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racism
Labeling All Criticism of Israel as Antisemitism Is Dangerous and Wrong
Weaponizing antisemitism on behalf of Israel does not protect Jewish people. It only makes them more vulnerable to future violence—for their sake, and the sake of Palestinians, Iranians and other victims of Israel’s violence, it must stop.
Mar 22, 2026
On March 17, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and pro-Trump ally, resigned from his position in protest of the war in Iran. In his resignation letter, he remarked, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent is not alone here. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) remarked that ”[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu just a few weeks ago said he’d been waiting 40 years for an American president to join him in attacking Iran. And in Donald Trump, he finally found somebody stupid enough and reckless enough to actually do it.”
Now, it is worth noting that this is one of several conflicting reasons that have been provided to justify this war. Yet, that is precisely why these allegations should be taken seriously and investigated. As it stands, the US and Israel have launched an illegal, unprovoked war that is indiscriminately killing civilians, including children, while wrecking the global economy. We must know why.
Despite this, these allegations against Israel have been criticized as antisemitic. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt condemned those who blamed “the Jews” for inciting this war. “It is a sad irony,” Greenblatt said, “that an operation against the world’s largest sponsor of antisemitism has prompted so much antisemitism.” Zack Beauchamp, writing for Vox, accused Kent of engaging in “antisemitic conspiracism.” He wrote, “Antiwar antisemitism is still antisemitism.”
Conflating criticism of Israel with genuine bigotry only makes it more difficult to assess and address this serious problem.
These responses represent a continuing and troubling trend of conflating criticisms of Israel (and the Israeli government more specifically) with antisemitism.
Let us be clear: Not all criticisms of Israel are rooted in antisemitism. Likewise, not all criticisms of Iran are Islamophobic. The same holds true for individuals: It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu.
What matters is the underlying rationale. Are we judging the person or nation based on the actions they have taken, the thoughts they have expressed, or the policies they have implemented? Or are stereotypes, prejudices, and ignorance fueling those claims? Are the accusations of Israel provoking this war based on the best available evidence or antisemitic hallucinations of a “secret Jewish cabal” plotting world domination?
Parsing through these questions requires careful assessment. If the allegations against Israel are grounded in hatred, then we must hold the people spreading those lies accountable. Antisemitism can never be tolerated.
If, however, they are supported by hard evidence, then a commitment to justice, morality, and humanity requires we hold Israel accountable. The same standard applies to all nations and world leaders, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or any other characteristic. No one is beyond reproach.
Greenblatt argues that referring to Israel as an “apartheid state,” accusing it of committing a genocide, or starting the war with Iran contribute to the “most concentrated, most dangerous surge of antisemitism in living memory.” What Greenblatt fails to realize is the role of people like him in driving this surge. His rhetoric does not silence opposition. It does not contribute to productive dialogue and understanding. Rather, it creates the false perception that all of Israel’s actions reflect its Jewish identity; that Israel speaks for and represents all Jewish people. That only someone who hates “the Jew” would ever find fault in Israel’s actions. That antisemitism is the only reason why someone would support Palestinians and advocate for their sovereignty.
We must remember that antisemitism and racism, like all forms of prejudice, are acts of depersonalization and dehumanization. The antisemite treats all Jewish people as a homogenous group—they all share the same thoughts, have the same aspirations, engage in the same acts. Here, the diversity of thoughts and opinions is denied. For the bigot, everything the Jewish person does is not a reflection of them as a person, but rather of their “Jewishness.” This flawed logic paves the way for the antisemite to hold all Jewish people accountable for the words and deeds of a few. When people like Greenblatt indiscriminately label any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, he follows this same logic: He treats Israel not as a sovereign nation whose actions reflect its own internal decision-making but as “the Jewish state” whose actions are inseparable from its Jewish identity. It reduces all discussion of Israel to its ethnicity and religion—that is, itself, antisemitic.
Jewish people are neither collectively responsible for Israel’s actions nor do they universally support them. For instance, two prominent Israeli rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—have accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist advocacy group, has protested against the US government’s unfettered support for Israel. According to a October 2025 Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, with 39% saying it is committing a genocide. None of this is antisemitism.
The reality is that according to both the Gaza Health Ministry and an Israeli security official over 70,000 Gazans have been killed in Israeli attacks since Oct 7, 2023. The reality is that Israeli officials have repeatedly implied or outright expressed genocidal intent. In 2024, Netanyahu said in a news conference, “In any future arrangement… Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan.” In 2025, he said: "We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us." More pointedly, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi said, we must “wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth,” while adding “Gaza must be burned.” Those killings happened, those words were said—we must reckon with this reality, not cast it aside as an antisemitic conspiracy.
None of this is to deny that antisemitism is on the rise worldwide. However, conflating criticism of Israel with genuine bigotry only makes it more difficult to assess and address this serious problem. It dilutes the moral weight of accusations of antisemitism and distracts us from the harm suffered by its victims. Ultimately, we cannot seek justice for one group while denying it for another. We must stand with Palestinians who have been terrorized by Israel’s military assaults, as well as the victims of the Bondi Beach shooting, Temple Israel synagogue attack, and other acts of violence. A moral double standard cannot be tolerated.
And yes, it is the case that some anti-Israel critics, like Nick Fuentes, are antisemitic. Similarly, some disparagements of African, Asian, and Latin American countries are racist; and some attacks against Middle Eastern countries are Islamophobic. This possibility, however, does not mean we should treat every criticism as being singularly and inherently hateful. Rather, it must caution us to be more careful and critical with the words we use.
Weaponizing antisemitism on behalf of Israel does not protect Jewish people. It only makes them more vulnerable to future violence—for their sake, and for the sake of Palestinians, Iranians, and other victims of Israel’s violence, it must stop.
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The Correct Solution to Antisemitism Is to Call for BDS Against Israel
Ending the notion that all Jews are responsible for and agree with what Israel is doing are necessary to deal with this horrific form of racism.
Mar 22, 2026
There’s been much debate on the left around the world about how best to respond to what appears to be rising antisemitism. What, if anything, is the best response? Some argue, mostly correctly, that raising the subject amidst Israel’s genocide in Gaza, bombing many of its neighbors etc. is an attempt to deflect attention away from that country’s crimes.
However, in so far as there has been a rise in one form of racism, let me suggest one solution:
An effective way for governments around the world to halt the rise in antisemitism would be to apply BDS principles towards Israel. Boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning would last until either a two-state solution was arrived at with Palestinians or all the people living on the land Israel currently occupies were given equal rights and opportunities.
Based on experience with the South African apartheid state, BDS could pressure Israel to end its military-might-makes-right, international law ignoring, colonial, racist, anti-human behavior. That is by far the major source of increasing antisemitism today. This should not be a controversial statement, but it is for those who remain supporters of Israel despite that country becoming a pariah in most of the world. Some people, for religious, political, or pro-U.S. empire reasons justify ongoing ethnic cleansing, apartheid policies, the destruction of Gaza, mass killing of children and women, expansion of illegal settlements and repeated bombings of neighboring countries. They either agree with or excuse Netanyahu’s extreme right, Jewish supremacist government that believes in expansion of a state imposed on the people of southwest Asia by western powers. They attack anyone who criticizes Israel and call them antisemites. They conflate Judaism with the interests of the Israeli state.
These should not be controversial statements. Israel’s current behavior and its conflation of Judaism with that country’s actions is by far the biggest reason for a rise in antisemitism in the last few years. Therefore, ending that behavior and the notion that all Jews are responsible for and agree with what Israel is doing are necessary to deal with this form of racism.
The most effective and quickest way to accomplish these essential tasks is a widespread and complete BDS campaign by most countries in the world. The goals would be to force Israel’s respect for international law and end what the largest Israeli human rights organization calls “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”. But instead, most western countries support Israel, empowering and excusing its bad behavior which emboldens existing antisemites and creates more. In other words, supporting and emboldening antisemitism rather than trying to end its current most damaging cause. It seems like those western governments and the pro-Israel organizations that pressure them to continue this madness are fine with the resulting increase in antisemitism. Why? One answer might be to push longstanding Jewish communities around the world to emigrate to Israel. Certainly, the notion of Aliyah is something promoted by Zionism.
But all of us, including millions of Jews, who oppose religious/ethnic nationalism and support progressive secular democracy as the best way to overcome all forms of racism, including antisemitism, must say no to Israel’s horrible behavior and quickly end it. The best non-violent way to do that is supporting BDS.
Massive economic, political and cultural pressures are needed to change Israel’s behavior. The same is true to change the behavior of supporters of Israel in many western countries who enable that bad behavior. For example, in Canada, government subsidies and give tax breaks to Zionist organizations that use this funding to attack anyone who criticizes Israel. More importantly they push the mistakenly dangerous notion that Israel is the state of all Jews, thus convincing people that all Jews are responsible for Israel’s behavior. Rather than give money to organizations that claim to be fighting antisemitism but instead use those funds to defend and promote the interests of a foreign state whose actions are a significant cause of antisemitism, governments must get to the root of the problem. They must engage in real action to stop Israel’s bad behavior. They must end support for organizations that promote the conflation of Judaism with that behavior.
It’s time for the political left and all those who believe in human rights for all to call for BDS as a way to combat antisemitism.
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Another Thing Trump and Epstein Share: White Supremacy
Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump.
Mar 18, 2026
Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also—wait for it—a white supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Donald Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.
Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.
Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and Indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.
The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners, being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”
There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the global South.
Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.
Epstein on Race
Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences. Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).
According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.
Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”
Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help. In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African-American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”
Epstein also spent time on hardcore white supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright white supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science. According to The Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.
The “Great Gene” President
Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:
- “Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”
- “You have to have the rights—the right genes.”
- “Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”
- “I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”
And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.
It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and congressional Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Al Green (D-Texas), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), radio host Charlamagne tha God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.
Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling white-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).
His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025 speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for white—and implicitly white only—immigration to this country:
Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, "This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest," because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden—just a few—let us have a few. From Denmark—do you mind sending us a few people?
In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.
At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 white South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely claiming that whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27 and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS) and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.
Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid-19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology. It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.
In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft—legal at the time—would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations. After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well-known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.
Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in US history. He will never acknowledge—or even understand—that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.
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