiably have spoken about a media silence; instead, he took a widely circulated, wildly inaccurate story and gave it full exposure just before the Israeli report came out. Imagine the salutary impact of the NYT and CNN covering Palestinians raping women of women of all faiths on the same day as the Israeli news report broke.
The post-modern blood libel is not about is not about secret religious rituals, but about secular matters, in an age when Jews, on the basis of the human right of self-determination, have the autonomy to defend themselves and therefore, on occasion, commit violence against non-Jews – something forbidden them by both supremacist Christianity and Islam. It is not wild, poisonous rumors of secret rituals spreading among a paranoid and ignorant public, but wild, poisonous accusations of heinous war crimes reported as news by journalists who claim to adhere to the professional standards of a free press and to report as accurately as possible to their audiences what they see and hear and deem to be accurate.
Whereas the medieval appeal of the blood libel was its hidden nature, and it was believed on faith, “everyone sees”, through the medium of journalism, the post-modern blood libels, and everyone believes them on the word of our information professionals. But in all the cases, the basic message is Jews deliberately kill innocent gentiles. And the subliminal message is: The Jews follow the dictates of a lethal religion, a cult of death.
The NYT Famine Photo: July 25, 2025
Consider the narrative of the famine in Gaza in the summer of 2025. The Israelis, who had until then supplied more food and supplies to the Gazan battleground than any earlier army in human history (no other army ever supplied any), realized how much of what they sent was commandeered by Hamas, strengthening their grip over the Gazan population. In March 2025, Israel restricted supplies, cutting off some entirely, but by no means cut off food for more than a month.
Suddenly the Western media was flooded with images of starving people from Gaza, including one of the front page of the NYT, a “haunting” image of a Gazan Madonna and child. In addition to the NYT, this image filled the news reporting across the global Anglosphere: BBC, CNN, Sky News, The Guardian, Daily Mail, and The Times, etc. etc.
In fact, every one of the floods of pictures of emaciated children that came from Gaza in the summer of 2025 was a victim of chronic illness, the kind of case that normally would be treated in Israel. In the case of the Gaza Madonna, the child was born with cerebral palsy and hypoxemia. Among the products of this photo shoot offered by Alghorra (but not published by the legacy media), was one that showed his brother standing by, with no signs of starvation.
To any alert, intelligent, viewer, this should have been a dead giveaway. Anyone who looked at the selection of photos provided from this photo shoot would have seen the “starving” child’s brother standing by, looking fine. Anyone possessed of an ounce of skepticism–the professional commitment of the journalist–might have asked how it could possibly be that the mother did not show the same ravages of hunger as her child, were he not stricken with a debilitating illness? Any journalist who sought confirmation by researching the starving child in question would have found Palestinian evidence of his exceptional medical condition.
As a poster-boy for an Israeli induced famine, this was precisely the imagery of blood libel. Not only did it claim to be news, but it evoked, for Christians, the Madonna cradling her infant child – “a diabolical masterpiece of manipulation and deceit.” Here we had the marriage of medieval and post-modern blood libels. In the Middle Ages, the Madonna and child depicted maternal and family bliss; now, via Palestinian “artists” and Western “journalists,” the world is flooded with pictures of a mother and dying child, killed at her breast by Israel’s inhumane, indeed genocidal deeds.
Five days later, faced with the evidence that the child had not been “healthy at birth” but suffered from a severe medical condition, the Times apologized:
Editors’ Note: July 30, 2025
The following Editors’ Note and corrections appeared in print on Wednesday, July 30, 2025.
An article on Friday about people in Gaza suffering from malnutrition and starvation after nearly two years of war with Israel lacked information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child suffering from severe malnutrition and whose photo was featured prominently in the article. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems. Had The Times known the information before publication, it would have been included in the article and the picture caption.
The obvious issues the NYT “apology” does not acknowledge here are: How could they not have checked before publishing such a shocking and accusatory picture? Why did they write “healthy at birth” in the caption, when they did not investigate it? What are the implications of these professional failures of the NYT in their use of this picture to illustrate Israel’s mass induced famine?
The bitter irony here is that in genuine famine conditions, mothers starve before their children, and here, in the photos of mother and starved child, unlike real famine photos, the mothers were not in any way “starving.” On the contrary. In other words, if these children had really starved to death, then their parents fed themselves and let their infants starve. Unless that horrible and unthinkable option is true, the picture is a deliberate act of disinformation, a shocking “illustration” of the blood libel accusation: Israel deliberately starves Gazans to death.
And from mass induced starvation there is but a step to genocide. ‘Of course, Israel is committing genocide. Anyone who denies it is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.’
Why call both the medieval accusations of ritual murder and the current accusations of mass starvation and genocide “blood libels”? Because both, in different cultural environments, make the same malevolent and false accusations about the Jews.
- They both accuse the Jews of the most heinous things imaginable – in medieval powerless times, of secretly ritually slaughtering Christian boys… in modern times, committing a genocide they had just suffered.
- They both take something Jews abhor – consuming any blood much less human, targeting children much less slaughtering innocents – and accuse the Jews of precisely those transgressions.
- They both arise in a matrix of religious supremacist warfare, part of a discourse that zealous holy warriors tell themselves, designed to stir up hatred and justify slaughtering, even annihilating so evil an enemy.
- In both cases, people who want to do the worst, project their evil intent, their malice, their death instinct onto their designated enemy, the Jews.
- And just as medieval people would soon be the object of these hatreds (the same Church that demonized Jews, tortured and burned heretics), when post-modern, progressive Westerners believe these new-age blood libels are true, they prepare their own downfall. They don’t, apparently cannot, realize that they too are the target of the genocidal hatred whose projection they adopt and endorse.
At least, in the Middle Ages there was a religious continuum between the haters who made up the nightmare narratives and those who spread their accusations. They were all Christian. In post-modern times, the jihadi haters who openly embrace what they accuse Jews of doing, count on people who think they champion humanitarian causes to spread their salvific tidings: Jews are the enemy of humanity. But this time, the people who spread these stories in the West are not Muslims but infidels, of other faiths or even opposed to any faith; and yet, they show no sign of understanding what they’re doing.
The first successful post-modern libel was created by Palestinian filmmakers and published by a French Jewish-Israeli journalist. And it was the widespread belief in post-modern journalism that drove many – as Jews – to denounce Israel’s misdeeds. Thus, Anan’s echo of the Ukrainian Christians, in 1892, telling Ehad Ha-am that his denial was ridiculous was able to include Jewish voices who agree with “the whole world”, ready to make the leap into blood libel terrain about their own people: “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends [sic] of Israel, can be wrong.”
Today, it’s a sarcastic meme on social media. The Pulitzer Prize wouldn’t go to an exposed blood libel! A democracy journal wouldn’t trumpet that as a worthy event! Unthinkable.
***
I have been describing and documenting this lethal journalism in the service of the Palestinian cause for a quarter of a century, during which, along with its NGO allies, it has only grown worse over time. Efforts to frame Al Durah as a blood libel had no traction in the aughts (‘00s). Today, the accusation of Israeli Genocide, as ludicrous as it first sounded in 2000, has become almost a mantra of the public sphere, and a striking element in American politics.
In March of 2024, during the presidential election season, “pro-Palestinians” put up a poster on the White House fence featuring pictures of an emaciated Yazan al-Kafarneh, a 10-year-old boy from Gaza who suffered from cerebral palsy and died for lack of treatment, another victim of a war Hamas started. Instead, the NYT presented him as “the face of starvation in Gaza…” and one Palestinian journalist in Washington decried his death as a “stain on humanity.” Indeed, some activists in the “progressive” wing of the democratic party would like to make publicly acknowledging Israel’s genocide a litmus test for democratic candidates.
Nothing could be more disastrous and self-destructive for the fate of democracies than to have their trusted, critical, fourth estate report blood libels, gathered from foreign religious supremacists who want to destroy any trace of a free press or an open public discussion, as news. Nothing can bode more ill than having their political parties hijacked by “activists” who want to make those libels matters of policy.
What I have reluctantly learned over the decades is how deep the resentment and fear of Jews among supremacist believers, for whom their visible superiority over all other faiths proves the truth of their faith. At the same time, I learned that many people who claim not to be part of any religion, are vulnerable to the supersessionist appeal, with its elective affinity for blood libels.
The task at this point is enormous. Westerners who consider themselves progressives are locked into a totalistic discourse that literally blocks out reality-testing. And these same people believe Hamas’ genocidal behavior (which should not be mentioned), is “resistance” (to Israeli evil). Some older people who consider themselves progressives might pull back and say, ‘it’s not that extreme’ and ‘I don’t agree with everything the Palestinian camp says and does,’ even as they silently swim in a poisoned current where Israel is maybe not the worst nation on the planet, but it’s certainly in the running. ‘Everyone knows.’
When I started this work on the West’s suicidal turn around 2003, I was amazed at the role of envy. It had never occurred to me that a society, a civilization, would commit suicide out of envy! And yet it became increasingly clear that the moral voices so loudly denouncing Israel – moral Europe and Nobel Prize winners and radical professors – were willing to aid in the subjugation of their own society and institutions to totalitarian religious invaders who raped their daughters with impunity, just so they could posture as moral giants on the world stage and piss down on an Israel knocked off her moral perch, in the present.
The eagerness with which these moral voices seized on phrases like ‘this time Israel has lost the moral high ground,’ and ‘it is tragic to see the Jews do to the poor Palestinians what the Nazis did to them,’ was a form of moral Schadenfreude, a thrill in the moral degradation of the Jews, the pleasure of putting them down, of “Jew-baiting.” Granted it clearly gives them some satisfaction, but it also made them public agents of their jihadi foes. Could the need to disparage Jews override basic survival instincts? Could really smart people be this stupid?
I finished my book in 2022 with the question: Are Westerners willing to commit suicide just so they can say to the Jews (quoting Peter from Family Guy, explaining how stupid people think): ‘What? You think you’re better than me?’
Do Westerners really want their civilization to go down over such a stupid move? Do progressives really want to say, “I’d sooner feed my enemies’ (apocalyptic) hatreds of me, than consider Israel an admirable, progressive, democratic, state”? Does it matter to those who consider themselves progressive, that those who sneer at the very suggestion that Israel has a moral army, consistently cheer on as “freedom fighters” the most immoral fighters on the planet? Does it matter to them that these same proud baby killers they support accuse the IDF of killing children? “Can the whole world (i.e., ‘us good guys’) be wrong and Israel be right?”
Since October 7, the situation is much worse. I always thought that when Hamas really showed its true nature, the moral West will wake up. Instead, like a page from my book on millennialism, when the mad paranoid apocalyptic discourse first surfaces in public, sometimes, rather than being soundly discredited, it “takes” and spreads. In the case of October 7, the poisonous marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern sadomasochism from Durban 2001, gave birth to an openly genocidal movement Jihad. Had it been so uttered earlier in Western public, this embrace of genocidal violence would have been soundly rejected. Now, it acts loudly and with impunity in the public square. Globalize the Intifada! That is, spread global jihadi suicide terror operations around the world. What a world for infidels to leave to our grandchildren.
The “turn” of the vocal, progressive left towards Hamas in response to Hamas’ genocidal slaughter, which they posted online for all to see, the cruelty with which mean girls tore down posters of hostage victims in the name of liberation, the jubilance of the “civil-society” Muslim groups (CAIR, SJP) and radical professors at news of the slaughter, the mobilization of campuses, and public demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands, were all revelations of how powerfully Jihadi war propagandists had colonized key Western institutions: academia most of all, but increasingly in schools and in industry hiring decisions, and now, in politics. Disputes over what is happening on the other side of the world are deciding local elections. In Paris and Madrid, radical teachers have kindergarten children perform the same graduation ceremonies that Hamas has performed in Gaza for decades. The scale of the jihadi penetration is amazing.
How to get out of this death spiral? It has to come from a mobilization of the civic decency of the people, a Maginot line whose collapse in 2000 and again in 2023 is so notable in democratic societies. Today, among US Democrats, ‘our Nazi misogynist’ is preferable to ‘your moderate’ female Republican, even though their candidate checks all the categories they used to demonize Trump, and far better than Trump.
The institutions of democracy – including free journalism – are powerful forces in our favor. We need the will to exercise them decently, with courage and sound fairness to all (even to the Jews). Just imagine a news culture that declined to publish Palestinian accusations without first checking them out! And then reported on the attempted fraud.
For that to happen, however, people – especially non-Jews but also assimilated Jews – need to do some serious introspection about their feelings toward Jews. This is not a fight I would want to pick – demanding that people introspect about their Jew-anxieties is not a great opening move – but one where circumstances demand that I – as a Jew – insist on challenging you progressives, you WEIRD Westerners: We Jews occupy an immense terrain in your moral imagination; you are obsessed with us. And whether you admit it or not, a great deal of this “attention” is because we rub you the wrong way.
For compassionate Westerners who believe that life is precious, that all people should have the best possible opportunities to flourish, who want a better world for their children… for such people in 2026 to understand at least a major piece of what is happening around the world and around them, they will have to renounce their now near-addiction to the moral Schadenfreude of hearing bad news about Jews. Only then, can they begin to have a sense of proportion, and see the anomalies their obsession obscures, namely that their compassion is being manipulated by the cruelest people on the planet.
Maybe it might help if supersessionists, formal and unwitting, could wrap their minds around the outstanding (and apparently disturbing) “fact” that Jews are one of the most life-affirming cultures on the planet, a religion of life, embodied in the extraordinary fact that Israel is the only modern society to have a positive birth rate, even among seculars. That Jews, whenever allowed to participate, have been model participants in the progressive movements that brought the democratic revolutions of modern times. That, if people were not so committed to putting us down, they might notice as a random example of Jewish contributions to making the world a more interesting place, the story of one Leon Rose and his role in the NY Nicks’ miraculous play-off run of 2026.
“What Leon is one of the best in the world at is having genuine, loving relationships with people. I think because of that, you see the way our team acts, the way our team conducts itself. We conduct ourselves like family, and he’s always had that family mantra in everything he’s done. Doing that, I think that’s real. The connectivity, the unity this team represents every single night regardless of what the deficit is.”
Spend a little time with the bright side of Judaism and you might also note that our enemies in all ages are themselves, like Hamas and Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood today, cults of death and dominion who call for the extermination of their enemies; and that when they peddle their blood libels – the Jews are a religion of death and dominion – it is consistently a self-description.
At that point, one might even raise the question: ‘Why am I spurning a natural ally in the struggle for the “better angels” of human nature – empathy, uncoerced relations, self-restraint, cooperation – and the prosperous global civil society those angels might procure for mankind in the “global millennium”?
Why instead, am I choosing to side with death and impoverishment, hatred and sadistic violence? What in these images from Gaza arouses my exclusive compassion for the Palestinians and outrage at the Israelis. Could it be because Jews are involved? Why don’t I care about the Christians in Nigeria or the Muslim Majority world or the Muslims in Yemen or Sudan or the Somalia from which Ilhan Omar fled, but only the ones whose suffering I can blame on the Jews?
Indeed, why can’t you pay attention to our – and your – enemies?
Who knows? Maybe, instead of constantly criticizing Israel, you might even entertain the currently unthinkable (but liberating) notion that Western progressives and humanitarians might have some things to learn from the Jews and the Israelis, valuable lessons about civil society and democracy under attack by supremacist religious fanatics, which looks to be the situation globally for the next few decades.
Can “the whole world” be wrong and the Jews be right?
Indeed, I suspect that had a Jew, a poshiter yid (simple, honest Jew) been at the court when the invisible clothes were displayed, the Emperor would not have gone out on parade naked. Only this time he’s not the embodiment of folly, but an icon of hatred.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin
Richard Landes, trained as a medieval historian, specializes in apocalyptic millenarian movements both in the 11th and the 21st centuries. He taught primarily at Boston University (1990-2015). In the 1990s he discovered the contemporary apocalyptic sermons and writings of Muslim preachers in which Israel and the US were the embodiment of cosmic evil. In 2011 he published Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, with a chapter on global Jihad. In 2022, he published Can the Whole World be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, a study of the turn of the third millennium CE as a successful launch of Jihadi apocalyptic discourse in the Western public sphere. He lives and writes in Israel as an independent historian. He is currently launching The Laocoon Project in honor of the Trojan priest who told his people not to take the Greek enemy’s horse into Troy. He blogs at The Augean Stables, and writes on substack.