Antisemitism Is Exploding: Thanks Israel Lobby

For making all Jews less safe

Now this is antisemitism. And it’s scary.

You see it and feel the jolt before you even process what you’re looking at.

A grotesque caricature of a Jewish man—beard, hooked nose, the oldest filth in the book—wrapped in an Israeli flag, laughing as he dances across a field of American graves. There’s no ambiguity, no policy critique to parse. The message is blunt: Jews are doing this. Jews are responsible.

And that is only one of them.

Scroll and you find more—short, jagged clips stitching Gaza’s destruction to symbols meant to signify Jews, editing events into a narrative where Jews sit at the center, pulling strings, directing outcomes. The imagery is crude on purpose. It doesn’t argue; it asserts. It imprints. And as it conflates all Jews with Israel, it conflates all Jews with Jeffrey Epstein, as insulting as the similar conflation of all Jews with Jared Kushner.

This isn’t fringe content buried in some dark corner of the internet. It is built for TikTok, for YouTube Shorts, for X—for the endless scroll where speed is everything, and outrage spreads fastest. Reporting has traced pro-Iran networks pushing AI-generated and conspiratorial videos across major platforms, some blending anti-Israel narratives with explicit antisemitic imagery. These aren’t one-offs. They are part of a system.

How widely are they seen? Enough to matter. Some clips pull tens of thousands of views, others hundreds of thousands, others millions. They fragment, repost, mutate. Add the broader flood of fabricated war content since the Iran conflict escalated, and you get the real picture: an ecosystem that is saturated, fast, and uncontrollable once something takes hold.

If you haven’t seen them, that just means the algorithm hasn’t pushed them to you.

What they represent—stripped of pretense—is open antisemitism. Direct. Unmistakable.

And yet they land so easily because the idea behind them is already familiar.

For years, Israel and its most organized defenders in the United States pushed a simple equation: Jews and Israel are one. Not loosely connected. Not historically intertwined. One. Israel speaks for Jews; attacks on it are attacks on Jews; opposition to its founding ideology is hatred of Jews.

That message wasn’t fringe. It was institutional—repeated by major organizations (led by AIPAC, the ADL, and the American Jewish Committee), embedded in politics, reinforced on campuses, written into legislation, amplified across media. Figures like Jonathan Greenblatt, Bret Stephens, and Bari Weiss give it its cleanest formulation—anti-Zionism is antisemitism—but it never belonged to any one person. It became the language of an entire ecosystem.

For a while, it worked. It raised the cost of criticism. It punished great universities because some of their students demonstrated against the genocide. It told Jews that the enemy is the anti-war progressives like Mamdani and AOC, while their friends are the likes of Lindsey Graham, Andrew Cuomo, and Elise Stefanik. It blurred the line between a state and a people until, for many Americans, the distinction barely existed at all.

But once you collapse that distinction, you don’t get to control what happens next.

The Iranian propagandists didn’t invent this framework. They inherited it. And they are using it exactly as it was always going to be used: as collective blame. If Israel bombs Gaza, Jews are responsible. The videos don’t need to explain it. The logic is already in place.

And it doesn’t stop with Iran.

The more dangerous development is that this same conflation has spread deep into American politics—primarily on the right. MAGA and some of the most powerful voices in conservative media have embraced the same premise: Jews equal Israel.

Figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly—while opposing confrontation with Iran—frame that conflict in ways that point back to “the Jews.” Sometimes it’s explicit, sometimes it’s insinuated. The effect is the same: collective responsibility. And none of it has anything to do with concern for Palestinians, the barbarism of the war on Iran, or any humane concern for any victims (the Right has no sympathy for nonwhite victims in any situation). The Right does not like Jews.

Israel’s crimes since October 2023 have just allowed it to camouflage that simple truth.

They’ve been helped—materially—by their Jewish allies like Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Dennis Prager, who have spent years insisting on the same underlying premise: that Israel speaks for Jews everywhere, that attacks on Israel are attacks on Jews, that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They share much of the same worldview as the nationalist right—civilizational struggle, siege mentality, politics organized around existential threat. The only real difference is Israel and Jews in general.

But once you insist that Jews and Israel are indistinguishable, you don’t get to decide how that idea is used. The far right has taken it, stripped away the pro-Israel conclusion, and kept the collective blame. And in doing so, they’ve turned that equation into something far older and far uglier.

Now the consequences are here. Not as a theory, but as an image. A cartoon American Jew dancing on American graves. American Jews as puppets with Netanyahu the puppeteer.

This did not come out of nowhere.

You do not get to spend years insisting that Israel acts in the name of all Jews—and then act shocked when others take you at your word.

You do not get to defend the devastation of Gaza in explicitly Jewish terms, to fuse a state’s actions to a global people, to insist that criticism of that state is hatred of that people, and then pretend that what follows is some inexplicable outbreak.

It isn’t.

First came the war—the destruction that saturated every screen. Then came the insistence that this war was bound up with Jews as Jews, that it implicated Jewish identity itself. That was how support was sustained: by making the state and the people indistinguishable.

And now comes the consequence.

Jews everywhere treated as extensions of that state. Jews everywhere held responsible. Jews everywhere absorbing the hatred that inevitably follows when collective blame is put back into circulation.

But you, the “We Stand With Israel” lobby, built that equation. You enforced it. You made it seem like common sense.

And now, as the ugliest forms of antisemitism spread at algorithmic speed, you want to pretend it appeared out of thin air. Or that “they” (there is always a “they”) always hate the Jews

Convenient lies. Reminder: they “loved” the Jews and even Israel when Yitzhak Rabin sought peace with the Palestinians, or, at the very least) treated them with respect. Then the Jewish right demonized him until one of their number murdered him.

And you fused a people to a state while that state carried out a genocide, and then joined the United States in two successive wars on Iran, while the world watched in real time. You insisted—relentlessly—that the two were one, that defending the war meant defending Jews, that opposing it meant targeting Jews. That was the strategy. That was the argument. That was the line.

And now the bill has come due in two ways. One good, the other terrible. The good one is that you have turned the American people, by overwhelming numbers, against the idea that Israel’s interests are American interests, and two, that the Israel lobby (AIPAC specifically) is a legitimate American organization that has a legitimate role to play in US politics. The terrible and dangerous one is the growing view that American Jews are the extension of a foreign government that is now almost universally held in contempt.

This isn’t some tragic misunderstanding. It is the predictable result of what you said, what you pushed, what you demanded people believe. “We are one,” not just a lie but a dangerous lie that could lead to terrible actions.

You probably thought you were combating antisemitism. Maybe.

But, in fact, you were writing the script for it.