Hundreds of millions of people in the world face humanitarian crises and death because of antisemitism.
This might seem hyperbolic to you. I mean, there are only 17 million Jews in the world. How could the bigotry Jews experience threaten the lives of hundreds of millions?
Yes, well, that’s the grandeur of antisemitism. It has unintended consequences.
Antisemitism harms non-Jews. It even kills them.
We’ll get to that not-insignificant fact. But first we’ll consider a whole range of ways that antisemitism harms non-Jews.
As I wrote in my previous post, I hate to make this argument. We should fight antisemitism because hating and harming Jews is bad.
That argument, sadly, doesn’t seem to hold much water in the world today. So I am reduced to making this case: Fight antisemitism or people you actually give a damn about might suffer and die.
The consequences are not always quite so immediately dire, of course. They can be a slow drip that harms the world incrementally. Here’s how:
Antisemitism diverts attention from real causes of harm. Blaming Jews offers an easy scapegoat that spares those actually responsible. When economic inequality, corruption, or state failure are pinned on “Jewish elites,” “Zionists,” or “globalists,” the systems and leaders causing the damage escape scrutiny. Ordinary people, including non-Jews, lose the chance to address real structural problems like deregulation, corporate wrongdoing, or authoritarian governance because they have contented themselves with the idea that it is The Jews who are to blame. End of story.
Antisemitism weakens democracy. Antisemitic narratives thrive on conspiracies: secret cabals, hidden control, shadow power. Once people believe outcomes are controlled by an all-powerful hidden group, civic participation feels pointless. Voting, organizing, journalism, and reform lose meaning. This erosion of trust harms everyone living in that society, not just Jews.
Antisemitism poisons social movements. When antisemitism enters progressive or justice-oriented spaces (and it has done so with a vengeance in recent years), movements fracture. Energy that could be spent building coalitions gets consumed by ideological dogma and, maybe worst of all, endless denial of the problem. Non-Jewish activists lose allies, credibility, and public support when movements tolerate or excuse antisemitic rhetoric.
Antisemitism normalizes collective blame. Antisemitism trains people to accept the idea that entire groups can be held responsible for the actions of a few. Once that logic is normalized, it is unlikely to stay confined to Jews. It becomes easier to justify discrimination against immigrants, Muslims, Black communities, LGBTQ+ people, or political opponents. Everyone becomes less safe. Weirdly, as long as Jews are the ones being blamed, a lot of people don’t seem to have a problem with the phenomenon. Just wait.
Antisemitism enables authoritarianism. Historically, antisemitism has been a reliable early warning sign of authoritarian drift. Leaders who demonize Jews often go on to suppress journalists, academics, unions, and opposition parties. Non-Jews frequently believe they’re immune until those same tools are turned on them. (As I keep saying: If you don’t fight antisemitism, “they” will eventually come for someone you actually give a damn about.)
Antisemitism replaces evidence with emotion. Antisemitic claims rarely rely on verifiable facts; they rely on vibes, symbols, and insinuation. Once a culture accepts accusations without proof when Jews are involved, standards of evidence erode across the board. This damages journalism, science, law, and public discourse for everyone.
Antisemitism offers false emotional relief instead of solutions. Blame feels satisfying. It gives people a villain and a sense of clarity. But it doesn’t fix anything. Communities that lean into antisemitic explanations often delay or abandon real reforms, leaving the underlying problems to worsen and hit everyone harder over time. This is what burns me most about antisemitism on the left. We are spending all this time on antisemitism (oh, call it antizionism, call it whatever, and arguing over whether we are guilty or not) and that is diverting us from the work we are supposed to be doing.
Antisemitism corrodes moral reasoning. Antisemitism teaches people to excuse cruelty if they believe the target “deserves it.” The celebrations of October 7 have been shocking not so much because they justify violence against Jews (we’ve seen that a lot in history) but because they involve feminists celebrating mass rape and genital torture, humanitarians celebrating beheadings and live human immolations, social justice-seekers celebrating the most venal barbarities because the “Zionists” deserved it. This is not so shocking because of what it says about the capability to tolerate crimes against Jews. It shocks because of what it says about the willingness of those who imagine themselves the arbiters of human goodness to justify, even celebrate, the most deplorable inhumanity. Once that immorality and inhumanity is accepted, it becomes easier to justify injustice and atrocities anywhere. Societies that lose the ability to distinguish criticism from dehumanization don’t stay humane for long. The celebrations of October 7 tell us that a lot of people are already there. And some of them are leading our social movements, our political parties, our trade unions.
All of these examples are somewhat theoretical. So I want to give you a very tangible example of how antisemitism harms non-Jews. First, you need to accept this premise: Antizionism may or may not be the same thing as (or a variation of) antisemitism. But antizionism stands on the shoulders of antisemitism. For a deeper exploration of this concept, read this. But, even if we leave aside the argument around antisemitism’s intersection with antizionism, the damage created by antizionism (even if it’s not antisemitism) is undeniable.
Since 1948, but especially after 1967, the Arab, Muslim and communist blocs at the United Nations and in global diplomacy isolated and vilified the Jewish state, Israel. (As I’ve written, they did that because it is a Jewish state, all disclaimers and fake explanations notwithstanding).
Like it or not, Israel is probably the world’s greatest example of postwar decolonial statecraft. While Israelis were still building the rudiments of their own nation, they were already sharing their significant achievements with other emerging countries in Asia and Africa. Techniques to maximize agricultural yields in arid lands. Cooperative and rural development models. Training and assistance in community development and regional planning. Public health and medical knowledge-sharing and health system cooperation. Institution-building and more theoretical infrastructures like democratization and pluralism in multicultural societies.
Almost all of these partnerships eventually ended under pressure from Soviet, Arab and Muslim leaders. That harmed the advancement of Developing World countries and peoples immeasurably. The damage is incalculable. And it is an example of antisemitism (call it antizionism, call it whatever) harming non-Jews.
Today, things are far, far worse.
Regular readers know that I have been a bit obsessed with the number 305,000,000 this year.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and partner humanitarian tracking for 2025, approximately 305 million people worldwide require urgent humanitarian assistance and protection due to conflict, climate disasters, displacement, and food insecurity — and about 190 million of those are facing life-threatening needs (meaning they are in severe crisis or catastrophe). This year alone.
To put that in perspective, that’s nearly one in every 26 people on earth enduring extreme hardship such as famine-level hunger, displacement without shelter, acute medical emergencies, or immediate protection threats due to violence, instability, or disaster — the highest sustained humanitarian need in recent history.
But turn on your TV, watch Question Period, scan social media and you would think the only crisis in the world is the one involving the Jewish state.
Was the war in Gaza catastrophic? Yes. But so are crises facing 150 times as many people.
According to UN Watch, the United Nations General Assembly this year adopted 16 resolutions concerning Israel and only 10 resolutions on the entire rest of the world combined — covering countries like Iran, North Korea, Syria, Myanmar, Russia, and the United States. The “world parliament” devoted more than 61% of its country-specific condemnations to the Jewish state, essentially telling the 303 million non-Gazans facing crises that they can die in obscurity.
Antisemitism allows hundreds of millions of people to face suffering and death unaided and unmourned.
Oh, but it’s not antisemitism! At worst, it’s antizionism!
Who gives a good goddamn what we call it?!
Jews/Antisemitism. The Jewish state/Antizionism. Whatever.
There are 303 million people in the world whose life-threatening crises are basically ignored by the world so that we can focus all our attention on the one conflict involving the country of Jews.
Even if you don’t give a damn about Jews, maybe the hundreds of millions of non-Jews suffering and dying because of antisemitism (call it antizionism, call it whatever) might spark a tiny flame of empathy in your humanitarian heart.
If not, you really are pretty far gone.
And there we are at the end of 2025.
(I’ll have a slightly cheerier new year’s message for you next week!)
Some people have generously asked me to make it possible to make one-time contributions to support my work. I have now set up a PayPal link for donations. If you like snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and want me to keep it up, any support is deeply appreciated. Click here.
Antisemitism has existed for a very long time in the West and going East right through to Russia. It existed in the United States but to nowhere near the extent it did in Europe. After WWII, this plague dissipated to the point where it was confined mainly to some crackpots. No respectable person would want to be seen as comparable to the Inquisition, the Hitlerites and the Stalinists.
It seems to me that it reentered the bloodstream via the universities and Islam. They were at first mostly two separate ideologies, but they joined together. It was the left wing ideology of the universities that it spread to larger culture. Oppressor-oppressed, CRT, intersectionality and all that jazz. The bias has been widespread throughout the media, but it was kept enough under the covers that most people didn’t notice. Curiously, after 9/11, Muslims became one of the protected classes but not Jews. That’s a big topic in itself.
At the risk of going on for too long, the West’s relation with Islam should be a far larger topic than it has been, at least in the mainstream media. The US State Dept has been Arabist for decades. Why? Money must be part of it. But our Middle East State Dept experts must be aware of documents like this from the Muslim Brotherhood:
“The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
The State Dept tells this to any Americans thinking of travelling to Saudi Arabia, the country surely behind 9/11:
While in Saudi Arabia, you are subject to local laws. If you violate Saudi laws, even unknowingly, you may be expelled; arrested; imprisoned; held without trial for lengthy periods of time; interrogated without counsel; subject to corporal punishments, including lashings; or executed.
Are you gay? The State Dept tells you:
Same-sex sexual relations, even when consensual, are criminalized in Saudi Arabia. Violations of Saudi laws governing perceived expressions of, or support for, same-sex sexual relations, including on social media, may be subject to severe punishment. Potential penalties include fines, jail time, or death.
The State Dept tells us:
Saudi authorities do not permit criticism of Islam or Muslim religious figures, including on social media.
The government prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam. Non-Muslims suspected of violating these restrictions have been jailed and/or deported. Church services in private homes have been raided, and participants have been jailed and/or deported.
Muslims who do not adhere to the strict interpretation of Islam prevalent in much of Saudi Arabia may encounter societal discrimination and constraints on public worship (emphasis added).
Public display of non-Islamic religious articles, such as crosses and Bibles, is not permitted.
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Now this is all true for most of the Arab world. Where is the media on this? Whenever an Arab leader comes here and is interviewed by reporters, they are obsequious in the extreme. No tough questions. No informing the public of the reality of these cultures. Certainly nothing on their extreme antisemitism. Our journalist are essentially collaborators. Saudi Arabia alone beheaded 345 people last year. Business as usual. Any reports on that?
I think that if the media did its job and exposed this, a great deal of the antisemitism would disappear. If they informed the public about antisemitic lies coming from Russia for decades, it would also do a lot the lessen the problem.
Incredibly depressing but also incredibly accurate, IMHO.
As a side note, I’d love to hear/read your take on the rise of the hate-Israel right in the U.S.—people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and more recently, Vice President JD Vance. Much of the focus recently has been on the hatred of Israel on the left (and with good reason), but the right has historically been full of Jew-hatred. It seems like that bastion of antisemitism is suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly?) reviving itself.