leunusualsuspect

[leunusualsuspect]

horsethoughtbarn 5 name

if horses werent called horses what do you think they should be called

[leunusualsuspect]

when will the goyim learn that matt bernstein and ben shapiro are two sides of the same Pick Me Jew coin

[leunusualsuspect]

i need leftists to cope with their post 9/11 + Iraq/Afghan wars Islamophobia guilt in a way that doesn’t involve erasing the fact that, like it or not, Islam is a proselytizing religion that has fueled centuries of colonization, genocide, and imperialism. idealizing Islam as a purer, better alternative to Christianity is in itself Islamophobic, and it also ignores the many communities who have suffered at the hands of Islamic imperialism. it is possible to not be Islamophobic while acknowledging that.

[leunusualsuspect]

Fuck I need to find that dumb person who was like "Iran doesn't want to kill me. They wouldn't want to kill amercian citizens" on one of my posts talking about why Iran having nukes is bad. I need to find them to specifically show them this quote from an article about the US bombing iran

"commentator on Iran’s IRIB state broadcaster declared following the strikes that every American citizen and soldier in the region was now a “legitimate target.”"

Iran has literally stated that they personally would like to kill you.

It's almost like this is what we have been saying for over a week now. Sucking Khamenei's dick won't save you

Source:

[leunusualsuspect]

The degree to which American-centric goggles color everything is astonishingly irritating, but I guess it's not that surprising; for all that American Leftists like to claim they're against US Imperialism, they're really quite ready to impose their limited worldview on other people's geopolitics.

So.

Having finally hit my limit on this, a list of things I've personally witnessed American Leftists claim Israeli geopolitics are "like", presented as rebuttals.

No, Palestinians are not like Native Americans.

No, Palestinians are not like African-Americans.

No, Israelis are not like American Settlers.

No, Gaza and the West Bank are not like Native Reservations.

No, the situation in Israel is not like the Western Settlement.

No, Israeli aid to Gaza is not like smallpox blankets.

No, Zionism is not like Manifest Destiny.

No, there is no plan for "Greater Israel" like there was for "sea to shining sea".

No, there are no "Indian Schools" for Palestinians run by Israel.

No, the Nakba was not like the Trail of Tears.

No, the Gaza Border Fence is not like the Texas Border Fence.

No, Palestinians coming in to Israel to work is not like Latinos coming into America to work.

No, fearmongering about Latinos by Republicans is not like the well-substantiated fears about Hamas terrorists crossing the border.

No, the border checkpoints are not like ICE.

No, Palestinians do not, generally speaking, want to become Israelis.

No, Palestinians are not being "blocked from Israeli citizenship".

No, Palestinians are not being "prevented from voting in Israel", because they're not Israeli citizens.

No, the conflict with Iran is not like Trump threatening to invade Mexico to attack the Cartels.

No, the conflict with Iran is not like Bush invading Iraq to deal with nonexistent WMDs.

No, Israel's attack on Gaza is not like America's post-9/11 attack on Iraq.

No, Israel is not attacking either Gaza or Iran for oil.

No, the "states" in a "two-state solution" are not like American states.

No, the medical care Israel gives to Palestinians is not like the Tuskegee Airmen.

No, Arab Israelis are not living under anything like Jim Crow.

No, the Israeli prime minister is not like the American President.

No, the Knesset is not like the US Congress--they have more than two parties, for starters.

No, "Al-Quds" is not like Mount Rushmore... at least, not in the way you think it is.

I'm done for the moment, but if anyone else has any to add to the list, feel free to toss them in.

[leunusualsuspect]

Jews will not replace us (white supremacists who think jews fake being white to take over the white race) vs jews will not replace us (thinking jews are pretending to be a targeted minority to take away from the real sufferers) crowd

[leunusualsuspect]

[leunusualsuspect]

Is Israel a Settler Colonialist State?

The claim is made so often that it's hard to fault people for believing it without much thought. 

Let's first look at what Settler Colonialism is, then look at the facts to see if Israel fits the definition.

What Is Settler Colonialism again…?

It’s a specific term used by historians and theorists (Patrick Wolfe and his whole "logic of elimination" thing). Features of Settler Colonialism include:

Expansionism, claiming land for its mother country/empire (monopole) and shipping natural resources back to the empire.

Foreign settlers move in to violently displace, erase, or replace the indigenous population.

Any other cultures in the land are suppressed or wiped out

Classic examples include: British Australia, French Algeria, Canada, and North America

Let’s see if the case of Israel demonstrates these features.

A Franchisee?

Settler colonialism is usually a franchise model. Some imperial HQ says, “Go forth and colonize!” and ships people over with guns, flags, and an expectation to reap wealth torn from the colonized.

The Zionist movement started as a grassroots effort by Jews who were tired of getting pogromed every other Tuesday. Sure, they got a nod from Britain in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but that’s a long way from imperial orchestration.

(While Britain controlled Palestine under the Mandate, it hardly coddled Zionist aims - especially after the 1939 White Paper, which locked Jews out even as the Holocaust raged. Zionists didn’t march under imperial flags; they were often clashing with them.)

Settler colonialism involves one imperial power shuttling in settlers from a single source. But Jewish immigration to Israel? It came from everywhere: Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Ethiopia, Argentina, Brooklyn…everywhere in the Diaspora.

This wasn’t a colonial outpost of one empire. It was a chaotic, desperate, and diverse ingathering of people trying to survive and rebuild. Half the Jews in Israel today descend from communities that were literally kicked out of Middle Eastern and North African countries.

If it’s settler colonialism, it’s doing it very wrong.

Foreign Settlers?

Settler colonialism usually involves people showing up in a place they have zero connection to and declaring it theirs. Think: Europeans showing up in Australia and telling the Aboriginal peoples, “Nice continent—don’t mind if we do.”

Jews didn’t just randomly pick Israel from a drop-down menu. They’ve had a connection to that land for, oh, 3,000 years or so. Jerusalem isn’t just spiritually significant; it's central. They didn’t have to invent a historical claim—it’s literally baked into their religion, language, and identity. (Quick Hebrew lesson: “Zion” is kind of a giveaway.)

Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years, including communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, long before modern Zionism emerged.

Calling Jewish return to Israel “settler colonialism” is like calling your grandma a squatter for moving back into her childhood home.

But What About Palestinian Displacement?

Let’s be clear: Yes, during the 1948 war, a large number of Arabs living in Palestine were displaced. That’s a fact, it's not disputable, and it’s not something to brush aside.

This wasn’t, however, some settler-colonial master plan with color-coded maps and a mission to erase or ethnically cleanse non-Jewish peoples.

The early Zionist movement was buying land legally (much of it from absentee Arab landlords) and building farms, schools, and towns. It was a messy nationalist project, like many others in the 20th century. The displacement of Palestinians came not from a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, but from a war. 

The war was launched by neighboring Arab states who made no secret of their goal: to destroy the brand-new Jewish state before it could take its first real breath.

Five Arab armies invaded in 1948, and local Arab leaders, along with the invading forces, told many Palestinian Arabs to temporarily evacuate, assuring them they could return after the Jews were wiped out. 

Things didn't go according to their plans, because Israel survived. 

Historians like Efraim Karsh and Benny Morris document cases where Arab leaders advised evacuation and cases where displacement occurred amid battle. War is brutal, and real people paid the price.

The tragedy is real, but so is the context. The war wasn’t started by Israel. It was a war of survival that Israel fought while vastly outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded.

And here’s a twist that is usually ignored in modern retellings:

The term Nakba - which today refers almost exclusively to Palestinian displacement, originally meant something else.

In 1948, Arab intellectuals like Constantin Zureiq used “Nakba,” meaning "catastrophe," not to mourn Palestinian suffering, but to describe the colossal failure of the Arab world to crush Israel. In his own words: “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a small downfall. It is a catastrophe in every sense of the word.”

The shame wasn’t just about lost land—it was about how a supposedly mighty Arab and Islamic world failed to destroy a state of Holocaust survivors and refugees.

The original "Nakba" was about that failure, not the displacement narrative that would emerge decades later.

History is a lot more complicated than hashtags suggest.

But Israel Sought to Wipe Out Local Culture, right?

If Zionism had been a settler colonial project, you'd expect to see that. Settler colonial regimes tend to come in hot with cultural carpet bombing: banning languages, crushing customs, bulldozing identities.

Israel? Not so much. Israel has official protections for Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Baháʼí religious sites. Ever heard of the “status quo” agreements? They govern holy sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Unlike classic settler-colonial cases like the US, Canada, or Australia where indigenous languages, religions, and identities were suppressed, Israel recognizes Arabic as an official language, protects Muslim and Christian holy sites, and integrates minorities into public life with equal legal rights for all citizens.

Is the situation always perfect? No. Does Israel have a Ministry of Culture Death? Also no.

But Israel stripped the land of its natural resources in the name of their imperial project and destroyed the ecology of the land!

First, there was no empire, no monopole to ship anything to because (again) Israel was not the outpost of a foreign empire - it was a desperate refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms, fascism, and a genocide which had wiped out a third of their people. 

Second, what natural resources could they have stripped the land of? Mandate Palestine was not known for its abundant natural treasures. Oil? Nope. Gold? Nada. Fertile, easily farmed land? Not much.

What Zionists did find was malaria, swamps, desert, and the occasional Ottoman tax ledger. The region was, in the words of Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain), "a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds."

Not exactly a paradise ripe for exploitation.

Here's a twist: rather than destroying the ecology, Israel has spent 75 years rebuilding it. The country has planted over 240 million trees, turning arid hills green and reversing desertification. Israel pioneered drip irrigation - watering crops with scientific precision to conserve every drop. It recycles nearly 90% of its wastewater (second place is Spain at about 30%). The Negev Desert is now home to solar farms, sustainable agriculture, and research centers where scientists grow cherry tomatoes in saltwater and build fish farms in sand.

Israel’s environmental stewardship of the land is so advanced that experts have come from Africa, South America, and India to partner with Israeli experts to tackle their own climate challenges. If this is what settler-colonial ecological destruction looks like, the planet could use a bit more of it.

So no, Israel isn’t extracting the land’s bounty and mailing it to a mythical European mothership. It’s been reclaiming wasteland, reforesting hills, and creating the most efficient water system in the world. And it did all that while fighting seven wars and inventing the USB stick. Not bad for a country the size of New Jersey.

It's a Colonial Struggle!!

It’s a nationalist conflict, not a colonial one. Two peoples - Jewish and Palestinian - with deep historic ties to the same land, both claiming national self-determination. That’s tragic, painful, and hard to resolve. But it’s not the same as a bunch of white Europeans setting up a Starbucks on someone else’s sacred mountain.

Trying to squeeze this conflict into the settler colonial box doesn’t make it clearer—it flattens it. It erases Jewish history and Palestinian suffering in one fell swoop.

History Deserves Better Than Hashtags

Calling Israel a "settler colonial state" might feel like a tidy moral label, but history is messier than slogans. The story is way more complex than “colonizer vs. colonized.” It’s about trauma, return, identity, nationalism, war, and a shitload of of mistakes along the way by all parties involved.

But if you want to understand it, really understand it, you’ve got to ditch the buzzwords and look at the footnotes, because the truth won’t always fit in a meme.

Aforementioned Footnotes:

Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 2006.

https://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/89.pdf

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230299191

Bickerman, Elias. From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees. Schocken Books, 1962.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59581

Biblical and archaeological records compiled in Israel

Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Free Press, 2001.

https://archive.org/details/bibleunearthedar0000fink/page/n5/mode/2up

Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674047426

Jewish National Fund archives of land acquisition documents.

https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/19702

Historical Aliyah data

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-immigration-to-israel-by-country-per-year

Protection of Holy Places Law, 1967

https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/lawofholyplaces1967.htm

Shapira, Anita. Yosef Hayim Brenner: A Life. Stanford University Press, 2014.

(Documents Jewish labor ethos and rejection of exploitative structures)

https://archive.org/details/yosefhaimbrenner0000shap

On the Nakba

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300126969/the-birth-of-the-palestinian-refugee-problem-revisited/

Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npnkg

Efraim Karsh, 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians – the True Story, Middle East Quarterly (2008)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258996946_1948_Israel_and_the_Palestinians_-_The_True_Story

Constantin Zureiq, Ma'na al-Nakba (1948):

https://archive.org/details/zurayk-nakba

_____

If you want to argue with this in the replies, please do- but bring receipts.

[leunusualsuspect]

How would you feel if your child died in an IDF bombing?

A friend of mine lost two children, so I've seen that sort of grief close up...and I have two kids.

I'd probably feel a pain so consuming as to defy words to describe. Not just sorrow, but that kind of white-hot grief that reshapes time. I imagine my body would forget how to move. My skin would stop fitting. Every future I had ever imagined would disappear. I'd probably scream until I couldn't.

Soon, I might also feel rage. Not the cheap kind, the social media kind, but a rage that lives in the bones and makes it hard to eat. I might direct that rage at the IDF, Hamas, the Israeli people, the world, myself, or God. Probably all of them.

Because losing a child in war isn't abstract. It's not a moral gotcha', it's not an aesthetic, It's not a meme, it's not a rhetorical device.

It's just hell and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

What the Death of Our Children Should Teach Us

If the death of a child should teach us anything, it's this: don’t start wars. Don’t glorify them, don't flirt with them, don't justify them with hashtags. Don't build your politics around people who do.

The wars between Israel and Hamas did not begin because two equal parties had a disagreement. Every round of conflict began the same way: Hamas attacked. Israel responded.

That includes the current war.

On October 7th, Hamas invaded southern Israel and committed the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. They didn't target only soldiers. They didn't storm only military bases. They raped, tortured, mutilated, and executed civilians - babies, grandmothers, festival-goers, migrant workers, and entire families in their homes.

Then they kidnapped over 250 people and dragged them into Gaza, including babies, toddlers, and Holocaust survivors.

One Side Targets Civilians. The Other Tries Not To.

Let's talk about bombings.

Hamas intentionally fires rockets at Israeli cities, aiming for civilian casualties. They hide weapons in hospitals and launch sites at schools. They do this knowing - hoping - that Palestinian civilians will die in Israeli retaliatory strikes. That's the PR strategy. That's not my opinion. That’s from Hamas’s own documents, interviews, and media.

Israel, by contrast, invests massive resources in avoiding civilian deaths. It warns people with phone calls, text messages, and "roof knocks" before airstrikes. It uses precision-guided munitions. It calls off operations if too many non-combatants are in the area. None of this is perfect - war never is - but the difference in intent matters.

It matters morally. It matters legally. And it matters if you're the one living under the bombs.

Yarden Bibas

You asked me how I'd feel if I lost my child in an IDF bombing.

I imagine I'd feel kinship with Yarden Bibas.

Yarden Bibas lived in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. On the morning of October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded his home. They kidnapped his wife, Shiri, and their two sons: Ariel, age 4, and Kfir, nine months old.

You can see the footage. It's online. Yarden's family being dragged away at gunpoint. A terrorist holding baby Kfir like a football. Ariel screaming. Yarden himself was taken separately.

While the whole family was in captivity, Hamas released a psychological warfare video showing Shiri and the children alive. Then, silence. For months, Israeli and international media asked for proof of life. None came.

Eventually, Hamas admitted what Israel feared: Shiri and the children were dead. Hamas claimed they were killed in an Israeli airstrike - but refused to say where, when, or provide evidence.

Yarden Bibas was freed by Hamas on February 1, 2025, as part of the second ceasefire-hostage release deal. He had endured 484 days in captivity after being kidnapped on October 7, 2023.

Hamas returned the bodies of his wife, Shiri, and their sons on February 20–21, 2025. DNA testing confirmed the remains, and their funeral took place on February 26, 2025. They'd been strangled.

So let me return your question: How do you think Yarden Bibas feels?

How would you feel if you, your wife, and both your children were kidnapped, your family was murdered, and then their corpses were used as leverage in a propaganda campaign by a genocidal death cult, while you sat in a dark tunnel underground?

Would you be calm? Forgiving? Would you write poetic appeals to humanity? Would you want the whole world to stop pretending this is complicated and get on with balancing the scales?

I can only imagine how Yarden Bibas or any other parent who has lost a child feels. I can hope that such a thing wouldn't destroy me -but it might.

That's the best I can do if I treat your question as sincere and in good faith.

What if it isn't sincere or in good faith?

When I write about complex and difficult things, I often receive comments which are rhetorical traps disguised as empathy. You probably know what I'm talking about, right? One of those fake-compassion tricks people play when they want to make a moral accusation without doing the work of making a moral argument...?

For a wrap-up, I'll assume that's what your question is.

Maybe you want me to say that if I lost a child in a bombing, I'd blame the bomber pilot, or Netanyahu, or Israel as a whole....so then you could say: See? That's how Palestinians feel about Israel. Case closed.

But life isn't a tidy moral equation.

It matters who started the war. It matters who used civilians (their own and enemy civilians) as shields. It matters who deliberately targeted families and babies and celebrated it with GoPro footage.

Intent matters, not just outcome.

So if you care about children dying, please don't participate in romanticizing the groups who engineer those deaths on purpose...and that includes Hamas.

If you really care about peace, don't try to weaponize other people's grief. Instead, start listening to it.

One way to listen to it is by giving your attention to peace activists who have lost family to violence in the Levant.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib lost 30 family members in Gaza in December of 2023. His response to that is Realign for Palestine...and I listen to everything he cares to share.

[leunusualsuspect]

I'll say it before, and I'll say it again, if you view all jews, or the default jew, as European, it is solely because you've put your focus on European history. Assuming European history is inherently more important than other continents' history is inherently racist.

[leunusualsuspect]

for weeks I read stories or watched videos of animals drowning in zoos, in their homes, whole ecosystems dying or being damaged for centuries ahead, we were screaming for help on all platforms and got completely ignored and silenced

this made me lose faith in humanity forever

[leunusualsuspect]

It's Juneteenth yall. And I'm not letting this day go unmarked.

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

💝

[leunusualsuspect]

Feeling spicy this morning so I'm gonna say it:

The way that people frame all Arabs as being equivalent to Palestinians with regards to Israel allows the dominant ethnic group in the region to launder their bigotry against a minority group that has been almost completely ethnically cleansed from the Middle East (save one specific state! guess which!) and present themselves as an oppressed group within the region, and I am extremely tired of this framing.

No, I do not need to "listen to Arabs" about Israel as if they have some unique authority on the subject, as if they have all been equally oppressed by the 7 million Jews in Israel as Palestinians have been, as if someone from Egypt, someone from Qatar, someone from Saudi Arabia, as if any one of the 400 million+ Arabs living across the MENA region is living under the oppression of Israeli Jews exactly as Palestinians are.

This is, plainly put, fucking stupid.

[leunusualsuspect]

do we think chocolate guy is gay?

[leunusualsuspect]

[leunusualsuspect]

*slams reblog*

[leunusualsuspect]

The list of horrific antisemitic attacks in the United States keeps growing. Two weeks ago in Boulder, Colo., a man set fire to peaceful marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Less than two weeks earlier, a young couple was shot to death while leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington. The previous month, an intruder scaled a fence outside the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and threw Molotov cocktails while Mr. Shapiro, his wife and children were asleep inside. In October, a 39-year-old Chicago resident was shot from behind while walking to synagogue.

The United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in 2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups.

American Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the country’s population, are well aware of the threat. Some feel compelled to hide signs of their faith. Synagogues have hired more armed guards who greet worshipers, and Jewish schools have hired guards to protect children and teachers. A small industry of digital specialists combs social media looking for signs of potential attacks, and these specialists have helped law enforcement prevent several.

The response from much of the rest of American society has been insufficient. The upswing in antisemitism deserves outright condemnation. It has already killed people and maimed others, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in Boulder. And history offers a grim lesson: An increase in antisemitism often accompanies a rise in other hateful violence and human rights violations. Societies that make excuses for attacks against one minority group rarely stop there.

Antisemitism is sometimes described as “the oldest hate.” It dates at least to ancient Greece and Egypt, where Jews were mocked for their differences and scapegoated for societal problems. A common trope is that Jews secretly control society and are to blame for its ills. The prejudice has continued through the Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the worst mass murder in history, the Holocaust, which led to the coining of a new term: genocide.

In modern times, many American Jews believed that the United States had left behind this tradition, with some reason. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” It tends to re-emerge when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened. The anger pulsing through society has manifested itself through animosity toward Jews.

The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.

The problem extends to popular culture. Joe Rogan, the podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, “They run everything.” In the Trumpist right, antisemitism has a home.

It also has a home on the progressive left, and the bipartisan nature of the problem has helped make it distinct. Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism. College campuses, where Jewish students can face social ostracization, have become the clearest example. A decade ago, members of the student government at U.C.L.A. debated blocking a Jewish student from a leadership post, claiming that she might not be able to represent the entire community. In 2018, spray-painted swastikas appeared on walls at Columbia. At Baruch, Drexel and the University of Pittsburgh, activists have recently called for administrators to cut ties with or close Hillel groups, which support Jewish life. In a national survey by Eitan Hersh of Tufts University and Dahlia Lyss, college students who identified as liberal were more likely than either moderates or conservatives last year to say that they “avoid Jews because of their views.”

One explanation is that antisemitism has become conflated with the divisive politics of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is certainly true that criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism. This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians. Since the current war began, we have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza. Israel’s reflexive defenders are wrong, and they hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism. But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction. They have engaged in whataboutism regarding anti-Jewish hate. They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years. “Americans generally have greater ability to identify Jew hatred when it comes from the hard right and less ability and comfort to call out Jew hatred when it comes from the hard left or radical Islamism,” said Rachel Fish, an adviser to Brandeis University’s Presidential Initiative on Antisemitism.

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Historical comparisons can also be instructive. The period since Oct. 7, 2023, is hardly the first time that global events have contributed to a surge in hate crimes against a specific group. Asian Americans were the victims in 2020 and 2021 after the Covid pandemic began in China. Muslim Americans were the victims after Sept. 11, 2001. In those periods, a few fringe voices, largely on the far right, tried to justify the hate, but the response from much of American society was denunciation. President George W. Bush visited a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001, and proclaimed, “Islam is peace.” During Covid, displays of Asian allyship filled social media.

Recent experience has been different in a couple of ways. One, the attacks against Jews have been even more numerous and violent, as the F.B.I. data shows. Two, the condemnation has been quieter and at times tellingly agonized. University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks, they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism. Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.

Alarmingly, the antisemitic rhetoric of both the political right and the left has filtered into justifications for violence. But there has been an asymmetry in recognizing the connections. After a gunman murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, observers correctly noted that he had become radicalized partly through racist right-wing social media. There has been a similar phenomenon in some recent attacks, this time with the assailants using the language of the left.

The man who burned marchers in Colorado shouted “Free Palestine!” and (awkwardly) “End Zionist!” The man charged with killing the young Israeli Embassy workers in Washington last month is suspected of having posted an online manifesto titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.” His supporters have since published a petition that includes “Globalize the Intifada.” The demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the right bore some responsibility for the Pittsburgh massacre; the demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the left bears some responsibility for the recent attacks.

Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group. Many Jews live with fears that they never expected to experience in this country.

No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry. The choice is between denouncing it fully and encouraging an even broader explosion of hate.