Truth and Lies About Anti-Semitism

Since Oct. 7, 2023, it has become more dangerous than ever to be a Jew. When Hamas murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians and kidnapped 240 civilians, you would expect an outpouring of global sympathy for Jews. Instead, organizations designed to protect innocent victims remained silent. And then the protests began—in support not of the victims, but of the terrorist group.

Support for Genocide

Between October 7 and 27, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project counted over 3,700 protests supporting the Palestinians—compared to over 520 for the victims.

Palestinian flags decorated monuments from Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa to Paris’s Monument a la Republique. On November 11, London experienced what was, by some counts, its largest protest since the anti-Iraq War movement of 20 years ago. On November 4, Washington saw the largest pro-Palestinian protest in United States history. The Counting Crowds Consortium estimates that half a million people turned out across the U.S. to support Palestine.

In Toronto, demonstrators celebrated the “heroic resistance in Gaza.” In Ottawa they shouted, “Long live the intifada!” In Sweden, the threat was: “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning!” In Manhattan and Poland, a placard showed a Star of David being thrown in the trash, with the caption, “Keep the world clean.” Crowds in Syndey chanted, “Gas the Jews!” Birmingham rang with, “Allahu Akbar!” London shouted, “Globalize the intifada!”

Pictures of Hamas murderers hang gliding into Israel has become a global symbol. Above all, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” has become the rallying cry. No matter how the mainstream media try to sanitize it, this is a call for genocide, eliminating all Jews from the land of Israel to give it to Palestinian Arabs. “Pro-Hamas” rather than “pro-Palestinian” would be a more accurate description of the demonstrations.

And it’s not just violent slogans. On October 20, London police said anti-Semitic hate crimes were up 1,350 percent. The Community Security Trust says such attacks across the United Kingdom are at an all-time high. In the U.S. they are up about 400 percent; in Germany, 240 percent. In Thousand Oaks near Los Angeles, Paul Kessler, a Jew, was killed by a Palestinian supporter. In New York, a man on a subway platform punched a woman in the face because, he said, “You are Jewish.”

Jewish schools in London and the Netherlands closed to protect their students. In Lyon, a Jewish woman was stabbed to death; her home was painted with a swastika.

Jews in Paris and Berlin have found their houses marked with stars of David. France recorded 1,250 anti-Semitic acts in the month after the attack. A Jewish center in Berlin was firebombed. Nine Paris synagogues and Jewish schools received bomb threats. In Dagestan, a mob broke through airport security because they had heard a plane was coming from Tel Aviv. This was an attempted pogrom in the 21st century.

Companies with any links to Israel are being targeted with boycotts. An Israeli-based McDonald’s franchise offered free food to Israeli soldiers; Starbucks is trying to stop its union from publishing social media posts celebrating Hamas’s October 7 massacre; Disney donated to medical charities in Israel. For these actions, these companies now face worldwide boycotts.

In Philadelphia, 30 Jewish-owned restaurants were placed on a boycott list by the Philly Palestine Coalition. “It reminds me of Kristallnacht and how the Nazis forbade people to buy from Jewish merchants,” said one Philadelphia deli owner. “It is scary.” In Montreal, Jewish-owned businesses were graffitied with swastikas.

Perhaps the most shocking attacks come from young people. A Harvard caps/Harris poll found that 48 percent of U.S. registered voters ages 18 to 24 said they side more with Hamas than with Israel. In the UK, the figures for that age group are similar: 46 percent sympathize with the Palestinians, 9 percent with Israelis.

Life is becoming hard for Jewish students. In the U.S., Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated October 7 as a “historic win” for “Palestinian resistance.” New York University School of Law Bar Association sent out a letter pledging “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance.” At Manchester University, Jewish students have been attacked with lit fireworks and subjected to graffiti saying, “Kill Jews.” University College London students’ union voted for “a mass uprising” within the West Bank and Gaza. At King’s College London, they shouted, “We will honor our martyrs!”

At George Washington University in the District of Columbia, students didn’t just chant their slogan. They projected messages like “Glory to our martyrs” for two hours on the side of the library building. At Cooper Union College in New York, Jewish students were locked in the library to protect them from an angry mob outside. At Hillcrest High School in Queens, a Jewish teacher had to shelter in her locked office for hours while mobs of students rampaged outside. Her crime? Holding an “I stand with Israel” sign at a protest.

These students are being encouraged by their teachers. “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very, very bad people …. May they all rot in hell,” read a note from a Chicago art professor. October 7 was “awesome” and a “stunning victory,” said a professor from Columbia. Another at Yale tweeted, “It’s been such an extraordinary day!” An open letter from 100 Columbia professors called the October 7 massacre “a military resistance by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power.”

No wonder Jews around the world fear for their lives. “The Jewish community at the moment is full of dread, full of fear, like I’ve never seen before,” said Jewish News editor Justin Cohen. Rabbis in Washington have told people to wear baseball caps instead of yarmulkes.

“In past wars or conflicts, we saw more verbal attacks and graffiti,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee. “Now, there’s a virulence that does set this apart.”

UN Against Israel

This anti-Semitism is being enabled and encouraged by major organizations worldwide. For years the United Nations has been anti-Semitic, holding the world’s only Jewish state to a moral standard never required of any other country defending itself.

In the days after the attack, the UN Human Rights Council held a moment of silence—not for the dead Jews but for “the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.”

UN Women was quick to criticize Russia’s use of sexual violence against women in Ukraine. They have published a detailed report on the plight of women in Gaza. But they said little to criticize Hamas or to help Israeli women raped by terrorists. “Believe all women” doesn’t apply to Jews.

UN officials have been quick to justify Hamas. Secretary General António Guterres said the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum.” Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese wrote, “Today’s violence must be put in context,” and blamed “[a]lmost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population.”

Regarding Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, Guterres said, “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I have been secretary general.” That is a lie. Hamas claims that 13,000 people died in Gaza. Even if that were true, that figure is dwarfed by other catastrophes during Guterres’s tenure. Half a million died in Syria’s civil war. Nearly 400,000 died in Yemen. Some of these conflicts began before Guterres took office, and not all of the deaths are civilian, but clearly his statement is grossly wrong.

Anti-Israel Media

When Hamas claimed Israel had bombed a hospital and killed 500 people, the media took it at face value. The New York Times published a picture of a bombed-out building on its front page with a headline implying it was the destroyed hospital. The truth: A missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad hit a hospital parking lot.

Yet when Israel said that Hamas had a command center at the al-Shifa Hospital—a fact Western media had reported for years—the media were extremely skeptical. Even when Israel Defense Forces displayed machine guns and hand grenades found at the hospital, the bbc made up excuses: Maybe they belonged to the hospital’s “security department”? The media accused Israel of making up the existence of Hamas tunnels under the hospital—then Israel published video evidence. cnn was forced to acknowledge the “compelling” evidence—but, they wrote, they had only been shown “something underground,” and “it was unclear what it was or how far down it went.”

When Israel said it was bringing in medical teams and Arabic speakers to the hospital, the bbc perversely claimed that Israel was “targeting people including medical teams and Arab speakers.” For this, at least, it later apologized.

Israel published hospital security footage showing hostages being dragged through the corridors by armed men. A Guardian columnist tweeted that this just showed that “injured hostages were taken there for medical treatment.” Presumably the meat cleaver held by one of the Hamas terrorists was brought just in case the doctors needed a hand in surgery?

Conversely, when Israel’s Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon was hit repeatedly by Hamas, the press made no mention of it.

Israel released a phone recording of a Hamas terrorist calling his parents to boast about how he had killed 10 Jews. His parents celebrated with him. But when npr aired the recording, they edited it, to make it sound like the parents were trying to persuade their son to come home.

Anti-Semitism was again on display when Israel agreed to release prisoners in exchange for 50 hostages. Western media portrayed these Palestinians as “women and children”—as if Israel were holding them hostage. cnn produced an emotional segment on a Palestinian mother whose daughter was among those scheduled for release. “She’s a child, and she’s so innocent,” she said. The truth: The “children” are 17-to-18-year-olds. All the women prisoners had tried to shoot or stab someone. cnn ran the entire segment without mentioning that this “innocent” child tried to stab a 19-year-old Israeli policeman. A top UK journalist had the gall to ask an Israeli spokesman if Israel released 150 prisoners in exchange for 50 hostages because Israel regarded Palestinian lives as less valuable than Jewish ones.

Many of the photojournalists used by these outlets openly side with Hamas. Hassan Eslaiah, a freelance journalist used by AP and cnn, has been photographed being kissed by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Soliman Hijjy, whom the New York Times used for freelance videography, regularly posts about his love for Adolf Hitler. When Refaat Alareer, another Times writer, learned that Hamas had burned a baby alive in an oven, he took to Twitter to ask, “With or without baking powder?”

HonestReporting published evidence that photojournalists working for AP, cnn and the New York Times knew about the October 7 massacre in advance, traveling with the terrorists to document it.

When Jews gathered to protest the treatment they received, one left-wing journalist complained, “This is the single whitest political demonstration I’ve ever seen. Trump rallies have more melanin in the crowd.”

Even outlets like the British Medical Journal feel the need to jump in and bash Israel. “Violence in Palestine demands immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes,” it wrote—somehow managing to blame Israel for the Gaza war and not mentioning “Hamas” even once.

Repeating History

Obviously the world has seen anti-Semitism before. At least in the West, most are familiar with the history of the Holocaust. Less well known is how it began.

“The martyrdom of Jews in the 1940s would strip anti-Semitism [in Britain] of its respectability,” wrote William Manchester in The Last Lion, “but in the 1930s, it was a quite ordinary thing to see restaurants, hotels, clubs, beaches and residential neighborhoods barred to people with what were delicately called ‘dietary requirements.’ … Contempt for [Jews] was not considered bad form.”

Former King of England Edward viii visited Hitler in Germany, said he admired the führer and did not lift a finger to curb the blatant acts of anti-Semitism surging in the government and across the country.

This “social” attack on the Jews came first—the legal restrictions and then government persecution that culminated in the Holocaust followed.

In Germany, persecution of Jews was adopted as government policy nearly a decade before the war began. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws and other legislation institutionalized anti-Semitism and provided the Hitler regime legal cover to begin harassing and oppressing German Jews. These laws led to Kristallnacht, a terrifying pogrom against Jews carried out in November 1938 by Hitler’s paramilitary forces and German citizens.

Nor was this confined to Germany. Anti-Semitism was common in Poland. Hungary passed anti-Semitic laws. In France in the late 1930s, rowdy crowds, alarmed by the prospect of war with Germany and convinced that Jewish warmongers were the root of the problem, protested in towns and suburbs crying, “Death to the Jews! Raid the Jews!”

Hatred of Jews was also common in America. “The worst period of American anti-Semitism,” wrote history Prof. Leonard Dinnerstein, “was sandwiched between the ends of World War i and World War ii” (Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis). He wrote that by the mid-1940s, animosity had swelled to the point where many American Jews feared that the pogroms occurring in Nazi Germany would spread to America.

This history shows why it is not only Jews who should fear the direction we are heading in.

Throughout history, rising anti-Semitism has been a symptom of a society in crisis. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland wrote, “Jews have often functioned as a canary in the coal mine: When a society turns on its Jews, it is usually a sign of wider ill health” (March 30, 2018). It is no coincidence that the world’s worst-ever attack on Jews, numbers-wise, took place at the same time as the world’s most destructive war.

As Russian society fell apart in the late 19th century, waves of pogroms swept through the empire. In the 1880s, Jews were attacked in Kyiv, Warsaw and Odessa. Between 1903 and 1906, thousands of Jews died in a series of attacks that ran alongside the turmoil surrounding the 1905 Russian Revolution. These pogroms were a symptom of a terminally sick society, one that finally destroyed itself in 1917.

Around that time, some in France blamed the Jews for its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). This sparked a rise in anti-Semitism that led to the infamous Dreyfus Affair and a steady undercurrent of French Jew-hatred.

For 2,000 years of European history, Jews have been persecuted in good times and bad. But a pattern has emerged: In periods of major social tension and upheaval, Jews become the scapegoat. When the Black Death killed tens of millions in the 1300s, people blamed the Jews. Hundreds of Jewish communities were attacked; about 1,000 Jews were burned alive in Strasbourg.

Whenever Europe got involved with the Middle East, attacks on the Jews also spiked. During the First Crusade in 1096, Jewish communities in central Europe were wiped out in a separate German Crusade. Around 12,000 are estimated to have been killed in cities around the Rhineland. When King Richard i of England left to fight in the Middle East, anti-Jewish riots broke out across the country. As Pope Innocent iii greatly expanded the Crusades, he also persecuted Europe’s Jews. He forced Jews to wear a special badge.

Why does this irrational hatred surface repeatedly? Why is it so common today?

To really understand why anti-Semitism is such a good barometer of more global bad news, we must see the spiritual dimension.

An Irrational Hatred

The Bible is clear that God the Father has a plan for mankind and that the Jews have a unique role in this plan. Most of the Old Testament is a history of the Jews and the other tribes of Israel.

The Bible also reveals that there is a devil who hates God and relentlessly seeks to destroy His plan (John 8:44; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Revelation 12). It is not fashionable to talk about him today, but one cannot believe the Bible and fail to recognize the devil’s existence. Ephesians 2:2 implies that he influences people’s moods, feelings and emotions. He is the author of jealousy, anger and hatred.

“Satan can stir up vicious hatred,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in his book The Key of David. “He loves to use out-of-control emotions. A religion taken to the extreme—such as radical Islam—gives him a great field to work in. Nazi Germany exhibited fanatical hatred for the Jews. The Nazis also used emotion to stir up a repugnant hatred. The coming beast power [a political-religious empire prophesied to arise in this end time] will exhibit the same hatred for the Jews as well.

“Most people who hate the Jews don’t even know why they do. Can we see Satan behind such lies and hatred?”

The global rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of a very real spirit world. It’s a sign that evil spirits are real and they affect your life. Its rise goes hand in hand with the war on truth. It has the same origin—a devil that Jesus Christ Himself called the father of lies (John 8:44).

God has used the Jews powerfully in His plan. His Son was born of a Jewish woman. God loves all people, His plan includes all people, and He will offer salvation to all people. But “God directly involved the Jews in His plan,” Mr. Flurry writes. “From these facts we must assume that God the Father and Jesus Christ have a close connection to the Jewish race—but only to further their spiritual plan” (ibid).

Satan hates anyone with a “close connection” to God the Father.

In fact, Satan’s attack on Jews is simply another front in his war on truth. The Apostle Paul wrote that unto the Jews “were committed the oracles of God,” or God’s “divine utterances” (Romans 3:2). God has preserved the seventh-day Sabbath, His calendar and many writings and revelation through Jews. This does not make Jews more righteous; in fact, they are under the same spiritual deception as everyone else in “the whole world” (Revelation 12:9).

Satan hates these “divine utterances” and the people who preserved them.

Many who hate the Jews don’t understand why. They are caught up in an angry backlash against God’s plan for mankind.

The fact that God would work so closely with a physical people points us to some of the most profound and wonderful truths in the Bible. God wants to invite all mankind into His Family—and the Jews have a special role in that invitation. To understand more about it, read our article “The One Minority Society Loves to Hate.”