“I’m afraid,” a Jewish friend from London told me two months ago. Outside her home in the Golders Green neighborhood, four ambulances belonging to the Hatzalah emergency service organization had been set on fire. It was just another incident in a long chain of attacks.
On May 21 last year, two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside the Jewish Museum in Washington. In October 2025, two Jews were killed on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Manchester. In December, a Hanukkah terror attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, left 15 people dead, most of them Jewish. In March 2026, there was a shooting attack at a synagogue in Michigan. A swift response by security guards prevented a mass killing. And last week, two Jews were stabbed, again in London’s Golders Green neighborhood.
My friend wants to leave and move to Israel. It is not easy for her; there are issues of livelihood and family. But she knows the next attack is only a matter of time.
We want to know why this is happening. Because confronting this phenomenon, which continues to worsen and of which terror attacks are only the tip of the iceberg, requires a deeper understanding of its causes.
We do not know everything. We do know that for many years an enormous propaganda campaign funded by Qatar has been underway. That is no secret. Hundreds of billions have been invested, in universities, culture and sports, producing one result: hatred.
It is not as though Qatar itself gained much from this. Quite the opposite. In the confrontation with Iran, those who were supposed to stand with Qatar instead sided with the progressive, anti-American camp that was effectively pro-Iranian. But the investment of vast sums over many years has indeed harmed Israel and Jews.
Still, with all due disrespect to Qatar, much of this would be happening even without it.
It is hard to remain indifferent to the vast sea of information operating like brainwashing. The average Western citizen is exposed to media outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde in France, Corriere della Sera in Italy and El País in Spain. And when they turn to Wikipedia, the world’s most popular knowledge platform, widely regarded as fair, it turns out that anti-Israel bias has penetrated there as well. The Anti-Defamation League is labeled an “unreliable source,” while Al Jazeera is granted the status of a “reliable source.”
According to an ADL study, “a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia policies in concert to insert antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias and misleading information.”
No one needs to be born antisemitic. Exposure to information platforms considered trustworthy inevitably leads the average citizen toward deep hostility to Israel and growing sympathy for “resistance organizations,” including Hamas and Hezbollah, which fight Israel and are granted the status of “anti-colonialist” groups, even if they themselves may not have known they were supposedly such movements.
A quick look at what they say about themselves is enough to understand that these are terror organizations seeking to impose a dark regime and that wherever they operate, they bring destruction, devastation and bloodshed. Yet somehow this escapes the attention of most journalists at the world’s leading media organizations.
This Wednesday, precisely as these words were being written, I received a BBC push notification: “The channel traces 10 minutes of Israeli bombing that brought destruction to Lebanon.” Ten minutes destroyed Lebanon?
I opened the BBC homepage. The lead story concerned progress toward an agreement between the United States and Iran. Fair enough. But two prominent adjacent headlines dealt with Lebanon. One, mentioned above, focused on the “destruction of Lebanon,” and the other, nearly identical, declared that a “massive wave of Israeli strikes brought chaos to Lebanon.”
Both articles were written by journalist Nawal al-Maghafi. I searched in vain for reporting from the BBC favorite about the fact that most Lebanese actually want peace with Israel, or reports explaining that Hezbollah and Iran are responsible for Lebanon’s devastation and ruin.
What lodges in the public consciousness? Israel bombs Lebanon. Without context. Without background. Certainly without justification.
As British journalist James Delingpole wrote two decades ago during the Second Lebanon War: “Forming an opinion on the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel based on BBC reports from Beirut is like forming an opinion on World War II based on reports of the bombing of Dresden filmed in cooperation with Goebbels’ propaganda department.”
It was true then. It is even more true today.
Most people exposed to this toxic information — which turns reality upside down and turns Israel into the problem — do nothing with it. Perhaps they resent their governments for continuing to cooperate with Israel. A small percentage occasionally join anti-Israel demonstrations. And from among those few who develop a profound hatred of Israel, a handful decide to act.
That, for example, was the story of Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, whose progressive views led him to murder Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Jewish Museum in Washington.
And if that is true of Rodriguez, who carried out an ideological murder, it is certainly true of those who arrived in the West from Muslim countries, where Islamist incitement is added to the constant incitement spread by Western information platforms.
“Wait,” some will now say. “It’s because of what Israel is doing.”
But no. Absolutely not.
It is because of what information platforms, led by the major media outlets, say about Israel — often with assistance from Israelis and Jews themselves.
The allegations of starvation and genocide were, of course, central elements in this brainwashing campaign. The problem is that there was no genocide and no starvation. Those lies have already been disproved in the most credible way possible.
Yet most of the media outlets mentioned above, like most leading university campuses, refuse to provide a platform for those refuting the accusations.
Prof. Danny Orbach, hardly a right-wing figure but one of the authors of the thoroughly factual report rejecting the genocide claim, does not mince words about his academic colleagues:
“In many academic circles around the world, there is a regime of terror and fear regarding Israel and Gaza. The blood libel of genocide has become a religious dogma that must not be questioned. Writers who believe it is a blood libel — including leading scholars — are afraid to speak out lest they be ostracized and confronted by unruly students. Legal experts, generals and historians who know it is a lie whisper it behind closed doors. Editors give writers ‘friendly advice’ to omit references to studies critical of the accusation so as not to be controversial.”
This week Orbach arrived in The Hague for a conference where, he said, “scholars willing to tell the truth” were gathering. It is a rare event, held under unusually heavy security.
“Under such conditions,” Orbach said, “there can be no talk of academic freedom or freedom of research. Only the accusers enjoy such freedom.”
And this Bolshevik-style brainwashing has consequences. For the overwhelming majority, the result is only opinions. For a few, as noted, it leads to murderous acts.
So it must be said clearly: You, the inciters in the media and academia, are responsible for the rise in antisemitism. You encourage hatred that leads to murder. You are neither enlightened nor progressive. You are reactionary people acting exactly like those who spread libels against Jews in the Middle Ages.
You know, or certainly should know, that Israel is fighting jihadists, Sunni and Shiite alike, who openly declare that their goal is the destruction of Israel and often the destruction of Jews. You know they wave Nazi swastika flags. You know Israel does not harm innocent civilians any more than the Western coalition did during the war on terror — and in fact, far less.
But you conceal the facts.
So yes, you are responsible for the incitement whose results include the attacks that have already occurred and those still to come.
And there is nothing like Israeli academics and journalists to raise the level of antisemitism.
Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel propagandists on every possible platform, knows exactly what he is doing. He appeared alongside Gideon Levy at the prestigious Munk Debates club opposite Douglas Murray and the brilliant lawyer Natasha Hausdorff.
The debate centered on the question: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?
It was a rare occasion in which those presenting what they viewed as the truth were given a hearing. In the audience vote, as is customary at the Munk Debates, Murray and Hausdorff won.
It could have been a glimmer of hope: the truth prevailing.
But the problem is that in most newspapers there is almost no trace of facts disproving the accusations. Hasan himself, of course, continued charging ahead.
“You claim there is no genocide?” he asks. He has what he sees as a decisive answer: three Israeli professors — Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman. If they say “genocide,” why should anyone object?
Before them there was Prof. Raz Segal, who on Oct. 13, less than a week after the Hamas massacre, published an article in Jewish Currents accusing Israel of genocide.
And it is difficult to forget the newspaper that led the campaign, Haaretz, which gave legitimacy to other newspapers around the world to spread the accusation.
If this is what Israeli academics say, if this is what an Israeli newspaper claims — who needs facts?
It is also worth recalling that Zohran Mamdani did not need much time. Ten days after the Hamas massacre, he was already leading a violent protest accusing Israel of genocide.
Israel is not perfect. Far from it. It is legitimate to criticize it. There are politicians in Israel, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are a tremendous asset to Israel’s enemies. Jews around the world who love Israel bang their heads against the wall after every one of their statements.
And there is no doubt that the current government’s policies do not help the fight against murderous antisemitism.
But it must also be acknowledged that hatred of Israel existed long before the current government and its wayward ministers. Polls conducted over recent decades — long before Oct. 7 and before the current government — revealed that in many European countries a large public, sometimes a majority, believes that “Israel behaves toward the Palestinians the way the Nazis behaved toward the Jews.”
This is not over.
Israel, together with Jewish organizations, should long ago have understood that we are in a state of emergency. The battle is not only against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It is also a battle over public consciousness, which is generating waves of antisemitism that could reach new heights.
They are already dangerous today. They could become far more dangerous.
The Israeli government must wake up.